Take that Road Less Traveled By

I had a dream last night, beneath the soft marmalade pool of the sodium streetlight, somewhere between here and a beautiful future of global cooperation. On my thin, pale sheets, snuggled under a thick spread of pillaged goose feathers, I dream of charting a new course for our culture on the rocks.

I dream of converting auto factories into bicycle manufacturing plants. All this talk of subsidizing the auto industry to keep it alive kind of makes me ill, not the least of which reason is that for several hundred years, western capitalist advocates have jeered and pointed up the failures of other systems' failures, from Maoism to communism to fascism. Now, when you can see the nails popping and the plumbing leaking in this shaky suburban tract house that capitalism built, the old white guys get together and say that we need to bail it out to keep it afloat. Watching rich people help out their other rich friends who just recently were involved in fraud investigations makes me a little ill. It seems extra-infuriating because Marx predicted it over 150 years ago, when he said that capitalism will follow a path of ever-deepening crises if everyone is allowed to maximize his or her own personal wealth and self-interest.

Back to cars. Why subsidize a dying industry, that is increasing the rich/poor divide while manufacturing the instruments of climate change that we are all shamefacedly addicted to, when we could forge a whole new direction? Imagine what a beautiful thing it would be to turn out thousands of well-made, moderately priced, mechanically simple bicycles each year in the rusty heart of an empire dying from its own antiquated excesses. No one has to lose their job after 20 years on the line machining engine blocks - teach 'em how to weld tube steel, aluminum, titanium. Let their powerful hands true the wheels and work the handlebars of our transportation successors. Cuba converted much of their petroleum transportation to bicycles in the wake of their sudden loss of oil imports after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, with pretty amazing results. The automobile has made us fat, paved, asthmatic, and frustrated - what do we owe it? Melt them down, roll them up, and lug weld them into real two-wheeled alternatives. Ride on the Ford forks and Saturn seat tubes. Steal the tires (can you rework vulcanized rubber? I don't know, someone tell me), cut up the leather from the BMW luxury sedans for some fine saddles, and take the Porsche bucket seats for your baby bike trailer. Imagine a new Flint, Detroit, Cleaveland, Pittsburgh, all turning out the soft click of freewheels that take to the streets of America and the world. It'll be like some fairy tale - just like... the Netherlands. It is time to think outside the four-wheeled, oil-powered box.

I've got other crazy ideas that might just make sense. How about getting a discount on the amount of taxes you pay into health care based on how much distance your feet travel each fiscal year? You could have a pedometer that simply tells how much you walk each day, and if you meet a minimum you get a tax break. You can earn more if you're even more active, up to perhaps a regular marathon runner who might represent the upper limit. Am I just saying this to subsidize my own gym membership? Heck yes, and to be more scientific in the fact that exhaustive studies show that we are healthier when we're more active, and therefore cost The System less in the long run.

How about electricity costing MORE for each unit more that you use? Right now it is often the opposite - after a certain amount of time it gets cheaper for the additional kilowatt hour. This is not really helping us into a conservation frame of mind. Pricing schedules like this reinforce our illusions that resources are limitless and relatively inconsequential. If we treat scarce things like they are scarce, I know we'll beat a more direct path to a better future.

I have other dreams that may take a little longer to bring into being, but will be nonetheless satisfying and worth the effort. I'm excited for real dialogue around energy, pollution, resources, and whether or not we actually have a large-scale social contract that seems to be working for everyone. Recently I've been seeing ads on the TVs at the gym (oh there's another wish for my Christmas list - gyms without TVs... mmmm...) that tell me about clean energy options for the future. You want to know what they are? Coal and oil. Hello?? I thought I grasped that concept really well back in... let's see... kindergarten. Coal and oil release climate-changing greenhouse gases when we burn them. Our sandy castles are built (literally) on the non-thinking premise that there will always be an infinite, relatively cheap supply of these. Recently we have discovered that the crazy, bearded, wild-eyed guys who have been writing for decades about peak oil aren't as quite as mad as one of Dostoevskey's characters. Now we are slowly beginning to face the truth that all the black stuff in the ground will run out sooner or sooner, and we will do well to plan with that in mind.

SO... what's with the pictures of kids running through green meadows in white cotton dresses, smiling and tumbling in the daisies while their parents loving stroll along like L.L. Bean models? It's not just for dish soap and feminine hygiene products anymore - coal and gas are the new clean energy. We need to sit down and have a real talk with ourselves about the difference between 'clean' and 'not quite as dirty.' If you catch a few more particulate pollutants on the way out of the smokestack, and bury the CO2 in the ground using an untested sequestration technology that many experts have questions about, does that make you 'clean'? I've got questions. And watch out for the nuclear folks - they're waiting in the wings for their renaissance, and it's on the way. Does it count as clean if you bury it really deep in the ground? How about we build their CEO's mansion on top of that mountain first, and wait to see what happens?

