Start Where You Are, or Life After the Decline of the American Empire

 I went to Arizona this past week for a nice vacation with Jess.  We enjoyed a few days with family and friends in Phoenix (she and they hit it off well, no surprise), and then headed to Sedona.   We popped in to the Grand Canyon briefly as well, to take in all its wintery goodness.  

The sights were breathtaking.  We got to shiver and watch the canyon get snowed upon at sunrise.  We walked the beautiful red rock formations around the town of Sedona.  We hiked from sandy desert up into snow and ice covered trees in just a few miles.  And we saw the sun rise and set over all types of desert landscape.

In tandem with this beauty, though, came the persistent feeling that we (not just Jess and I, but everyone) are witnessing the increasingly rapid decline of the American empire.  We built the domestic empire by wiping out the native populations, and have since gone on to colonize the world with supposedly soft ideas about capitalism and democracy, backed by men with guns.  We've paved roads, built dams and canals, and put up high-tension power lines to bring our necessities and drugs (electricity, water, and dense sugary calories) to most corners of America and the world.  We did all this with cheap, accessible energy that was seemed limitless when we began but is now quickly running out.  We've exported our goods and lifestyle choices, to the point where the world is now swimming in plastic, chemicals, inequality, and debt. 

Rolling through Phoenix and the surrounding highways, the main features seem to be cracked but endless pavement, slow suicide through sedentary and corpulent lifestyles, and divisive politics based on shallow and fearful opinions about how to grab as much as we can of the vanishing pie.  Wide people are driving wide cars on wide roads to wide shopping centers with wide selections of cheap crap.

How do we live in the face of such decay?  In some ways, it seems daunting.  We can be our own worst enemies in the challenge to live lightly in a meaningful way.  We choose distractions - television, drugs, iPhones, Youtube, farmville, Harry Potter films, and more - rather than engagement with the world immediately around us.  It's tough to look at the decay and destruction around us that we ourselves are facilitating, and not want to shut it out through distraction.

It's not a great mystery as to why we seek this distraction.  Behind the destruction, we (accurately) perceive a high level of fear in our society.  We are afraid that we won't get a piece of the good stuff (big house, exotic vacations, power over other people, social status) if we don't work hard to climb the ladder at work.  It is ironic, perhaps, that we can see that climbing the ladder is how we degrade the world, yet we are afraid that if we choose lifestyles other than scrambling to the top of the heap, we will be left behind (homeless? friendless? penniless?).  I don't really want to drive to work, but I "have to" to keep this job.  I don't want to end up in a pile of debt, but I need to get a graduate degree to have a secure future.  I dislike the stock market as much as the next person, but I don't know what to do with my money to get as good a return.  I must toe the line in order to make real changes in society.

When we feel this fear in ourselves and others, we often think that there is no alternative besides joining in the race and hoping we come out closer to the top than the bottom.  Crabs in a bucket?   Mob of children fighting over a toy until they break it?  Third world countries vying to have the lowest wages in order to attract business to become "prosperous"?  Philanthropy from wealthy corporations that have already trashed the planet?  None of them paint a pretty picture.  Seems like a tough game to win.   Hmmm...

So, if our ecosystem and society are breaking under the strain, what do we do?  To paraphrase someone more famous than I, "I'm not here to tell you how it ends.  I don't know that.  I'm only here to tell you how it begins."  Worrying at this point about what the future will look like is another way to get wrapped up in a fear-based story.  The future is unknown.  Starting right where we are is the only way to begin. 

When I look at where we are at, I feel quite sad.  The sadness that comes with being present, however, is a powerful motivation to engage in making the world a more pleasant, diverse, and habitable place. When I perceive alienation and fear amongst myself and my fellow humans, I want to just be with that feeling instead of launching into some story in my head about what that means or what I can and can't do about it.  It is tempting to give into the fear voice in my head, where I think that my actions don't matter all that much anyway, or I'll be ridiculed/ostracized for being different, or that I'm a naive fool for thinking that we can be different.  OR... I can smile a little more and enjoy being right where I'm at.

When we are present and awake, we feel wonder, gratitude, and love.  When we live an authentic life rooted in these feelings, we are less inclined to engage in the race to the bottom and write it off with a fear-based story.  We spread our consciousness like a light simply by being present.  Others around us can take courage and sustenance from our presence, and in turn spread the aware, mindful life.  Sitting and being with your breath at Starbucks one morning may not incite an immediate global revolution of consciousness, but it will feel good inside and create some ripples of a different way of being.

By practicing being more alert, awake, present, and therefor loving, can we turn the tide?  Can we be the change we want to see in the world?  Can we weave together a new tapestry of life based on love rather than fear?  

I'm not sure.  I'm skeptical myself that being lovingly mindful from moment to moment, all the while burning fossil fuels and working Wall St. hedge funds, is even close to enough to save our society.  I don't even know what "enough" means anymore with respect to changing our culture, or even if I want to put energy into "saving our society" in its present form.  But I do know that it feels good to practice and join with others in living differently.  I literally get misty-eyed when I read about groups of people in history banding together to create change by being different, and there are large-scale examples that I love to invoke.  Ghandi leading the salt marches?  I get all choked up.  A hundred thousand people in the Philippines marching to the airport to oust the American-backed dictator Marcos?  I literally started to cry in my political science class reading about it (embarrassing, let me tell you).  Coal miners going on strike because things were so bad they couldn't imagine living another day like that?  I'm so faklempt I need to take a moment to gather myself. 

Did I just suggest that you can be like Ghandi?  Yes I did.  History is full of stories of people who chose solidarity and love to overcome fear and create a revolution.  Even better than their stories, though, is Our Story, because it is the only story we have, and begins the only place we can begin - right where we are.  The stories of others are inspiring, but our lives moment to moment are where we make a stand.  It is our own satyagraha.  How can I love myself and take care of myself better?  If I feel that I'm going too fast, how can I slow down?  If I'm chasing money and it's never enough, how can I see a broader, deeper picture?  How can I communicate a more loving outlook in life to others?  What do I stand for in my actions?  How do I translate my personal values into outward action in a loving way?  All these questions are relevant and urgent as we seek to make the world a better place.  In asking, answering, and asking again, we create a present reality that challenges wider societal trends of narrow fear. 

