'Beauties' are tough, poignant

Mills essays explore the region, world

By ELIZABETH KANE BUZZELLI
Special to the Record-Eagle (11/09/07)
 

In "Tough Little Beauties," Stephanie Mills has delivered on the title.

Her collection of essays, previously published from 1997 to the present, are sometimes tough, sometimes achingly poignant. They take on what is happening in our region and the world with a great deal of concern, grace, and at times, with anger and barely concealed irritation.

The essays also explore her own life -- as she has learned to live, maybe not as she would have chosen, but as life has chosen for her. The correlation between macro and micro becomes evident as she plumbs decisions that direct her life, and the quality of that life, then decisions that govern the future of the planet.

In the title essay, she finds herself on Beaver Island, looking over "abundant arrays of the rare dwarf lake iris. The dwarf iris, she finds, is 'both fragile and not."

Talking about the Michigan forests, she writes, "It takes more than three or four kind of trees, trout lilies, and trilliums to make a Great Lakes forest. It takes a rich and fitting community of wildflowers like the irises, violets, polygala, wild lily-of-the-valley, and starflowers. It takes stumps and root-wads and tip-ups, blowdowns and widowmakers. It takes fallen tree limbs and trunks crisscrossed like jackstraws to structure the niches for all the animals necessary to the forest's flourishing ... It takes uninterrupted millennia to grow a real forest on a sand dune-covered hunk of limestone in Lake Michigan, and only some form of natural areas protection can secure the time for the forest to continue."

In "Reverence for Forests, Reverence for Wood," she writes, "In Michigan ... there were trees enormous beyond our ken. Here stood white pines well over a hundred feet tall, hemlocks half a thousand years old, and sugar maples," and goes on to point out how these grand forests have been diminished by lumbering, farming and by civilization itself.

On her own woodland in Kasson Township, she attempts to heal what has been done, if only on this one plot of land: "By protecting my small expanse of regenerating woodlands, by planting native trees and removing the alien Scots pine, I hope to recall some land to health. In my dealings with trees, animals, and soil, I am courteous and grateful."

Wanting all of us consider our life patterns, Mills states, "Living like there's no tomorrow is guaranteed to make tomorrow no place you'd want to live. In contrast, reverence for forests and reverence for wood might make a future of dignity and delight for posterity and for the myriad beings with whom we share the planet."

Of these essays, only "Nulliparity and A Cruel Hoax Revisited" reaches a level of stridency. In taking on overpopulation, she revisits her graduation, at which time she declared, "the most humane thing for me to do would be to have no children at all." She goes on to point out the hypocrisy of being totally consumed with worry for the earth and then adding to the woes of "Earth's evolutionary processes" by adding more children. She has kept to that vow.

At times Mills shares the joy she takes in nature, as in her story of a caterpillar: "When ... I first noticed the perfectly camouflaged critter, it looked like a little twig. Yet the twig startlingly became an inchworm compassing brisk counterclockwise circles on the striped fabric of my PJs. After I had contemplated it awhile, I tried to brush it to the ground. The tenacious spanworm reared up, struck a stiff twig pose and clung to the pajamas. At length I pried it loose with a stem of dried grass. The caterpillar remained rigidly in twig character as I transported it back to the maple tree."

Perhaps "The Matrix of Solitude" best explains who Stephanie Mills is, and outlines her mission, hardly changed since early days in San Francisco. Describing herself as "an ecological activist," she said she has devoted the past 30 years to activism through advocacy, writing and speaking "in service to the wild."

She ends with gentleness: "Perhaps the minds of hermits, yogis and yoginis, of nuns and monks in silent cloisters, and of cussed recluses all are wilderness refuges for honor, clarity of vision, and the evolution of ideas -- like the duty of civil disobedience -- to nudge humanity toward better ways."

That's what "Tough Little Beauties" ultimately becomes: a gentle nudge to at least think of what the world coming after us will be and then to make a positive move to conserve, to protect and minister to the mother earth beneath our feet, above our heads, and around us. She gently asks that we take on a form of stewardship, no matter how small, that cares for the insects, animals, and perhaps for those who will come after.