myth of idle hands

These are my hands, sometimes of stone and sometimes of sand, fastidious in the sweet earth making room for trees to run deep and grow high, knuckle deep in bike grease as I explore these simple and wondrous metal machines of efficient transportation, lightly grasping the pen to jot notes of love and redemption from the aimless effervescence of my heart, curving smooth wet clay up into usable vessels reminiscent of craftsmen roots long forgotten, typing plastic keys here to shift photons electrons across through and around assembled polymers and bits of metal to convey an incessant theme to you that I cannot let go of, bleeding as I cut myself with misdirected misaligned force while trying to do well, fingers on my forehead with my eyes closed to the patterns I repeat and wish I could transcend, cupping warm water to propel myself slowly across the pool and back in the warm luxurious open night of northern California paradise, turning knobs and making gestures and stirring batter, trying to embrace and grasp it all while my mind quietly works to let go.

If I do enough with my hands, will I be able to create a better world? Can I fix, smooth, patch, massage, sprinkle, and trace my way through the years of my life? Can I create the meaning I'm always searching for? Perhaps I can learn to find the calm of mind that comes with purposeful action, and the calm actions that come with a purposeful mind.

nature of contact

beautiful cold
wraps my Californization,
frosty to freeze pipes
unusual here in Paradise
I layer thick under wool sweaters
because I'm skinny and new to myself,
staying warm is outside
my routine,
a new visitor from an east coast past
of childhood snowbanks
and red-faced frozen
sled adventures

pale florescent light
fills the cool room,
the cluttered desk
a still life
of stationery and
a few plastic bottles,
sticky notes with sleepy numbers
crusted bike gloves
small dusty vitamin bottle
a cut-out drawing of two purple flowers

a place,
a window on disparate lives of friends
threaded through mine
in tension of four dimensions
but cradled in the rough palms
of old longshoremen
and grandmothers crocheting
(these are the keepers of our lives
the pillars of hope,
those who carry us in tired
uncertain times)

how can my heart move out
through these streaming bits of colored light
and be touched from afar?
overcome by connections,
the warmth is wave after wave
of us doing what's important to us -
we can dig deep and share the treasures
anthracite in times of bituminous glut
gold in times of pyrite glitter
oak in times of soft pine
keeping on sharing the truth of what we find

so that's what she looks like

so this is me and a girl named Emily. she lives in a town/city called Guelph, in a province called Ontario. Just wanted to share the photo for those who might be curious. i think she's special, and generally fantastic...

boiled down haiku extract

My father was a surgeon, specializing somewhat in hand surgery but also doing plenty of general surgery. For many years, he worked once or twice a month doing long, overnight shifts in hosptitals throughout northeastern Pennsylvania where there were not nearly enough doctors to go around. These towns are post-industry towns, with names like Coaldale and Slatington, where mining or manufacturing ruled the towns since they first appeared on any map. Now they are often tired towns, run down after the closing of the major industry there or simply winding down with the knowledge that the world has moved on to cheaper coal elsewhere, replaced slate with asphalt shingles and pressboard, or outsourced manufacturing to China.

One main side effect of the these towns burning out was widespread use and abuse of alcohol by the locals there. My father used to recount stories every now and then about superhuman feats of stupidity and self-destruction due to the intoxication of some local fellas on a Saturday night. One common incident that he mentioned was accidents while driving drunk. Patients would be brought in to the emergency room of the hospital in the late hourse of the night, all torn up from a collision with a building, large animal, or other vehicle. I always thought the saddest aspect of the story was when my father told me that the person who was driving drunk was often in much better shape than the person that they hit with their car, because the alcohol acts as a depressant and the drunk doesn't brace up their body upon impact. They bounce around more like a rag doll, and are consequently less damaged than a sober person who reacts with fear and adrenaline and tenses up muscles only to get injured by being rigid and running into parts of their car or worse. It's an ugly truth which is not always the case but often enough that I feel a sense of anger at the irony and injustice of it all.

To turn a sad example into a positive one, I sometimes think of myself as a person who is trying not to brace up before impact. I feel like our whole global culture is crashing, with more speed and intensity all the time, and we don't know how it will continue to unfold. Will we turn to nuclear energy when cheap oil runs out? Will we dovote lots of energy to sustaining the lifestyles of the wealthy, with exotic foods, cheap air travel, and lots of home appliances and cars? Will epidemic disease play a big role (I see more and more in newspapers and scientific journals about the looming resurgence of a global flu or worse)? Will we fight wars over access to water? Who will be left without food, water, and energy when there are not enough of these to go around? There are so many questions, and so many more that we haven't even imagined yet. The future is so unknown, with billions of us all over the planet making purposeful or random contributions to the growing ecological crisis. There are so many people who have made big splashes which I can live without, and so many people making little splashes each day that add up to a situation too big and complex to ever fully fathom.

