Editor’s Preface

“Have you ever noticed the words ‘silent’ and ‘listen’ are spelled with the same letters?”

This December, I was able to devote some time to myself in a silent retreat in Bali, Indonesia. The quote above about silence and listening greeted all silent retreat guests as they made their way into the ashram lodge where meals would be shared each day in silence. Even though guests were not allowed to talk to each other while at the retreat, my time at the silent retreat was filled with sounds of all sorts: the quacks of the ducks in the nearby rice fields, the cries of the waterhens and croaks of frogs in the nighttime, the rushing river at the edge of the jungle, the sound of the villagers celebrating festivities with firecrackers, the staff communicating, the sound of the rain against the wooden bungalows, our footfalls against the wooden floorboards, each person’s individual movements and sounds amplified by the silence…

This issue, we tune in to the sounds and silences of “unnatural disasters” (Su Thar Nyein, Singapore), oil spills, and “garbage patch[es]” that are “broken in a large ocean body and ingested” by our children (Madeline Newell-Wilson, Vermont, USA). We are challenged to listen to the choices that we make about the food that we eat, and how one day, we too will be eaten in one way or another (George M Jacobs, Singapore). We are asked to sit and listen to “flowers and decay” (Tonia Leon, Mexico), knowing that the flowering and decaying are one and the same. Our contributors pay tribute to the gardens that they have planted, and to the trees that have “etch[ed] [themselves]… so that years later [their] impression lies deep within” (Shalome Lateef, Ballarat, Australia) their consciousness, body and memory. Michelle Pietrzak-Wegner’s (Western Tokyo, Japan-Minnesota, USA) Sound Maps approaches the sounds of the forest through playful mark-making, “recreating slowly the sounds of a place in fiber and stitch as a remembrance of that moment in time”. 

In “The Jungle of Kasro”, Nazia Kamali (Dehradun, India) tells the story of environmental activism as an act of keeping the memory of a loved one alive, reminding us that our fight for ecojustice never really ends, and that we fight for what we love: “It is going to be a long day, a long week, and a long fight.” Indeed, the question posed by December Ellis’ (Phoenix, Arizona, USA) speaker in the closing poem of the issue: “where is my own land?” asks that we reconsider what it means to belong to a land, and where and how the borders and boundaries of one’s own land and body are drawn and mapped.

Esther Vincent Xueming

The Tiger Moth Review