IN MEMORY OF LAURENCE FERLINGHETTI AND HIS NOTION OF INSURGENT ART
As those who promote and feed on greed, fear and hate are poised to assume power we need more than ever to to find and foster empathy, compassion and a just and peaceful world. Remember there shall now be a little more light everyday. I have found that now and then an escape into literature can illuminate, entertain, make me laugh or cry and leave me rested to resume the fight. Here is the spiritual sunbeam I found last night:
A native is a man or creature or plant indigenous to a limited geographical area – a space boundaries and defined by mountains, rivers or coastline ( not by latitudes, longitudes or state and county lines), with it own particular mixture of weeds, trees, bugs, birds, flowers, streams, hills, rocks and critters (including people), its own nuances of rain, wind, and seasonal change, Native intelligence develops thru an unspoken or soft-spoken relationship with these unspoken things: it evolves as the native evolves himself in his region. A non-native awakes in the morning in a body in a bed in a room in a building on a street in a county in a state in a nation. A native awakes in the center of a little cosmos – or a big one, if his intelligence is vast – and he wears this cosmos like a robe, senses the barely perceptible shiftings, migrations, moods and machinations of its creatures, its growing green things, its earth and sky. Native intelligence is what Huck Finn had rafting the Mississippi, Thoreau had by his pond, what Kerouac had in Desolation Lookout and lost entirely when he caught whiff of any city. But some have it in cities, like the Artful Dodger, picking his way through a crown of London pockets, like Mother Teresa in the Calcutta slums, Sissy Hawkshaw had it on freeways, Woody Guthrie in crowds of fruit pickers, Ghandi in jails. Almost everybody has a dab of it wherever he or she feels most at home……
-David James Duncan: The River Why
Jessica McKenzie: I was wondering if you could start by telling me how you arrived at this topic—why critical metals?