Where was I before this sidetrack? Oh yes, public dialogue. If you take the box we're so often stuck in in our thinking, and set it on the ground, it makes a mighty fine podium for local get-togethers where we can all share our ideas. Let's talk about where our water comes from and whether the aquifer or snowpack is a safe reliable source. How can we make it more so? Do we want to sell it or dump paper mill effluent in it? Or do we want to kick back and read our Danielle Steele novels by the lake while our kids swim in the clean, blue goodness of it?

Let's talk about buying local goods. I'll sign the letter to China where we assure them that we mean no ill will towards their fine people who produce EVERYTHING that we eat and utilize, but that in this less-stable 21st century they will surely understand our move towards local resiliency and self-reliance. We'll post pictures on our blog so they can see our projects, and we'll look at their pictures too. It'll be great. Say it with me... bicycle-powered grain grinders. You'll grow to like having quads like Lance Armstrong.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room too - population. Yes, there are a lot of us on the globe. Yes, perhaps with some heavy-duty tweaking of the whole global system of food production and distribution, we could get food to everyone who needs it right now. My big question is: Do we want to do it into the indefinite future? It seems crystal clear to me that our system is overburdened, and will continue to be even with serious redistribution measures. Do we want to maintain the current population? How about if we don't have any global agreement about growing the population? Do we still want to support everyone who wants to have four or five kids in their family? Do we want to address the inequality that exists now globally as the result of hostorical oppression, slavery, and exploitation? I'm not lining up to be the first to force other people to behave a certain way. However, it seems that as the global population swells, and the voracious middle class bloats along with it, our lifestyles and the number of people who live in affluence are affecting everyone in more and more interconnected ways. The poor folks in Africa aren't using reams of bright white, perfect paper but they've got dioxin in their blood from the mills just like we do. We don't have to live next to the crowded Beijing factory neighborhoods, but their pollution comes across the Pacific and ails our lungs while brightening our sunsets. Steel is expensive because everyone in Asia wants it too. Vietnamese coffee is so successful that it flooded the market and it's own price bottomed out, so the American guzzlers get it cheaper while the farmers get poorer (this is an advertisement: buy fair trade coffee, and drink it in moderation). The web of connections is vast and runs in all four dimensions - three in space and one in time.

We are linked even if we don't want to be, and that is becoming a huge problem. Why is this problematic? Because we don't have any agreement about how many of us we want to feed, how many of us get to have their own automobile, how many of us get to live in a tract home with a chemlawn, or how many of us get to have cork floors or copper plumbing. Now, I'm not talking about rectifying this with all the terrible ways that humans have invented to wipe each other out. If you're still feeling on edge, read that sentence again and repeat until you're not thinking of fascist Germans, crazy Cambodians, or gritty Rwandans. What we need, however is to at least TALK about it. The link between population and resource use is the major one facing our planet today. In many ways, it is the root of other problems like global warming and food shortages. Let's talk amongst ourselves, and see what we can do to CONSENSUALLY and THOUGHTFULLY address this problem now. If you think it doesn't affect us here in the developed world, think again. This is the problem of expanding cities/pavement/electricity use, the loss of farmland, the increase of acid rain, the price of our food, the decrease in measurable happiness over the last generation, the feeling of more competition and less cooperation, and numerous other shadows in our lives.

Whew! That was big. Where to begin? Smile and breathe deep. Yoga and tai chi are nice. Regular exercise gets us feeling better and thinking more creatively. As we take care of ourselves, we live richer lives and are more able to imagine positive and optimistice possibilities. We don't even have to sit and bit our nails about this stuff all the time (those of you who know me are possibly laughing right now... I'm working on getting better :-). Just being aware and informed is an infinitely better place to be than with our heads in the sand. Those of you who are excited to see Obama take the reins from Bush know what I mean. The road may be long and rough, but we'll make it. I just think it will be easier to face that long, quiet highway if we've got friends who share common ground and a bike trailer full of wool sweaters, rice cakes, and peanut butter. May it rise up to meet you...

inward ode

Still morning holds the cold
green leaves and bright grass,
seen through the steam off
my mug.

My pen wags the dog
these tired,
beautiful days.

I'm sifting, sorting,
composting my inadequacies,
shredding my tell-tale
documents of doubt,
kept under my bed in
the dark
like a plaid canvas
suitcase from my dead father.