It's the holiday season, and I know you're busy, so I'll wrap up here.  What is the take home message I wish to convey?  I support anything you want to do in life to slow down and be present with yourself and your surroundings.  I predict that you'll feel more love and delightful wonder for the world.  And that is where I always want to begin - right where I am. 

Give It All to Get It All

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest piece in the New Yorker entitled Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.  I loved it so much that I feared I would lay awake restless and twitching, unable to fall asleep due to the adrenaline I get when reading something on which I've reflected for some time.  Before too long, though, I fell into a nice slumber with the warm anticipation of coming here this morning and writing a little bit about the article and my thoughts.

In the article, Gladwell draws a broad comparison between high risk, strong-tie activism and low investment, weak-tie activism.  High risk may be characterized as the act of risking something in your own life for the cause - often your own safety and well-being, as in Gladwell's example of white activists who came down for the Freedom Summer in 1964 and risked injury and death to help move forward the Civil Rights movement.  The strong-tie aspect refers to connections with other people whom you know and share some background with - friends, family, members of the same church group, etc.  It is a sliding scale for sure.  I think of it perhaps as having two brothers with a whole life background together on one end, and the other end as being myself and a person in Lithuania who have nothing in common but membership with million others in an online group called I Love Jelly Donuts.  One of these pairs is likely to feel closer to each other, and to be willing to risk and endure some degree of hardship to help each other out.  The other pair is less likely to know anything about each other or to feel any investment in the life of the other.

Gladwell posits the idea that online social networks are mainly weak-tie networks, and that strong-tie networks are what create social revolutions, in the past and today as well.  He is challenging the idea that Facebook and twitter are tools for meaningful social revolutions.  I say, Right On Mr. Gladwell.  The key to this argument is that we (the generation that is logged on to facebook and twitter much of the time) will join nearly any and all movements that come our way and look even the tiniest bit like something we may sympathize with.  We'll sign up to save cities we can't even locate on a map (where is Darfur?  somewhere in Africa?), we'll oppose dictatorships for crimes we can't recall, and we'll put our name on a list to support a charity without giving any time, money, or attention to the cause.

The problem with this type of "activism" (I put it in quotes to show my skepticism at our efficacy in such endeavors) is that we end up subscribing to a large number of causes that each take very little investment.  It's easy to work for peace and freedom in Rwanda, Sudan, Tibet, Burma, Cambodia, America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Sri Lanka all at the same time if all I have to do is click a button between browsing You Tube and browsing J. Crew, while I wait for 5 o'clock to roll around.  Do I give substantial donations to each of these causes?  Heck no - I belong to so many I'd break my bank account.  Do I go to weekly meetings for their organizations?  Not nearly enough waking hours in my week for that.

The kicker for me is that I think we are still sensitive and sympathetic people.  I think this type of activism does not necessarily reflect some sort of growing callousness or apathy on the part of the younger, completely plugged-in generation (kids these days! :-).  Instead, I think it is another manifestation of an idea that we are hoodwinking ourselves with - that we can have it all and give up nearly nothing in exchange.

Gladwell talks of the early protesters in the Civil Rights movement as putting something at risk in their activism, and being highly invested in the cause.  I can't even imagine, due to my comfy suburban upbringing, what it was like to have your life and liberty threatened by other people in your very own town who were angry and terrified by your challenge of being black and sitting at the white folks' counter.  Or seeing other volunteers with your organization get beaten and shot at for registering people entitled to vote, who had been denied suffrage only through persistent, deep-rooted discrimination.  Or, in other cases, taking to the streets to oppose the corrupt dictatorship of your country (Philippines, Iran, Chile, everywhere).  These people were invested in their cause, and faced much higher risks, including their lives.  Would you go toe-to-toe with the National Guard to support a facebook group with a million members you've never met?  I pause and wonder.

What is the upshot of me writing all this?  I, like Malcolm Gladwell (I enjoy comparisons between he and I), feel that there are so many aspects of our culture that deserve a good, hearty revolution, that it's difficult to fathom them all.  At the same time, our lives are precious and finite.  We only have so much energy in the day - call it X amount.  I believe that we can only do so much with that life every day, week, and year, and still give our high-quality attention to the task we are engaged in.  The promise that we can do 1.1X things, or even 2X things or more, and still make a high quality effort, is an illusion.  I hold that we can't belong to 15 social justice groups on any social networking site, be a full-time student, get enough sleep, eat mindfully, get in some movement and exercise, and do all the other things in our daily routine in a high quality way.  Something has to give.  I think we can do many of those things in a low-quality, half-assed way if we choose that route.  Or, I think we we can do fewer things and really learn to feel a sense of investment in the activities we undertake - work, study, exercise, loving, etc.

I feel that we are doing the world and ourselves a disservice by continuing to perpetuate the myth that we can do it all and give up nothing.  At Stanford University, where I help teach a class, I see this in students all the time.  I have literally talked with students who are basically nodding off while trying to explain to me how they are just fine cutting out sleep as part of an overstuffed life.  I've met students who are really excited about committing to a club fully, only to end up attending two or three meetings over the whole quarter.

It isn't fair to pick on Stanford students, though.  From my interaction with other students around the country, and my peers who are now young professionals, I get the impression that we all want to feel like we're having and doing it all while giving up nothing.  Beyond social media, we've turned this trend into other troubling aspects of our culture: bumper stickers on cars about not supporting a war for oil; conferences where we fly in people from all the over the world to talk about local-focused living; green building assessment standards that purposefully omit the energy footprint of the building materials that went into it.  We're like three-year-olds sometimes - we really really want to fly all over the world while saying that we're sensitive to climate change.  We really really want to consider ourselves in touch with various global causes.  We really want a cheap, steady supply of all our consumer goods in a green, sustainable way.

