The World Belongs to You

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Me, or You)

2012-01-16T09:21:00.000-08:00

Walt Whitman came back into my life two weeks ago, just before coming to the Zen Mountain Monastery, near Woodstock, NY, where I am currently residing for the month of January. He came to me in a hardbound green book, containing all his writings. This came to me from a gentle and loving hand, attached to a heart and mind that are profoundly human. Who knew that through a man who died long ago, whose writings I thought I knew, I would discover the song of myself again for the first time?

from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

"I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them... to touch any one... to rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment... what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight... I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them and in the contact and odor of them that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well."

This is our work here at the monastery. We seek not to retreat into ourselves, but to be with ourselves just as we are in the world. We seek to lean into the experience of being alive. Not to cultivate an absence of thoughts, but to be at peace with the thoughts as they come and go.

We generate a story about what it means to be ourselves. Are we good or bad? Does a certain thought make me evil or kind? What does it mean if I don't know what I want right now? How shall I be in the world to make my life worthwhile? If I don't perpetuate the story of what it means to be me, what will be left and who will I be?

In zazen, which is the formal sitting meditation, and in all other life here at the monastery, we are seeking to find the still point where we don't buy into the story of meaning. What happens when I am cleaning a toilet and am just present with my breath? What happens when I chop wood and shovel snow, and let the thoughts flow through without latching on to them or struggling against them? Do I die? Worse yet, do I become nihilistic and shallow once I get "free from attachment"? How can I live a good life if I'm not beating myself with the whip of my conditioned mind, shaped by all the elements of my society that have told me what is Right and Wrong and whom I now carry in my mental machinery?

My experience is that in the moments of life where I can dissolve the story, where I can consider all the facts and feel joy in my existence, where I can feel the fullness and emptiness of the universe at once, where I can be loving though I don't know how, where I can accept my accidental cruelties due to my ignorance... these moments are full of compassion. I can feel that all of us are the same.

You and I are the same, though completely different. We are made of the same elements in identical arrangements (it's amazing what carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen can do when they spring to life). We operate with nearly identical biological processes. We, for the most part, share faculties that give us rough approximations of what is happening around us.

But, we also keep ourselves wrapped in the illusion of separateness, from each other and from the universe, by our stories. I like rum raisin and she likes coconut. I am a Buddhist and he is a Presbyterian. He is the Secretary of War and I talk about peace. He leaves dirty dishes on the counter after cooking and I am a conscientious person. He is the thoughtless 1%, and I am the awake and aware 99%. These are endless, if we choose for them to be so.

A different path that we can take is to realize our unity. Freed from the clinging or aversion to our stories, the unity of experience overtakes us. We're all eating, drinking, breathing, and seeking warmth in the winter. We all feel better living from a place of love in our hearts instead of fear in our minds. We feel joy in our bodies sharing a sense of connection with each other. We wish to break through our limitations, and we wish the same for others. We are the same and different at the same time, existing simultaneously and seamlessly together.

Perhaps a question is begged here: if we accept ourselves just as we are, how we will we engage with and, in this the darkest of all hours, save the world? How will we turn the Red States back to Blue? How will we keep fundamentalist Christianity out of our government? How will we convince the North Koreans, Iranians, Southern Baptists, Republicans, our mothers who don't listen enough, couples with more than one child, the neighbors with the noisy dog, Israelis, people who leave the lights on, people who don't check with us before making plans, people who don't love us exactly as we need to be loved every moment of every single day (which incidentally would be so much better if you just saw that you need to change and repent of your old ways)... how will we convince all these people that they need to see the world from our enlightened viewpoint? How will we do it? How????

The zendo is still and quiet. The late morning light comes through the south windows, slanting across the black cushions and the square mats under them. Outside the field is crusted with hard and bright snow. The creek coming down the mountain gurgles under the small ice waterfalls that are frozen on the rock ledges. The trees are bare, leaning into the wind and calling out for nothing against a bright empty sky.

I bow as I step across the threshold, and walk quietly to a mat halfway down the empty row. I bow to my seat, and then turn to bow to the middle of the room. I pick up the cushion, set it aside, and kneel down. I tuck my homemade wooden seiza bench under me, and sit down on it. I rock gently side to side to find a balance point. I smooth out the fabric of my gray robe where it flows down to the mat all around me. I place my hands in my lap in the cosmic mudra that is standard practice here. I look at my watch one last time, and then gaze toward a spot on the floor a few feet in front of me. The baseboard heaters tick wildly for a few seconds, and then settle into silence.

I am here, as best I can be. Sometimes I count my breath and am in the river of my body that flows through my life. Sometimes I sit and worry about the future, and why I am how I am. Why do I struggle in marriage? What kind of work do I really want to do? Will I cut it as a therapist? I wonder how long it would take to build a 10x10 hut all by myself. It would be nice to have a good portable table saw for that kind of project. How deep will a spiritual practice take me? I wonder if that's a... and back to the breath. Just like that. Just like that. The still point is always there. It is not the end, nor is it the beginning. It is not an anchor, but I can anchor to it. I am not empty when I have no clinging in my mind, and I am not full. I am uniquely and completely myself when I realize my connection to all things. Though it may feel that way sometimes, there are no gaps in reality. The puzzle is rich and infinite, and my heart burns to explore it.

The shimmer of a steel spoon in the mug,
still hands hold the gentle book -
the cat adjusts its paw.

Harvesting What the Earth Brings Forth

2011-10-14T14:18:00.000-07:00

We need 25 bunches of green kale.   You got it?

I've got it.

I drag my knife across the gritty sharpener six times, and tuck it in my small harvest apron next to the bunch of rubber bands. I haul the big plastic barrel called a tomba off the truck, and carry it on my back towards the long beds of bushy, green, nutrient-packed goodness. The sky is probably as big and beautiful as always, but the morning mist obscures it for now. I can just see the autumn colors where the vegetables end and the forest begins.

The quiet of 7 a.m. is still upon the fields. I don't mind if the others want to talk, but I'm happy these days to walk a little further down the row to harvest in silence, especially in the morning. The kale is cold and wet in my hands as I roughly bunch up the leaves, and a quick slice of my stainless knife separates them from the stalk instantly. It's nice to handle sharp tools with confidence - no distractions, no blood, minimal effort, clean cuts, an attractive bunch of leafy greens. My now-practiced fingers twist the rubber band around the base of the leaves, triple up the loop, and toss it into the harvest pile. If my father the surgeon were still alive, he might smile to watch me using my hands and a knife to help take care of people.

230 bunches of salad turnips. They come out of the ground with a faint satisfying pop as the tap root comes free. What beautiful white shoulders and smooth bodies. 170 heads of cabbage. Walk quickly down the line, cutting and leaving them lay. We'll double back to toss them to the receiver, who puts them in the big crate being carried by the tractor. 5 tombas of spinach. Sigh. Spinach is tedious for me, but our shareholders love it. I bend over to slice it at ground level into handfuls, then toss it in the tub. Seems like forever just to fill one, especially if it's a weedy row. Next, an entire bed of acorn squash, four rows at 800 feet long...??!! All 8 of us are out there. I'm taking 5-gallon buckets as fast as I can and dumping them into crates on the trailer as the tractor idles along. 6 people are on the ground carrying me more full buckets and taking away the empties to fill. We find flow for a while, brown skin and white and the comaraderie of a system that has harmony like a fine-tuned John Deere.

The farm keeps moving. Harvest, plow it under, seed the next crop, weed the beds, hope for the best. Lay down plastic, take it back up. Watch the satellite imagery as the weathermen tell you that a hurricane is coming up the coast. The rain comes and you watch it fall, taking in the butternut squash anyway and hoping for the best.   We lose some lettuce to bottom rot, but the broccoli looks beautiful. The first round of zucchini is delicious, and the second is wiped out by disease that decimates the whole planting. Those radishes are going to save us this year, she says. I smile. How did the share boxes look this week? They were beautiful, I say. Others nod.

The work doesn't have to break your back, but you need to keep moving to stay on pace with the flow of nature. Your hands get dirty. It's hard to drag a tomba full of celery 100 feet to the truck, let alone lift it up. (A tomba, pictured here, is probably about 20 gallons in volume.)

You start at 6 a.m. in the summer, 7 a.m. in the fall. If you're the owner and things need to get done, you get up earlier. The cucurbits (zucchini, patty pan, summer squash, cucumbers, watermelons, and the like) scratch your arms as you reach into the plant for harvest. A bee stings you. You smell like onions all day after harvesting them. Why worry? You're working on a farm.

There is tremendous beauty on the farm. The aforementioned quiet mornings are rich in tiny nuances. In late August, a red pepper right off the plant is a taste explosion. The smooth, deep purple skin of the eggplant is so satisfying to hold, putting them in crates by the dozen. The cold morning air is bracing as you head out at first light on the bed of the truck. The sweet aroma of basil fills the wash barn while we pack the leafy bunches into brimming boxes. The warm feeling of cooperation with the crew to quietly get the job done day after day feels incredibly human.

Working on the farm this year, I've learned the lesson yet again that it is important to have as much of your life as possible be connected to physical reality. Our lives are fundamentally somatic experiences, regardless of how alluring it may seem to live in virtual worlds of our own design. Working with our hands, through easy times and hard, is of the utmost importance. As we put our shoulders to the wheel of a task that needs to get done, we can learn to ride out our inner dialogue that longs to contextualize our experiences with mental contortions.

When we lose touch with our bodies, when we give the captain's wheel to our fearful, ego-centered selves, we rob ourselves of authentic experiences in life. If we're bored, we seek distractions from the computers in our pockets or recorded music that we know inspires a certain mood. If we face a task we dislike or disdain, we try to speed through it if we think we can get away with a shoddy job. If we're afraid of not getting rewarded for being bright and cutting-edge, we learn to posture ourselves as clever by playing with language and sticking to areas where we think we already know the answers. If we think we're being treated unfairly, we create a story that we repeat in our heads about how we have the moral high-ground and how to seek justice and/or retribution. We behave much like children when they spend more energy resisting reality than it will take to accept and complete the task at hand.

In the face of our mind's best efforts to sabotage our own growth, it is empowering to remember that comfort is the enemy of joy. When we ride out our reactions of discomfort, we can get to the other side of our petty stories and discover the joy of simply being with what is all around us and within us. It is a spiritual leap to learn to be with discomfort and not ascribe meaning to it. Not having the right answers, methodology, approach, insight means nothing about me as a person. Rather, it is a chance to open up and have an authentic learning experience.

My own work with meditation is a reflection of this. When I sit in meditation, and my mind keeps racing along thinking about things, that is what is. I accept it, sit the 30 minutes, and get up at the end. Tomorrow I will do it again. I've noticed that my ego goes wild like a chihuahua on bad acid when I simply accept what I'm thinking and feeling, yet refrain from jumping to act on the impulse.

What do you mean you're going to keep writing? You've never published anything. Why keep going?

You're really going to keep working on the farm? What about the doubts you have that you should be doing something to make a bigger splash instead?

You're going to take a pottery class? You know you'll just go for a while and then drop it. Why bother?

All these things and many more have flowed through my neurons while I'm sitting on the cushion. I'm still on the farm, still writing, still throwing pottery, and still trying to not take my ego's stories as the Truth. And miraculously, I'm still alive. You might even say I'm thriving.

If this were an after-school special, I suppose the take-home message is that so much good stuff happens in life when we follow our discomfort, heading towards the things that our egos just KNOW we can't do. A great way to do that is to find a task for your hands and body to do, and get down to it. Bake a sweet potato casserole. Clean the bathroom. True your bike wheels. Take a carpentry class. Go to a silent retreat. Turn off your computer for 72 hours. Breathe into the discomfort. Remember, the chatter in your head isn't your friend, and it will fade away. It may reappear. Keep going. You are practicing being alive and in touch with the wonderful self that is your body, in this amazing world.

Not-so-Strange Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Farm

2011-07-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

Where have I been in the past seven months? Has it really been since early December that I've sat down to drain the reservoir of brain synapses that have been bouncing and building in my head? This surprises even me, though as you likely know if you're reading this, I've been keeping a full life.

Jess and I went to British Columbia and Alberta for nearly a month over the winter holidays. We came back and helped Magic move towards the inevitable shuffle and purge that is coming with the new house next year. In early April we decided to get married. I don't remember April, really, because we planned our wedding from scratch in only three weeks. In early May we got married (you can find a link to photos on my Facebook account). In mid-May we flew out to the east coast, had a few parties to celebrate, and took the train from New York up to our current home, Picadilly Farm. We're living in the southwest corner of New Hampshire for the bulk this growing season (May through November), staying in the farmhouse with Bruce and Jenny while working on the farm.

At this moment, I am at my own little axis mundi of the here and now - a coffeeshop in Keene, NH called Brewbakers. Jess and I usually come here when we make a trip to the big town of Keene (population 24,000), about 25 minutes by car or 150 minutes by bike, as we discovered today. The good decaf, friendly and attractive servers, wireless service, and creaky wood floorboards help me tap the spring inside that I draw upon for thoughts worth sharing.

So what is on my mind these days that brings me back to the keyboard? Resisting the global race to the bottom, starting on my hands and knees at 6:05 a.m. under a gray New England sky.

We were talking in the kitchen a few weeks ago about selling eggs at the farm each week for $5 a dozen. Many people who come to pick up their vegetables each week also purchase other products from local producers who sell through us. We have maple syrup, milk, yogurt, cheese, bread, meat, and our own Picadilly eggs. We do it to help support regional farms, offering them leverage by being a point of sale where more than 200 people pass through each week (already committed to buying local produce by virtue of their being there). It adds a nice feeling of community to the farm, and lots of shareholders enjoy getting easy access to locally produced foods.

In the kitchen, though, we were talking about the incredulity that some shareholders express at buying our eggs for $5 a dozen. This price represents the focal point of a pickle in which we find ourselves at the farm. With the cost of feed, the labor it takes to care for the chickens (daily food and water, as well as maintenance of their hen houses and fencing), and the time we invest in gathering, cleaning, and packaging the eggs, Bruce estimates that we're only just about breaking even at $4 a dozen. Even if we sell 30 dozen eggs a week (about our average) for the whole shareholder season, at $5/dozen we're taking home only $780 for profit. If there any mishaps along the way, or the price of chicken feed goes up, that only reduces the profit further. And this is for a farm where most employees work 50 hours a week for more than half the year, and the owners are willing to pay reasonable wages, which come out of their bottom line. Lots of work, and no one takes home big profits.

What this whole equation basically amounts to is that selling eggs at $5 per dozen is just the busy farmers doing a favor for the shareholders. We try not to be soured by complaints. The area of New Hampshire we're in is not full of money tree plantations. It is as depressed as any other rural area in this modern American permanent recession.

The pickle is this. You can go down towards Brattleboro, NH, and probably buy a dozen eggs from Walmart for about two dollars. When you do that, you're supporting industrial scale food flows. Why do I say flows? Think about the quantities involved. According to the American Egg Board, 77 billion eggs were distributed in the US in 2009. That's a huge number of chickens, cropland to grow their feed, energy to process them, energy to transport them and keep them cool, material to package them, antibiotics to feed them, etc. That is a flow, to keep all that process of supply and distribution going every day of every year. It's a tsunami of calories on an epic scale, like most food production in America and throughout the world these days.

At scales of this magnitude, Picadilly farms can't compete. We could try to cut corners. We could give them antibiotics to reduce the risk of infection and disease. We could box them up for their entire lives so that it was easier to just go and grab the eggs. We could feed them only really cheap chicken feed rather than let them scavenge in pastures for food which requires more of the farmer's time to maintain. We could pack twice as many in half the space. We could do these things and probably more, but we like giving the chickens a little decency and ability to realize their full avian potential. We like having a farm with more integrated cycles of animal life. We like selling eggs that are probably more nutritious than conventional ones. (I can attest that the yolks are a deeper color yellow than I've seen before.)

When people come and buy eggs (or bread, or vegetables, or anything else) from Picadilly rather than their supermarket, they are making a choice with their dollars to support local producers. This choice means stepping away from our usual m.o. of giving as little as we can and taking as much as we can get away with. The idea that we will feel good maximizing our own advantage while externalizing disadvantages (like cheap eggs, the production of which trashes the chickens and the ecosystem) is an insidious myth well worth examining and possibly rejecting.

When we buy cheap, mass-produced things, we are commanding an exploitative way of life with our consumer dollars. We may not enjoy sitting around contemplating the effects of our purchases (human and ecological exploitation and degradation), but they are the end result nonetheless. This is the race to the bottom. If we offer our money to someone who can do it "cheaper," they will find a way. Scale up production, dump your waste, enslave your workforce, medicate your chickens, spray your vegetables. When we smell the chance to save a buck, and the producer smells a way to make an extra buck, we often chuck our moral compass out the window. We think we're all winning, when in fact all we did was abuse some animals or people, and make the world a little less liveable for future everyone.

The background to all this is the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." We want others to support us when we're struggling to do the right thing. If we perpetuate the race to the bottom, what reason do we have to expect others to help us when we wake up to all the destruction we've caused? How can we support others right now so as to keep the circle unbroken when it's our time to receive help?

How can we be different? How can we take a stand for the things we want in this world - happy chickens, healthy and content friends, a stable ecosystem that will support farming into the future? I think the key to our work is changing our mental organization. It may seem difficult at first to think that spending more on our food than is necessary (local happy eggs vs. Walmart agribusiness eggs) is the path to more of what we want. But what if we took the least satisfying dollars we spent in the past week or month (the third beer, the second scoop of ice cream, the cheap shirt at Forever 21) and convert them to purchasing food that does less harm to the earth? What if we explore the feeling of voluntary buying fewer things and instead making higher-quality, local purchases? What does a life like that look and feel like? Where will it take us? What does it feel like to want to pay $5 for eggs to support local farmers?

In these times, this kind of exploration is not a destination, but rather a journey that is not always clear. We live so interdependently. We use resources from all over the world, and are heavily addicted to our exploitative, corporate systems. Connecting to local resources is a great way to begin untangling our own place in this web of modern life. Finding other people who are on similar journeys is a good way to boost our own enthusiasm. Asking heartfelt questions is great, too. Why are the eggs $5 when the Big Box store sells them for $2? I want to support local folks, but I'm not sure how best to do it. Where can I begin?

Five days a week, I and about 10 others are working at Picadilly Farm, living out the answers and the questions together. We're on our hands and knees weeding and harvesting. We're smiling or frowning at how the crops are doing. We're mending irrigation lines. We're washing thousands of vegetables each day and boxing them up. We're helping to run the farm because we believe it's a good place to begin.

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

2010-12-03T08:32:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-01T08:56:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-29T10:25:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-23T08:30:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-05T08:44:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-26T17:07:00.000-08:00

"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.

Sepia-toned Narratives

2009-12-18T12:04:00.000-08:00

We are all story tellers, from our earliest days that we can remember (and possibly before) until we return to the earth or lose our capacity to mentally hold together, whichever comes first. Our tendency to tell ourselves stories seems rooted in the situation we find ourselves in - an organism with an agenda (simple or complex) in an environment that we cannot possibly understand in a full or complete way. To sum it up, we tell stories because that's how our minds make sense of the world.

Our stories begin when we are young. They begin with our experiences: love, sadness, joy, pain, separation, physical injury, chocolate bars, flying kites at the beach, riding with no handlebars down a hill, going with our father to see his work, shopping with mom in the perfume-laden department store, seeing other humans do the things they do. We notice that there are patterns to these phenomena. Dinner comes when the clock shows a 6 followed by a : and a 30. Dad comes home later on Wednesdays and we don't usually play with him then. Other kids want to hang out with us when we have a new, shiny bike with shock absorbers. Two brownies are great, and the third sits uneasily in our stomach. When adults drink alcohol, they smell and act differently. People's faces and body language sometimes match the words they are saying, and sometimes they don't. We get some reward for being obedient in school. Soft sheets and blankets feel good when we climb into bed. Our lives begin to take shape around these patterns, as we participate in and create ever more complex and lengthy ones.

As humans we also begin early in life (at birth perhaps, definitely within the first few years) to tell ourselves stories about the reasons why things happen. I get a hug more quickly when I've already cleaned up the legos by bedtime, because mom is happier. Polite people don't burp at the dinner table because it offends others. Our parents drive to work because they need to work to earn money. Fast-food chains use throwaway everything because it's cheaper that way, and cheaper is better. There are as many stories as there are interactions in the world.