I think of snowy summer
mountains out west,
and my own space-time
stretched like taffy
across 3000 miles,
thin as a spider's silk
between my memories
and who I am.

If it snaps, I'm sure
I'll be lost
as old lovers and
well-worn friends
float away, untethered
by my clinging.

My four walls collapse
outwards, and silence
comes over me as I
step out into alpine
meadows of melting
ice and rich purple flowers.

Stuck in solipsism,
I picture myself
alone,
free to be me with
the small, infinite
price of solitude.

Love and Home take a chisel
to my stone mountain,
driving steel all flesh
sweat brown toned
muscular singularity

and chip away
at my old reality,
the song of the steel
welcome like a
terrifying healer,
to sublimate my
winter into a
new spring.

A Prosperity Calculus

The automaker GM lost $15 billion in the second quarter of 2008, the headlines read today. The Gates Foundation is endowed with billions of dollars to fund the fight against infectious diseases in the developing world. AIDS is on the comeback again in rural southern States of the U.S., often cited as the result of lack of education about how it spreads and how we can prevent it. Rich patrons in Asian restaurants buy sharkfin soup for thousands of dollars a bowl. I've met Thai farmers who are happy without two nickels to rub together, and we've all read about multi-millionaires who couldn't resist cheating on their taxes to keep even more of their money.

In the endless hamster wheel that is my brain, I've recently been ruminating about poverty and wealth, and what it means to be wealthy. They are concepts that come up a lot in the media, and are huge, fundamental aspects of how we understand the modern world. We can donate to the global campaign to Make Poverty History, which is organized around the goal of forgiving Third World international debt. We can measure our lives to see if we're above or below the poverty line. We can go to the library to get a wealth of information about any topic we choose. We can talk with a financial planner to find out how best to manage our wealth. A lot of what we do is look around at our fellow homo sapiens and try to place ourselves in the pecking order of rich to poor. Where we find ourselves each day, month, and year has a profound impact on what we choose to do next.

Beyond these ideas of wealth and poverty, I've been wondering about our culture as a whole. Are we headed towards greater collective wealth as we learn more about the world and what is happening in it? Buckminster Fuller defined wealth as "the measurable degree of established operative advantage". Elsewhere, Fuller described his notion as that which "realistically protected, nurtured, and accommodated X numbers of human lives for Y number of forward days". Philosophically, Fuller viewed "real wealth" as human know-how and know-what which he pointed out is always increasing. (These excerpts stolen from the Wikipedia entry on wealth.)

I think it's important to keep our view of wealth as broad as possible, and to learn to recognize poverty as well. I think if nothing else, we can check our gut to see if we feel rich or poor when we think of a situation. Some examples from my prefrontal cortex:

Wealth is the huge amount of fresh surface water in Canada. Poverty is selling it to the U.S. because they mismanaged theirs and don't have a plan to do better in the future.

Wealth is a society that encourages public discourse so everyone feels well represented. Poverty is having only two political parties from which to choose a leader of a 300 million person country.

Wealth is having done a hard day's work and being properly acknowledged for it. Poverty is feeling trapped into a life of it without being thanked.

Wealth is having a lot of money, while poverty is feeling that you can never have enough.

Wealth is admitting that we're in a collective crunch with regards to the planet's climate problems. Poverty is accepting talk of outdated and inadequate agreements as signs of a solution.

Wealth is saying that something isn't right and we need to talk about it. Poverty is shrugging our shoulders in anger.

Wealth is freedom that comes from thriving with a simpler and more sparse life. Poverty is keeping our demands high and living a life to feed them.


The common thread, as I see it, is that we feel empowered with wealth, and feel fearful and powerless with poverty. There is no baseline for wealth - the measure is floating in all realms of our lives. If we are financially flush and unhappy at home, are we wealthy? If we don't make much money but can pay our bills and take care of ourselves, are we impoverished?

As we advance our own understanding of the world, and act on that information, we create our own wealth. When we take charge of the quality of our food, we feel wealthy. When we think about our footprint on the planet, and change it if we don't like it, we feel empowered. When we question existing systems that seem broken, we benefit ourselves and the world tremendously, even if it's not clear right away what to do with our questions.

Wealth also begets wealth. Development studies show that by increasing the baseline amount of education for women in poor countries, they in turn have fewer children. Fewer children means less strain on the natural resources there and elsewhere. Less strain on the resources (sometimes) means fewer wars within and between groups of people. We take our knowledge and empowerment and roll with it.