Perhaps we can have these things.  Perhaps I'm a curmudgeonly pessimist at the age of 32 - wouldn't that be a hoot?  I have yet to see evidence for it though.  I think we're wrapped up in the illusion that we can have it all.  Wouldn't it have been great if the black guys at the white folks' counter could have started their revolution without being threatened with violence and imprisonment?  Sure.  It would have been nice if they could have kicked off big changes without having to invest and risk a lot, and have their girlfriends, sisters, friends, and mothers worrying that they were going to be the ones to "take one for the team" and lose their lives.  Wouldn't it be great if I could click my mouse and stop deforestation, violence, ocean acidification, and more?  Sure.  Sign me up.

I think it takes more, though.  I think we need to slow down, accept the limitations on how much high-quality life we have to give, and then use that life to get invested deeply in the work around us.  I think this is the way to foment the revolutions we need.  I think we need widespread actions where we feel solidarity with others by actually giving something up and taking a risk.  I am skeptical that the revolution will have a corporate sponsor, souvenir t-shirts, and prize giveaways.  I doubt it will happen while we click away during a bored moment at work.  It might happen if we question the suit and tie, and walk out of the office.  It may happen if we actually pledge to not use fossil fuels for transportation - not sometimes, or just this one wedding, or for this one special event, or because we haven't seen so-and-so in a long time.  If we give up some things, and feel like we're doing it with others with whom we have strong-ties, I think we'll get amazing results. 

The other incentive (who likes sticks with no carrots?) is that when we slow down, and shed the illusion that more and faster is fine and even desirable, we really begin to notice the world and people around us in a deeper way.  We hear more of what others say.  We notice the place we live (I'm telling you that you can't take real stock of your home if you're flying 50,000 miles a year for work).  We enjoy the food and the water.  We learn more about the plight of others, and feel moral outrage at a deeper level.  We're less quick to proclaim that we already know and understand everything, and more likely to open our senses and learn.  We give and get more out of this one precious life.

What I Want To Say When I Write About Life

The title of my blog is the World Belongs to You, and the web address is Nothing Is Lacking. These lines were shamelessly stolen from the Tao Te Ching, an ancient Chinese text by the apocryphal author Lao Tzu. The slightly larger context of the chapter from which I took it is this:

Be content with what you have,
Rejoice in how things are.
When you realize nothing is lacking,
The world belongs to you.

Last week, after posting my most recent blog entry, I felt compelled to reflect on what I'm trying to communicate with my blog. I thought a lot about the title, and how it relates to my reasons for writing and sharing thoughts with you.

When I'm operating from my higher sense of self, as far beyond ego and pride as I can get, I want to communicate ideas that are helpful to others in reflecting on their lives. I really do believe that the world belongs to us. For me, this means seeing the world as accurately as we can and taking responsibility as best we can for how we are in the world, both being and doing. I think when we do the best we can by acting with as much courage and love as we can possibly generate, then we have done all that we need to as human beings. I really do love when I live on that edge - trying to be as aware, compassionate, and intentional as I can be. That is the place from which I generate a deep feeling of ownership in the world.

I see the 'nothing is lacking' part of it as a call to remember that we can be fully aware only when we see that the world is what it is. There is nothing lacking - when we feel that something is, it is merely us resisting reality. We can surely work to create a future that is different from the present (more love, more peace, more harmony, fewer potato chips consumed [my own personal journey]), yet we must begin with who we are and what the world is.

For me, this means talking about the shadows and the light that I see around me all the time. In my writing, sometimes I feel an urgency to communicate more of one than the other. In my last post about my perception of our biophysical and cultural homogenization tendencies, I felt compelled by the wilderness to write, so I sat down and banged it out on the keyboard in a few hours one morning. My intention is not to present any one piece of writing as a Complete Version of Reality, but rather to share one interpretation that I have found useful and relevant in learning to accept how I perceive things to be. Someone once told me that it is important to be able to make a case for all viewpoints when considering a contentious course of action, so as to be able to fully understand and empathize with the parties involved. I like the spirit of that approach, and it is what I aim for in my writing.

In looking back over my past few years of blogging, I see many different flavors of writing: poetry and essays, optimism and pessimism, admonishment and uplift. Some people have reacted with strong support to my writing, others with occasional but sharp criticism. Some readers enjoy the variety of styles, while others strongly encourage me to forgo the variety and stick to just one straightforward format. My only defense is to invoke Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." I do not aim to confuse or confound, but rather to shoot from the hip and accept that some pieces will resonate with a reader while others may not.

As I look at where I'm at in life and think about my future writings, I want to continue to cultivate awareness of myself and offer a useful viewpoint on the world to share with you. I aim to keep writing from a place of love, even if it means working through some despair. When I criticize our modern culture, I want to do it from the spirit of Edward Abbey, Derick Jensen, or other naturalists who love the world so much that they weep for the steady loss of natural beauty and diversity. I want to write from a place beyond hope and despair, and instead embrace what is and talk of what we may do differently from now on. How can we accept the crisis around us, and sometimes in us, yet still sing, dance, and enjoy life? It can be done, and we sometimes do it well. I personally need courage to do it, so I write to unburden myself of weighty perceptions, and relish the replies I get from all of you.

I make no claim to Truth. I am for sure only one small voice, trying to be one of many lighthouses and offer what I can to those sailing the seas. I have my own prejudices, predilections, and foibles - forgive me if they rub you the wrong way sometimes. The greatest compliment is simply for you to say, "Hmmm, I like that you're sharing a different perspective. I'll ponder it."

This piece itself is a step in my growth and journey as an amateur writer. I love to write, and have so far to go that I can see my journey stretching beyond the horizon. I do not write from a place of defensiveness, but rather a reflection for myself. Thanks for reading it, and I look forward to writing more.