The renowned linguist Benjamin Whorf posited the idea that our language is both a platform for and a fence around our worldview. Our stories function in much the same way. With language, we can communicate complex ideas clearly and simply with language. We generate words like praxis, relativity, and entheogenic to expand the world as we conceptualize it in our mind. When we change from passive to active voice, we feel more clarity about who is doing what in the world. On the flip side, people who come from cultures without the language of individual ownership have/had trouble participating in a private property society like ours. When we reify concepts (Government keeps messing with my healthcare rights!), we obscure who is actually doing something (We elected a few people, they hired a lot of other people who go to work and write legislation that is enforced by other people who threaten violence, imprisonment, or other penalties for breaking their laws). These are a few of the things we do.

We do the same things with the stories we tell, sometimes because of the language we use but also by arbitrarily embracing some stories while rejecting others. We tell ourselves that we need to drive because we live far away from work, friends, and the stores we frequent. We see hope for the future in news articles about 'green' buildings built from recycled industrial waste products. We 'know' that our father didn't love us or mom because he didn't tell us the truth about having an affair. We 'know' that, sadly, life just doesn't work that way. We know that grassroots activism is a nice idea but it's not effective in changing the world. You've got to have mass mailing campaigns if you want to save the rainforest.

On the warmer, fuzzier side, we also tell stories about how we function well. We describe ourselves as having overcome traumatic relationships and emerged stronger and wiser. We recognize that we don't want to devote life to playing video games. Yoga and meditation are always good for you. We are a closer family because we came together after grandpa died. We inspired two dozen people to meditate regularly last year. Both of these lists are endless.

What do all these things have in common? They are stories! They are mostly based on little bits of data gathered by us in our tiny slice of experiencing the universe. This is the key to the whole matter. There is so much that we don't know about cause and effect in the world around us. We do have some very gross, rough control over what happens to us. We can choose where to go to work, whom to marry, whether to toss it in the recycling bin, how much caffeine to consume, whether to buy fair trade-labeled products, what we devote life to talking about, and many other choices that shape our days. However, as many psychologists have told us, we as humans seem to have a fundamental need to have a coherent story or narrative about the world around us. To achieve a functional narrative that at least appears durable and stable, we fill in and smooth over blind spots by telling ourselves simple, all-encompassing stories about the World and How It Works. It is a natural process that we all engage in, and seems to be a key to basic mental health and our ability to wake up each day to live our lives. How could we really function at all without a coherent narrative tying together all the sensory inputs we get from the world around us?

When we start to tell ourselves stories as black-and-white, brick-and-mortar reality, however, we run into problems right away. We begin to narrow our sense of what is possible by limiting our ideas about reality to the stories that we tell and to which we eventually cling with an iron grip. When I drive a car as my main means of getting around for a decade, I lose my ability to imagine how I might be bicycle-based instead. When I get much of my information from corporate nightly news broadcasts, I believe that "the environment" is just another issue to be considered alongside politics, religion, economics, etc., rather than the underpinning for all life on the planet and therefore worthy of our immediate, full attention. When I see most others around me working at stressful, disempowered jobs and seeking to release tension through alcohol and Hollywood entertainment, I come to believe that this is how to live a balanced life. When my story is that I need Them tell Us what's healthy/beneficial/useful, I literally lose the ability to remember that I can discover these things myself.

If our stories are limiting, we impoverish ourselves. I have long believed that poverty is as much tied to our stories as it is to how much cash we have stuffed in our mattresses or Manhattan apartments. If you have 10 million dollars in the bank, but can't imagine raising a family on less than 20 (don't laugh, some people believe this) than you are impoverished (i.e. not free) because of your story. If you're a poor farmer in Thailand, but have good food, family, and health to live out the rest of your foreseeable future, then your story of 'enough' makes you wealthy. If your story is that we are all in this global crisis together, then you'll feel more empathy with other human beings throughout the world (and perhaps less inclined to bomb/sanction/enslave them). If your story is that you have the one Right understanding of God, government, or how to be a contributing member of society, I predict you'll be more likely to react with fear and anger when you encounter other people (anyone, really) who deviate from your storyline.

What is your story? Is the world full of possibility? Is your life full of potential? Is life nasty, brutish, and short? Is it Us vs. Them? How much is Enough? Is death something to be afraid of? Do you need to fight aging with botox, make-up, and hair color because old is ugly? Is a conversation full of gossip and complaint a worthwhile use of your life? When you see high school kids getting high, laughing, and playing in a park, is this scary or perhaps beautiful? When someone hits on you in the coffeehouse, is it a threat or a compliment? Is your life sacred, or is it something that you have to trudge through while keeping your chin up?

Here's the magical twist on stories: by changing our stories, we can change our life. When we change the language we use and the thoughts we have about the world and our place in it, we actually feel different. At the recommendation of a skilled therapist, I tried out writing a brief story of my life both as a victim and as a hero. After writing the victim story, I felt deflated and empty. After writing the hero version, I actually went on to do some good creative writing in the weeks that followed because I felt so good about myself. When I tell the story that my struggle with my mom is centered around her fear of growing older and my fear of not being loved and understood, I feel more compassion for both of us, rather than feeling impatient and angry with her for not being how I want her to be. When my story is that I'm learning more about what kind of person I want to partner with, I actually feel excited and optimistic that I've yet to pair up and have kids, rather than feeling despondent that I'm "behind the game." This is the power of stories.

What is the point of all this? I want to encourage you to take a little space from your stories about yourself and your life. I and others have found that when we create a little space, i.e. when we remember that our stories are NOT reality, we infinitely increase our ability to relax, take a breath, and imagine more possibilities in life. What if we can be more scientific about our values? What if we're not as healthy as we thought we were? What if more "green" technology is not enough to "save" our present global society? What if it isn't about Us vs. Them? What if there is more to life than money (come now, let's be honest that when we say that we're rarely giving more than the thinnest lip service to the idea)? What if we're actually addicted to most legal drugs and failing to avail ourselves of the benefits of the other ones? What if getting misty-eyed about democracy and free-markets doesn't really amount to a hill of sustainably-harvested beans? What if we don't need to be afraid of so much because we'll handle whatever happens? What if we really are being selfish defectors from the greater common good by using power that comes from gasoline and coal? What does it mean if all our technological advances have downsides that we can't foresee?

We an also create space to live with more fulfillment than we previously thought possible. What if I am the type of person to do yoga twice a week? What if I can switch from coffee to green tea? What if I sit down at dinner and say to my friends that I'm concerned about the state of the global ecosystem? What if I am the kind of person to say "I love you"? What if my actions do speak louder than my words? What if I go for a walk without my iPhone? What if I am the kind of person to write a blog in the hopes that it can be a light in the world? What if I don't feel good about resignation, and want to be an agent in my own life instead?

The answers to these questions are the beginnings of new stories. What will your story be today, tomorrow, and in the future? I invite you to comment right below this posting. Click the button, change your story and mine for the better. Let's get free.

Sandcastles on Clouds, or That Bad Feeling in Your Gut When You Take Strong Action Based on False Information

2009-12-06T13:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a brief list of some of the things I've been wrong about in my life, 1 through n, where n is an unknown integer that grows faster than the total bailout money headed towards the pockets of executives.

1) I thought I would always feel at home in Bethlehem, my home town. As I'm currently discovering, I merely have nostalgia for some aspects of this container which no longer feels comfortable.

2) I thought that I would never need a laptop computer because "I'm not the type of guy who takes it to cafes to write and surf the web." Turns out, I am exactly the type of guy to take my computer to cafes to write and surf the web. Who knew?

3) When I was in college, I thought objectivism (Ayn Rand's... collection of thoughts/inner emotional landscape) was deep and profound. Boy was I wrong about that.

4) I thought it wasn't really important or necessary to love yourself as a first step toward towards loving others with empathy. Wrong-o.

5) I thought for a long time that things will "just" get done in life if I think I value them. Turns out I've got to stay relatively vigilant and on-track with myself, with at least a rough plan, if I want to be effective.

6) I used to think partisan politics was meaningful. Now I really just see talking heads everywhere while we, who observe them and yield decision-making and information-disbursing privilege to them, simply end up feeling more disempowered and prone to alienation.

7) I used to think that working out was self-indulgent and irrelevant to my overall well-being. If you know me now, just smile at that one and tuck it away.

8 through n) So many more things I can't even imagine yet.

Thinking that we know things in any absolute way is really dangerous. We create boxes that we are unable to perceive clearly and then function as if they are some sort of ultimate reality. From these mental constructs we stumble our way through the world wreaking havoc on ourselves and others. We wage "just wars." (Yeah, let that one roll off your tongue while watching Fox news and thinking about two scared guys with dark skin and different flags on their shoulders trying not to get killed in a God-forsaken desert.) We make blanket statements about things being healthy or unhealthy ("almonds are good for you") while deliberately ignoring the questions of quantity, quality, and how we relate to food throughout our life. We keep working to "solve" "environmental problems" while failing to comprehend our predicament in a deeply ecological sense (the total impact of what we're doing on our green and blue sphere of paradise lost). We know that it's not Us but rather Them who need to do something. We know that "you can't just be a writer/actor/teacher." We know that America is blessed by God (whoa! and again... whoa!). We know exactly what we mean when we talk about these things.

It's a funny, beautiful trick to let go of the idea that we Know things. It's scary and fun, like getting strapped into the roller coaster and feeling your stomach sink but your heart soar while you get slowly, inevitably dragged up the first big hill. It's a beautiful thing to learn to see our worldviews as simply that - our view of the world. Can we Know things with only the rods and cones tucked into our two eyes, with their unique set of strengths and limitations? We can see patterns for sure, but what do we Know? One thing I seem to Know is the more I see, the less I feel that I Know.

What do you do when you relax a bit of that iron grip on Right, Wrong, and Other Widely Held Myths? I'm not sure. You probably still wake up, get dressed, have tea, think about your day. What kind of tea? Well I used to drink green because I knew it had the most antioxidants, but now I drink white because I've read in several places that it has the most antioxidants. I thought in the past I'd be going to some kind of academic job because I knew that's what folks with East Asian Studies undergraduate degrees do, but then I learned that I can do other things like build and teach about ecology. You probably still put shoes on your feet and head out the door. What kind of shoes? Well, I used to put really padded, cushy sneakers on because I knew that's what offered the most support to fight pronation. These days I wear open sandals or old sneakers with little padding left because I've read a lot of articles recently about mounting evidence that we do well to run and walk as close to barefoot as we can get, to both strengthen our feet and make them springier and more supple.

What else do you do when you Know fewer things? You probably eat lunch when you get hungry. A few years ago, you probably didn't think much about flax seed or walnuts, because you knew you were eating well. Now we think we see patterns about omega-3 fatty acids being important for the health of our hearts, so perhaps we eat some of those with lunch. Trans-fats? 15 years ago we Knew that they were great because they weren't your run of the mill traditional saturated fat. Now we think we see a pattern of heart attack risk if we eat them, so much so that they are banned in some places.

What's the point of all this banter about changing our behaviors? It's to suggest that we can live well by trying to remember just how little we actually know about the world and ourselves. I think we often pay lip service to this idea, but then act with a huge amount of hubris and attachment to our ideas. We create empires, smoke cigarettes to "open up" our lungs, build with asbestos (oops), trade huge amounts of our waking lives for money, hold climate talks without addressing population, buy clothes made literally by slaves somewhere we've never heard of, and an ongoing list of other acts, large and small. When we forget that we don't really have the Answers, we instantly begin the process to label and divide the world up into Black and White, Wrong and Right, Moral and Immoral, etc. We quickly move to force our ideas on others, or engage in endless inner and outer struggle to subjugate others through our volume, intensity, cleverness, or violence.

Though I'm not certain, I get a strong sense from looking around me and back in history that we naturally become more empathetic when we let go of Knowing. I think this comes about by acknowledging our own flawed process of gathering information about the world, and thereby seeing that other people are just like us. We still go out and act in the world, but we act in more modest, humble ways when we admit our uncertainty. Our humility grows, as does (at least my own) sense of wonder at the beauty and complexity of humans and our ecosystem.

Just some thoughts off the top of my head. Thanks for reading these. May you find a little space to step back this holiday season and say "Maybe things aren't what I think they are." And may you smile in that new found light.

surf mission accomplished

2009-11-27T08:53:00.000-08:00

What a beautiful year it has been for me, full of everything under the sun - love, joy, pain, sorrow, reflection, wilderness, pavement, drift, and purpose. In true southern California style, I thank the universe for all it has given me. In a more tangible vein, I also thank everyone who gave me a hand, who pushed me further, who let me off the hook, who never let me off the hook, who loved me, who cried with me, who told me with a quiet voice that all I needed to begin was to love myself. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is my Thanks-giving.

I also want to share my success in achieving the final part of my year's commitments, which I laid out for myself in my June 15th entry. After Gestalt, wilderness, tai chi, meditation, and writing, all that was left was to wax down that board and hit the surf. So last weekend I hopped on a jet plane to San Diego, dropping some CO2 but loving the journey. I arrived in the evening to the lights of downtown San Diego and the big ol' military base there. My friend Sam picked me up, and we flashed away through the night to his secret paradise up in Cardiff, where he lives in a small apartment with his girlfriend, looking out over the Pacific. Next morning we rose at six and checked the surf conditions from his balcony. That's right, from his balcony. We strapped on our neoprene gear, tucked a board under our arms, and walked down to the beach to hit the waves.

It was amazing. I failed to get up on the board in any significant way, but I paddled hard, body surfed through the whitewater, got chewed up and spit out by a few waves, and felt a little bit of the rhythm of the ocean. These simple acts constitute a huge step for me. One of the reasons I put surfing down as a goal for 2009 is that most of my life I've been somewhat scared of the ocean. It's beautiful, sure, but the feeling of being out in the big, cold, salty waves coming over and over used to make me brace up inside. This time, though, I felt the fear and just pushed through, embracing the salt and my own struggle. I even ended up cutting the bottom of my foot on our second surf lesson, but went out later on anyway just to feel the ocean again. It was refreshing and rewarding, and I will go back to it again. My deepest thanks to Sam for taking me out there to the edge of my known comfort zone...

On a related note that I also want to share, my weekend in San Diego was also marked by conversation that was nearly 100% purposeful and directed. Sam and his partner Brooking are pretty self-aware folks who have done a lot of personal work in their lives, and it was wonderful to avail myself of their good natures and broad minds. I noticed somewhere in the middle of the second day that we had established a pretty organic flow of speaking only when we had something relevant and meaningful to share, about ourselves or the world. In the absence of that, we kept our peace and functioned well in silence, even as we were occupying the same small space. I felt my mind clearing of clutter and becoming light. It was amazing. Not that I necessarily spend most of my life engaged in idle gossip or chit-chat, but the experience of hewing away unnecessary chatter is a beautiful experiment that I highly recommend. The more I do it in my life, the better I feel. I help myself stay on track and in touch with my purpose in any given moment. The more I can let go of nervous filler talk about celebrities, abstract political views, hollow pleasantries, and other things that feel vacant, the more I get down to discovering my purpose, being loving with those around me, and feeling good about what I communicate to the world. It's like a cleansing diet for your mind - get on down to the brown rice and vegetables of your soul by cutting out the pork rinds of vapid banter. Thank you Sam and Brooking - you are inspiring!

This is all I want to say for now. As I write about speaking with purpose, I feel like I've put enough words out there in the world. May you be well and thriving, enjoying this weekend to give thanks and praise.

The Revolution Will Be Internalized

2009-11-20T10:14:00.000-08:00

What is our brightest, deepest truth?

This question is big for me. It has some heft, like a blender you pick up that you assumed was going to be lightweight plastic made in China and turns out to be metal and glass made somewhere in Scandinavia. It's robust and durable. I can kick it around and it holds up. I can try to rotate it and come at it from another angle, and it still inspires simple yet powerful reflection.

I come at this question after reading an essay by Derrick Jensen last week entitled "To Give Our Brightest Deepest Truth." He writes about the importance of admitting to ourselves how we are free or not free, how we are connected to the systems that support us, how he feels inspired to speak the truth about what we're doing to the world, and how he feels that speaking this truth is of utmost importance right now. I like what he has to say, and his courage inspires me. As I wake these days, or find myself in a few idle moments transitioning between tasks in life, I find myself often feeling this question throughout my body and mind. What is my brightest, deepest truth?

My brightest, deepest truth is unfolding. Part one is to do my best to acknowledge where I am at and where I think the world is at. I'm doing what I do - traveling to San Diego (where I'm currently writing this entry) to see my friend Sam, feeling bad about burning the fuel and feeling bad that my feeling bad doesn't seem to change the physical reality of climate change. I'm biking a lot and trying to have fun as a role model without getting too attached my righteous sense of identity. I'm helping teach Stanford students that they can inquire deeply and broadly in their lives about what they want and how they think they're going to get it, and loving the process of struggle and discovery between us. I look at our society and ecosystems and feel clearly like we are not doing enough, and aren't going to survive in any form that comes close to resembling the resource flows and power dynamics that we currently cling to. I feel some sadness in this, but also lots of desire for movement to come (even if through collapse) as a way of at least taking a shot at ending some of the inequity, violence, and fear that seems to permeate most aspects of our world order. Will we peacefully deconstruct our physical world and our stories about how things need to be, in time to create a future utopia where we get to keep our cars through a magical fuel source while also eliminating racism, disease, and war? I don't see it coming, but I suppose I'm a little open to that. It's a warm target to aim for and a dream worth remembering.

Admitting this somewhat grim ecological pessimism in my blog is an important part of my brightest, deepest truth. I feel sometimes that I hold back from disclosing my pessimism about the state of the world, for fear of turning off some readers who give me feedback about how they like my general trend towards uplift and inspiration. To all of you: please know that my truth encompasses all these things. When I focus too much on the world outside me, beyond the beautiful faces I see each day, I know that I run a high risk of getting lost in arguments about whether our technology will 'save' us, depression over seemingly intractable trends of some people wanting to kill others, or fearful attempts at predicting particular scenarios that may come to pass as a way of somehow buffering myself against that future. All of these are rooted in fear, which is difficult for me to process sometimes because (I think) fear is a natural reaction to have when we read the latest news.

Part two is to find the antidote to this inner struggle by asking what it is I have to offer. What can I give that the world needs? This blog is one thing. I find much joy, peace, some pride, and a small sense of accomplishment in channeling my thoughts into this more useful container.

Another is doing my best to live my life in accord with my ecological understanding of our planet. I get much joy from talking with people and hearing from that I've inspired them. So many people have inspired me, and others have inspired them before that. This chain feels amazing when I think of it stretching across space and time. When I think of myself as part of this infinite group of people, I can draw courage from my roots and feel some peace thinking of where my ripples might go next. This is good - for me, it is a fundamental part of being human.

In the past few months, I've also been discovering that I really love helping people work through the knots in which we tie ourselves, and I feel that this is also an important task to help heal the world around me. I've done two Gestalt workshops this fall, and I've come to see that process as a powerful tool for myself and others to better understand ourselves. I have noted that when we begin to look deeper within ourselves to understand how we operate, we seem to (inevitably?) create at least a tiny space to wiggle and explore different ways of being. We can at least minutely begin to imagine that the story we tell ourselves about any given aspect of our lives is just that - a story. Over time, we selectively latch on to perceptions of the world around us in order to shore up and reinforce our existing stories. If we are attached to our stories as if they were True (and we almost always live like this), we get stuck in a way of operating in the world that is really self-limiting. Gestalt, and other processes like it, resonate with me as good places to begin to view ourselves and the world differently, and in doing so find more feelings of freedom and an ability to lead the lives we imagine.

For now, this feels like my brightest and deepest truth - share this process that speaks to me, develop my skill in facilitating it, keep talking about how I perceive things to be, and draw on the energy I feel when I'm on a good path. What is your brightest, deepest truth? Yoga, medicine, writing? What is the story you want to share with the world? How do you feel when you are on a good path for yourself and the future of the world around you?

Thanks for reading. I feel a sense of community with you, wherever you are and whatever you may be doing. May you get a glimpse of the good stuff around you and run with it.

