MY NEW CAREER

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Adele’s New Career2/25/2011

                              MY NEW CAREER

At last count about five decades of my life have revolved around five children, eleven grandchildren, ten greats and another five great-greats. This makes me at once happy and gloomy. You see I’d majored in art and poetry in college—and followed theatre everywhere- but creative moments for me as an actor had become the stuff of dreams. As a result, I had become convinced that I was forever burdened by the belief that I had a lost career, a lost passion. Why hadn’t I performed as a splendid Caliban in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” leaping out at my best friend, Prospero? Too, I didn’t I play the prince in “Socar and the Crocodile,” made my own kilt and a wig of black paper strips. When, at the height of my one speech, my kit fell off—well, I rallied like a trooper when my worst enemy was laughing in the audience. So angry was I that I hauled up my kilt, turned my wig around so that I could see, finished my speech and marched off the stage.

    But wait a minute! On the horizon looms a luminous new sun thanks to my book, “Our Sacred Garden-The Living Earth” because my days of performing aren’t over after all. Now I had to spread the word to audiences everywhere – a prospect which made me shudder. Book fairs, lectures, and worse yet the prospect of Twitter and You tube still sounded dreadful. Time and again, I shouted “No” to my publisher and “no way” to my editors, Bishop and Blake who, I assumed, just as leery of the gauzy new world of the Internet as I was. And so it was that I turned my back on such a frightful new world. I just won’t do it all summer; I have to paint, maybe in the fall. THEN it struck me that my long lost career could be right here and now. It had crept up and was shouting “Wake UP”. Use a little imagination and more courage. To renew your potential Hollywood career might be just the challenge you need to stay alive until you’re a hundred-years-old or more. You can talk to the whole world. You can tell them to stop destroying the Earth and figure out how each of us can heal it—and us. You can read them, I told myself, T.S. Elliot or Bill Collins, John Donne or Dylan Thomas—most of all W.B. Yeats. You can even perform your own poetry—and that WILL take some acting.

   So, world, wish me luck.

Introduction

Throughout the past 60 years I've been writing books of poetry. The first of these were children's books (Ask a Daffodil and Ask a Cactus Rose), which were stimulated by my oldest son's despair at not being able to read. We discovered that he was being taught by the "look-say" system of reading (by whole paragraphs, often memorized) instead of by a phonetic base of teaching the alphabet, integrated with hearing, speaking, and writing. This method was a foundation to construct whole words. My husband found a French primmer and taught our second son. He learned the basics in a month and transposed them to English. Thereafter we taught the rest of our family read before they went to school.

I became involved not only with my own phonetic poetry books but with contributions to new readers published by Lippencott Publishing Co. I also co-authored with Helen Grush "The Reading Series". (Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.)

In the late 1980's I worked as Co-Coordinator of Visual Arts for "Summerthing," Boston's Neighborhood Art Festival, a program to help unify the city through arts after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. The beauties and challenges of this city, which I had never really known, became part of my life. I wrote Deliver Into Green as a tribute to all the visionary people with whom I'd worked and learned to love.

My family and I moved to Arizona in 1992. For two years I was able to restrain myself from jumping into yet another cause. I listened and looked and began to rally appreciate this new country. The varying environment, which changed from tropical warmth to snow in three hours was a landscape painter's dream.

In the early '90s I visited England with a metaphysical group. While I visited Glastonbury I had an experience which changed my life and was my incentive for starting a new book about gardens, which became a kind of odyssey.

In 1996 a group of artists and educators with a common passion for gardens started Gardens for Humanity, an organization which is still alive and blossoming in the growing environmentally-oriented climate of the 21st century. Part of this is, of course, our economic crisis, which is inducing people to grow their own vegetable gardens. They are also more aware that the effects of our ongoing exploitation of our Earth, unless drastically helped, will destroy us, too.

After 13 years of actual gardening experiences — digging, building, catalyzing gardens in places of need (schools, hospitals and health care centers, on reservations and in urban centers) — with the advent of a new Gardens for Humanity President, Richard Sidy, I finally have found the time to finish my book of prose, poetry, and paintings. It is called Our Sacred Garden, The Living Earth.