So what does all of this mean for those of us truckin' along in our jobs and daily routines? Let's get wealthy. Ask questions to yourself and those around you. Preserve your health so that more of your life down the road is good. Experiment to find out what you have enough of and what is lacking. Do you have enough good food, sleep, exercise, love, time with your dog, reflection, etc? Do you feel trapped in any pattern in your life that you want to change? Where do you feel impoverished? Follow your gut. If you're already overbooked in life, don't add another thing. Don't sell your coal, timber, and precious metals to the neighboring empire - save them for your own rainy days. Talk to those around you and see if anyone else is feeling like something isn't right. Our friends can be such a rich deposit of wealth.

And remember, no matter how rich or poor, you've got to do what Annie Dillard recommends. "Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you."

It's A Question of Balance

Where have I been these past few months? Sometimes I wake up in my bed and feel that question, looking out the window at Norway maples, old brick houses, lilies, college students, trays of kale sprouts on the porch. I've been stealing honey from the bees on faraway farms, chewing it down to the wax that rolls softly in mouth 'til I spit it in the fields of sprouting rye. I've been two knuckles deep in grease, feeling the races for traces or places where they may be pitted, cleaning the tiny perfect spheres of metal and packing them back into a bed of jelly from dinosaur bones, 10 million years later allowing me to make those pedals turn so smoothly you'd think you were about to take flight. I've mingled sweetly with family and memories, embedded in the smell of larch logs since peanut farmers ran the monolith of the modern world, dusty workbenches I've walked past since I could toddle, now full of rusty tools I coddle and discard in an effort to combat my genetic code that calls out to save everything for an unimagined yet possible future. I've become one with basil, nurturing it and tenderly testing it between my callous fingertips, willing it to grow as my own practice deepens like their roots, slowly and patiently in a pattern we can't hurry, envisioning broad leaves reaching their Italian cultivated potential in my new northern environment. I've been dreaming of water, forest fires, the courage of the Tibetan revolutionaries who have been left to hang by the rest of the world, friends who have had enough of a mysterious conviction to end their own lives, a world de-schooled and re-educated, fewer gatekeepers and more companions, climate banter and the tangible pace of my footsteps threading through a cool and silent morning neighborhood. I've also been thinking about scale...

There's a story about some tribe of people (now nearly apocryphal but often mentioned at cocktail parties) who had lived in a completely forested habitat, perhaps the Amazon, for countless generations. When at last they encountered open space in the Kansas sense of the word, either through deforestation of their ecosystem or forced removal, they were said to lack a sense of perspective for things far away. This is because the forest is so dense you get no practice in viewing things more than 30 yards away, and things tend to blend together into myriad shades of green and brown. At the edge of the forest, surveying the plain, they had trouble telling if the horses they saw were just tiny horses you could reach out and pick up or were simply further away. They couldn't tell how fast things were going far away or telling clearly if something was approaching or not. In this popular accounting of their story, they were unequipped to handle this new setting.

We've entered an age where we need perspective more than ever. 5,000 years ago, you didn't need that much perspective. Unless you lived in one of the few places with a slowly emerging empire, you could do what your fellow villagers had always done and count on the world to be the same next year and next decade. There were periodic droughts and floods, feasts and famines. For better and for worse, you didn't have to know what was going on 500 miles away because it didn't really affect you at all. If the next village over managed through great effort to deforest a whole 20 acres and keep it clear for cultivation, it didn't affect you in the least. Even the beginnings of small Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian kingdoms or empires didn't affect the rest of the world's population beyond the scope of their actual physical domain. While they did manage some occasional feats of environmental destruction (water pollution, deforestation, erosion from agriculture, etc.), they weren't making big splashes.

These days, there are so many big splashes it seems like the canoe is going to tip. We've got atmospheric bomb tests, the Three Gorges Dam, plans to drain the Great Lakes, McDonald's beef coming from the land formerly known as the Amazon rainforest, megatons of newsprint devoted to celebrity gossip, yada yada ad infinitum. In this new world, we like to feel that we're in the know and aware of what is going on around the block and beyond the horizon. Awareness of this type is a laudable goal, as the only way we can make thoughtful choices in our lives is to be informed.

Our desire for information, however, poses an interesting dilemma in an age where we continue to creep towards total information awareness and closing the feedback loop into realtime updates. What happens to us when we try to live our daily lives, with all the attention to mundane details that are necessary, and also track the big picture? How can we keep a sense of perspective in the front of our minds when we are awash in new data presented in novel ways each day?