Reaching Back to Look Forward

2009-10-27T08:14:00.001-07:00

I just looked at my photo on this blog, and I saw my dad. He's there in the details for sure - old jeans, cotton shirt that was probably a little beat up, the posture with my arms akimbo, my smile that is faint and unsure of myself while sure of the world, the sunny day surrounded by beautiful people. My father's usual style involved either highly-predictable outfits for the office that involved gray or black slacks and one of a dozen identical pale blue dress shirts, or at home on the weekends it was anyone's guess as to whether it would be a checkered flannel shirt or solid color scratchy wool sweater to go with the old jeans that bordered on embarrassing family members who were with him. The best paternity test you could do for me is look into my closet right now.

My location is also where my father was too. I've listed myself as being from the United States: Minor Outlying Islands because that is often my emotional interface with the world, and my clever monkey brain loves metaphor and being rewarded for cleverness. My father was an outlier. He spent a lot of his life being slightly anomalous to the rest of the medical community in which he practiced surgery. He was often giving his life away, to too many people in too many ways without knowing what he was looking for. It's bold of me to claim this level of insight, but there's my assessment and I stand by it for now. Our house was awash in Christmas cards each year from patients of his from years or decades earlier, who still felt indebted to him for the care he gave them (often at a discount or a long series of affordable installments). Occasionally there were even in-kind payments of fruitcakes, breads, kiffles perhaps, baked goods that hearkened back to the slightly old world roots of Bethlehem, PA where I grew up. These are the odd and touching rewards of being a doctor with a smaller-town approach in an area that was actually growing and booming.

He gave his love away too, and I think his marriages and relationships suffered for it. I think he may have been very insecure his whole life, wanting to be loved but not really feeling able to accept it from others at a deep, meaningful level. It's a tough row to hoe if you can only give it away but not feel that you really deserve it yourself. (I know, cry me a river.) I think this kind of imbalance does lead to infidelity, stretching yourself too thin, thinking that the next person you meet will finally be The One to make you complete, feeling like you're stuck in a pattern that you can't get out of. I know this from my experience, and I'm working on being different and trying to feel more whole in my own right.

Whence this sudden reflection on my father? It just struck me as I opened my computer this morning in the slanting sunlight. I have also been thinking about revolutions, and as I rounded the corner heading over to my favorite local coffee shop, I had been thinking about what revolution meant when my father was a young man and what it means now.

I remember my father talking of things in history with a turn of phrase that seemed funny at the time. He would say things like, "Back at that time, there were many of us who were upset with the dictatorship in Spain," and he would have a slight sadness in his voice, like some grand vision hadn't panned out the way he imagined. He spoke of himself being included in a set of people who were undefined and without number, but I always had the feeling that he was speaking for humanity at large (maybe we all do this with our parents, and hence our worldviews end up the way they do). He was always mum on the U.S. party line about who was Right and Wrong in the world. He didn't go in much for speaking against specific countries, leaders, or the other side of the Cold War. He listened to public radio, and stayed on top of the news as best he could for someone who worked a lot. He had a bit of an academic removal from current events, in that he often spoke of them with regard to their historical contexts and roots.

But I feel that, at the end of the day, he had big hopes for humans at large that he couldn't let go of and he turned these into his motivation to be a healer. He supported the ephemeral dream of a socialized, single-payer healthcare system in the United States. He spoke with a warm wistfulness of some day working for Doctors Without Borders. In the Vietnam War, he spent much of his leave time working at an orphanage for Vietnamese children. I think that throughout his life he grew away from the hope for a top-down revolution to 'fix' our problems, and instead found satisfaction in working with individuals in his circles to be an example for how we might live our lives to create a different world.

I feel that I run the risk of waxing nostalgic here as well as simply mapping my own worldview on top of my memories of him. I know I am afforded this possibility partly because he is dead and is not going to call me up tomorrow to tell me that I've got him all wrong. I know that I'm skewed by attempts to find order and pattern in the bits that make up the past. So be it. If my memories are a bag of wool freshly shorn from the walking lambchop, then my coherent worldview is what I card, dye, spin, and knit to keep the narrative of my life intact.

After all this musing, then, what are my thoughts on revolution and my place in it? I think we need a revolution at the fractal level. What we need to do for ourselves we also need to do for society and the biosphere. We need some serious ownership. We need to cop to the fact that we're tearing through our resources and polluting the planet in myriad ways, all the while arguing what language we can use to describe it, obfuscate it, relieve ourselves of guilt about it, etc. We need to admit that we're making ourselves crazy by working harder and losing ground, even as we're motivated in large part by fear of falling behind. We don't know how to trust each other on a big enough scale to co-operate. We in the States have internalized the Official Party Lines inside our craniums through telling ourselves that we deserve our place in the pecking order, that our capitalist-socialist-fascist hybrid government is the best and we just need to tinker with it, that we can purchase and off-set our way to a brighter future, etc.

We need to revolt by owning the implications of society as it currently is and what we're doing to perpetuate it. Owning it is the first step, and when we do that and band together with others who want to smile and talk lovingly about how to be different, we can muster the courage to take further steps to change the world. We need to spread the revolution by setting our minds on fire, fueling our own personal growth by tossing our illusions in the blast furnace. We need to plant gardens, actual and metaphorical, and tend them as best we can to harvest good things. We need to place ourselves in an intellectually robust, meaningful context at all levels while doing our best to avoid religious dogma, empty rationalizations, struggle for illusions of control, and other fear-based ways of living.

When I think of revolution, I think of always swinging back and forth between our personal growth edge in the nooks and crannies of our soul, and refining our big picture understanding of the world at large. How do I want to be? How can I come from love instead of fear? How can I do better tomorrow than today? How can I find peace with this whole process, in success and failure? Much of my work these days is focused on moving more and more easily between and amongst these types of questions. How can I navigate more smoothly, so as to get stuck less often in a corner feeling like I can't imagine an easy way out?

These are my thoughts, laid bare in the disinfecting yet swaddling sunshine. I wish you much success on your journey today and everyday. While writing, I was reminded of a poem I love and want to share with you. Thanks to those who have kept poetry in my life. In spite of resisting it as best I can, and even identifying as a person who writes it much more than reads it, I find good treasures there.

To Lead or Follow?

The cup of my mind was filled with light,

But the darkness on their faces

Made me put out my light and follow them...

It was only afterward

When we were wandering in the dark together

That they told me

They had come looking for light.

~Harper Brown

the path disappears over the next rise

2009-10-16T08:22:00.000-07:00

Turn Over Your Hand

Those lines on your palm, they can be read
for a hidden part of your life that only
those links can say - nobody's voice
can find so tiny a message as comes
across your hand. Forbidden to complain,
you have tried to be like somebody else,
and only this fine record you examine
sometimes like this can remember where
you were going before that long
silent evasion that your life became.

- William Stafford

How's that for an opener?

So where have I been and what have I done? What are the tea leaves holding for my future? What's it all about?

Answers: I've been out to the wilderness and back. After a beautiful week in Yosemite, I did another beautiful week in Desolation Wilderness just southwest of Lake Tahoe. More mountains, more granite, more Jeffrey pines that smell like butterscotch when you get within a few inches of their bark. Some swims in cold lakes above 7,000 feet, some fearless jumping off of rocks into cold water with fish where I couldn't always see the bottom. Go fearless me :-)

A few days after my return to the grid, I departed with some friends for a work week at the Tassajara Zen center in the Ventana Wilderness down by Big Sur. Yet again, so beautiful! We worked with good people, took tea breaks, plunged in their cold creek (more jumping off of big rocks, which has historically been a little challenging for me), sat zazen with the monks and lay practitioners, and sat in the hot baths while looking at the stars. So beautiful... The picture above is from a hike we did one day. Most of it was charred forest (picturesque in its own way) but this meadow of invasive wild oats had sprung back to beauty in the past year since the burn. Thanks David Saxton for urging me to go do that week. So worth it!

The morning after our return, I launched into the fall quarter at Stanford where I and the folks I live with are teaching a course about valuescience - the scientific inquiry into our ideas about value. I helped teach it in the spring, and am really glad for this opportunity to do it again. It is beautiful to help and watch the students wrestle with placing themselves in an honest, rigorous ecological context and then accept the implications for what that means about our lives. What are we up to as individuals? How about as a species? Where are we and where do we think we want to go? Can we get there? Are our ideas about self and world accurate? Big questions, beautiful discussions and activities, lots of growth for myself and others. You can't beat it.

In all this swirling activity, some of you have asked how my Summer of Doing went. I'm flattered that you have been paying attention. If you look a few postings back in this blog ("juicing the long days for every drop of goodness"), you'll find my public testament of the things I intended to do. The amazing news is that I actually did almost everything on the list. I got Rolfed. I did Gestalt work. I spent some time in the wilderness. I have been studying more tai chi with an eye towards teaching. I kept the meditation and pancakes sessions alive each Saturday morning. It's all been wonderful and good. Too much to describe right now, except that sometimes it's okay to kick the doors open in our comfortable lives and let the brisk, clear morning air of challenge come sweeping in.

Some astute friend and readers have asked about one detail I haven't done yet. Seems like folks want to know about surfing. "Have you surfed yet?" they ask. "You said you wanted to do that." Well, thank you for the push. A few days ago I booked my ticket to San Diego for a long weekend in November with my friend Sam. I think that there is no better way for the Old White Guy in the Sky to tell you it's time to surf like having a friend who lives two blocks of the beach in southern California, who is the same size as you and has two surfboards and two wetsuits. There is definitely some divine planning up in there somewhere, and I'm rolling with it. I'll let you know how my capstone experience of getting ground into the sand goes next month. Thank you for keeping me honest and on track.

A few folks have asked what I've learned in all this doing. What's the take home message? What's the take home feeling? I think my main lesson is that I'm learning more and more each day to love myself, as a way to begin to build a life. I think often this concept is somewhat of a dirty idea in our culture. I think many of us (myself included for a long time) feel that loving ourselves is some combination of ridiculously obvious, self-indulgent, narcissistic, New Age, Californian, and a few other things. More and more, I'm instead finding it essential as a way to begin loving others and engaging with the world around me in a deep and meaningful way.

First, I think it's not at all obvious and it is dangerous to take it for granted. Sure, we all take care of ourselves by eating, sleeping, and gathering the resources we need to sustain ourselves from day to day. But so often, we can do these while still not believing in our capacity to have a decent life. Or we can be in a relationship for a long time and still deem ourselves unworthy of love, which in my personal experience almost completely limits my ability to love others fully.

I think sometimes we also worry about being too self-indulgent. I think this is a legitimate worry, but I also feel that we check with our internal touchstones to see how we're doing. Is it indulgent to treat yourself to relaxing weekends of just chilling out? Of course not. Is it indulgent to express our self-love by enjoying activities that come at the expense of others' quality of life, like buying diamonds from an exploitative industry or traveling great distances on carbon-fueled adventures while the climate is continuing to change? Harder question to answer. We all do a broad spectrum of things in our lives, and I think we need to look seriously at how we've defined our ideas of what is good for us, what is necessary for us, what we think we're entitled to, etc.

I think of my friend Sarah (go you!) who is taking the life to do a yoga teacher training course as a way of slowing down and getting back in touch with herself. I think that's wonderful and right on track. I think of friends starting men's groups so that guys can get back in touch with that side of being human. Awesome! These are great things, I think. There are so many ways to love and take care of ourselves that don't involve being indulgent to the point of our own detriment.

One thing I've noticed about this as I practice it (and it takes real practice to love ourselves if we're not used to it) is that the more I'm able to love myself, the more equipped I am to love others. I think it's just a simple extension of the idea that we need to take care of our own basic needs before being able to provide for others. Like on the plane where you do your own oxygen mask first before helping the kids or other people around you.

Does this translate into advice? Well.... sure, okay. I recommend doing something really kind for yourself today. Cup of tea, putting the feet up, reading that book, whatever turns your crank from the infinite number of choices. I also recommend an awareness exercise that I've found to be a great litmus test for things we rarely explore in ourselves. For all my life up until a few months ago, I found it impossible (not that I thought much about trying) to look at myself in the mirror and just tell myself that I'm a decent person and that I love myself. When I say this, I know that some of you, mainly on the east coast perhaps :-), will bristle/scorn/laugh and distance yourself from even thinking about this. I used to do that too. Then I thought about it a bit, and felt sad that I couldn't do this simple activity. I resisted by rationalizing - "Why does it matter whether I can do it and really feel okay with it? I 'know' that I love myself." I resisted by labeling it strange and self-indulgent - "Normal people don't do this." Both of these are perhaps true, but I have also noticed that once I tried it a few times, felt the discomfort, and began to revisit it in light of some personal growth work, I learned a few things.

One - I didn't become some deranged narcissist. Two - I didn't become any softer in the head than I perhaps already am. Three - I learned a lot by asking myself why it seems so hard at first. Four - I gained some more self-esteem. Five - it's not a slippery slope down to a Stuart Smiley level of meaningless drivel. Six - wow, I'm better able to empathize with others and connect in meaningful ways. Seven - life is pretty good.

So this is my story and I'm sticking to it. I'll let you know how it continues to unfold. Know that if you read this, I'm thinking of you and sending you good vibes. (I've started to feel okay with this 'cause it's my own little version of praying for your soul, but feels much better and less invasive.) Be well, my friends, and don't let the cool weather keep your own life from being hot.

my healthcare rant and love

2009-09-05T14:02:00.001-07:00

PS - I have this note here next to my computer about things I want to blog about, and one is about owning realities especially in reference to healthcare reform. I know it's non-sequiter from the last entry, but I've got to put this out there. We won't get healthcare reform without PAYING MORE TAXES. We keep building really dumb-ass illusions that we're going to 'fix' things and make everyone happy and healthy without paying more and investing lots of effort to OVERHAUL a BROKEN system. We can't pay fewer taxes and get more out of the system. Not possible. Not even a little bit. Socialism works because people pay MORE and get MORE. We pay LESS and get... well, you know what we get. If you think everything's fine, ask someone who is self-employed about health insurance or ask yourself if you or a loved one loses their job for a few months. I read an interesting article yesterday that claims that all those townhall meetings where people were irate were actually much more civil and engaging, and the few freak Libertarian whackos who want the government out of EVERYTHING were actually the ones making the noise and getting press coverage, even though they represent what amounts to a tiny fraction of the population.

You can tell by the number of words in all capitals that I'm passionate about this. Why? Because it's a chance to move towards a more humane society. We're the laughing stock of the planet in terms of people who claim to be living at the top of the global pyramid (we certainly are in terms of consumption and trash generation) but who actually have no comprehensive way to take care of ourselves. We aren't stemming coming epidemics like obesity and diabetes, we leave tens of millions of people out of the loop for care, and tens or a hundred million more have the terrible experience of having to fight through mountains of paperwork and manage their own cases in order to get the big-business health insurance companies to pay for health care costs. We aren't talking about what the demographics look like for the U.S., with fewer young working people paying into a pot to take care of an increasing number of elderly people, who use up a disproportionately high amount of healthcare funds. We aren't talking about preventive care in any serious way. We aren't talking about taking the profit motive out of healthcare, which seems like a real no-brainer to me. (Yes, in some hypothetical world that doesn't exist, free-market competition could possibly lead to the most efficient delivery of a particular service like healthcare, but so far in human history no one's managed to do big business without screwing lots of people down the line, including the end recipients of the good or service.) So I say, let's get real about the challenges we're facing and talk about ways to do better.

I'm not aiming to be a Euro-trash sentimental socialist who loves all things Scandinavian (though they do make some high-quality stuff, and who doesn't love things made in Norway or Sweden?) and puts on blinders about the problems inherent in all big networks made up of fallible humans. What I'm saying is I feel better at the end of day when I'm living in a world where I at least trust the government a bit more to take care of me and my fellow citizens, even if there is waste and inefficiency along the way. I think (and do this test for yourself inside your own ribcage) that it feels better than the system we have now where private companies are the ones profiting at exorbitant rates from our imperfect system.

A more humane, socialist culture is GOOD. I promise you'll feel GOOD if your tax dollars go to helping other human beings, rather than keeping a few more for yourself while the poor people get f**ked and the rest goes to a war machine. It's not any one of us that's a bad person. We do live in an incredibly complex bureaucracy with vested interests that are slow to change because (in my opinion) we are afraid. We're afraid that others will take advantage of any kind of welfare state while we toil away to contribute to it. We have yet to feel like we're all in it together. We maintain the illusion of competition as a virtue, while altruism of any kind is lauded and held up as a rare example of how we "should" be that is so hard to achieve. It's not actually hard to achieve an altruistic mindset. If we give a little and take that course where it leads us, we'll get to good places of more love and less fear. There are many institutional hurdles to come down, but that didn't stop us from ending the Vietnam War, getting women the right to vote, achieving civil rights for all at least in theory, and other big causes. We can do it, one by one and then two by two, three by three. It's a small planet and getting smaller all the time. We can make it more hospitable and loving if we talk realistically about what we want and how we can get it. We need to start with owning our present reality and blazing a path with heart from there.

Good morning, and good luck.

Living Integration, or Small Axe Break Up Big Pavement

2009-09-05T12:52:00.001-07:00

What am I up to these days?

Yeah, that's about it.

I'm living large, swallowing the mountains and sniffing the streams, thinking about places that feel like home and how to get in touch with my primal self. I just got back from a seven day, six night wilderness hiking trip in Yosemite with some friends. It was so beautiful, I can't really describe it.

Some highlights:
- close encounter with a bear, in a friendly way
- watching baby deer nursing and playing
- swimming in glacier-fed pools at 11,000 ft.
- watching the stars
- seeing very few people
- carrying everything I needed on my back
- no cell phone, email, or electricity
- not showering
- watching the sunrise every morning
- basically everything about the experience...

I'm convinced that we would all be foaming-at-the-chakra conservationists if we each spent some time each year in wilderness places. Just being there, in a landscape that is so immense and vast, you feel some humility that I think is lost in our rectilinear, paved world of wireless everything and Twitter De Dee and Twitter De Dum. You feel not so much vulnerable as integrated and enveloped. I feel like my biological roots come alive when I'm able to be away for at least several days in the wilderness. Not that I'm chasing down deer and gnawing on them raw, but I am appreciating the silence, feeling much less need for control, and getting a sense that I'm part of a bigger creation that has evolved for billions of years. We swam in frigid waters and loved it. We played with abandon on the big rocks and boulders. We drank the water right from the streams, no iodine or filters, and it tasted like the Tao. We lived a tiny slice of life without a higher goal or petty fears, and it was spiritual and religious (religion comes from the Latin re-ligare or "to reconnect").

So what? Exactly! I'm back here in Palo Alto, sipping my occasional morning decaf and reading a book while the sun rises over a quiet bar and office building across the street. But I'm different, and it feels so fundamental and great. I think the more time we spend in wilderness the better equipped we are to take ourselves less seriously. Because we need to face the fact that we take ourselves WAY too seriously as a culture, to the detriment of our own well-being and that of the entire planet. We talk of balancing economy and the environment. Bad news for the economists but there is no balance. Economics is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the planet's ecosystem. Nature always bats last, despite any of our species' efforts to retain control. As we destroy biodiversity and throw long-standing cycles and patterns out of whack, we jeopardize our own future, even if we think we're getting what we want by creating thousands of jobs. We're selling out our long-term future for very short term illusions of gain, and questionable ones at that.

Am I now an (even more) wild and wide-eyed 'environmentalist'? I guess so. Perhaps it was always there, waiting just beneath the skin. For years I've considered myself an ecologist, but this trip ratcheted up both my angst and my appreciation for wilderness and preserving it. I think you are too. We all think we love the illusion of control - air-conditioning, cars, moving from polluted areas to "less" polluted areas, living in quiet suburbs but still having easy access to city life, the CDC watching out for swine flu, stores to sell us things and trash companies to take it from our sight, and countless other things. But what is our deep ecology? How much energy and matter goes into our stuff? What are the long-term consequences for OUR CHILDREN of the products we use? What is our footprint and how are the footprints of others tied to us? How much China do we breathe and drink? How much of Ecuador's sweat and humanity went into our smoothie? How much injustice in 24K gold? What do we do when we think about all these things and start to go crazy feeling a mixture of guilt and paralysis?