Embrace the Wrinkles of Your Life

So I've just returned from a week above 10,000 feet. Three days in the Ansel Adams Wilderness east of Yosemite, and then we crossed over into the national park via Donohue Pass at 11,100 feet for four more days in the high country. Whew :-)

What struck me most on this trip was the combination of diversity and fragility of life. We saw marmots by the dozen, all fat and waddling through the alpine meadows. We saw chipmunks, deer, a bear (from 100 safe yards away), frogs, fish, more than a dozen flower species, hawks and other raptors too numerous to count, dragonflies and mosquitoes, several types of pine and fir, and grasses and reeds in abundance whose names I never learned. All this at two miles high or more, and the species I saw and am aware of make up just a tiny portion of the complex web of life. Microorganisms are doing their invisible work all the time, as are plants growing beneath the surface of the alpine lakes. Lichens and mosses are processing sunlight, and countless insects are filling niches in the ecosystem in ways that we can barely begin to understand. In the moments when I was able to step back even a bit and try to take it all in, I felt awed by the scope of life in which we hiked, slept, and nourished our spirits.

In between the profound moments of awe, I also felt a huge amount of sadness at the destruction that we humans are perpetrating on the earth. The Bay Area, where we left from last Sunday morning, is a bowl of pavement and human infrastructure surrounding the San Francisco Bay. To get to Yosemite, we drove through the Central Valley, which is completely full of large mono-culture orchards and farms where the farmers are drawing down water supplies and washing away topsoil. The park is relatively protected from our tendency to lay waste to the natural landscape, though even in the national forest where we entered, there are two large dams, built decades ago, above 7,000 feet in elevation. Everywhere that humans settle and fill in the landscape with our activities, we tend to wipe out the fragile, previously-existing ecosystems and replace them with asphalt, concrete, and farms to meet our perceived needs for food and shelter.

I think that homogenization is a good way of characterizing human activity on the planet. We take what we find before human settlement and reorganize it to meet our needs. As the Europeans swept across North America, we cut down the forest to make lumber, paper, and firewood, as well as to simply clear land for farming. We build huge dams to create lakes for irrigation, flood control, and electricity production. We extract resources from the ground to either burn up or re-shape into products that we use, from soda cans to computers. We turn wetlands into compacted salt flats devoid of life except for another set of cookie-cutter homes.

All these activities create a more homogenized world, and destroy the previously existing biodiversity. When you deforest a landscape, the trees can't recover and a few invasive species take over while the animal population also becomes less diverse and more skewed towards a few species. An economic plantation of a single species of palm fruit trees in Indonesia has a tiny fraction of the diversity that the tropical forest had before. When we filled in the Central Valley (or any other area in the world) with single-crop agriculture fields, we destroyed the diversity of plants and animals that lived there previously in inter-connected web of life. 1000 acres of a single type of almond tree can't support the same variety of life that the previous, diverse grasslands did. As we continue to expand our cities and pave over more and more areas of the earth, we compact the soil, change water percolation patterns, and pollute the air. These all radically change the habitat for all life that existed there before the opposable-thumb bipeds came to town.

As always, I was also thinking in the wilderness about other "meta" levels of what we're up to with this whole homogenization process. I can see it in all aspects of our modern culture, which I feel quite sad about. Wherever we can in modern America, we put up big box stores that are identical to the ones in the next large urban area. We put up more and more fast-food restaurants to serve us more food in our increasingly busy lives, to the point where we go to them when we travel abroad (Pizza Hut in Bangkok?) and can eat an identical meal to that in Fresno, California. We pay huge amounts of money to see formulaic Hollywood love stories that sell us a simplistic, candy-coated story of two people meeting, over and over again. You can choose any flavor of baby toy you like at Babies R Us, as long as it plays jingles, has a soft color scheme and rounded corners, and is cross-marketed with the latest Disney movie. We spent the past twenty years creating suburbs all over America, ensuring that all the little boxes came with large lawns, no sidewalks, huge garages, and big neutral-colored rooms to fill with Ikea furniture. We work long hours to pay for these things, and spend our recreation time ingesting calories and media that come from an increasingly small number of large corporations, who study ways to make us want their product even more. You catch my drift :-)

What's behind all this homogenization? I think it's coming from the same drive - fear of the unknown. We used to clear land around the villages to create a border between our homes and the dense forests, for fear of what lay in that wilderness. When you have a big, flat space, you have the feeling of safety from what you don't know about in the darkness of the trees. Perhaps this is simplified, but I think it is also accurate. We began with agriculture as a way of feeding more people, and to do so we cleared the land so we could have the feeling of control. Agriculture turned into cities surrounded by farms. In the cities we developed more and more ways of making things 'safe' and predictable. We made the surfaces hard so as to travel over them easily, and made the buildings more complex and energy-intensive so we can control the inside climate (from the Romans' plumbing all the way to air-conditioned condos).

This is our trend. We think we want more and more control all the time, and the way to get it is to homogenize our lives. Diversity requires acceptance of greater variety in life, including more encounters with the Unknown and therefore less control. Why take a chance at a local curry house in Shanghai when you could eat at McDonalds? Why go the local hardware store and risk that they won't carry the lumber you need when you can go to Home Despot and be sure to get it at a Third World price? Why watch an unknown Korean film with little dialogue when you could watch a reliably predictable Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy and turn off your brain? Why talk about what you love deeply when you could talk about the weather again?

Encounters with the Unknown or even Outside Our Usual Routine are scary! But they are also so good, and in true parallel to nature, they often hold much promise that we cannot imagine ahead of time. When we alter an ecosystem to pave it, mono-crop it, or build that next oh-so-critical Bed Bath and Beyond, we risk destroying all the fragile relationships of life that had evolved there over millions of years. When we encounter it close to its' wild form, we get such a rich experience. Who knew that this bird species lives only in that type of tree? Who knew that marmots need to eat this specific type of grass? Who knew that this particular type of frog lived only in that swamp? These relationships are beautiful, and yield so many wonderful things to appreciate, which at first glance we often don't even see.