I often think about soda/pop/Coke when I'm thinking about scale. (Did you ever go to the Midwest and have someone offer you a Coke, and when you say "Sure," they then say, " We've got Sprite, Coke, and Mountain Dew?" I love culture.) I have this tiny tidbit in my brain, sequestered there like CO2 from the coal-fired plant of the Infotainment Complex, that says the average American drinks the volume equivalent of 2 cans of soda each day. I feel like this was in the late 80's and early 90's before bottled water became all the rage. Let's round it down a bit ('cause I just did a brief Internet poke around) and say it's only 1.6 cans a day. Rough math:

300 million Americans x 1.6 cans daily = 480 million cans daily

How much space does that take up? Even if only 1/3 of that yet again is in actual aluminum cans, where do you get the aluminum for 160 million cans on a daily basis? How much water does that take? If each can takes 12 teaspoons of sugar, how many tanker cars of corn syrup is that? How big is 45,000,000 gallons of soda? That's the daily flow rate of a decent-sized stream.

It may not be important to have a handle on how much soda flows through the U.S. (let alone the rest of the world) an a daily basis. I concede that without argument. However, so much of our lives spreads out like veins which give and take from the massive, elaborate systems wrapping the globe that it seems foolish not to at least try to understand our planetary impacts. Keeping a sense of perspective and awareness of scale begins to seem terribly daunting when we think about our coal and oil flows, our water usage, plastic, garbage, wood, concrete, everything. The how, where, and why of our impact can seem overwhelming, but without it we can't really be scientific about where our global society is at and where it may be headed.

Where do we go with this Herculean mental task of knowing where we are, at all zoom levels of google maps? I'm not sure. My approach so far in life has been to try to develop a baseline framework for understanding my place in the world and how the world works. What does that mouthful mean? The world has a lot of people. I have yet to see any sign that we can come up with yet another technofix to adjust any current system so that the soon-to-be 7 billion of us won't continue to destroy this sphere that I've been enjoying a great deal. So let's talk about VOLUNTARILY and HUMANELY shrinking our numbers, so that when nature bats last it's not quite as ugly. Using fossil fuels makes climate instability worse while also depriving future generations of access to these limited resources. No matter how I rationalize my behavior or what I refuse to admit to myself, this is the case. I actually find that a hardline stance with myself, rooted in a reasonable understanding of how things work, really helps me to feel liberated and supported in choosing more sustainable options.

Basically, I get up in the morning just like you and I do my thing. I choose amongst biking, walking, driving, local food, bananas, lights on, lights off, hand tools, recycled materials, used books, new CDs, policy, action, preaching to the choir, being a black sheep, eating vegetarian, elk jerky, glass, plastic, cloth bags, toeing the line, bending the rules, smelling the flowers. I try to find courage to be thoughtful and different in meaningful ways. I get buoyed by others who are radical, or I can despair with one foot nailed to the floor. I write like I'm a SETI maniac scanning the night sky for you. Sometimes I can lay back down at the end of the day, smiling out at those Norway maples, and think about all of us doing the best we can and how we can do better.

tiny update, nothing earth shaking

The questions have been echoing all around in my inbox, attached to the ends of emails from friends and family, casually dropped in between recipes, break-ups, new pregnancies, new loves, old questions, and all the other filling that makes up this ravioli we call life. The executive summary of all these questions is: So, what are you up to these days, or just as likely, where are you?

I am in Canada, land of trillium flowers, tar sands, something resembling a single-payer health care system, and good people biking around as spring rolls into summer. I arrived on May 1st, which was Immigration Day back in the States. I watched some rallies on t.v. in the bus station, and thought about all the folks all over the world who move across borders motivated by fear, hope, hunger, or love. I feel a slight connection to them all, though I don't claim to be able to really empathize with Sudanese refugees or housekeepers and nannies from El Salvador.

In my first month back, I've been doing some gardening, lots of bike repair and refurbishing (including getting my old Fuji sandblasted and repainted), a fair bit of cooking, some job searching, and lots of looking into my soul, trying to make heads or tails out of the dark, turbid water.

I've been wondering a great deal about why I'm here - not just in Guelph but on the earth at all. Do I have a mission, a purpose, a reason to be one person or another? Is my purpose simply to do what I do in life and learn to accept that everything (including myself) always changes?
I have a small scroll with a quote from the Dalai Lama, urging the reader of the scroll to be compassionate with everyone (including ourselves) and to never give up. I like the feeling of that, though it lacks a little bit when I'm looking for direction on a Monday morning at 9 a.m. Sometimes, when I'm feeling spiritually expansive and warm, I think my main purpose in life is to pass through it, trying to be kind to as many people as possible and have a little fun on the way. Again a good feeling, and again lacking a bit in figuring out how to bring the Canadian bacon home.