Here's what I do. First, I try to avoid thinking of everything consciously at once. Recipe for bad times. I work instead to establish patterns that I feel okay with, and then make them habits so I can run on autopilot there while I put my conscious attention to whatever feels like the most low-hanging fruit. Once I've got the fair-trade coffee thing down, I just operate at that level rather than worry about how I can do more. I go on to cutting out an automobile trip or two each month, which takes some brain power and life energy. Once I've nailed that, I go on to low-VOC paints in my house, or perhaps making do with the old color scheme for a while longer. Then perhaps take that personal-growth workshop you've been putting off. Your inner compass is SO good at telling you what is the most important work right now. If you're not sure, just ask around inside your heart (literally, just feel out different veins of your life like work, money, family, health, whatever) and your heart will tell you where to do the work. It's easy, and we need to keep it simple and easy in order to not feel overwhelmed in this world with so many billboards and loud voices telling us what to think about. Shut 'em out, get back to basics.

Also, these days, I'm going primal.

My friend Matt tipped me off to a website about living primal, which I have really enjoyed. It's something I've thought about for a few years now. Here's the gist of it and many other sites like it. Many people think (and I concur) that the best place to find information about how to live well is to look to our biological ancestors. Why? Because we evolved to be certain ways (movement, exercise, diet, perhaps psychology) and those patterns/needs run deep in our structures. We don't get to decide that sitting behind a computer screen for 35 hours a week is fine with us. It may or may not be. Most people find it's not. What the primal folks are up to is trying to discover through various methods (observing our close genetic ancestors like chimps, anecdotal self-experimentation, dietetic studies, etc.) what are the patterns we may want to harmonize with. The blog that Matt pointed me too, as well as a book about ancient running cultures and modern running science, has a few suggestions that I've taken to heart and have been enjoying.

I run barefoot one to two times a week. The gist is that we run differently when we go barefoot. We're more careful with our foot placement. We may pronate a little a bit and that's okay. Our feet get tougher and more flexible too. If you're a runner, you've got to try it. There is an emerging body of evidence that running barefoot is really good for you, and, believe it or not, that our own evolution did a better job building us to run over millions of years than Nike's shoes have done in the past 30. I know - hard to believe. I mean, I really wanted to trust a company, that has a profit motive as its bottom line, to do the right thing. But life goes on. So I run at a moderate pace (9 minute miles?) with occasional sprints. It feels so good. Main point - avoid injury by starting slowly and carefully. Build up gradually, as it is a DIFFERENT experience than running in shoes on pavement. Some people run barefoot on pavement. I haven't gotten there yet, but if it works for you, keep rockin' it. If you take up barefoot running even occasionally, please write to me and let me know what you think. I'm gathering anecdotal evidence myself because it is such a new thing.

More primal: get lots of sleep. If you're depriving yourself, for whatever cultural reason, you've got to get back to biological roots and SLEEP. I promise you'll feel way better, like a different person.

Eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. Avoid the processed stuff as much as possible. People looking at longevity and incidence of disease are continuing to tell us that fresh foods is the way to go to prevent inflammation (the basic root of so many ailments, including eventual organ failure). Smoothies, seasonal local foods, organic stuff, stir-fries, things with Omega-3 fatty acids like flax and walnuts, salads, all are sooooooo good. These days, I'm eating mainly fruits, vegetables, some meats, nuts, seeds, and occasional dairy in the form of yogurt or lower-fat cheese. Good stuff...

Move alot. The idea is that our biological ancestors moved at slow speeds most of the time, and occasionally very fast (evading or chasing other animals). Try to walk around the office if you're at work. Definitely walk at lunch. Do small tasks that require coordination. Take up tai chi or yoga if you're inspired. Swimming is great (I'm up to 2 days a week after years at only 1 or less, and loving it!).

These are my main threads and principles right now. I feel pretty good about them and the balance of my life. I just finished my 10 week series of structural integration bodywork (done TO me, not by me) and I feel like my posture and movement are significantly different. He even straightened my nose a little bit in one session.

If you're looking for inspiration this fall, write to me and I'll be glad to talk more about it. I love this stuff. I continue to feel like my work in this life is to help free myself and other from old ways of living that don't serve us and instead re-pattern ourselves to live lives more as we imagine they can be. It feels really great.

Metaphor! or, Busting Old Patterns Like White Collar Criminals

2009-08-06T22:39:00.000-07:00

That's what my summer is about, in a nutty shell. Friend and others have been writing, wondering how my big Summer of My Life is coming along, looking for details of the glory or the carwreck. Here it is, straight from the equine mandible.

Rolfing! I'm seven weeks in with my 10-week series of deep tissue massage sessions. Each Wednesday I go to an office decorated with Buddhas and dream catchers to get constructively mauled by a short, stout 75 year old man in a Hawaiian shirt who looks me up and down while I'm standing in my underwear. Have I been taking bad acid in a Guantanamo Bay detention cell? Heck no, I'm paying for this stuff. He's worked my body all over with heavy duty massage, in order to loosen up my myo-facial system (muscles and the collagen that sheathes them). He's basically creating in me the potential for a great freedom of movement and possibility to realign my body in a stack that is harmonious with my anatomical structure and gravity. It's been really amazing to FEEL the difference between my usual somatic habits and what good posture can be. One incredible thing is that after having my feet and legs worked on, he suggested I go barefoot or just in sandals to let my arches stretch out. Historically, I've had really high arches and custom orthodics to support them. In the past I've been unable to go without orthodics for more than a few days before my arches begin to hurt. I'm now gone 6 weeks without them and haven't looked back, all after just my second session. Miracle cure? I don't know, but it feels good and liberating. If you want to know more, drop me a line.

Gestalt! I just did my weekend workshop this past Saturday up in Marin County. It's called the Empty Chair, and it involves getting in the middle of the circle of people and talking to an empty chair (in our case a cushion) where you put something or someone with whom you have unfinished business. I loved it. I talked about fears revolving around money and security, and my dreams of finding/creating a place that feels like a settled home that is safe and secure. Maybe everyone who's done more therapy than I already knew this, but talking about my issues and really OWNING all sides of my human experience is really liberating. That's one of the main thrusts of Gestalt work - acknowledging that we have polarities. We've got hate that goes with the love, greed that goes with the generosity, cruelty with the kindness, etc. They are all there, and that's fine. What a concept! It doesn't mean anything about what I need to go out and act on in my life, but owning all my feelings as opposed to cutting them off and resisting them is pretty freakin' sweet.

Wilderness! I'm headed in a few weeks up to the Sierra Nevada mountains to do some camping with friends, and a few solo nights as well. Yikes! I'm only afraid of the bears, and the deep darkness that feels like Nietzsche's abyss staring back at me. Wish me luck and mental stability.

Meditation! I've been facilitating a gathering of meditators here at my place (still at Magic in Palo Alto) each Saturday morning for a few months now. I say facilitating because I always feel strange when I say that I "lead" a meditation group. It's such a personal thing, I'm not leading squat. Often I'm barely able to hold on to my cushion for dear life and keep it together for that 30 minutes. But it feels so good to do it, and we've developed a small but determined community of sitters, pushing onward and always going Further. Afterwards we eat pancakes and talk about life, which is a great balance for the stillness in our sitting practice. If you're in the area, cornmeal buttermilk is the flapjack du jour these days.

Shifting gears...

I haven't been looking out at the world so much, which probably explains why I haven't blogged so much either. I assume business as usual is still going on. I saw a few days ago that drug companies lobbied heavily to get out their share of healthcare reform, complaining about taking too much of a hit or something like that. We are still a pretty sick culture, spending so much on guns and resisting a national healthcare system. When are we going to admit that private healthcare companies DON'T WORK? They certainly make huge amounts of money for people high up in their ranks. They certainly get good at boxing people out who might actually need healthcare, and therefore they save some money. But these for-profit companies (yes, I know technically they are non-profit, but that's the biggest pile of horse shit I can imagine. That's like Stanford University being a non-profit because it's an educational institution. When you've got $7 billion in your endowment, own thousands of acres, and partner with corporations and governments at the highest levels, you are basically just functioning like any other really large corporation. With that much money and politics involved, you may perhaps still be a non-profit in the letter of the law, but the spirit of it is completely gone.) Whoa, I got lost in my parentheses... Oh yes, medical Big Business. When the insurance companies are under pressure to perform and measure against the bottom line while paying tens or hundreds of millions in salaries, and when new drugs are multi-million dollar enterprises, we've got a system that is fundamentally BROKEN.

OK, so I guess I have been thinking about the outside world a bit. While I'm at it, when are we going to admit that capitalism in general has failed? When can we wake up and smell the viable socialist alternatives? Yes, there is all that reified (reified means ascribing human agency to an abstract idea, like "The company's quarterly report scared investors away.") crap about free markets "driving innovation" and competition "promoting" healthy survival of the fittest. I just don't like the feel of a system where 40 million people are without health insurance and we're barely going beyond twiddling our thumbs about it. How about the working poor and the homeless who have fallen off the bottom of the social ladder? Having been to a few countries with a functional government that actually tries to take care of all the people, it just seems like the more humane way to go.

I think many people in our country are motived by their fear of falling off that ladder. There's no parachute or trampoline there, just a scary future if you don't out-compete someone else. I don't like the idea of needing to compete. Doesn't anyone else feel like they'll sleep better knowing that they will be taken care of by a functioning welfare state (as in "your and my welfare", less about the mythical, lazy exploiters of welfare that we're supposed to fear from the Reagan years) when they get old or sick, or when their kids want to go to college? Does it seem so crazy to just hard cap everyone's personal income at $3,000,000 dollars and everything beyond that goes to taxes? Oh yeah, I'm totally sure that would instantly kill all motivation to work hard or innovate. I'm sure we'd all suddenly be living in a Maoist nightmare where we all have to rotate jobs and live in ugly concrete apartment blocks. I would just be crushed if I could ONLY earn $3,000,000 dollars a year while I had to grind my teeth knowing all my tax money went to take care of my elderly neighbors and folks in the neighborhood who came down with cancer. That would be a tragedy.

Hello sarcasm. Where'd that come from? Must be the Gestalt therapy helping me let it out...

Yes, I'm a dreamer, and possibly one who should go live in a socialist country. But I'm not the only one. Maybe the big theme on my mind these days is: Be Kind, to ourselves and others. We know that what goes around comes around. We know that most of our privilege in life is an accident of our birth (race, gender, how many Benjamins our parents have racked up in the bank). When can we let go of the fear and struggle and learn to share ourselves a little more with those around us? If we all turned the rat race down a notch, what might happen? I don't know, but I love the sound of that experiment. It's the only way I can imagine to move towards more love, peace, and taking care of each other. It's way too big a fish to fry in any quick fix, even for a country with a charismatic young President who has big hopes and a decent portion of the population behind him. It's going to take all of us resisting old fears and dysfunctional patterns. We need to re-invent how we live. We've got to slow down, eat well, listen to each other, get back into our bodies, stop these Wars Without End, own our fears about climate change, and spend time in a park with loved ones on the weekend.

My gray cells are firing and I'm thinking of you all, wishing you peace in your corner of the world. Big love going out to those who have just returned from the canoe trip up north to the Arctic. You are super stars and tough cookies! And a peace sign, thumbs up, California Right On to everyone who has written to tell me of what they've taken on this summer. Philadelphia, San Diego, Bethlehem, Guelph, New York, D.C., and others I don't even know of yet. You are my raison d'ecriver and owners of those beautiful gems known as Your Lives....

whisked away to stillness

2009-07-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

Can we find lasting peace in our lives if we don't continually do the inner work of learning to accept and love ourselves right we're at in this moment? I ponder this, as I chew on some tall stalks of grass out at the farm at the edge of Guelph. I'm here for a few days to see friends and pack up some things, and I felt an urgent need to visit the farm, where I have helped my friend harvest grains and also raised two summers' worth of gardens. Today is impeccable - soft blue skies, fluffy clouds sliding across the sky on a steady breeze, trees in full splendor of summer foliage. It's probably 23 degrees and the air is light. I look out over the barn to a hundred acres of soy, gardens, some blooming mustard, and fallow greenery. I can't help but feel some peace and a desire to reflect on where I'm at, where I've been, and where I may go.

Sometimes in my blogs, I feel a bit like Cheri Huber. Cheri is a Zen monk who writes Buddhist-inspired books that you might call self-help. The one I love most is There Is Nothing Wrong with You, where the title tells it all but it is still a worthwhile read. She has many other books, such as Be the Person You Want to Find and How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. Why do I feel like Cheri? Her books touch on many themes in life, but after you read a few it becomes clear that the message is the same throughout. It basically comes down to practicing being calm and centered in the moment, and letting go of the stories we tell ourselves in our own heads about how we're not good enough, how we might fail at our undertakings, how we just need to wait a little longer to begin living, etc. It comes right from Buddhism, though she packages the messages in a broadly approachable way for a modern audience.
Love yourself. It's going to be okay. Everyone has fears and doubts about themselves. Acknowledge the fears, see them for what they are (insubstantial), but pay them no attention. Get back to loving yourself. A good way to do this is to sit and practice calming the mind. Carry this practice into your life. Interact with others, be a light in the world.

These are my own take-home themes from Buddhist writers as well as my own spiritual practice.

So when it comes down to it, my blog is me recycling old themes in new packaging. (Perhaps all writing is this - different people at different times working with variable degrees of success to tap into the themes that speak to their audience.) When I write, I like to focus on specific topics, from global politics to resource scarcity to personal growth. However, I really like to get back to basics as often as I can to convey the message that we are empowered to live beautiful lives. I know from my own experience that lots of information about the world is often not useful if I don't also have a context for seeing how it relates to my life and more importantly what I will do with this information. In the end, this feeling of empowerment is the thing that I want to convey to everyone who reads these posts.

What does all this have to do with me strolling down the tan earth lane in the slanting sunshine? I've been getting a lot of wonderful life this spring from sharing honestly about where I'm at inside. I try to do it more, even when people I don't know make a casual inquiry. While aiming to not overshare, I do try to accurately describe what I'm feeling and what I'm working on. For me this is a big step forward in owning and treasuring my life while learning to love myself. It really seems to begin with accepting that where I'm at is where I'm at. I want to "be here now" as much as possible, instead of thinking about how I might "be there then" and losing sight of my experience right at this moment.

I think I've just figured out why I'm writing this now (which is good, since I'm hundreds of words in and taking up your life :-) I just want to share that it feels like a long road, but that I'm on it in a good way. After my last few posts, and talking with many friends about my inner work, I have been deeply humbled and heartened to hear that lots of folks have taken my work as inspiration to go deeper, further, and in new directions in their own journeys. When I hear these things, I feel a clear sense of camaraderie and companionship with all of you as our paths unfold. And this in turn makes the long journey seem feasible and worthwhile all over again. Because I have to admit that in spite of tackling so much good stuff in my life recently, I do have plenty of moments of darkness and doubt where I get wrapped up in old stories that aren't serving me, and I can flounder there for sure. In spite of working to help others feel empowered and enlightened, I still need some help myself a fair bit of the time, and you my friends are wonderful at helping me out.

So this is a thank you card, an update, and a slice of my life. The feeling I want to convey is walking under the walnut trees with the tall grass brushing under my palms. The sun is perfect, the gardens smell rich and earthy, and it feels like the safest place in the world to walk and ask deep questions of the heart.

Rolling out a New Project

2009-07-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

The time is now. Can you feel it?

I can.

So, as promised in my last blog, we (my friend Nick and I) are rolling out the alpha version of our project, Shake Up Your Life, and we're pretty excited. You'll find all the details at

shakeupyourlife.org

When you first arrive, definitely check out the link that tells you about the background of the project.

If you're reading this post, I also ask a favor of you. After you see what we're putting out there in the world, please try one of the experiments, or your own version of one, and put your experiences up there. If you're not familiar with actually adding content to a Wiki format, it's one click away at the little "edit" button on the right side of each entry. Take it from there and run with it :-) I know that as this project grows, it will take on it's own life. This is our dream for it. If you do just one, even with a small entry, this whole thing will take a huge leap forward, all due to you.

We know it's rough and bare bones, but we're excited to simultaneously use it while also evolving and enhancing it with feedback from you. We're already thinking of appearance (color schemes and formatting) as well as content (enhancing the entries with background info). We're thinking about the language of the entries, how to help you feel invited to participate, how to grow it, and more.

If I write more, it will only be clutter. This is all for now. Visit it, use it, let me know how it handles. Thank you!

juicing the long days for every drop of goodness

2009-06-15T19:20:00.000-07:00

This is the summer of my life. If you had to choose a word to emphasize in that phrase, "my" might be it. It's less of a statement where you are 18 years old and about to drive across the country with your boyfriend, and you're going to have the summer of your life taking pictures of yourself at Car-henge and The World's Largest Ball of Twine. It's more about me choosing, me doing things that I've been reluctant or afraid to do, me keeping it real and lively and engaged, me coming out of a long winter of struggle, me honoring everything in my life that has led up to this moment by doing my best. It's that kind of summer.

What am I up to? I just had my first Rolfing session an hour ago. Rolfing is a form of deep tissue massage designed to loosen up and realign your body's structure to move more freely, upright, and in harmony with our design that evolved under gravity's constant presence. It's 10 weekly sessions, and it's really intense and painful sometimes. But I feel great already, and I'm psyched for more.

I'm going to travel down to San Diego and learn to surf with my friend Sam. I hope to do this on a roadtrip with another old friend, living the American dream of Californiating myself in the sun and sand. Perhaps we will pop in to Mexico and say hi.

I'm doing a Gestalt therapy intensive weekend session in August. Gestalt therapy is working with a group of other people, facilitated by a few leaders, so as to become mirrors for each other. In doing so, we build trust to allow others to see us more clearly and also share our insights about them. I have read the pioneering book about it that lays it all out (from the 1960s) and spoken with a practictioner in Toronto who's been in a group for a few years. It really speaks to my soul, I think, so I'm eager to check it out.

I'm going to increase my tai chi practice, with the aim of learning to be a full on teacher. Tai chi feels so important and relevant to me that I really want to share it with the world effectively. I have thought about this for a few years, and I'm glad to be moving in that direction.

I'm working on writing an essay that I want to get published in a magazine. I can't say more, for fear of taking the wind out of my own creative sails, but I'll let you know when it happens.

I want to do a wilderness backpack trip, either with a small group or solo, to reconnect with the wilderness. I like the idea of a challenge by heading out on my own, and I also like the idea of doing it with friends. If you're interested, contact me.

I've started a weekly group doing meditation and pancakes. Saturday mornings, if you're in the Bay Area. Check it out in Palo Alto.

These things all spring from my desire to show up for my own life. Someone once told me that is the secret to life. I like the idea of it - showing up for your own life. I've definitely had times when I've shirked being an active agent in my own life, and let the tide carry me where it wanted. I like the feeling of engagement much more, and I'm really getting a lot of mileage from facing my fears and doing these things anyway.

Which brings me to my challenge to you. (This is where you sweat nervously and wish you had never taken that stupid advice to always sit in the front of the classroom so as to learn the most.) Because I'm a co-dependent friend with you if you're reading this, I want to challenge you to do something you're afraid of this summer. I'm thinking less about risky daredevil adventures and more about something you've been putting off doing for yourself for a long time because... of whatever reason you have in your head. Take that class, learn to make pottery, ask that barista for a date, whatever it is, do it. Feel that fear and do it anyway.

In tandem with my own summer work, a friend of mine and I are launching a website in the next week about shaking up your life. (Okay, realistically, I sort of spun out this idea while we were chatting and then he had the ganas to go home and set up the website so that when I looked at my email the next morning, it was fully up and running. He's that kind of guy.) I'll make a product launch here on this blog by July 1st, because that's my commitment to myself. It won't be flashy, but hopefully substantial and usable.

Wishing you all beautiful summer days, wherever you may be...

Sunlight in the Shade

2009-06-02T10:39:00.001-07:00

In spite of the claim in my last blog entry that I want to write more, I haven't posted here in nearly two months. What's up with that?

Well, I've been doing some heavy thinking about what I want in life, and unfortunately no easy answers came. I have given up for now my community in Guelph, Ontario and instead embraced the familiar feel of the Magic community in Palo Alto. This process of trying to be kind to myself has been very difficult, and tends to still be a wild ride from time to time. I haven't had many moments of clarity where I can sit down and generate good material to share with the world. I've been down on myself, down on the world, or just feeling down without an object, and that has been hard. So that's part of my excuse. The other part is that I have been doing lots of writing, just not here in the blog. But let's stick to the important stuff.

