Ebb and Flow Reversing Falls Sanctuary Newsletter May 2019

Whoever you are, you are welcome here. Wherever you come from, you are welcome here.

Protestant or Catholic, you are welcome here, Buddhist, Jew or Muslim, you are welcome here

From whatever religious tradition you come, you are welcome here, And if you come from no religious tradition at all, you are welcome here.

If you are a believer, you are welcome here. If you are not a believer, you are welcome here.

Whatever your sexual orientation or gender expression, you are welcome here.

Whatever your age or ability, you are welcome here. If you come here often, you are welcome here.

If you have not been here for a long time, you are welcome here. If you have never been here before, you are welcome here.

We open our hearts to you, and ask only that you open your hearts to each other.

This poem by Marie Morehouse Epply is from the program, Water: Music and Poetry, which kicked off our late winter/spring series on water. Photo is of the cover of her forthcoming Poetry Chapbook, Murmur and Flow.

August Evening Billings Cove 5:12 p.m. A lone dog lolls and finally eight sailboats weave along the Reach lumbers over to inspect me, catching their billowed breaths, investigating to see if some heeling with airy burdens. foreign leviathan has washed ashore. One windjammer commands Slapping water wets rolling stones, the currents and tides while, soothing body and soul in its rhythmic, closer to shore, dinghies strain echoing constancy, sound and movement against tethers, restless, waiting. complicit with silence and shore Moored too, a powerboat where islands stretch, distant and proud designed to defy wind and time, where conifer carve silhouettes presses its stubborn weight against the sky, and I absorb against insistent waves. every solace that nature allows. Four children on the distant point amble their way toward a woman who, covered in towel, leans her head against the back of a chair. She offers to share the empty one with me, but I have my writing to discover and prefer sitting on sand sifting pebbles and broken bits of rough-worn shell or running my palm back and forth absentmindedly, summoning spirits from the underworld.

Exploring Our Local Watersheds through Maps

As part of the “Water Is Life” series and “Water: Flow and Form” art exhibit currently at Reversing Falls Sanctuary, on April 28 mapmaker Jane Crosen will present a slide talk on the art of mapping watery places and exploring local watersheds through maps. Join her on a virtual adventure, looking at photos and maps exploring the form and flow of our freshwater systems, the underlying geology and landscape patterns, and the natural and cultural history of lakes, ponds, and estuaries around the Blue Hill Peninsula and downeast Maine. The program, open to the public, will be from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at Reversing Falls Sanctuary, 818 Bagaduce Road, Brooksville. Info: www.reversingfalls.org. or 469-7850

For nearly 40 years, Jane has been on a journey of discovery in making and interpreting maps and exploring Maine’s landscape and its history. Finding her niche in maps and editing at DeLorme, she came home to downeast Maine in 1981 and has since created and published more than 30 hand-drawn maps of Maine coastal and lake regions, available as posters, cards, T-shirts, chef aprons, and floursack towels, at www.mainemapmaker.com. Also a freelance editor and proofreader, she writes essays and articles, published Maine Mapmaker’s Kitchen, and is working on a second cookbook, Culinary Landscapes. She lives with her husband in Penobscot.

MAINE: THIS MUST BE THE PLACE

The Gallery Within announces the exhibit, Maine: This Must be the Place. Photographer Julie Cleveland writes that she “can’t remember when photography hasn’t been part of my life.” When she first began working in a darkroom, she found “watching an image appear in the developer . . . was magic.” She writes that “the camera records the image, but it’s the eye that finds it . . . my work is more like painting than photography. I try to create order and simplicity and show the viewer a small piece of the puzzle, not the entire landscape. This sometimes takes my images to abstraction.” Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4th, 1:00 to 3:30 p.m. Gallery open 1-4 on Saturdays and Sundays in May.

Musical Recital by Bobby Cleveland Bobby Cleveland will perform Johann Sebastian Bach’s Arias & Chorales from the Cantatas and selections from the Clavlier-Ubung; Georg Friedrich Handel’s Hornpipe and Royal Water Music Suite; and Cleveland’s own composition, Tribute to Philip Glass.

Cleveland has played a variety of musical instruments and has performed in a variety of musical genres since childhood. Cleveland’s achievements range from playing the banjo and singing in a high school Bluegrass Band that won the Philadelphia Folk Festival to being composer and musical director for a half dozen Harvard/Radcliffe original stage productions. After performing with his band in California, Cleveland relocated to Harborside. Here he plays tenor sax with the Brooklin Band, and he offers a Bach recital series with Dan Conte on Tuesday mornings in the summer at the Brooksville United Methodist Church.