How do you choose the work you do? What do you think needs to be done in the world? Write me and let me know. I'm looking for advice and some direction in this crazy world.

In the meantime, while awaiting your feedback, here is a picture of me and my newly painted bike. Yes, I love bikes, and bikes love me.

Be Your Own Talking Head

I was watching Fox News with my mom, getting all starry-eyed over the gratuitous and frequent use of the American flag graphic, waving in the background, when I had a sudden feeling of waking up with my house having landed on a witch and America having inched much closer to Fahrenheit 451 while everyone was asleep at the switch. The triggering event for me was when the attractive models-cum-news anchors (a man and a woman) briefly covered a story about a women who was driving a van to evade police, until it stalled out on railroad tracks and she barely escaped the vehicle before a train came and creamed it. Of course, there was a piece of footage from the police car camera so that we could be voyeurs into the thrill of the near-death experience/foible of this otherwise nameless person trying to escape the law. The anchors were actually chuckling as they wrapped up the short-attention-span clip by saying that the woman had several previous convictions and was wanted for something-or-other. The "story" had the same feel as, "Coming up after the commercial, you won't believe (chuckle...) how many soft-serve ice cream cones a miniature schnauzer can juggle, caught on tape by the Hendersons in Cedar Rapids, Iowa."

The whole scene reminded me so much of the people in Ray Bradbury's story who are watching the chase as the Hound goes after the hero and eventually catches the wrong person but that information isn't given to the viewers who are too wrapped up in the infotainment to care. The government news media just wraps up the chase and everything goes back to normal. If you haven't read the book, I haven't given away all of it and it's certainly a great, worthwhile read when you have a chance.

Whenever I'm watching Fox News (which is such a reliable news source that they have taken to reminding viewers between each segment that they are Fair and Balanced), and I'm thinking about all the people who get their disinformation from this big box store of a media outlet, I wonder about what we are filling the airwaves and fiberoptic cables with these days. As we increase the media bandwidth with more channels, websites, internet radio stations, self-publishing sites, etc., what is happening to the quality of the information that comes down the pipe and trickles into our stream of consciousness? What does it mean for us to be living in a world with so many bits and bytes flying around that it's difficult at best to sort out the information? When the figures are lying and the liars are figurin', who do we trust?

I finally stumped myself in my own blog. I don't know who to trust. I like the New York Times, I like indymedia.org, I read Science News (because I'm a dork), and I trust Fox News about as far as I can throw my friend Sam's vintage 1974 TV set. I trusted recycling programs until I found out that my high school dumped most of the bins into the trash because there were staples still in the papers. I trusted my high school health textbook until I met some nice, responsible, well-adjusted pot smokers. (Pay attention, kids - see what happens when you trust people over 30?) I trusted the Sierra Club and NRDC until they started warming up to nuclear power again. I trusted my own eyes and ears until I saw a television ad for coal as "the clean alternative" (I really wish I was joking).

I say trust yourself. Tap just to the left side of your sternum, and if your heart is indeed in the right place, that's all you need. Read everything with a keen and skeptical eye. Take "solutions" with a grain of salt. Take quick-fixes to global catastrophe with a heaping tablespoon of salt. When The Man (that's right, I said The Man) tells you about how hydrogen is going to save our spherical greenhouse by running our cars, ask a few basic questions to yourself about what it takes (more energy! say it with me) to make hydrogen into a useful fuel form. We're a planet full of well-intentioned primates who are rightfully fearful, in a world with more of us and not enough luxury sedans and clean drinking water to go around. But when we're slow and thoughtful in what we do, and remember that quick fixes and innovations (teflon works great, why test it for human health problems?) are a huge part of how we ended up in the hot seat, we do a decent job of taking care of ourselves. Indian cuisine, yoga, tai chi, vision quests, the inclined plane, compasses, The Golden Rule - all these wonderful things were evolved and articulated over long periods of time with the help of countless hands and hearts who were working for the greater common good. I think our generation's work is to evolve a higher consciousness that involves zero fossil fuels, reducing and reusing everything, remembering that climate change is coming for all of us, and working with the humbling reminder from Anne Lamott that if God hates all the same people that we do, it's a sure sign that we've just made God in our own image.