In this dark night of my soul, I've been often unable to reach out for help. Why is that? Well, I often have this feeling that the rest of the world (i.e. everybody I see in my life on a regular basis) has it all "figured out." To me that means they've got the answers to their questions, if not chiseled in stone then at least adhered to the stone with a durable marine epoxy that's going to last a long time. Do I know that they have it all figured out? Of course not! That would only come from me asking them, "Hey, do you have It all figured out?" and them saying, "Oh yeah, I wrapped up the package of my life a few years ago and now I'm just crossing T's and dotting I's. Why do you ask?" But when I feel stuck and fearful inside, like I'm never going to be able to figure MY life out, find peace, or be able to answer the question How much is enough?, then I project my desire for inner peace on the rest of the world by imagining that everyone else is at peace with all their choices and has a smooth plan for near 100% life satisfaction into the foreseeable future.

Do I know that this is a false projection? Yes. I often get stuck in my fearful little reptilian head, though, and can't easily get out of the illusion that I'm being left behind by my peers as they settle into marriages, houses, parenthood, careers, etc. It's a tough illusion to crack, especially when I'm less interested in telling the story in my head that they are wrong, but rather just want to be okay with a different path for myself. I mainly want to be okay with not quite knowing yet how and to what I want to commit my life. I know that I am doing it by all the choices I make. From the outside, you can truthfully say that I'm committed to a life of:

working part time - 25 to 35 hours per week
not accumulating much money
not spending much money
self and social experimentation
traveling around the U.S. and Canada
staying connected with diverse groups of friends in many different cities
swinging between serial monogamy and non-exclusive dating
constantly diversifying my skill set
being a generalist
reading and writing a lot
social rather than financial capital

These are some of the hallmarks of my life. I want to get to a place of either feeling at peace with my choices or changing my life so that I feel better about them. Right now I often feel stuck in between. I think in many ways my choices are reasonable. I like many aspects of my lifestyle, and I think our culture needs another competitive, narrowly-focused white male like we need a hole in the ozone layer. But I know that I get afraid sometimes because we, in our North American affluent society, value money and the accumulation of wealth more than an experimental life that may not yield the same type of capital security.

Every lifestyle has benefits and costs. I'm working on accepting the benefits of my lifestyle choices so far (more time freedom, more life spent with loved ones, more recreation) and finding peace with my trade-offs (less money, fewer stamps of approval from mainstream folks). This work is where the rubber is meeting the road of my life, where the real action is at.

Beyond all these worries, I've recently been reading and thinking about some ideas that I find compelling and useful. In the past few days I have gotten a lot of mileage from thinking about fear. I like the idea that we all live our lives in the face of fear. Any big or small action we take is scary to some degree. Big fears, like abandonment or failure, can rule our lives if we focus on the fear. What I've found liberating is the idea that fear is never going to go away. We always need to take action in the face of fear. Waiting for our fear to disappear is to wait forever. Instead, we can live much better by recognizing that we will be able to handle it if the thing we're afraid of comes to pass. If we fail in our marriage, can't close the deal, end up working way too many hours each week, or can't afford to own the house in the long run, we will be able to handle those things as they happen. We don't need to focus on them as likely possibilities. We can simply acknowledge the possibility of their occurrence and take action anyway. This may not be rocket science for you, but it feels like a big step forward for me. Perhaps I've known it all along, but now I've found it at the right time and it jives with my needs and hopes.

Some other useful ideas... hmmm... I think we really benefit by being in touch with wilderness. I think that's why most of us feel something intense and at least slightly pleasant when we're at the ocean. It is wilderness for sure. It may not appear as highly differentiated as a mixed deciduous forest, but it is large, powerful, and indifferent to us. In spite of our highly effective impacts on the life in the ocean, the sound and the feel of the waves when you sit on the beach is still amazing. Each one is unique, yet also just like the billions that have come before and will come after. The sound is perfect white noise, varying yet constant. It is a place to be so as to remember our connection with the Earth as part of us and vice versa. We are not in control and nature bats last, for sure, but we are still steeped in this illusion of control in our lives that comes with living in a rectilinear world designed mainly by human minds and hands. Returning to wilderness, whether a the beach, dense forest, or somewhere else, is a return to a feeling of connection with the world larger than us. It is therapeutic. We can heal ourselves with such contact.

Thanks for reading this. Thanks for being out there, doing your own thinking and processing. I take heart in our journey, in loving ourselves and being kind to each other through such dark times as my own recent trouble. Let's push on into the mystery. How can we be there for each other?

chambers and champions of the heart

2009-04-09T01:23:00.000-07:00

courage: (noun) the quality of a confident character not to be afraid or intimidated easily but without being incautious or inconsiderate. (the italics are all mine :-)

It's time to think about babies and courage, at least for me anyway. And I'm not just talking about the courage to open up that diaper after you just felt the H-bomb of a solid-food palpable poop drop into the diaper like your kid just laid down the heavy science for you, although that takes real fortitude so props to the parents out there.

I'm talking about courage in the face of our unknown future. Has Chris been reading articles about the accelerated pace of increasingly unpredictable climate change? Heck yes. Is this going to be a doom-and-gloom blog about diaper dumplings hitting the proverbial fan, during which you'll get depressed and wonder whether you actually want to think about it? Hopefully not. I haven't gotten very far yet, so stick with me my campesinos and campesinas.

What do I mean by an unknown future? I mean the sea levels are likely coming up, but we're not sure how soon and how high. I mean hurricanes are supposedly going to get stronger and more frequent, yet we're still allowing new people to settle in Florida and we'll likely as taxpayers (yes, I actually paid taxes this year too) cover the costs of cleaning up the next big one. (Actually, just looking at bang for your housing buck, now IS the time to go down and scoop up a condo in that crazy, depressed market known as the Sunshine State. Pennies on the dollar, that's all I have to say... oh wait. Houses on big stilts. I need to throw that in there too as a public service announcement for real estate speculators.) I'm talking about the ever-present threat of nuclear weapons, which don't get much press coverage but get an awful lot of geographical coverage when deployed. On Fox News and other quality media outlets, we're usually looking at what the left hand is doing over in North Korea or the Pakistan/India border, while the right hand is maintaining thousands of warheads throughout the Western world as well. (Nukes creep me out, and if they creep you out too, go to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation website and see what you can do to help). Food shortages, water wars, building nuclear power plants to fuel the extraction of oil from dirty sources - the list is long and I don't want to go there right now 'cause it's late. These are factors in our present reality, and they stretch into the future like a freight train full of wheat and corn syrup crossing the Prairies bound for North American mouths and bellies.

There's the 3 Tbsp. of gloom and 2 tsp. of doom to get things rising. So what's the murmuring about courage related to? I feel like courage is a/the key element in how we get from automatons to radical, peaceful throwers of monkeywrenches who can deconstruct our trends and break through to new ways of being. It's the power to shrug off our chains (real and imagined) instead of shrugging our shoulders.

Why do I use the word "courage?" I don't know about you, but I find it hard to swim against the stream of just doing our thing, keeping our nose to the grindstone (there's an interesting image that I think we don't usually visualize when we hear it), and not rocking the boat for fear of falling "behind." The etymology of the word is that it comes from the Latin root cor for "heart." We need that bit of heart, just like the cowardly lion was seeking, to speak about this stuff. We need it to remind ourselves that we can speak about this stuff and still have a good time in life. We certainly need it to do things that might be labeled deviant, difficult, strange, inconvenient, or other terms meant to dissuade and intimidate us.

Where do we find courage? Good question. A few folks have told me that they find courage reading this blog (one of the best compliments ever.) I find it in talking with other people who seem to have cool, inspiring ideas about how to swim against the stream and yet are able to smile, be pleasant at the party, and don't have to corner the rest of us to unload diatribes and hard-edge worldviews. I find it occasionally in works of art that inspire me. When I'm seeking courage, I can usually find it around town in a few places.

One of my main motivators to courage recently is spending time with babies. I feel like I'm in the baby boom of friends and peers close to my age. It seems like I woke up in a tent in the tundra one night, and instead of being surrounded by 10,000 migrating caribou cutting a swath through the scrubby vegetation, it was a stream of babies from friends all over the country. There's Asha, Maya, Gwendolyn, Gwendolyn, Cohen, Indy, Lukas, and lots of others... It's been a big year for birthin' babies.

I'm not sure about you, but when I'm holding a baby, I like the idea of being able to say that I did my best that day to make the world a better place for him/her. I have trouble saying that when I've been driving all over Creation, chucking styrofoam in the trash like there's no tomorrow, using mondo amounts of electricity from (regardless of those TV ads, not-so-clean) coal, buying sweatshop clothes, or any other of a number of things we all do from time to time. I do find, though, that I can call upon a reservoir of courage, that I sometimes forget I even have, to go the extra mile (by bike or bus or foot) and be a little more of an Earth steward than I might otherwise. I find that I can get a lot of umph in talking about living lightly and taking action when I do it in the context of helping future generations. It makes it easier to spend a few cents more on fair trade coffee/bananas/sugar/teas/chocolate/clothes/whateva. It keeps me warm when I'm biking on a cold fall day. It helps me feel appreciated even if I haven't been thanked for much in the past few days or weeks for anything. It helps me stay up 'til 2 a.m. writing these blogs... (no, wait, that's an ill-timed cup of coffee.)

For me, thinking about these babies also inspires me to talk more with other folks in an encouraging way rather than spreading the guilt-and-shame cream cheese on the everything-is-hopeless bagel. I feel empowered to ask about how much is enough, and follow that beast from the tail back close to the head. I feel encouraged to have deep converstions with my mom about my hopes and fears, so as to have a deeper sense of connection in this one life that we've got. I can ask myself what my heart longs for, and be patient waiting for an answer. I can make changes in my life with less begrudging and fear that I'm going to give things up, other people won't, and the planet will get screwed anyway and I'll miss out on the fun that I could have had by trying to help in an effort that was futile. (Is that just me? Someone get back to me on that one.)

So for me, tonight, under the near full moon, babies and courage go hand in tiny hand. If you have access to a baby, or even a small child under the age of 8, visit him or her and try this experiment. Look them in the eyes and say, out loud preferably or just in your head if you're shy, "I'm doing my best to make the world a better place for you." How does it feel? Important? Honest? Sad? Uncomfortable? Take that feeling and run with it. I guarantee it will give you wings.

(On an unrelated note, I'm attempting to reach a broader audience with this blog. If you like it, can you do me a small favor? Take a moment right now and send an email to someone who you think will enjoy it and give it a small endorsement to them. I know this seems like vanity (and I admit to a bit of that), but I'm actually trying to a) get more feedback, b) fortify my mental process by imagining a broader audience of readers, and c) inspire myself to write more so as to work towards generating longer, comprehensive piece(s). If you have an entry from my backlog that you like, recommend that too. I know I can be a hit or miss sometimes. Thank you!)

Volumetric flow rate, or the Curious Incident of the Blog at the Right Time

2009-03-27T11:22:00.000-07:00

Recently in Manhattan, a small Filipino woman was standing on the corner of 59th and Lexington, a little overbundled which can be forgiven for a small Filipino woman placed in that concrete jungle in early March. She was holding a bundle of flyers in one mitten-clad hand and waving them furiously with the other, getting just inside the comfort zone of each passing pedestrian in a small, sad effort to get him to take one. I say him because she was passing out flyers for Buy 1 Get 1 Free Mens Suits, which I think lent to the vague impression that she was targeting men more than women. Only by volume is she effective - 50 attempts at each cycle of the light, maybe one person takes it, out of those takers maybe 1 in 50 goes to the store (not such a far fetched idea in the shopping district near the original Bloomingdales). The store has turned a wad of tree pulp and ink, plus 8 hours of her nearly invisible immigrant life, into a few sold suits.

We live in a world where the sheer volume of things must be taken into account as an important aspect of any deep understanding and analysis. Everyone knows that the Earth can't support a growing Chinese and Indian middle-class with eyes for meat, martinis, and a Mercedes Benz. It's not the individuals, it's the group. Wait, hold on... I guess it IS the individuals who make up the group. Wait. Those two are different somehow, but I can't put my finger on it. Sheer volume....

The Dalai Lama speaks and speaks again, travels and smiles at crowd after crowd. Millions of people people have the shared experience in their lives of feeling his beaming presence, his quiet hope, his thoughtful approach to human suffering. The Tibetans and their plight are not forgotten. Buddhism ebbs forward. Sheer volume of time and exposure. Hundreds of thousands of university students in North America and Europe, photo spreads in yoga magazines, stickers on water bottles, small percentages of profits going to support the Free Tibet movement. Ripples of peace and love from a life of myriad contacts with people looking for a deeper connection.

A tremendous amount of life devoted to a single purpose can produce amazing results on the individual level too. Malcolm Gladwell poses the idea of a 10,000 hour rule - that's how long you need to do something to be great at it. Bill Gates working on computers for decades, the old Chinese man who I practiced tai chi with once who had been doing it for 8 hour days for 60 years, Miles Davis for 40 years on the trumpet, Lance Armstrong biking for 8-10 hours a day for a decade. The numbers are arguable, but the concept seems to emerge as clear. Sheer volume of life devoted to a single purpose can yield extraordinary results.

AIG. Decades of your life spent immersed in a culture of incredible material and monetary wealth. Living surrounded by wealthy individuals and those who serve you. How many hours can you hear that you deserve it and are right in pursuing it single-mindedly before you feel a sense of entitlement? How long can you live a life immersed in greed, without an outside reference point in the reality of others, before you feel untouchable? Sheer volume of feedback. One day a few billion dollars doesn't seem like so much anymore, either to take in bonuses or to gamble with even if it's not yours.

Sheer volume of ideas, urgent messages communicated in surreal soothing voices and homogeneous scenes, coming over us in waves of advertising. TV is ever more finely tuned to tap our subconscious desires and fears so as to manipulate us into consumer action. Billboards tell us we could be home by now when we're stuck in traffic. Our email programs scan our words and use our own fuzzy logic against us to suggest things we will want to buy that perhaps we hadn't thought of yet. At at time when we will do well to slow down and question our actions that have brought us to this historic intersection of ecology and economy, we are also pushing forward technology to more seamlessly integrate ourselves into convenient, subconscious consumption and subscription.

This is all stuff you think about in the crowds of Manhattan, when the headlines hint at the Depression even though the losers didn't see it coming, when the urban population beats the rural, when the information about climate change is increasing yet we can't agree as a planet what to do with our agreements from years ago, when we still mistake the environment for an issue to be concerned with among others instead of reclaiming the holistic view of ecology, when there is too much information to process as you think about making a tiny path for yourself winding through the three-dimensional world. Sometimes there is so much concrete, glass, and negligence that I can't feel the harmony, the joy of doing the things I love, and the peace of finding real grounding in myself. So I write to get it off my chest. And now, for some disc golf. Be well, take care of yourself, and keep at least some of yourself small and beautiful.

Speaking of small and beautiful, check out this picture of me and my niece Gwendolyn. Making cute look easy...

Difficult to believe story

2009-03-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

In a slightly unusual vein, I'm including an excerpt from an article in The Economist that I just read moments ago. It's just a terrible thing, and I feel a need to make note of it for the public record, no matter how small. It's from the first week of March, 2009.

"Earlier this month, two judges in Pennsylvania's Luzerne County admitted sentencing thousands of children to jail in return for kickbacks from a prison-management company. Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan received a commission for every day they sent a child to private juvenile detention centers run by Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister company. The pay-offs came to $2.6 million over seven years."

Words can't describe this. These two guys took money from PRIVATE PRISONS to send kids to those juvenile detention centers, aka prisons. It's beyond insane. Keep your eyes and ears open.

My next post will be warmer and more self-reflective, I hope. I think it's important, however, to occasionally point out gross injustice and low points in humanity, such as these two judges and everyone else involved in paying them, as well those who support privatized prisons in general.

Be well, live loud and peaceful...

Amble on down the road

2009-01-12T06:54:00.000-08:00

Often I feel like I'm just passing through, this life a beautiful and bittersweet stretch of time, on lease perhaps from someone somewhere or Someone Somewhere (I may never know), perhaps I am an incarnation of something whose form has passed and the predecessor of something to come, a life as yet unknown, (I secretly harbor aspirations of a wild and beloved golden retriever on a farm deep in the middle of nowhere San Luis Obispo)

I shuffle, stride, or run down the alleys and sprawling boulevards of the days and seasons, moving through snow, fallen leaves, or the delicately rich feel of Kentucky bluegrass under my bare hopeful summer feet

I mean no harm, and try to operate from a place of giving and simple loving, my own panacea recipe for meaning as I watch our civilization slowly crumble and the stars still shine bright in the cold sky but from such an inaccessible distance, an inch or a million light years is the same beyond my eager fingertips

So I search here for meteoric remnants and find them in eyes and slanting sunshine and supportive hands on my shoulders and the first steps after last tears and the smell of thousands of years of low technology summed up in a freshly baked loaf and the sound of a small gong with hot tea

Each 365 1/4 brings aches pains experiments triumphs connections and it keeps spooling in my heart almost but not quite entirely unlike the World's Largest Ball of Twine because my story and song move in four dimensions, I dig deep with books and therapists and map myself anew on top of memories I thought were secure in the safe deposit boxes of Been There Done That

I want Something to mean Something Definitively, but alas the sands shift and from above what just resembled Michelle Obama's face now looks like three scoops of mind-defying sugar-free ice cream and wait now it's a little brown jug, but then the loop goes back to the beginning and it's all what I project, looking out the window peeking from behind thick lace or tacky venetian blinds the World Out There is simply a reflection of My World In Here, once again responsibility and freedom tango forever onwards and it is mine to create the world through my lens

My list for Santa didn't yield much this year, probably because he doesn't exist, but the carbon copy which I keep under my pillow includes less fossil fuels, more smiles, an explanation of why anyone would shoot John Lennon, warmer toes, enough patience for me and all my friends, sense of clarity that persists, 7" statue of the Buddha in gold leaf detail to go with aforementioned sense of clarity, whole grains, world peace, accurate accounting of where all those zeroes in bailout money are headed, bone marrow matches for those who wait each day, voluntary population reduction plans, a national holiday where everyone hits the yoga mat, time to read with jasmine tea, an apology from Big Brother about killing public transit back in the 40's and 50's, bigger libraries with old leather chairs, and kale and sweet potatoes for dinner as often as I want it

As always, this is an invitation, hopefully leaving you feeling a bit like you stepped into a high-quality reproduction or perhaps even an original Salvador Dali painting, but in a good way

Take that Road Less Traveled By

2008-11-14T11:33:00.000-08:00

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

2008-09-24T12:13:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-11T06:13:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-11T14:31:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-15T22:23:00.001-08:00

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.

indelicate delicacies

2007-11-29T19:48:00.000-08:00

I just learned some sad news that I think may be worth sharing. In the past thirty years, it seems that we have wiped out about 90% of the sharks in the oceans worldwide, mostly in the pursuit of their fins for soup. For some reason, this nugget of info hit close to home for me. I think part of it is from watching cool footage of sharks underwater when the Discovery Channel was a rising star on TV in the 1990s. Part of it may also be the number "90%", which seems too close to 100% for comfort. Anytime we have something that's gone 90% bad, it's pretty bad and tends to get our attention.

I'm not sure what to do with this info. I feel scared by it because lots of scientists apparently think it may soon lead to the collapse of whole fish stocks all over the world. This in turn will threaten the whole balance of life in the oceans, where a lot of our oxygen comes from at the bottom of the aquatic food chain. This possibly scenario freaks me out, but I'm not sure what I'll do differently tomorrow morning just because it's in my head.

I think this is a great example of how we can act with narrow self-interest (individual, regional, national, whatever) which harms the group (global). I think if we went down to the docks where the fishing boats, large and small, set out each day to catch sharks, cut of the fins, and throw the bodies back in, and talked to the fishermen there about the situation and the remaining 10% of the sharks, I'm unsure what effect it might have. They need their livelihoods, and have their own fears about dropping out the bottom of the socio-economic food chain in our culture. How do we ask them to give up work that they need to take care of themselves?

