La Vieja: A Journal of Fire
by DEENA METZGER Who is La Vieja? When writer Deena Metzger first began to receive “inexplicable communications” from La Vieja, she knew very little about her. Over time it became clear that the old woman was a seer, seemingly real, but spirit-like, who had taken permanent residence in a fire lookout tower in the Sierras of California. Her watch there took on a great significance in this time of climate destruction, pandemic, and the possibility of the extinction of the natural world. There, La Vieja’s senses began to sharpen, turning toward a greater connection with the intelligence of the natural world, including the bears and the surrounding trees. Two other characters emerged from this contact: Lucas, a doctor who also loves to retreat to a little-used...
The Literature of Restoration
The Literature of Restoration actively seeks through form and language, content and focus, to create and inspire a cultural shift, developing a body of literature that radically seeks the restoration and vitality of the natural world. It is concerned with the climate crisis, environmental destruction, extinction, the factors creating global, social chaos and the ways that Western and other contemporary imperial cultures inadvertently promote these conditions even while the themes may be opposite. Close scrutiny of self, language, cultural and literary standards is required to help us avoid reinforcing the trajectories we are on toward the destruction of all life. When the natural world, the environment, ethics, spiritual awareness and regard for the...
19 Ways to a Viable Future for All Beings
This is one guide to how we change our minds sufficiently to live differently and act in ways that will preserve the future and protect the earth and all beings. When we incorporate these ways of thinking, we will no longer be people who do harm. But again, we have to change our minds as we won’t fully know what to do or how to do it until we respond instinctively with different minds, values and reflexes. These 19 Ways indicate the areas where transformation can occur. The changes required are systemic and cellular. Too often these days, the very framing of the issues limit the possibilities. How will we survive? How will we thrive? How will we prosper? may no longer be the questions, if the WE refers only to humans. We have to free ourselves from the...
Published Works
“To be a poet is a way of being in the world. It is a way of seeing and of attending the reality which otherwise disappears behind the proverbial curtain. When I am fortunate enough to be one with my poet self, it is like living in the Sabbath when, we are told, we are given a second soul. The act of living as a poet is primary, the writing is secondary, that is, part of, but not the entirety, of the poetic process. I am drawn to write the poem, now as much as ever, if not more so, as a way of making the invisible world, the most real world, manifest. If that world were to disappear, then everything I value, love and understand would go with it.” – Deena Metzger, West Word 2, Winter/Spring 1990. Books La Vieja: A Journal of Fire (novel) 2022...
Letter 5
Dear Friends: April 4, 1999 Fifth Call Council of Elders Sitting in Council in Zimbabwe and Finding Hope I am beginning to write this letter on Easter Sunday in the midst of the Festival of Pesach in which we are enjoined to remember the difficult passage through Mitzraim, the ‘narrow place,’ toward freedom as if we are going through that passage ourselves. Even as I write these words, NATO is bombing Belgrade. I am assuming that the questions in my mind are similar to the question in your minds: Will things change and how? How long can such wars continue? What are our individual responsibilities? What is our [unconscious] individual participation in the seeming inevitability of violence? Will we ever truly govern ourselves according to answers to...