We can help ourselves. It will be a long and difficult journey to get back to a stable ecosystem and a just, humane culture for everyone. It will take all of us being skeptical, scientific, and loving to the very best of our ability. The unpredictable twists and turns will come, as they always have, and it's certain that not all 6.6 billion of us are going to make it. We are going to face some tough times collectively when Nature gets off the bench, spits some tobacco in the dust, gets a clearly-masculine-non-homophobic pat on the ass from the teammates, and bats last (as always). We don't need to worry about whether she's going to crush it out of the park. We only need to take care of ourselves as best we can when she does.

How can I maximize my interest and the interests of the group at the same time? It's no mystery - it's just off the path that we're beating with the suits and the talking heads and the hype and the misdirection. Be well, be kind to each other, be good to yourself. Think about what all these things mean, in the biggest sense possible.

End transmission.

Farenheit 4.51 - the Temperature at Which Bike Tires Freeze

The East Coast has welcomed me home with a momentary cold snap, biting at my fingers and chewing at the concrete jungle avenues. This cold city is tall and hard, bearing a family resemblance to stature of it's historical roots, now undermined by the slow slide of our Empire into sand. It's new yet familiar, the bones that built me long ago but carry me into new adventures. It's trying to tell me something, whispering from vacant lots and grandiose murals, produce stands and the grinding shuffle of homelessness. In a blink it all comes together, to collapse, and I re-open to the present moment as I slide tight through a Narrowing, Death Defying, No Chance, But Wait Just Maybe, No Room for Doubt gap between a grimy bus and indifferent Mercedes. Adrenaline tangos through my musculature, a smile flashes behind my seven-day beard, and I blow the yellow light to speed on.

Navigating deftly and hopefully, I traverse Walnut St. and cross Philadelphia in a bitter cold, asphalt grey evening. I crank my chrome companion, an impeccable steel frame lover, across bridges and vacant train tracks, through clouds of deep-fried enticement that scream a primal neon to my olfactory cells. Potholes and black ice whiz by by my buzzing wheels - the frigid lover Numbness curls up in my earlobes, and I think of Jack London, sled dogs, and trying to build a fire.

The homestretch is eight blocks of dodging trolley tracks and inopportune car doors that will catch you asleep at the handlebars. Stone churches rise up and fade away, beautiful red doors under a dim perpetual porchlight to welcome those who can go inside. Twitchy guys on the corners peddle a sparse version of community, on the tired blocks with sagging porches and occasional rubble piles that replace a forgotten house. I roll up to the stoop, and warm light comes faintly from inside where creative energy moves through the fingers of friends to craft valentine cards. Teapot whistles, I strip off my outer wool, and settle down to ponder and slowly bring my extremities back to warmth and sensation.

Sometimes I think we're analog creatures, struggling with our increasingly digital culture. Binary bits conspire to form endless streams of choices (the number of permutations on a swanky corporate coffee shop menu board is just staggering) which all come from the same vein - consume responsibly, take on some serviceable debt, stay ambitious with an appetite for a lifestyle that is a little more expensive and expansive than what you have now. The vast majority of questions in our lives occur within this boxed-in framework, rather than taking us beyond our existing habits into the realm of an imagined future. Which professional degree do I get? American Apparel instead of Gap or Forever 21? Geo-thermal or tidal power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power) ? It's like taking a cross-country road trip in a 1988 Volvo and not getting out along the way. Sure, you saw the sights, but what was it like? Heat or AC? Drive -thru at McDonalds or Wendy's? What about, "the Grand Canyon is so big I can't think of anything else so let's just sit in silence on the rim for a while"?

I read a little book once called Strategic Questioning, and in it Fran Peavey explains that long-lever questions help get us thinking in new and unexplored ways, while short-lever questions lead us to rationalize our past choices that have lead us up to this point, and to reinforce our existing opinions.

Short-lever: Do you want to ensure that everyone has access to basic utilities of heat and electricity? (Hello! Barely a question since there's only one answer)
Long-lever: What do you think about the link between energy production and the planet's ecosystems? (Hmmm... I was reading something about that last week. What do you think?)

What are our big choices these days? Everyone wants to know if it's Barack or Hillary, but I want to know what happened to busting the myth of #2 plastic recycling, and the hope that we might Free Tibet? (The answer is Barack, by the way.) Where did the Zero Population Growth people go? Seems like they went out for a beer after their last get together in the 70's and never came back. Who's talking about our water and where it's going to come from for our kids when they grow up? Who's talking about whether we want cars, instead of how are we going to fuel them with fair trade, sustainably harvested biofuels? Who's talking about McDonald's being the biggest purveyor of salads in the U.S.? Who's talking about healing ourselves instead of waiting for Merck and GlaxoSmithKline to lobby for a new ailment to be named so they can sell us the drug to cure it? What are we doing to fight run-off and dead zones in our coastal waters? Most importantly, when is the next potluck and dance party? Which of my personal habits do I want to keep and which do I change?