No less responsible are the folks who are demanding the shark fin soup delicacy at their parties. If it's exotic, and someone is willing to pay to get it, then they can find someone willing to catch it and prepare it. What are they concerned about? Perhaps nothing - they may not know that shark fins are a commodity that threatens a global ecosystem. Perhaps they are anxious about being able to show that they are wealthy and can have the better things in life, distancing themselves in appearance from the people with less.

I think this type of situation is the crux of the crisis that we are facing together as a species on our tiny spaceship. We get afraid, and trapped in our narrow self-serving patterns because we have difficulty imagining other ways of being and having the courage to follow them. I don't think we can be too hard on ourselves at the individual level, because everyone knows what it is like to feel like we're struggling and competing to get ahead or at least stay even in the rat race. The shark fishermen know it, and the wealthy lunch guests know it. Anyone who knows the relief that comes with a pay raise knows it, as does the person who just lost their job and feels like they will have trouble getting another one. People who would "really like not to have to drive to work" but drive to work know it.

I know that it's hard to think of a bigger picture in a warm fuzzy way when we feel like we're in the big picture in a competitive, doom-and-gloom way. But when you take that first step towards cooperation on a global scale, with billions of folks you've never met or who aren't even born yet, you know it feels good to be less afraid. Biking in the snow, walking in the rain, taking time between jobs to explore your passion for oil painting, skipping the shark fin soup and telling someone why, turning off lights more often than you turn them on, having fewer children instead of more, eating less meat, it's all connected. We can find such joy and satisfaction in a million small things, acts for which we'll never be rewarded with a feature on the front page of Altruist Weekly.

In taking these steps, we can know that we're doing more to make the world - the only one our children have - a better place. I think we'll never know if we're doing enough, but we'll know that we're doing more. It's the choice we face every time the path splits. Sometimes we don't have enough information, and we just have to follow our hearts and guess. Sometimes we have lots of information, and we just need to find the courage to listen to our inner voices. Often we want companions to join us, so we don't feel alone and like we're the only ones taking the broad view. The path isn't always clear, but our good intentions based in broader love instead of narrower fear will get us going. To survive and get on a good track as a society world wide, we need to take this more thoughtful approach to our lives, look long and deep at what we're doing, and get more on the same page with each other about getting from where we are to where we want to be.

Here's the best part (I think so, anyway): we're not giving anything up when we make these choices. We're gaining everything, bit by bit. Our lives unfold in beautiful ways, dovetailing together with other folks who are looking for the good life. We are the ones...

Our Beautiful Struggle, or I Got Them Ol' Zen Cushion Blues

2007-11-18T07:48:00.001-08:00

I came in from the cold, frosty and sweaty after running in the frozen sunshine. I peeled off layers and paused to make some green tea, steaming with jasmine and memories of ancient China. I put on soft cotton pants, a wool sweater, and sat down in front of my 17 inch window to the world. I looked up at my blog, with a vast white background and only the blinking cursor, and realized that its address is Nothing is Lacking. I took a sip, looked out at the clinging golden maple leaves, took another sip, and exhaled.

It's hard to remember that nothing is lacking. It's hard to remember that where we're at is where we're at. The Madison Ave. folks want us to buy our kids toys for Christmas, either Chinese or unleaded. Just after New Years, as we sign in to email, we'll have an image of someone who is not at all overweight telling us that she wants to lose those holiday inches. Some days we wake up to find a close friend or even ourselves on anti-depressants, never believing before that moment that it was necessary. We see headlines about disasters that we'd love to help alleviate, but we're so busy we don't know where to begin. Unusually warm weather makes us all a bit nervous, because we don't know if we can count on past years to know the future. And in our heads, we tell ourselves the stories that we've told all our lives about how the world works, what we can and can't do, and why life "doesn't work like that."

Regardless of the tempests in Bangladesh and in our teacups, nothing is lacking because the world can't be any other way than it is. We get to choose to accept or deny the world and our place in it, and that's about it. I can't bring my dad back to life for the holidays, just because I want to get to know him better and didn't get the chance while he was alive. I can't make the Canadian border guards the friendly people they were ten years ago because I want to visit the States more often. I can't magically lower my mom's cholesterol and tell her she can eat as much creamy French food as she wants. These are wishes that won't survive being hurled against the rocky North Atlantic shoreline of reality.

Denial is just fear. We are afraid of not being loved so we don't share ourselves fully with our partner. We are afraid of sounding foolish, so we don't speak our minds. We are afraid of making a mistake, so we shirk responsibility and pass the buck. When we find the strength to admit our weakness, ignorance, or inability, then we can love, grow, and learn. It's a pretty tight loop, that can spiral out in a closed life of fear or an open life with love and freedom.

When we choose the open path and expand like the frontier of the universe, it's beautiful because nothing is lacking. When we pick up any self-help book that is worth it's salt, and take the advice (which is the same in all of them) to heart, we can return to the moment we're in and stop fearfully traveling to the past and the future all the time. In this moment, we can be free - free to take some distance from our incessant monkey minds swinging from tree to tree. This freedom is empowering, and we can begin again to do what we want with our lives, unburdened by our usual baggage which is momentarily gone. We can create inertia in new directions for our health and well-being. We can imagine, with positivity, getting from where we are to where we want to be. We can begin to heal - ourselves, each other, the neighborhood, the planet. It's pretty groovy and organic (did I just write that? :-) and pretty mind-blowingly liberating.

The full quote is something roughly like:

Be grateful for what you have,

Rejoice in how things are.

When you realize nothing is lacking,

The world belongs to you.

All this being written, I still have to get up each day, remind myself of it, and try to stay in a good headspace. It's a beautiful struggle - sometimes I find joy in remembering that we are all doing the best we can. Sometimes I get depressed with that same thought when I read about American nuclear policy or see half of my fellow gym members oogling celebrity news about who Drew Barrymore was making out with. I know, however, that we are all doing good things and trying with the most courage we can muster. Sometimes I wonder if we will make it. I wonder if we'll be able to effect change on a big enough scale to "save ourselves" before it's too late, or if each of us as individuals will be able to lead full and satisfying lives without regrets.

Then, on the good days, with the frost on the grass and the sun slipping through spindly branches, I know that we will certainly make it. I smell the tea, and remember that there's no way we can't make it. Let's go back to our breath and start again. That's where it all begins.

identity and action

2007-10-25T19:34:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I saw something in the news that I can't forget. Some women (prostitutes, I believe) in El Alto, Bolivia, sewed their lips together with actual thread as part of a hunger strike to pressure the mayor into re-opening brothels and bars there. They were threatening to bury themselves alive the next day (today) if they were not granted their demands. There was no follow up story today that I could find anywhere about the women in Bolivia. I think the original story had appeared under Odd News, and that's probably where it's laid to rest forever.

What does it mean to have something you believe in so much that you would sew your lips shut and threaten to bury yourself to get it? Is that passion or confusion or illusion? As I sit here in my North American comfy enclave, what is so dear to me that I would lay my life down to protect it or protest it? I think of the monks who set themselves on fire to draw attention to their pleas to end the Vietnam war, and the Burmese monks recently who marched in the streets as their government blacked out communications so the world wouldn't see the protesters being killed. I can't even imagine what that is like, to believe so much that you need to give up your life in a dramatic, traumatic way for a cause. I think of all the actions we take like changing light bulbs to fluorescents, eating more local food, buying recycled toilet paper, etc., and I think of people taking their own lives.

While reading that article, I was also reminded of the old familiar quote that we are the ones we've been waiting for. It's true - we are the ones. Those women in Bolivia are at the rock bottom of the totem pole, and they have to help themselves because no one else is going to. But what about us in the plugged-in, developed world? I hear stories of shocked scientists watching the icecaps melt, I read about Iran getting set up by the U.S. for another war, I see vapid talk shows with MILLIONS of viewers, I see pictures of Europe baking in the heat more each summer, I hear about drug companies manufacturing drugs to treat a condition that is known to simply be the side effect of taking multiple other antidepressants. Even with all these problems, we still are the ones we've been waiting for. It is tempting to think it's someone else, but actually there's just a mirror there when we turn around.

So now that we've been waiting for ourselves, and we've arrived, what will we do with our new found selves? I often get stuck in the conundrum of pondering how much is enough. If I write lots of letters of concern to everyone I can think of about global warming, but the planet keeps warming, have I done enough? Am I supposed to give up my life and sew my lips shut until the planet cools down again? Do I try to recruit others to take such a stand with me? If the scope and complexity of the problem are bigger than we can even imagine, what do we do then? Make small contributions and hope for the best? On my good days, I can do this and remember to breathe and go to bed at night with a smile. On my rougher days, I burn desperately inside for an answer as to how best to live my life to address all these concerns - how can I keep abortion legal, how can I contribute to shrinking the population, how can I get Chinese folks to NOT aspire to North American middle class lifestyles, how can I help more people to get on their bikes.

I think as people we want to know if we've done enough. We know if we've put in the appropriate effort to host a dinner party - we made dinner, cleaned up the place, played nice music, everyone had a good time. We know if we've crossed out t's and dotted our i's on the tax return, and send it in feeling restful. We know if we've practiced frisbee enough by going to the game, handling it well, and winning. But how do we know if we're doing enough to solve issues way bigger than ourselves, issues that seem so complex because they involve the different thoughts and actions of millions or billions of individuals who aren't necessarily on the same page? What do we do if the situation is so complex that we don't know how to solve it because we don't even understand it fully?

I don't have any answers this evening as I look out my window at the full moon. I did enough to win at ultimate frisbee tonight, and I'm tired. I know that I had some good one-to-one interactions today, where we both smiled and came away feeling better. I know that they were enough. I cleaned the kitchen to ease my mind, and I hope it was enough. I biked instead of driving for a few kilometers, and that felt like a start. I wrote this entry tonight, and am too tired to write more, so I know it has to be enough for now. May you ask the hard questions, and find peace too...

Keeping your neighborhood atoms together

2007-09-04T10:47:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of babies in my life right now. My friends Greg and Shana have a one-month old boy named Forrest, who is quite adorable and lively. An old friend in Chicago gave birth at the beginning of summer to a girl, Taryn, whom I have yet to meet but is pretty photogenic so far. And my old friend Natascha gave birth way back in April to her first son, Ian, who I am very excited to meet on my next visit to D.C. Yes, this autumn will be full of changing leaves and changing diapers, frosts and knit hats to stay warm, and hundreds or thousands of digital photographs carrying baby news like Mercury to the far corners of the world.

All these babies make me think of the future. I think about them growing up, scraping elbows, going on first dates, and differentiating themselves from us, their predecessors, who are shaping their future as we live in the present. I think about what they'll say of our current actions, once we've rolled the dice and gone ahead with our best laid plans. What will 20 years of hindsight tell them about what we're doing now?

I look back on the generation before me and what they did, and scratch my head a lot. Buddhism expanded in the United States, and became part of the popular culture. Star Wars was a movie and a national defensive strategy (that sadly has yet to really die). Some diseases were eradicated in parts of the world; others came on strong in new ways. There was an "energy crisis," the president called us out to conserve and think differently, and we replaced him with a teflon-coated actor. People who wanted to drop out of the System formed fringe communities - some failed, some persist, many are still trying new variations. Recycling programs spread around the country and the world.

Why all this retrospect in my blog? I was sweating out a tough 55 minutes on the stairmaster a few weeks ago, flipping through Maclean's (a pretty thoughtful Canadian current events magazine). Just when I thought my heart rate couldn't go higher, I turned to a feature story about the return of nuclear energy. The instructions on the machine said to stop if I became "faint, dizzy, or short of breath." So I closed the magazine and pretended that I hadn't seen it, and felt much better as I finished my workout.

Where did nuclear go and what's going on with it now? After the meltdown incidents at Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl, it seemed like you couldn't get any more three-inch deck screws into the coffin of nuclear energy. Everybody "knew" you couldn't trust it any further than you can throw it - and heavy water is pretty heavy. Who wants their milk to double as the refrigerator light? (Cows in the fallout zone of Chernobyl... you get it.) Leaky storage drums in Nevada and Tibet continue to poison water supplies. No one could promise the problems would stop. So we turned to other alternatives to experiment with - solar, wind, those funky wave-motion-capturing turbines offshore, etc. - but mostly just stuck with coal, natural gas, and oil. Existing nuclear plants have been kept online, but no new ones have been built in the US for decades and expired ones (they do expire) are decommissioned and dismantled in a lengthy process.

It seems, however, that we the public are getting more upset about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change due to burning fossil fuels. Storms, heat waves, and droughts are becoming common enough to merit at least a bit of attention to our plight on this tiny ball we call home. So the Big Decision makers are getting ramped up to sell nuclear energy as the cleaner, "greener" option for meeting our energy needs in the future.

Here's my concern: nothing has changed. The laws of physics still dictate the properties of fission and radioactive waste. We still haven't found a better way to deal with nuclear waste than to bury it really deep in the ground. We still can't guarantee anything, and certainly not reactors that won't melt down or crack in an earthquake or discharge radioactive water as a byproduct of the fission process. People are still people, with plenty of room for human error in all that we undertake.

If anything, I feel that it's a more dangerous time than ever to undertake the rebirth of nuclear power. For one thing, the competition is tighter and there are more of us than ever converting more energy and stuff than ever before. Some people estimate that China may build up to 40 new nuclear reactors in the next two decades. I'll love to meet anyone besides a nuclear energy company CEO or energy-strapped Chinese bureaucrat who will sleep better with that information. I mean, it's not like modern Chinese economic development as led them to cut corners to get ahead in the capitalist game, has it? I'm sure they wouldn't cut any corners in rushing to get new sources of electricity for their booming economy. (I managed to bring a little sarcasm with me to Canada - I hid it in a secret compartment of my suitcase.)

It's not just about building reactors in the developing world, though. Building dozens of new reactors around the world simply increases the chances of a meltdown or failure anywhere in the world. The fuel is hazardous to mine, transport, use, and discard. Just like all our activities in God's ant farm, we'll be doing things faster than ever before in a political, sociological, and climatic environment that we don't come close to fully understanding. More of everything at a faster pace means more possibilities for the unknown to happen.

Why am I worrying about the unknown possibilities in the future? Why am I being "anti-technology" and dredging up spook stories? It's all about those babies I see smiling back from my friends' photos. If you build the reactors, use the uranium, and bury it in the ground (or worse yet have another disaster), you can't go back. Let's ease off on the throttle and talk about the precautionary principle a bit. If in doubt, don't do it. Proceed slowly, especially when we can threaten our own existence.

Let's get the MTBE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBE) out of the water and dioxin out of the breast milk (two other legacies we could do without but can't get away from) and then talk about introducing other novel compounds into our lives. Let's give the plywood a chance to finish off-gassing and the paints a chance to disperse their VOCs. Let's talk about conservation (someone go get that peanut farmer Carter and bring him back) and reducing our footprints. Let's talk about cutting back our own population numbers significantly so we won't have such a huge demand for electricity that we split atoms to get it. Let's talk about per capita use, the have's and the have-not's, and who's using our current energy supplies for what purposes. (Some folks in Canada want to build a group of nuclear reactors simple to process the oil sands in Alberta to get crude oil out.)

As always, let's talk about the future we want and whether or not our current actions are getting us there. I want to see us collectively chill out until we get to a place where we can tell our children that we're finally erring on the side of caution.

This blog dedicated to Taryn - you can see she's either concerned about nuclear power or she's just thinking about breast feeding. It's hard to tell. Either way, I want her future to be safe.

give your teeth that competitive edge

2007-07-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

I woke up this sweet July morning, turned on my computer, got dressed, and squandered my few spare minutes reading the news story about drug tests and scandal on the Tour de France. Seems like in the wake of Lance Armstrong being such a gifted athlete and dominating force in the sport, things have gotten a little rough. Two riders were disqualified for failing blood doping tests, and the leader going into stage 17 was removed by his own team for missing two drug tests in the months leading up to the race. There was a lot of sound and fury in the article, with one Frenchman even being quoted as saying it's time to stop holding the race which has been going on for more than a century. The race continues on, but the tone of the article implied that everyone was shaken. I hustled down the stairs, stepped onto my bike, and pedaled out to our community garden to harvest zucchini with my friend Neil.

My first thought on reading this story was: Chinese toothpaste. The connection lies in competing to get ahead in a world with more competitors and a decreased feeling that we're all playing by any agreed upon rules. Remember the scandal with the Chinese toothpaste (not to mention bad pet food and other products) in the past few months? Some small production facilities had been cranking out toothpaste sweetened with an antifreeze additive, because it was cheaper and considered by some to be "not harmful in small quantities." They shipped it to America, Canada, and probably elsewhere with labels saying it was manufactured in South Africa. People bought it (mostly in discount stores, I believe), used it, got sick, and the investigations began. The ending to that small chapter in human history was the execution of the head of the Chinese Food and Drug Administration.

Much like the Tour scandal, there was much hubbub about tainted products coming from China. How could this happen? Where are the regulatory folks checking on the production of these goods? How could someone knowingly send out products with toxins in them for consumption by other people and their pets?

My take on it is this: I doubt there was anyone in China or elsewhere who was looking to poison people. I doubt anyone in the Tour de France was looking to shame the professional athletic community in the public's view. I clearly see two cases of people trying to get ahead by attempting to take advantage of loopholes in the system. If no one is looking, and I can gain a competitive edge in my profession by bending or breaking some arbitrary rules, why not take a risk? The reward is big - fame, fortune, a few more dollars to take home at the end of every day. Some might say that we have rules to make things more fair and even, but when you look at the news, the world is full of the powerful acting on their own agendas without regard for fairness. We make exploitative trade deals, lay land mines in third party countries, dump cheap commodities in foreign markets, cook the books at our respective Fortune 500 company, etc.

I think it's important to once again acknowledge that there are a lot of us on this green and blue sphere streaked with white that orbits the sun. We're still increasing our numbers all the time, with more of us struggling to get the finite goods, both real and imagined. There are more people waiting to be on professional sports teams, and more people pounding it up the mountain to get that yellow jersey, so you've got to be better to keep your spot. There are other facilities all over the world who will gladly supply cheap toothpaste and dog food if you can't do it at the right price. In this kind of environment, if we don't cut corners to get ahead, it's foolish to think that no one else will. Feeling shocked each time a scandal is discovered is an empty gesture that leaves us in the same place again and again. If we want to change our situation, we need to start our 12 step program as a global village and admit that we have a problem.

Where do we go from here? I have no idea, but I find that can never go too wrong returning to a smaller-scale life. How can I work to feel like I'm competing less with strangers 10,000 miles away? When I'm up in the garden, knee-deep (literally!) in bush beans, I can't imagine selling antifreeze-laced toothpaste to another human being. Maybe it's just the beta carotene going to my head, but as I much on a carrot I've just pulled up and gaze out over brilliant yellow mustard fields, I really don't want the U.S. to dump excess dairy products on other countries (like Jamaica, India, and others) and drive their farmers out of a livelihood. When I'm playing ultimate frisbee with friends, and I'm chasing down the disk like a manic golden retriever, the farthest thing from my mind is taking steroids just to get a slight edge on the others. Frankly, I'd much rather lose and go home happy...

Wherever you are, take one step local this week - meet someone at the coffee shop, buy from the farmer's market and meet the grower, talk with a person who looks lonely, do whatever inspires you to make your world a little...smaller.

ps - gotta get it out there - I just discovered that the dental floss that I love, Crest Glide, that super smooth awesome-feeling stuff, is Teflon coated. So, if you use it, I recommend reconsidering. Dupont says Teflon is safe, but the people living downstream from the factory in Ohio beg to differ. Cancer! I recommend a nice unwaxed, unflavored one. May your gums be pink and firm.