The same is true for our daily experiences. When we homogenize our lives, I think we are making ourselves dull and deprive ourselves of much joy in the human experience. We read Danielle Steele novels and remain mentally unchallenged. We eat the same food all the time and it becomes automatic and thoughtless. We go to the same theaters for the same Pixar story, or watch the same plot thinly-veiled in new dialogue on the big screen dominating our living room. We drink the same beer at the same happy hour on an interchangeable Friday afternoon, and wonder where the spark has gone. We talk of the same mundane subjects, and slowly the part of us that yearns to share our dreams, fears, and love fades away inside, leaving an emptiness that we can't fill with an ordinary routine. We swallow the story of Us and Them from the government and chalk it up to unresolvable politics and religion.

On a brighter note, we CAN embrace a diversity of experiences, we are better able to stay awake and aware of what is going on around and inside ourselves. The simple example is trying a food you've never previously tasted, and really liking it. Beyond that, there are so many things to try. Learn to hula hoop. Try meditation - ALL the studies point to the trend that it is good for your physical and mental health. Fast for a day - yes, it will do you good. Go to a class for a skill that you just KNOW you aren't good at - you may be right and you may be wrong, but either way your brain will turn on in new ways. Buy recycled gold wedding rings, and tell people that you did it to avoid supporting such an exploitative and destructive industry. Rent a room to an interesting person outside your usual circle of friends. Read some alternative media and find out the real story behind global conflicts (here's a hint: water, oil, and space for population expansion). When someone asks how you are, and you're feeling anxious about something in life, tell them that and turn over a whole new leaf from the chit chat that wasn't taking you anywhere in the first place. In general, the guideline is simple: step outside your routine when you can and embrace what comes.

Every time you do something outside of the ordinary, you literally create diversity and make your life richer in unknown ways. When you go to Costco, you know what you are going to get, and it's not a story for your friends later about how neat the place was and how much character and charm there was in the creaky floorboards and the smell of old, oiled wood. But you might get that at the general store in your local small town. Or you'll get a whole other experience worth having, which is way better than the slick, pre-packaged, safe, everything-designed-to-make-you-buy-more-stuff experience you'll get under the fluorescent lights of Big Box Land. Instead you'll meet store owners, pleasant surprises, occasional frustration, new twists and turns, and other flavors of the Unknown. These are all so much better than a mundane life of Sameness that we sometimes think we want and keep trying to push on ourselves.

Breaking out of that box and embracing the diversity of life is a key part of waking up to the crisis that we are in. I think the more we can embrace diversity for the sake of itself, the more we will want to honor it and preserve it. All of our destructive trends on the planet come from thinking we want some form of control (certain foods year round in ever-growing quantities, more giant homes, completely sanitized households, dirt cheap and abundant plastic Everything for Everyone) to allay our fears of the Unknown. When we can let go of the desperate desire for control, and accept more of what comes, it's just like hiking into the wilderness in spite of your fear of bears, annoyance of mosquitoes, irritation of the weight of your backpack, and boredom of the same instant lentil soup over the campstove every night. In spite of all those things, the beauty of a diverse world washes over you and you suddenly realize what a joy it is to live with the Unknown and see what it brings.

The Long Road is Shorter Than We Think

Somewhere along the line, you lost sight of why you were running.

When you began, it was a pleasant morning, walking with friends over hilltops and in the shadows of trees that filled the valleys. There was enough - berries on the bushes, water in the streams, sunshine on your skin (no burning, just vitamin D), shade when it got too hot, warmth at night around the fire as you went to sleep with close friends. The world was an adventure with no goal other than to explore. There were mysteries, beautiful things to admire, some scary moments when you heard unidentified rustling in the bushes during the darkness of a new moon. You were following the river, perhaps finding your way to the sea but feeling alright if you didn't make it. The reason you were walking was to walk, to enjoy the journey and have a good time with the others along the way.

It's difficult to remember when things changed. They happen so incrementally, and our brains aren't wired to remember all the details of the past. Somewhere along the line, we started to walk a little further each day, even though we were sufficiently tired already. We felt that if we went that extra mile, we'd have a little extra space from the increasing number of our fellow pilgrims. Where all these other travelers came from is not clear, but with each passing season we saw our numbers grow. The grass was a little more trampled each day from those who had walked before. The streams seemed to hold less water, like someone was drawing more of it off up in the hills. There were fewer trees to give us shade or with which to build shelter. Much of the low-hanging fruit was gone already, and some of the less ripe ones were missing as well. The feeling of scarcity began to creep into our minds and edge out the feelings of sufficiency and abundance that had marked the beginning of our journey.

Nowadays, we often run flat out for fear of being left behind. Our story is that we'll catch only the scraps or sometimes nothing at all if we don't stay ahead of the pack. All the good things - well, we've got to be faster, smarter, and sometimes a little more ruthless to earn access to them. We'd love to slow down again and take time to talk with the others on the path, but now it seems that there isn't enough time in the day to stay ahead and still connect with others. We've got to cover a lot of ground, gather the resources necessary to take care of ourselves and our family, and when we're done with that well, frankly, we're plumb tuckered out. We know that tomorrow will bring more and we've got to be thinking about how to cover more ground and outpace the rest.

So many days, we wish we didn't have to run this hard. The sun is pretty hot now that there are fewer trees. The streams with enough water are sparse in this landscape. The days when we can sit and listen to the cool, nourishing rain seem fewer and further between. When we look at those who can't keep up, we're afraid that we'll end up like them - disenfranchised, lacking access to the basic means of sustenance, not having a voice in the group. The promise of abundance seems a little further from our grasp each day, but if we run faster and faster, and learn to endure the discomfort and strain, we hope to close that gap, for ourselves at least. Each day we run more, and eventually we lose sight of the walk completely and can't remember anything other than the running.