If you are at all susceptible to being called out, I call you out to dig up some long-lever questions, jam them in that fissure along your head where the bones healed in the first months after you were born, and pry open the rusty lock to discover a broader horizon. (Oh man, is Chris claiming he's got some extra insight that the rest of don't have? How pretentious...) False! I've been unlearning and rediscovering so much recently that I thought I knew before. I've been walking around proud yet blind, only to discover that I've still been in the box. I'm like a kid in a the cardboard fort made from the box of the new water heater that just got delivered. Give me a utility knife and point me towards freedom - I'll cut my way out. (Note to any over-zealous followers: Maybe wait on giving utility knives to kids, at least until they're old enough to appreciate the Beatles' Revolver.) I've got no claim on esoteric knowledge, just a passion to keep on liberating myself and going Further.

It's snowing now, in Philadelphia where I'm sojourning, and I've got to hit the streets to send some air mail love to far away places. The revolution will be human-powered, and I'm going to go practice for it. Send me your hopes and dreams via the last passenger pigeon of your soul, and I'll do the same. We've all got one inside, despite the rumours and strong scientific evidence of extinction - let them take flight and make headlines for a better tomorrow.

render the old world

There are wild things afoot tonight, under the spread of cosmic constellations crocheted into meaning by mundane minds. There is political babble of black men and white women and who can be less politics as usual. People plot plunder and wars (Iran? hello?), squabbling on our earthship that is indifferent and dying because of our audacious bustling. We're reaching for oil and peace and celebrity gossip all at the same time, how big is our hand? The underground great frothing river of status quo takes almost no notice but rolls and rushes on with inevitable inertia and our simultaneous rage and complacency. Our culture can't be jammed - it's a monolith and a megaladon, with an inscrutable gearbox that stretches in five dimensions that will compost us if we throw ourselves in.

In an election year, we hear so much blaming. We hear the talking heads tell us again that we won't see a dirty election, we won't see mudslinging, we won't see character assassinations. Then each year it creeps in, so soon after these promises that it's almost unbelievable. This process gnaws at us, undermines our hopes, leaves us dejectedly scraping old bumper stickers off while vainly hoping for a new witty one to ease the pain. I want to believe, too - I swear that I do. I know you may not believe it, but I do so much. In light of the patterns from time immemorial, though, I say throw the TV out the window and take matters into your own hands. We can all join the Monkeywrench Gang and shake up our little snowglobes of existence, shakedown the people who want to be in positions of power, and shake off the blues of a world that was handed to us without our consent. Take up your chainsaw and cut down the billboards that spoil the expanse of red rock desert. Find out for yourself which way the wind blows. I hear more people say that want to make art and find soul mates and let go of fear and eat healthy and take the power back. We know the ability is within us, sometimes dancing through our eyes and heart as we offer an act of kindness, sometimes slumbering like an ill-defined giant that can swiftly and graciously liberate us if only we knew the charm to awaken it.

Plant fruit trees and watch them grow. Finally awaken to the fact that we (you and I) are running out of clean water and access to it (plans exist to drain the Great Lakes... sigh). Call an old friend and invite them to dinner. Clean off the bike and ride it - it's cheaper. Transcend the fear (a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid) that we carry from past experiences which very likely have no bearing on our present reality. Start a block party and paint an intersection - if you've never seen the ones in Portland, they are sweet. Make 'health conscious' a good word instead of a dirty word like 'plain rice cake.' Walk in the woods - that's all you have to do. Just take a breather from the people on The Boob Tube and The Paper telling you what's important and listen to your own voice. You can trust me (in spite of my now being 30 years old) that if what They say is important is actually so important as to merit lots of your attention, it will still be there when you get back from your vacation to your own liberation.

I've got no answers, just fatigue from the blue light of the television cast faintly on the opposite wall in the dark. I'm waking to see all you beautiful people out there reaching and trying. It's the sight of a field of poppies to someone who has just turned on her rods and cones. It's me pushing beyond foolish consistencies. It's you keeping your promise that you made to yourself. It's the hypothetical beautiful shockwave of everyone in America buying nothing for one day. It's these endless arrangements of type, combined into words and loosely assembled to try to express where I'm at. Guided by a north star, it's all of us in the boat on still water, glad to be together in the unfamiliar, expansive twilight as we seek out a place to wait for sunrise. It's our big chance, each morning that we get up and look out the window and see that the revolution is still saving a seat for us on the bus.