I feel that in the face of all this craziness, perhaps my best plan is to not brace up. I want to stay flexible and adaptive in my outlook on life. I want to be thinking about how I can live well now and into the near future. I feel like it is more important to live well and take care of myself than aim to make a big splash in the world. Is it enough to aim to get a good nights sleep, get some exercise, eat some healthy food, take regular quiet time to read and write, make myself available to friends in need, write my blog, learn to grow vegetables, bike around town, work when I need to, take lots of rest time? I think so. We didn't evolve for a 45 hour work week. I'm not sure what we evolved for, but I feel like I'm closer to it when I'm well-rested and mentally balanced.

What is the highest and best use of my life? Trick question :-) The sun will burn out in perhaps 5 billion more years. If we colonize even the most distant reaches of the universe, their suns will burn out too. Knowing that in the end it's all a big entropic disk getting ready for the next big bang, what's a wandering, wondering soul to do? Follow what feels good. I've come to the radical notion that if I don't ever engage in the rat race and feel good about that choice, then my life is still great. If I keep giving my life away to throw dinner parties and help friends build houses, and feel good about it, that's great too. I feel like this is the lesson of "you can't take it with you." I also feel a strong identification with "First do no harm." The synthesis of these for me is to lead a chill, slow-paced life full of fun and laughter. Once again, for the record, I identify with the values of the hippies - sharing the love, not working to amass private wealth for myself or others, working towards social equality, being in touch with the world around me and my fellow humans. I really like these ideas, and think that they are a valuable guide for my life.

What's my take-home message for today? Love life! Do your best to drop out of aspects of culture that you don't enjoy, that you feel in your heart are detrimental to your physical and emotional well-being. Find others with similar questions and recognize that there you have the beginnings of community. Dare to be different than those engaged in the rat race - try to remember that it's a race that can't be won. Take time now, you can't take it later. Be with friends and just be with them. The next product roll-out, software package launch, promotion, new car, bigger condo, where are all these things going? What are these things in our lives that are not an end in themeselves? How much are we willing to feel like we're sacrificing to get to some point in the imagined future? Here comes the big cliche - the journey is the destination. If we slow down, we can taste it softly in the air, see it in the corners of our vision, smell it in the passing breeze.

Much love to you all - may you all find peace and fulfillment in your work and play. May harmony and integration be the words of the day every day...

geomancer of my own fertile ground

Back in California, the sun shines in through the winter sky and warms me through the days and abandons me at night. The stars shine clear in the sky and fill the midnight blue with points of illumination, dreams to follow through the infinite of time and space to an unforeseen end. Fruit dangles low on branches taxed by the new, fleshy weights - shiny wax of oranges and thin-skinned pale green apples. Damp bricks of deep red lie in their sandy bed and grow their mossy surface through patient weeks and months on end. Ansel Adams' black and white Yosemite now lies between me and where I was, buried deep in mountains that many died while trying to cross to get here. Me? I took the train, and watched the rolling hills of Iowa pass by, strolled around the Omaha station where it was 65 degrees in late November, read the labels of rail cars full of corn syrup (5000 gallons of corn syrup... say it with me, 5000 gallons of corn syrup), saw the cloudy fractured ice forming on the banks of Utah desert creeks, and at no time feared for my life. I didn't have to haul my cart, family, and oxen up a cliff to continue westward. I didn't have to eat my companions (all or in part) to survive. I didn't have to bring 100 lbs. of bacon with me from Missouri, but if I had that wouldn't have been all that bad... I just moved around the train from time to time, conversed with my fellow travelers, and felt like I was on a long journey to discover my home. I left behind love and snow wherever I went, hoping they would both remain white and pure in my absence but smiling at the unstoppable grey entropy of winters in the developed world. Upon my return, white will yeield to green then to red, brown, and eventually nothing before the white comes back upon it all. Who am I to challenge the seasons? Who am I to ask for a moment in time to be held aside for me, plucked gently from the incessant sweet stream of everything and cradled in my hand while everything else continues turning, spinning, spreading, cooling, and dimming? Who am I? I'm my evolving sense of self, shaped forever by all the places I go and by the very idea that I am shaped forever. I'm a preparer of warm feasts in houses defiant to these seasons, I'm a valence electron that wants to jump to your shell so we can be a great molecule, I'm a tired son, I'm a cancer scare survivor, I'm a comet at it's closest point to earth wondering when I can get away again from all these primates and their nuclear weapons, I'm a dancer for myself only when I'm not dancing for others, I'm a friend who's slowly understanding, I'm a proponent of peace even as I feel our electronic paper theoretical walls cracking inwards, I'm a lover of many things looking to see if one sweet love is enough, I'm in need of a bit of salvation but I'm still trying to save myself. Thanks to all the friends out there, may you keep on keepin' on with your own struggles and joys...