Chris and Jeff ponder floss and how to go local

Walking Shoes of Spanish Leather

2007-07-10T19:01:00.000-07:00

I put one ear down to the tracks and one up to the sky of faint silver clouds rolling across the powder blue twilight. I can hear it stretching away from me in both directions forever, the slightly rounded I-beam that carries oranges, timber, and eager lovers with a gentle sway across the countryside. I hear the thunderous logs coming east from clear-cuts on the west coast, sometimes so big you could see them from the space shuttle in orbit. I can hear hopeful fishermen turned migrants headed back west, exchanging empty seas for full tar sands in a surreal swap meet. It's all too much, so I crunch back a few steps on the gravel path and lean against the sturdy, taken for granted brick wall in the moist summer evening. It's cool and earthen and red, I can feel all that through my imported disposable t-shirt. I close my eyes and smile from my pre-frontal cortex on down, thinking of the sweet apples I carry home from market on this very path on Saturday mornings. The moonlight gently washes the outside of my eyelids and the inside of my neural pathways, and I slide into some peace under this night sky that I shared with you wherever you were. For just a moment, it's all too perfect - the tender balance of joy, creation, entropy, and absence of meaning in the ebb and flow of this big bang that we find ourselves in the middle of. It's so sweet I'm afraid to upset it, breathing gently in and out of my nose and cradling this balance where I've come to rest, both sides of the scale filled with equal gold and tears.
Questions alight and dance gently on the great grey angst machine inside my skull, but flit on into the open arms of a broad purple sky robust with twinkling yellow stars that gave it all to reach us with their message of beautiful silence. Touched by their persistent footsteps, I cannot hold my ground but only place my palms gently down on the pavement beyond my knees. I slip out of the moment slowly, with a little regret and a tiny smile, thinking of warm fresh bread, kissing and being kissed, bicylce repairs, sailing winches, and how great it is to have local sweet potatoes even up here. I can feel the cosmic non-coincidence of faint vibrations, and hear the horn of the train. A warm breeze blows down the rail corridor, just ahead of the iron horse, and I see the sweet yellow lights of people who can't see me in the darkness. The bright fluorescent lights show me infitesimally small slices of life - a young, wild haired couple leans toward each other, a conductor leans idle in the alcove at the end of the car, a newspaper page is being turned, and the wake of the train is only the futile attempt of noise to leave its mark on the pressing, animated silence.
If only I could remember this passing of time, the universe providing a quiet mirror with no frame, then I could pocket my zen and stroll under the maples, oaks, and ash trees, holding your hand and admiring the brownstones and gently rubbing the brief bit of enlightenment in my pocket between thumb and forefinger. Instead, the search begins again and again, and perhaps we can lose ourselves in that together...

roots up and evolve

2007-06-04T13:11:00.000-07:00

It's crystal clear to me, the feeling filling and flowing out of my mundane marrow. the theme of reinvention is back - blasting with effervescence out of my mouth as I pound the stair stepping machine at the gym, glinting off the faint sharp smiles of bicyclists trying to outrun the gathering thunderstorm, I smell it from the sunburned trees on a planet with diminishing amounts of ozone, I see it in the bank of televisions where celebrities' boobs compete with dead children strewn in a nameless street, in a world where we STILL manufacture the lead additive that used to go in gasoline, I read it between the lines of economists setting national environmental policy, I hear it sliding down the ever-fresh powder at indoor ski resorts in desert countries, it lies behind the advice that you've got to see Las Vegas once before you die... The chance to reinvent is there in all the cognitive dissonance which is driving us crazy as a culture - every time we can't stomach something and see no one else working to change it, even though we're pretty sure they can't stomach it either.

is it so bad to be tired of fighting to preserve the world as we know it? is it so terrible to let it go? how much before we know it's enough? how many presidential elections do we need to see go past with a group of old white talking heads babbling about a smaller group of old white men who are constrained by other old white men behind the scenes? when do we get local - starting with our arteries and veins, our skin, our clothes, our loved ones, the houses we live in and the block we live on, our ideas about what will make us happy, our hopes and fears about companionship, our biological compulsions? when can we carry a global consciousness without sinking our lives into global struggles that are complexifying without end? when can we stop being co-opted out of radical action by putting energy into politicized debate between two meaningless, polarized options? when can we have the courage to see past the illusion of economic growth as salvation and see a significant downsizing of humanity's footprint as a basic starting point?

yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm some guy behind a computer screen who's belly-achin' about the world while he sits on his butt and types. But please listen, 'cause we've got to talk, gotta get some common ground in our public discussions, gotta get some science on the front pages mixed in with some talk about how we want the world to be in even as short a time as 50 years from now. I get nervous when I see bad science out there, I get nervous when I see an absence of long-term thinking in public policy, I get nervous when I feel the Us and Them mentality coming from us and them.

Where is all my angst coming from? My neighbor is a wonderfully sweet woman with an equally sweet five year old daughter. When I see Faeron, I want to be able to say that I did what I could today to make the world a more liveable place for her when she grows up. I really, really want that. I know we all do. But we're not doing that, nor do we really know how. There are so many people around the globe, living life based on such widely different sets of information (religious dogma, political dogma, fear of scarcity, gluttony of surplus, racist anger, etc.) that it's unimaginable to me to get us all on the same page. Could we even get close to a unified agenda to save ourselves? Could we get an agreed upon analysis of what we're doing in the ecosystem and what that might mean for our future? Could we admit to the darker, fearful part of ourselves and try to bring them out to the light of day?

I don't know, but I have hope. It's not hope grounded in a talk show host giving cars away to audience members for feel-good ratings. It's not pictures that kids drew with crayons showing how much they like endangered species. It's not about rebuilding New Orleans. It's not about Kyoto anything. It's about starting with small is beautiful. It's about waking up and remembering to be grateful to be alive and have all the things I have. It's about thinking about the consequences of my actions in the short and long term, and having the courage to follow my heart in choosing what to do. It's about the precautionary principle - going slow and taking it easy before doing things or creating new things with possibly huge ramifications. It's about the Hippocratic oath, and aiming to be kind. It's about turning off the 500 channels of vapid babble and turning to the person next to us instead. It's about discovering gentle and tough love inside ourselves. It's about leading thoughtful, informed lives where we take ownership for our actions. For me, it's about feeling like I'm in it with all of you - we can always do better when we help each other out. You're the one I've been waiting for...

tangled (perhaps beautiful) solipsism

2007-05-30T05:51:00.000-07:00

rhapsodic explosion of late spring has swallowed the earth from the ground up with reiterative solos of lilac, tulips, and jasmine, some staccato storms to enhance the sweetness of John Cage silent grass growing thick and rich under the trembling oversized maples, we're walking on narrow paths of concrete, reduced to the background because the panning away shot reveals magnificence of nature overtaking us in budding and branching delight, at least in that fabled fourth dimension as we peer into the cloudy brass spyglass to vainly preview the future. summer holds forever secrets, unknowable to us probably even as they are realized and fade away, our prefrontal cortex trapped behind our eyes reveals only our narrowly imagined possibilities

our hands calloused from digging, tongues tired from healing, legs sleepy from walking, ears in rapture from believing all come together to lay out under the stars and join the dirt dandelions lawns, just for a moment tangential but different because of the coincidental variation in our atomic structure... watching tufted seeds drift as spring snow, I momentarily interpret reality as slowing, perhaps the universe has slowed it's acceleration outward away from us and is having a bit of buyer's remorse about committing to this whole Big Bang thing - why would it speed away from children with ice cream, puppies, wise smiles of the dying, the imprecise but perfect crash of tides, faded blue throw rugs in evening sunlight, a large group of homo sapiens trying to figure out the Mystery, bears inadvertently breeding apples with their choices, or a tired wooden bench by a still lake where we meet from time to time?

no messages, just a wafer thin cross section of the morning wrapped in wondering just how much we'll ever know, and how much divine action there is to appreciate on this unique sphere that carries all of our dream shots out over the fences in left field...

thousands of words

2007-05-05T18:05:00.000-07:00

A few pictures for visual tidbits of where my life and southern Ontario overlap. Hmmm... where to begin?

You know, after a long winter, you go and hop on your bike, and something's just not quite right. You realize that maybe you forgot to oil the chain in the fall or something like that - it's all frozen up and you just can't ride it.

Really, Ontario is just like anywhere else. You know, you go to a party where there's a soymilk tasting by the farmer who grew the organic soybeans himself and then made soymilk from them. It's totally like Palo Alto here. Even the weather is... really... well... um, see above picture of bike.

One of the many splendid views of the Georgian Bay from the cliffs along the shore. This is part of the Niagara Escarpment - a jagged seam of tectonic goodness that runs up through New York state (Ithaca Falls!) and through Ontario. It is what creates Niagara Falls, as well as the cliffs along the Bruce Peninsula where I am in this picture. It is the peninsula that sticks up between the Georgian Bay on it's east side and Lake Huron on the west side. If you're not sure where this is, don't worry - no one else in America is either (I didn't until I looked at the maps to go here). Get out the maps and brush up on the Great Lakes, and you'll see where I was at.

Another view of gorgeous coastline, in the Bruce Peninsula National Park. Look at how clear the water is! You really just want to jump right in, because it honestly looks like the Caribbean all along the shore, except for the large shelves of sedimentary rock that make up the beaches. If you were to dip your toes in, though, a balmy five degree Celsius bath would await you. We went in for a little less than a minute, and then dressed quickly in the sunshine. The days we visited were sunny but only 12 or 13 degrees Celsius. (Oh, why does Chris torture me so with SI units of temperature? Why??? Okay, it's 54 to 56 degrees Fahrenheit).

Me and my companion for three days in the beautiful, quiet, and peaceful environment of the Bruce Peninsula. Emily and I had a lovely time!

Things besides these pictures - I'm learning to play guitar, learning how to make yogurt and cheese, practicing throwing more pottery on the wheel, planting a few trees, doing bike repairs, learning a bit about arborist work, planning a weekend bike tour, putting the "u" back in colour, and trying to keep myself out of trouble. What are you doing these days? Write and let me know...

Over, north, and out.

think globally, act splendidly

2007-04-16T13:48:00.000-07:00

It's hard not to have some fear, in a world with more people all the time sharing a decreasing amount of good stuff. The math isn't rocket science - smaller pizza divided by more people at the party equals, at the least, an embarrassed host and more likely some hungry guests. But the ways in which we feel it manifest around us are numerous and constantly evolving like endless flakes in an April nor'easter.

Education - To get into university or graduate school, you have to look better than the other candidates, of whom there are more now than ever. Your parents know/feel this when they sign you up for competitive entry kindergarten programs that have homework and achievement tests (yikes!). The teenagers feel it when they do 163 extra-curricular activities on top of their already large homework burden. The college graduate feels it when she knows she has to come from a big name school, have excelled there, worked for the U.N., spent time doing field work with hardworking indigenous people somewhere below the equator, have 8 years work experience packed into 3, and have an undergraduate thesis as long as a Tolstoy novel. This is competition for a scarce resource (grad programs and big time schools) to ensure our seat at the table in a class- and scarcity- conscious society. I'm not speaking for or against schooling as an institution (eye-rolling is allowed here), but I think the education system is clearly being affected as it becomes a scarce resource.

Food - Speaks for itself. We see the images on TV still, with children far away not getting enough calories to survive and thrive. It's happening here in North America too, especially in big cities and in the rural South. I know we're all aware of how restaurants and stores toss food away, but how do we feel about throwing away food in a world of hungry folks? We're privileged by accident of being born where we were, and others are hungry because of the same random placement in countries that begin with the letter Z.

I'm not sure what to make of the scarcity thing, besides to recognize that we all feel it at the edge of our fields of vision. It's the background in the wars that rage about access to water and food, oil and minerals. It affects us here in housing prices in desirable neighborhoods, the gangs of politicians in L.A. and Phoenix engaged in turf wars for water control, huge numbers of applicants for underpaid non-profit menial jobs, paving national parks so more RVs can come in each year, oxygen bars to compensate for terrible air quality outdoors, and much more...

If nothing else, I see the manifest scarcity in the world as a call for cooperation and being honest with ourselves about our collective predicament. We can plan towards a more positive future if we accept where we're at, namely that there are more of us on the earth than the fragile ecosystem can ever support in a long-term sense (more than one more generation, I think). By positive, I'm not promising that all will be sunshine and suburban soccer leagues. Instead I mean acting based on the best information we have in the present, combined with wanting a healthy and satisfying future for all us homo sapiens, not a small group of us at the expense of others. I mean recognizing that working ever more feverishly to advance our immediate physical comfort and security, we are generally decreasing everyone's ability to have a liveable, pleasant future. Overfishing to stock up against a future famine doesn't make sense if we know that the fish stocks will soon collapse completely.

Let's bring talk of a more positive future into our personal discussions, the cocktail parties, the newspapers, the magazines, the streetcorners, and everywhere else. Let's ask the big questions - where are we on the timeline of human history in terms of resources? Where do we want to be headed? If we can't tell where we are or what's going on in the world around us, do we want to keep on the same path that has brought us here or do we want to change course? Let's look all the kids in the eye and think about what we'll have to tell them when they grow up about what we choose to do now.

(This post is dedicated to my friend Jeff in California, who has encouraged me to write with "more bite" about some of the ecological analysis that we've been talking about over the past 5 years. Thanks for the nudge :-)

seedlings in the window

2007-04-11T19:49:00.000-07:00

Canada comes out swingin', brandishing a small April blizzard in a desperate attempt to reassert her identity as a cold country in the face of global climate change. Big wet snowflakes come streaking nearly sideways out of the orange night, and I step out through the cone of pale light to beyond the street lamps. It's not too cold, probably just around freezing, and I can feel the moisture in the air against my face. The storm is just a farce, though - one last hollow bellow before spring does away with the discussion for this year.

It's time to reinvent ourselves, to challenge ourselves to a new enlightenment, innovation and adaptation being the tools to carry the day. We as a global culture are crumbling rapidly in the era of too much - too much change, too much destruction, too much extraction and conversion of materials from the earth, too much information that we don't know, too many patterns that we can't see clearly because they are too big for us. We've been proud monkeys, and when the planet was big and we were a small force to be reckoned with, perhaps we deserved a tiny bit of pride. Now there are too many factors, the heat's been turned up, and the pressure cooker is continuing to work an incomprehensible unknown magic...

Let's do away with hydrogen cars and biofuels, certified lumber and debate over international treaties. Let 'em be what they are - dreams of a desperate man rife with tumors but lacking the word cancer in his vocabulary. Let's get local, get loving, get wise. Share information - how to fix it or how to bake it, when to plant it and where to find it. Let's admit how little we know and move forward with the precautionary principle in mind. Let's dissolve the myths that competition works for the betterment of everyone and be human enough to admit that cooperation feels better. Let's dispense with the homophobia and fearful, closed relationships so that we can hug a friend in need. Let's ask ourselves if we want the current state of affairs to be sustainable.

Let's be thoughtful and kind to one another. If we are the only one on the block to shy away from competition, then we will inevitably be afraid of falling behind as everyone else edges us out. We need each other for support so we are not alone in our endeavors to create a better world for our kids. We need to gather in potlucks, dances, picnics, town meetings, libraries, coffee shops, street corners, and kitchens full of the sweet smells of this new life.

I only know these things from feel, from the ten thousand smiles or tears impressed upon me every day, from the faces on the street carried by my synapses around the corner and down the hill. I know I feel at peace writing like this, and I carry trouble in my heart if I go to bed silent at the end of the day. I only know that I need to nurture these thoughts, to carry them forward each day or risk withering something inside me. Look for the smoke from my chimney and lights in my windows, and I'll do the same with you.

condensation is a first step

2007-04-01T09:52:00.000-07:00

Today is a day of sitting in wicker armchairs, observing the cool rain and looking right through it, beyond the budding and bare trees in the distance, beyond the small worlds of red brick houses, out through the thin batik fabric of space and time to imagined futures and the sweet delicacies sprinkled in the present. It is a day of plotting coups to overthrow the affairs of the present which we do not love, it is a day of scented green tea with emerging friends and spring discoveries. It is the day we know we can get damp in the rain and not face a terrible chill at home. Today there is no guilt due to overstuffed sofas and pulling a light blanket over our feet and knees to stop the clocks for a while. Today is the satisfaction of a yoga stretch where amnesiac muscles speak of wintery tension and neglect, but prepare for the long walk to the fields.

In this season I can learn, teacher's hand placed thoughtfully over mine to guide the clay into useful vessels and the brush to lay down vibrant greens and oranges. The hustle of crowded sidewalks slows just enough to crack open the possibility of smiles in passing, seeding for hybrid blossoms of appointments blissfully made and adventures schemed. The Platonic essence of rebirth walks in the misty noontime, hands turned up to the sky, scarf draped forgetfully around her neck, a dormant muse so patient and unsuffering, bursting into the world silently in tender petals.

Where do your footsteps go on days like this? The stage, the office, the kitchen, the classroom, all the spaces of life charged with new energy. May you unapologetically track mud and smiles indoors, with seeds and twigs in tow, picked up along the path that seemed straight at bedtime last night and now curves and branches to fill the surface of our planet.

words to capture a day

2007-03-27T18:39:00.000-07:00

making lists, inking small names and places on the backside of a slightly wrinkled piece of scrap paper, running my fingers through my beard, tracing an invisible line down the side of a tired photograph of old friends, slipping on thoughtlessly comfortable shoes, smoothing the front of my synthetic black jersey, crunch of salty peanut butter dipped carrot with dirt specks, crusty helmet sets on and clicks under my chin, leg over bicycle and I'm off
over the short steep street
blast past the cathedral
dodge potholes and freeze cracks
suck in sunlight through my open mouth smile
past former farmland now homogeneous dreams
gray vinyl siding and silent lives melt in the spring sunshine like a stuffy unwanted wax of talking heads left in the bonfire of revolutionary carefree youth

Now sun on my back warms me up and flows, pushes the Coriolis effect of my thoughts as my mind tilts towards exuberant solstice, these rolling hills are all I want right now, gravel and dust on the shoulders and sweet moist earth with last year's cornstalks all blend sweet and fine into a backdrop of rural possibilities, if I just pedal a little harder I know I can get ahead of the sun before it creeps down to the west, just one more hill to be conquered and then infinite journeys with only the click of my freewheel and the thoughts of coming home to you to rest...

Just the facts

2007-03-20T19:49:00.000-07:00

So, a few bits and pieces of information that resemble the objective reality we all supposedly share. (These are in contrast to my usual blog posts where I muse cyclically about the cyclical nature of the universe.)

I arrived in Canada about 10 days ago, traveling first to Quebec. I stayed with Emily and friends in a town named North Hatley, which is a little over an hour east of Montreal. Emily's family has a vacation cottage there which overlooks the valley including a large lake and the town of North Hatley proper. This is the view on a clear day in late winter, i.e. my first day there.

It is quite beautiful - lots of rolling, big hills and snow spread all over the place. The white patch in the bottom of the valley is the snow-covered lake which Emily took me walking on after I got all excited about the possibility of it. I was a little late this year to go skating on it - that is an activity more suited to the deep freeze in the middle of winter when there is no layer of slush on the top.

After recovering from the bus lag of my trip up from NY state (caused mostly by the painful Vin Diesel comedy The Pacifier, which I had to watch because the sound was broadcast over the PA system on the bus), we went out snowshoeing. My first time! Loved it! The snow was a bit wet but still fun.

Then I felt tired so I took a rest.

We explored the area, cooked good food, got lots of rest, and generally lived it up bourgeois style in the winter wonderland of francophone Canada. Can't beat it with un stick if you tried...

After we were sufficiently vacationed, and the snow began to melt with a warm spell, we headed west by southwest, into Ontario, past Toronto, and eventually reached Guelph, the town where Emily and her tribe live. It is a beautiful, old town surrounded by farmland, with only a bit of homogenized subdivisions so far (but don't worry, they're on the drawing boards.) Back in Guelph, Emily has been returning to work as a therapist/teacher/front line social worker with teens overcoming addictions. I have been settling in to this lovely town and begun to plan parties, cook dinners, think about my income to expenses ratio, and try to get in touch with the gestalt of this place. Just yesterday Emily, Simon, and I went for a ski, which was only the second in my life (the first being two days earlier with just Simon. Again, loved it!