And then, every once in a while, we wake up. We lay in bed and hear the breeze in the leaves or the soft silence of snow. Our muscles are weary from being clenched. We flex our toes and rub our hamstrings. We massage our palms and fingers that ache from grasping. For a precious while, we see the race for what it is. We see it as just one story - so real, so scary with the overarching feeling of competition and scarcity, but just a story nonetheless. How did we get lost so deeply in that story? How did the race become an all-encompassing reality? How did we lose sight of different ways of being?

There are so many ways of being in the world, but all too often we get wrapped up in the feeling of crisis and scarcity that seem to permeate our existence as humans in the modern world. This is not an unreasonable response. We're in the deepest ecological crisis that the world has have ever seen, with the possible exception of a catastrophic meteor impact millenia ago. There are increasing numbers of humans while at the same time we continue to strip our resources and lose them forever.


I often think that the greatest challenge of our generation is how to live in a time of deep man-made crisis. How do we deal with the catastrophe? Do we ram whaling ships? Do we engage in political debate at international meetings? Do we just run the race a little harder than everyone else so as to get ahead, and hope that everything will somehow miraculously turn out OK?

All I can offer is my own imperfect, personal strategy. I'm trying to stay calm but aware. I want to be able to embrace facts, as best we can discern them, and avoid generating a false sense of security by burying my head in the (tar) sand. I want to act with efficacy and also keep in mind a sense of scale about what I can undertake while maintaining a sense of balance. I want to remember that we're all doing the best we can, and accept that this may not be sufficient to steer ourselves out of this crisis that we're in. I want to have good times with friends, and help us all relax while we navigate life in the modern world. I want to keep myself honest about what messages I'm sending out to those around me through my words and actions.

I know that the only way to avert more oil catastrophes like the one in the Gulf right now is to stop demanding, with my consumer dollars, that we keep drilling for oil. I know that the only way to end the endless war is to speak and live for peace and tolerance. I know that the only way to decrease the amount of plastic trash floating around our oceans is to stop using them. I know that the only way to promote a slower, more reflective society is to continue making space in my life for reflection and calm. I know that turning to dogma of any kind (political, religious, etc) is just placing myself in a box, and I think we want to avoid that. I want to be thoughtful and question everything, while still waking up in the morning and going forward in my life.

All this is difficult, but not impossible. I know that you are with me, and I am with you. I take heart in your courage, and you can do so in mine. I'm glad to help carry your burden when you are feeling weak, and I'll be glad for a hand up from you when I stumble. I like the different flavors of life that we offer each other, and I delight in the new synergies that we create. Let's conspire to live well...

A bid for your attention

This morning I'm sitting in the slanting sunlight, thinking of English scientists and living inside the box. Why is that, you ask? Doesn't Chris usually write this blog in an attempt to get "outside the box"? And why English scientists? Is Chris somehow connected to Climategate?

The English scientist I'm speaking of is Michael Faraday, who lived from 1791 to 1867. He was a geek par excellence for his time, doing work in electromagnetism and electrochemistry. He was apparently one of those Really Bright People who made huge strides in the physical sciences due to the combination of his experimental curiosity and the low hanging fruit that was waiting to be discovered in his day.

I don't usually sit around reflecting on deceased scientists, though, let alone English ones. I'm merely writing about him here as a segue into my own experiments in life, and more specifically meditation. Yesterday evening, I was sitting on my cushion, surrounded by a lovely group of friends who were also meditating with our regular Tuesday evening sitting group. About halfway through our sit, when I was "supposed" to be thinking of nothing, I suddenly started thinking of the room we were in as a Faraday cage.

A Faraday cage is a pretty awesome thing that Michael Faraday discovered. You can think of it (as I do in my not-as-brilliant-as-Faraday-way) as lining the walls of a room with chicken wire (or some type of conductive material). What this does is prevent electric fields from entering the room or space. You can protect things from lightning strikes this way, as well as block out any electromagnetic radiation that is outside the cage. You are creating a box that is relatively safe from outside interference, which is useful for conducting experiments or protecting sensitive equipment. The finer the mesh of the protective wrap, the more types of electromagnetic radiation you can block out (basically any radiation whose wavelength is bigger than the holes in your surrounding mesh).

Why was I thinking of Faraday cages while I was supposed to be working towards nirvana? Sadly, I cannot answer that. However, after the meditation, I started thinking of our lives as being full of signals that are coming at us, much like all these forms of electromagnetic radiation that are present in our modern world. We've got cell phones frequently going off, we've got incoming texts, we've got computer screens with visual and audio alerts for new emails, we've got alarms, we've got Twitter. We've got all the distractions you could possibly hope for in this modern age of leisure and well-being. Reflecting on all these incoming bits and bytes, I suddenly felt a huge amount of gratitude for my friends who come together each week to help me create a safe space of quiet meditation - a Faraday cage for our spirits, a sacred slice of life devoted solely to sitting with our breath.

I've been thinking recently that it's really important to pull the plug on our lives as often as we can, and find a little bit of uninterrupted time with ourselves. I have this suspicion that we are failing to serve ourselves as we live at the beck and call of our technology. As we fill our lives with more little noises and flashes that signal an incoming message, we actually erode our ability to be aware of the present moment. Yes, there are useful bits of info that come through the internet to our eyes and ears. Yes, we can stay connected with friends and family more easily than ever before. By inundating ourselves in communication technology, though, we steep ourselves in a new ethos that it's okay to be interrupted by anything that comes along. Few things rub me like petting a cat's fur backwards as much as being in the middle of a deep conversation with someone when suddenly their phone gives them an email alert. They say sorry, pause to check it, and then say "oh, it's only a fill-in-the-blank" from some organization they get mass emails from and don't care much about anyway. I hold that the very act of checking interrupts our train of thought and takes us out of the present moment, into which we then need to focus to re-enter. Something is lost in those situations, and I (obviously) feel some apprehension about giving our lives over to them.