Cleveland is the author of J. S. Bach for Electric Bass, and has recorded a jazz CD, Tenor Romance as well as a CD of the Bach recital series. Cleveland’s Recital is on Saturday, May 4 from 3:30 to 5 p.m., immediately following the opening reception of Maine: This Must Be the Place.

Photos from Water: Flow and Form

Bathroom and Kitchen Work The Building Team reports significant progress on bathroom and kitchen construction. The old floor has been ripped out and a new one laid. Walls for the toilet and shower stalls are finished and walls for a closet and vanity are well under way. The facilities will include a utility sink and a

baby changing station. Gerry Gray will start electrical and plumbing work the last week of April. Insulation will be installed by early May. Treasurer Karen Adamo reports a current balance of $28, 857.98. Daksha Baumann reports that the next round of expenditures will run to about $15,000.

Coming Events

Sun. 4/28, 4 p.m. Jane Crosen, Exploring Our Local Watersheds through Maps Mon. 4/29, 6:30 p.m. 12 Step Recovery Program Tue. 4/30, 7 p.m. Ellacappella Concert at Brooksville UMC Thu. 5/2, 6 p.m. Meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition Sat. 5/4, 1-3:30 p.m. Julie Cleveland photo exhibition, Maine: This Must Be the Place Sun. 5/5, 1-4 p.m. Gallery Within open for viewing Maine: This Must Be the Place 4 p.m. Women’s Circle Mon. 5/6, 6:30 p.m. 12 Step Recovery Program Thu. 5/ 9, 6 p.m. Meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition

Sat. 5/11. 1-4 p.m. Gallery Within open – Maine: This Must Be the Place Sun. 5/12, 1-4 p.m. Gallery Within open – Maine: This Must Be the Place Mon. 5/15, 6:30 p.m. 12 Step Recovery Program Thu. 5/16, 6 p.m. Meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition Fri. 5/17, 7 p.m. Dancing with the Cannibal Giant: Five New Stories for the Great Transition, a film featuring Sherri Mitchell Sat. 5/18, 1-4 p.m. Gallery Within open – Maine: This Must Be the Place Sun. 5/19, 1-4 p.m. Gallery Within open – Maine: This Must Be the Place 4 p.m. Jennifer Greene presents Looking at Water with New Eyes: Steps Toward Discovering its Intrinsic Nature Mon. 5/20, 6:30 p.m. 12 Step Recovery Program Thu. 5/23, 6 p.m. Meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition Sat. 5/25, 1-4 p.m. Gallery Within open – Maine This Must Be the Place Sun. 5/26, 1-4 p.m. Last opportunity to view Maine: This Must Be the Place at the Gallery Within Mon. 5/27, 6:30 p.m. 121 Step Recovery Program Thu. 5/30, 6 p.m. Meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition Sun. 6/2, 4 p.m. Women’s Circle

Sandhill Crane, a last poem from Water in Music and Poetry. For millennia tens of thousands of Sandhill Cranes, traveling in large flocks, have spent late winter and early spring in the Platte River valley of central Nebraska. They stop to feed and to court as they fly from their winter-feeding grounds on the Gulf of Mexico to their nesting sites in Alaska and Siberia. Cranes are among the oldest of bird species. They stand four feet tall and have wing spans of seven feet. Growing up, I had taken the annual gathering of Sandhill Cranes for granted, not knowing that nothing quite like it took place anywhere else in the world.

We were in Johnson, in Southeast Nebraska, far from the Platte valley, to attend a wedding. On the first morning, as I was out walking, I heard a cry overhead. It was a cry I had not heard for at least 35 years, but I recognized it at once. The cry of the Sandhill Crane is not as plaintive as the cry of the Loon, but it is as ancient. And the cry stirs something old and deep in the souls of those who hear it.

Sandhill Crane

Late snow melting in cornfields, March winds softening at last,

Wild cries among scudding clouds of morning, Long, broken lines of black in the sky.

Sandhill Cranes return to the Platte, A ritual enacted across millennia ─

Thousands crowd fields along the river, Pairs leaping ten feet up in mating dance.

This I saw before I can remember,

First memory lost in timeless repetition. How does a child know what is unique?

In leaving and returning understanding comes.

March, my first Nebraska spring in years, On a hog farm 100 miles from the Platte,

Morning solitude broken by a single wild cry ─ One lost crane headed to a rendezvous with memory.

Gary Vencill

Photo Credits: Jane Crosen, Julie Cleveland, Pat Wheeler, Daksha Baumann. The photos from the current exhibition, Water Flow and Form, are of art work by Pat Wheeler, Connie Myrick, and Susan Merrill with a view of work by several contributors with Connie Myrick’s quilt in the far center. Information: www.reversingfalls.org