Beyond our ability to be present, more and more people are writing about how gathering data via instant-access web technology is actually changing the way we think. Reading bits and pieces while bouncing around the web (the irony is not lost on my as I write this blog post) seems to leave us remembering less while we actually read more than we have in the past. Our attention spans are shortening, and our ability to take in and process data is changing as the technology changes. It's pretty wild, and we're not sure where we're headed with it.

Why am I being so dramatic? I don't know. All my explanations may just lean dangerously close to rationalizing my semi-Luddite lifestyle. Perhaps I'm just an old soul who is persnickety about new-fangled things. Perhaps I'm just a late adapter. I do know that I love the wave of peace when I unplug, tune out, and turn off. I like practicing being present with those around me in an uninterrupted way. I like when people offer me the same attention and consideration. I like reading longer pieces of writing without giving consideration to surrounding ads or novel formatting and presentation.

I don't want to blame anyone for being plugged in in this way. I think it is a common way of life in modern affluent American society. I think I can tell a story of the benefits of receiving a more constant stream of signals. We can stay more frequently connected with family and friends. We can follow news stories closely. We can keep our hands in more work projects. We can gather bits of data and triangulate from various media. We can avail ourselves of benefits unimaginable even 20 years ago.

Rather than blame us for being enticed by the signal stream, I want to encourage you to take a step back when you can. Create a little space that is sacred and keep it clear of tweets, pings, rings, pop-ups, and alerts. Turn off the phone and computer and be with the space around you. Reconnect with the freedom from technological distractions. Maybe Tuesday evening can be your very own Faraday cage, with a book, a loved one, a good dinner, a picnic in the park, or whatever you want. If you feel inspired, leave a comment on my blog and let me know how it goes. I'll love to hear from you, even in cyberspace.

water and mountains

Has it been two months since I've written? My blogger account tells me that, so it must be true. Wow. I have so many thoughts these days that I'm not sure where to begin. So I'll start at the beginning of recent memory, which is my wonderful trip through the northwest of the U.S. and into British Columbia.

In the two weeks before starting the current quarter at Stanford, I took a trip from the Bay Area up to Portland, a community called Windward in Klickitat in Washington, Bend (in Oregon), and then on to Victoria, Vancouver, and town called Nelson in the middle of British Columbia. It was an amazing trip.

This is my lovely traveling companion Jess, who inspired the trip in the first place, and I on the train to Portland. I love the train! Smooth, pretty on-time, way less stressful than dealing with the random attempts at security/harassment in the airports, and scenic.













This is driving along the Columbia River gorge, east from Portland headed towards Klickitat and the Windward community.











It's impossible to capture the feeling of Windward. This is due to the fact that it is situated in a forest so you can't step back and see the whole thing, as well as it being a community of people doing great work taking care of themselves and the land. I've included this picture because the sheep were really cute, and very friendly every time we walked past their pen. The Windward folks are doing so much more than sheep-raising. They are gardening, doing aquaculture, managing their forest as best they can, and perhaps most importantly asking deep questions about how they and all the other people on the planet are living in terms of resource use and cooperation. They are seeking to model a different way of life focused on love, caring for each other in a close-knit community, working smart with appropriate technology when they can, and living in the peace and quiet of a rural setting. They were wonderful hosts, and I look forward to visiting them. If you have more questions, just email me. It's too much goodness to put into words here.


Then we drove a few hours south to Bend to visit my friend Matt, who turned out to know all sorts of people that Jess knows as well from Stanford. Small world! Bend looks like this...










this...



and this. Yes that's snow. Both the rock tower and the snow are a few miles outside of Bend, in opposite directions. Skiing one day, hiking in 65 degree sunny canyons one day, and lots of chilling out in downtown Bend. Local microbrews are great, people are friendly, and our hosts were great.




We got back on the train in Portland, and took it to Vancouver. Vancouver is a lovely city, with lots of views like this one. In the total metropolitan area it has around 2 million people, and it is snug in between mountains with snow on them and the ocean. We only stayed for a day, but had a great time walking around and eating Japanese noodles.








Victoria is a smaller city, located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, about a 90 minute ferry ride from the southern outskirts of Vancouver. I loved Victoria. Nice beaches, beautiful downtown right by the harbor, and the restaurant that is the source of my favorite cookbook, The Rebar. We stayed for four days here, split between wandering the beaches, downtown, and idling in Jess' grandparents' house nearby.







At this point you may notice that the rainbow sweater makes frequent appearances in the trip album. I packed with the intention of camping, and therefore had few clothes so as to save space and weight. I ended up not camping, but rocked the rainbow (wool!) sweater all over town.




Check out this sunrise over Mt. Olympus that we saw on the ferry ride back to the mainland from Victoria. Amazing!














The last stop was Nelson, a 7 hour drive inland from Vancouver. Jess' dad Bill lives in this town of about 20,000. It's a nice place. Good people, good nature nearby, quiet vibes. This picture is from a provincial park nearby where we went on a long hike one day. Once again, amazing!


These are just a few photos from the trip. I have a few hundred, and wanted to share at least some of them with you to let you know what it was like. My main feeling the whole time was being overwhelmed with gratitude for access to such natural beauty and wonderful people. I had a fantastic time with Jess, and it was great to see old friends. It took me a while to mentally check back in after this epic 16 day trip, which is fine with me.

These days I'm helping lead a class at Stanford on values, science, and the current deep ecology of being human. I'm also leading a regular meditation group, doing yoga regularly(including bikram - John Nishan, who could have guessed I'd get there?), and thinking about what I'm looking for in community. It's a great place to be. I look forward to writing some more reflective pieces for this blog in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

So much love and peace to you, from the western edge of the continent.

ps - Forgive the chunky format of this posting. I can't get blogger to do what I want with the photos and spacing.

The Refined Art of Calling Things as They Are

"Why don't we fight harder?" The question burns in me, sometimes gently and other times like a southern California fire in July pushed by the Santa Ana winds. I think of it as I sit here and watch the cars roll by, as I glide past the smokestack at the Stanford co-gen plant in the evening, and as I picture an iceberg the size of Luxembourg breaking off an Antarctic glacier. I think of it as we plan weddings and funerals, make deposits into our 401K plans, or talk of property values and long-term investments. I think of it as we pursue our individual passions, advance our entertainment technology, and struggle through this Great Recession without an end in sight.

The question came to me from a Derrick Jensen article that I can't even find right now. But that particular article is not terribly important. He, and some courageous others, have been writing for years about our losing struggle as humans to save ourselves and the biosphere from our heavy hand of destruction. He is of the opinion, which I share, that we're not doing nearly enough to stop the catastrophic changes we're wreaking on the planet. In one of his articles in Orion Magazine about getting beyond hope (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/170/), he says:

PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.

I'm glad he wrote that. I share his sentiment. When I look around, I see little evidence in our culture at large that we are going to stop being destructive to ourselves and the world around us. Yet I delight in good times, love the people close to me, and am trying to enjoy each day as much as I can. In fact, this is my purpose in life - to walk my journey as best I can and work for common good, while keeping in my heart the knowledge that we are not doing enough.

I can't prove it to someone who wants to argue about whether or not we're deep into an ongoing catastrophe that we can't seem to slow down. I think of resource wars, overpopulation, extinction, climate change, alienation from each other, and other big picture trends as evidence that our impact is too big and too complex for us to remedy in any significant way. I see no real, logical reason for optimism in any other trends, either - 'green' technology, buying things with a slightly smaller ecological footprint, conferences on the idea of sustainability, healthcare reform legislation, carbon offsets, etc. However, I don't want to live in despair because the tide of destruction is overwhelming. I believe that the reason we are unable to really change course as a culture/species is the same reason that I am able to live with something other than perpetual despair.

There is an analogy circulating widely, mainly amongst liberal folks who read science news I think, that we are in a condition similar to a frog in a pot. As you turn up the heat on the frog, in small increments, it does not notice that its habitat is quickly becoming hazardous to its health. Apparently, you can come close to boiling the frog without it freaking out. Our situation as humans is postulated to be analogous - we are poor at perceiving threats due to slowly changing circumstances. As the air gets more toxic in big cities over decades, we fail to notice the changes because we continue to acclimate ourselves in mind and body to the conditions as they evolve. We fail to look at a planet with 7 billion people on it and freak out about overpopulation and crowding because it has been (relatively) slowly growing over many decades. If the population doubled or the air became cloudy with soot within the course of one year, we might notice with alarm that our environment suddenly became less hospitable. Such a drastic change might overwhelm our senses and thinking enough to capture a large part of our attention, and perhaps subsequently our action.

Instead, we focus on the bits of our daily life in front of us. We pay bills, go to work, adapt as best we can to new technologies, medicate ourselves with entertainment and drugs, spend a lot of energy finding and thinking about a life partner, gather or grow our food, and on and on. These activities take up our attention and energy, and we only have so much life left to devote to pondering our place in the big picture, what the big picture even is, and how we may contribute to the future of this big picture. I believe that we can only focus on the big picture, which for me at this point in time is on a scale smaller than astronomy and bigger than your local town, for a certain amount of time each day, week, month, and year. To sit with the idea of global ecological collapse, day in and day out, is overwhelming. Such a practice might lead me, or anyone else, to kill myself. I believe we are simply not organized in our heads to be able to give constant attention to such a broad, sometimes subtle, multi-faceted, ever-evolving threat to the basis of our lives.

We give so much thought and action to the little things that make up our daily lives, that to me it seems that we are fundamentally unable to take the individual and collective action required to steer our planet on a drastically different course. It will take going beyond politics, economics, religion, habit, and all the other impediments to a thoughtful and scientific look at ourselves and the world around us. We will need to immediately cease so much of what we have built our modern standard of living around - massive throughputs of energy and materials, neither of which we are allowing to regenerate at anything close to the rate that we are extracting them. We will need to voluntarily reduce our population by some amount in the billions, at the very least. We will need to leave the trees in and oceans in peace, to let them recover as best they can. We need to stop putting plastics and other novel chemicals out in the world to wreak havoc on us and the biosphere. We need wholesale change on every level.

What does all this have to do with me not wanting to live in despair? Everything! I want to admit all these terrifying things about the trends I see in the world around me, and continue to feel like I'm doing a bit to live lightly on the earth. I want to write and talk about futures that I feel good about. I want to have love, intimacy, fun, exercise, sleep, meaningful work, and good food. I feel that by disclosing my fear and resignation that we are destined for some kind of collapse, we can still feel good each day by taking care of ourselves and aiming to have a milder outcome as we emerge from this crisis. I want to protect wildlife - not because I think humans are really going to voluntarily give back habitat and resources to them and they'll return to a "natural" state, but rather to keep diversity alive beyond this period of destruction if possible. I want to free the political prisoners in Burma - not necessarily because it is the most important thing in the world, but because I carry a little pain in my gut thinking of them spending their lives in prison. I like public transit, but it's not going to make New York/Tokyo/Bangkok/Cairo/Paris/Portland an ecologically sound place. I want to tackle these problems, while admitting that I don't think we will be able to "save ourselves" (i.e. preserve something resembling our way of life and level of affluence) through any action we can muster at any level.

I'm writing all this to get back on track with my purpose. I want to come clean like I'm at an AA meeting. I want to share that I think we're completely screwed, but we can delight in the joy that life brings and in doing things that we feel good about. My purpose is still, as always, to sink my teeth into good things and put one foot in front of the other. I want to write useful essays. I want to help carry my friends through their hard times. I want us to disabuse ourselves of illusions. I want to dig in the dirt a bit and build with my hands. I want to try my best to live and die with integrity. I want to go beyond rhetoric of self-congratulation and self-flagellation. I want to cut out the frivolous (not the same as fun). I want to be more radical all the time.

I'm looking for partners. Leave a comment, help me out, send me a vibe. I'm doing my best.