So, perhaps this is a summary of diversions rather than real grist for the mill of, "But how is Chris really doing?". I'm doing the best I know how, for better or for worse. It's all just beginning to unfold, like a delicate amaranth flower that looks good now but yields an even better tasty, tiny grain that you can cook like couscous. If you're eager for a quotable tombstone by-line, then perhaps I'm in it for the ladies, and that sweet, unbearable lightness of being...

never in vain

2007-03-16T10:32:00.000-07:00

This is a road less traveled by, up over hills and through valleys with bare, patient birch trees so white they stand out against the thick snow. This pavement flows as smooth as the tired yellow lines dividing the non-existent traffic, through a town of broad houses on the lake, boarded up for winter with rough plywood against the clean, colored window trim. Gray snow piles yield to puddles in the first melt of March, cold and harmless in the soft gravel shoulder where my boots leave gritty traces in the mud. To town is where this current heads, to the main street on the frozen lakeshore with a handful of solid tea houses, restaurants, and wooden planked general stores. For me it is all a postcard - gazebo in the lawn by the lake with blue string lights at dusk, lingering French from the wrinkled couples blending like cream into the settled coffee aroma, fog sliding off the hills from the warm wet air meeting this year's snowpack. It's a curled up bear rolling over once more to hit snooze before hibernation ends, it's a beaver rolling in the snow who has momentarily forgotten his unending urge to fix the dam, it's the tinkle of laughter from children narrowly evading an icicle finally melted free of the eaves. It's all these and pure silence, flowing down creeks and gulches in this Appalachian basin, water seeking a joyride to the lowest level with less than a nod for the structures that the primates have built. Fine slate roofs and leaded stained-glass keep out the elements another winter, the accomplishments of lumberjacks and capitalists. These towns and the moments of childhood spent swimming in summer and skiing in winter are origami cranes floating down wide rivers, no less beautiful because of their inevitable sinking below the ripples. Let us make more beauty with our hands and set if free to the world - what I have seen wash down stream in spring has inspired many a summertime project of whittling and sanding, shared smiles with friends over the endless possibilities that lie outside our small towns.

snowman in full lotus

2007-02-27T21:29:00.000-08:00

I stepped outside to feel the cold air of a few minutes past midnight, and rediscovered the silent appeal of tiny unexpected snowflakes floating through orange streetlights. After too many images of the lonely far away war on television, the sweet silence brought me together again through the graceful solitude that sweeps each of us away from time to time.

None of us knows exactly what to do, but our government keeps sending young men and women to damage and get damaged in the shifting sands of a war without end. The tiny eyes of the talking heads who take no risks keep shining out in increasingly high definition, while some people somewhere write headlines to gloss over the casualties who return home to suffer. The more numerous the words about bloodshed, the more hollow it all becomes and healing slips silently out under the crack below the door.

Smooth cold asphalt is a monolith under my shoes. I can feel the interconnected impermeable slab of contiguous paving that probably connects me to you right now wherever you are in North America. Barefoot in a snowdrift, the grey snow at the edges of curbs appears almost comforting in that way that it fits neatly in my cupboards of memory. Sometimes I'm toughened by fatigue and watch the pale clouds of midnight in just a t-shirt and jeans from the sidewalk outside, thick-skinned soles affording me ten or fifteen minutes of unmitigated communion with the nighttime hum of a civilized wilderness. Then my feet chill through to the bones of my heels so I retreat to carpet and wool socks inside, sipping rooibos tea the color of creamy rust and vacantly smile out the windows.

Where can we journey together, you and I, across spring lakes cold from recent melted ice, summers of sweaty knee-high grass and checkered picnic blankets under shady oaks, autumns of rich spicy apples and crumbling orange maple leaves, winters of bright rigid icicles and long nights made short by well-loved quilts, and spring again for unfolding creased and spotted maps to chart this year's tillage over last year's fallow hollows? Life without cycles is unimaginable, and summer is never too far away when we make lentil stew together and dance. We can honor February while hurrying it out the door to call March and see if it wants to go out dancing with April. May is coming to town soon, a visit to look forward to before June comes and unpacks childhood delights in the backyard. For this sweeping procession, our music is the food of love and seeing your face each morning over steam rising from mugs brings me some transcendence.

Our planet spins swiftly and keeps on carousing around the sun without regard to our tiny consciousness bubbles. So let's think less about war and fear, make snowcones in the park, and delight in the solar radiation that does reach our not-so-epic rock even in the winter. Spring will be here soon to ensure that we forgive and forget and begin again.

walking before flying? why wait?

2007-02-15T21:25:00.000-08:00

It lies out there in the desert, somewhat more fortified than the Great Wall of China, a bit more heavily guarded than an Israeli security checkpoint in the occupied territories, with higher fences and more razor wire than San Quentin. It's that place Outside Your Comfort Zone, and it's tough and scary to get there.

However, upon lots of recent reflection, I've come to feel that most of my really meaningful, challenging, and satisfying moments in life have come by stepping outside my comfort zone. I've grown comfortable with a strong workout routine when I used to be baffled and bored by the idea of a gym before ever really setting foot in one. I've tried experimental diets to boost my own body's immune system through alternating fasting days, and although it was really tough some days, it was great to really step back from food and reacquaint myself with what it means to be hungry, to eat well, to be full, and to eat for reasons other than hunger. I managed to bicycle 3500 really satisfying miles in one summer trip, even though the idea of really long rides (over 50 miles) still brings up fear issues in me that I won't be able to make it for some unknown reason. I tried throwing pottery for the first time last fall (something I've secretly wanted to do for years), and I was actually pretty good at it and loved doing it. I built a chair last year from scratch in spite of being daunted by the idea of "furniture building," but it has turned out quite well and many people have speculated that they might buy such a piece (??).

We also can also push the borders of our comfort zones in less tangible ways. Learning to be a better listener when everyone tells you that you talk a lot can be an immense but satisfying challenge. Practicing a little financial restraint when we're used to shopping to provide meaning in our lives can be a novel and scary idea, but often with plenty of rewards. Cultivating patience at times when we feel we're about to burst with anger can be a lifetime practice, but who knows how many joys it will lead to?

I think when we can step outside our comfort zones, it's really good for us. We shake up our old world views with new perspectives and information. There's also lots of evidence that our brains go into a different mode of perception when we're doing or encountering new things. This heightened level of activity keeps our brains active and may even work to delay or prevent degenerative ailments like Alzheimer's. Doing new and difficult things gives us something interesting to talk about at the water cooler at work - much more exciting than last night's predictable TV babble. We also give ourselves chances to discover new passions, things that we thought we might enjoy but in fact we actually LOVE to do. Look at all these benefits...

Right now I feel like I'm taking a big leap outside my comfort zone in moving to Canada to be with my girlfriend Emily. I've discovered (in my relationship with Emily) that I feel most safe and secure when I can be in a place where there is a clear and strong need for my help. Heading to Ontario is really scary for me because I'll have to create a niche for myself from scratch, so to speak (although lots of help from Emily's friends is not be discounted at all). It's a feeling of letting go of control and safety to a large extent. I feel like I'm breaking out in a new direction, though I don't even know what that direction is. I suspect it will unfold before me as I move along this unknown path, but to remember that is hard and it doesn't always bring comfort in my moments of doubt. I like the idea of testing myself and my comfort zone in a big sense like this, but I'm also scared to death. I guess this is what the big changes in life are all about.

So, what are you going to do this week to push at the edges of your comfort zone? What do you want to do that you are afraid of failing at? Have the conversation, buy that alpaca ranch you've been dreaming of, follow your heart's desire wherever it leads, especially if it's a little scary and a little unclear. That's where all the good stuff lies in wait for you...

(that's a sea otter in those waves, saying "Ain't much changed 'round here since the beginning of time. But do you know where you're going?")

minute intermission

2007-02-11T20:54:00.000-08:00

I feel like so often our culture is going to fast, or more accurately we are moving ourselves along too fast. We've got time-saving devices but fill that time with even more activities. We work more hours than ever before, and therefore try to cram compensation into short vacations that are difficult to relish because we're not practiced at being slow. We're connected to the whole world more and more all the time - cell phone calls from 3000 miles away while we walk down the sidewalk, cable that brings us more images than ever at faster speeds, internet news about events worldwide and even out in the universe. We're plugged in and turned on, tuned in to what is being broadcast. It's a fast-paced, high tech life that can carry us away if we let it.

I think being able to slow down is a virtue. I think in slowing down, we can see ourselves and the world around us more clearly. When we're in a hurry, we are simply unable to take in the same level of detail that we can if we slow down. We get wrapped up in our own narrow, self-justifying ideas about what is important in our lives and focus on them with less and less skepticism or curiosity about alternatives.

What do I mean by slowing down? Taking time to just be - sitting with a cup of tea, standing and looking at the moon for a while, making sure to have enough free time each day to feel balanced, taking a few moments to consider our food before we eat, sitting on a Saturday afternoon in the sun wondering what it will be like to grow old and die, walking on a short errand rather than driving, just sitting with a loved one to listen deeply to what she has to say. It's tough to slow down, especially in our culture. Everyone else seems to be going fast, getting things done, moving on to the next thing, multitasking - and if they're not, maybe they look like they're getting behind in the game while others get ahead. It's possible that we will fall behind in the rat race if we slow down, but I think there are many advantages to slowing down in life and making more space for reflection. I think there's a lot of evidence that we are healthier, smarter, well-rested, and more satisfied if we just take a little time to slip back into first gear and look around.

This has been a public service announcement brought to you by me. Nothing eloquent, just some thoughts while I sit on the corner watching things and wondering :-)

california creation myth

2007-01-22T20:27:00.000-08:00

Well it's alright, riding around in the breeze
Well it's alright, if you live the life you please
Well it's alright, doing the best you can
Well it's alright, as long as you lend a hand

You can sit around and wait for the phone to ring
Waiting for someone to tell you everything
Sit around and wonder what tomorrow will bring
Maybe a diamond ring

Well it's alright, even if they say you're wrong
Well it's alright, sometimes you gotta be strong
Well it's alright, As long as you got somewhere to lay
Well it's alright, everyday is just one day

Maybe somewhere down the road aways
You'll think of me, wonder where I am these days
Maybe somewhere down the road when somebody plays
Purple haze

Well it's alright, even when push comes to shove
Well it's alright, if you got someone to love
Well it's alright, everything'll work out fine
Well it's alright, we're going to the end of the line

Don't have to be ashamed of the car I drive
I'm just glad to be here, happy to be alive
And it don't matter, if you're by my side
I'm satisfied

Well it's alright, even if you're old and grey
Well it's alright, you still got something to say
Well it's alright, remember to live and let live
Well it's alright, the best you can do is forgive

Well it's alright, riding around in the breeze
Well it's alright, if you live the life you please
Well it's alright, even if the sun don't shine
Well it's alright, we're going to the end of the line

lyrics from End of the Line by the Traveling Wilburies

lost manuscript of new directions

2007-01-17T17:09:00.000-08:00

The opus of my life is made of myriad movements, large and small, stretching forwards and backwards in time beyond any perceptible horizon. Most of the events that are remarkable in my heart I won't recognize until afterwards, looking backwards and seeing it all again for the first time. Some movements that ring particularly beautiful for me:

- getting a final sign off for occupancy on the house I built at Magic over four years
- a Valentines Day/welcome to Thai farmer's party in Berkeley in 2006, with an indescribably vegan chocolate cake (go Cara, kick your heels up :-)
- a canoe trip with an old friend in the Ontario wilderness
- running in the foothills of the Alps on a family vacation near the French Riviera
- watching the lives of the twin girls at Magic unfold
- my 29th birthday and subsequent New Year's activities - swimming in the ocean on New Year's Day
- running in the snow on a quiet, swirling snowy night in the Quebec countryside with a wonderful friend

Sometimes it's hard to see how they weave together, and indeed I wonder if I ever will. I can feel the patterns more than I can see them, I can taste them and smell them but can't spell them out. I feel like it's less of a direction in life than an expression of an underlying order that is bigger than my mortal mind can comprehend. I'm a cowboy taking a drink from the banks of the Snake River, knowing what water is like but seeing that the river is so much more.

What are your moments? Where are your signposts from the past? What might lie in your future?

parting the red sea with a 2x4

2007-01-06T21:29:00.000-08:00

Standing on the threshold of 2007, I've got my hands in the warm pockets of my jeans and I'm looking up at the sky. Climate change is creeping in the front door steadily (72 degrees in Central Park today), wars rage on in sandy, far away places with real consequences, I'm idling and hanging out with good friends, and my heart is full of love for all the insanity that swirls around us. It's like a coriolis effect of positives and negatives, hope and despair, twisting together and spiraling all over this sphere of my mindscape, cirrus clouds of delight preceding thunderstorms of cathartic flash floods, moved back to clear skies and sweet smell of ozone in the starry clear sky the night after.

I'm helping a friend build a house again (alittlehouse.blogspot.com for pictures of it and yours truly) and enjoying the feeling of old buildings pass through my hands. Wood milled once and assembled a long time ago by past craftsmen gets rebirth through Matt and I as we cut it, plane it, assemble it, stain it, and admire our work at the end of cold short days. It's something I do love, creating small pieces of tangible structure and order from earth, metal, wood, and glass. Satisfaction is my sweet reward for resisting (never give up!) entropy if only for a little while as I sojourn on the earth.

2007 will be a time of coming together again, big changes, tectonic sonic booms of culture on the rocks, touching discoveries as we bravely walk in the undiscovered country, the silent magnitude of a swiftly tilting planet hurtling unimaginably and effortlessly around the sun. What will we do different for this little piece of paradise and time that we have undeservedly found ourselves in? How can we honor our good fortune to be alive, with friends, food, rest, hope, and choice? I'm aiming to be a photon for peace, love, and intrepid exploration, coming to a retina near you with a story to paint on the inside of your mind. Maybe with the right tools we can go Jackson Pollack on each other's worldviews, blow out some cobwebs and drizzle creative love from up high on the gigantic expectant canvas of our opened minds. Or perhaps we can make some popcorn with a little dill and salt on it, and snuggle in front of cold windows hoping for snow...

myth of idle hands

2006-12-23T22:45:00.000-08:00

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

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

nature of contact

2006-12-20T22:33:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

so that's what she looks like

2006-12-11T23:43:00.000-08:00

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

boiled down haiku extract

2006-12-09T21:46:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

geomancer of my own fertile ground

2006-12-03T17:52:00.000-08:00

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

I know I'm not alone

2006-11-27T12:15:00.000-08:00

People say I'm crazy,
doing what I'm doing
Well they give me all kinds of warnings
to save me from ruin.
When I say that I'm okay,
well they look at me kind of strange,
"Surely you're not happy now, you no longer play the games?"

People say I'm lazy,
dreaming my life away,
Well they give me all kinds of advice
designed to enlighten me,
When I tell them that I'm doing fine watching shadows on the wall,
"Don't you miss the bigtime boy, you're no longer on the ball?"

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll,
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go.

People ask me questions
lost in confusion,
Well I tell them there's no problem
only solutions.
Well they shake their heads and look at me as if I've lost my mind,
I tell them there's no hurry,
I'm just sitting here doing time.

I'm just sitting here watching the wheel go round and round
I really love to watch to them roll,
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go...

- Watchin' the Wheels, by John Lennon

summer peeks through split autumn

2006-11-18T11:52:00.000-08:00

tumble-down redecorations, grass springing between
marble columns etched tired
boy girl enter space sacred, naive
laugh hand-holding, peace blankets place
nature sounds mix in sunshine
forming memories stretched past to future

real or fantastic less important now moment
encompass, path labyrinthine marked by
large oaks
disc flies unusual warmth drops from sky
October momentarily gracious,
hope feeds richly
on waterfalls shared music
their coexistence separate and together
forever

no choreograph helps bloom
four part cycle of annual crush to reinvent
is prime mover,
nestled in bed later
earth spinning unstoppable
while their hearts flood arteries with
fresh damp oxygen, in same room
rain room
sane room has drips rolling down panes
strolling down lanes their robust dreams
are fed, smiles crest silent on their lips
crash as benign waves
eroding and replacing beaches subconscious,
tender black sand reveals creation myth
touch volcano leftovers
underfoot soft encouragement
to travel onwards in cover
of luminescent night

(they hold hands in the dark, one taking the other before she falls asleep as well and they lie still in familiar, taken-for-granted sheets)

tangible hope

2006-11-18T09:47:00.000-08:00

The low clouds today hold in a bit of warmth, keeping the day a few degrees above freezing. The grass remains a faint green with the rain, and a few leaves still decay along dusty curbs and lend the last remnants of autumn scent to the air. The shift is on towards winter, no turning back this year. Bicyclists bundle up, mittens make more appearances, large pots of soup become the choice for dinner, steaming things are appealing and comforting...

I felt the revolution today, within reach at the edge of my fingertips. It's a revolution of kindness, of sweetness - the smile of a girl selling organic apples at the market, the Turkish baker with a thick moustache who loves what he creates, the crowd of strangers in the densely used bookstore who are ready to offer suggestions and critical reviews, the offer of tea which stands open at all houses you visit, the pleasant durability and familiarity of red brick homes with raked yards, sunlight passing gently through large cold windows onto fleece blankets draped over our legs. It's a revolution not of the season, but of how we want to be.

It's scary yet liberating when we remember that we are the ones we're waiting for. We are responsible for our own happiness. We choose each day how to be, what to do, how to live, how much to work, how much to play, what to eat, how much to love and how much to fear. It's up to us to create a society that is not over-worked, drug-addicted, or sleep deprived. We need to practice kindness everyday - being kind to ourselves and each other. So often I forget, and I blame others for problems or hope for others to be our salvation. The world is only what we make of it, and each of our kind acts moves across the world like ripples on a lake or a beautiful figure skater on a frozen pond. We can be beautiful people with rich lives - sometimes we just need to take back the portions of our lives that we don't feel control over or move beyond the fear that keeps us from stepping up and doing things today that we were afraid of yesterday. We are acorns in the frozen loam waiting for spring, clippings of grapevines waiting to fill vats with crimson life, children learning to laugh and hug, old men whittling on the porch and keeping the neighborhood covered, lentils waiting to sprout in shallow loving water, the limitless echo of smiles that can move throughout all our lives if we all remember just a little more...

karma of empire, and our own (unrelated?) paths

2006-11-08T16:44:00.000-08:00

Celebrity dance shows with glitter and rouge, serious-looking scientists talking about the eminent collapse of most of the world's fish stocks, and advertisements smearing and blaming political candidates fill the screens of three adjacent TVs at my gym. The images alight there like butterflies for me, curious and almost beautiful because of their sadness. I watch them while listening to music or the sound of my own heartbeat, as I'm not plugged in to the audio system that goes with them. Frivolity beyond the pale, an impending cultural and ecological crash, and chatter at a volume so negative it is hard to hear or even think about clearly. I guess you could call them choices of what to watch while you're exercising - I'm not sure what I would call them.

Some days I really feel like we're missing the point. I don't know quite what the point is, but my blind hands groping through life tell me that for the most part, we haven't found it yet. Sometimes, with my cold hands in the warm pits under a dog's legs, outside on a rainy November day, I can make out faint contours on the map that can lead us to joy and satisfaction. Often that's the best I can do, the best I have to offer. Moments, slices, cross-sections, whispers and smells, peripheral visions, a pointalist life of nuances and fleeting moments...

What do you see when the talking heads fade away? What do you want on a highway with no billboards? What do you eat in a farmer's market full of fresh foods? How do you travel to get beyond here and there? How do you live life without waiting for joy to come to you, while cultivating infinite patience?

Thanks for reading all my wonderings-out-loud. A few new folks recently said they've enjoyed reading my thoughts and that's always nice to hear. I'll keep on ruminating like a cow moving that grass down inside and back up again, and scribbling it on this electronic paper like an already fading jetstream in the sky.

reading the leaves

2006-10-29T17:10:00.000-08:00

Hot wisps of roiling tea carry on up past my nose, headed for dissipation while I steal a sniff along the way. Jasmine-scented green tea - the smell always takes me back to my few months in China in 1998.

My friend Kim took me and a few other friends to various tea shops while she shopped for tea and teapots throughout Beijing and Nanjing. We would sit in the air-conditioned interiors, resting on thin cushions that adorned the dark, smoky wood interior of shops that were more comfortable than ancient, more timeless than archetypical. Little old women would serve us tea while Kim browsed and we engaged in small talk that was muffled by blending scents from giant glass jars on the shelves. We never spoke that much, as it was an odd adventure of the pleasant variety which proved entertaining enough in it's own right. Kim had the knowledge and the gusto to seek tea and pots, and it was amusing to sip hot teas all afternoon in the steamy, exotic funk of Chinese cities in the summer. The cold dry tea parlors always had an initial bite when you stepped in, but the tiny wrinkled smiles of the women and the nostalgic feeling we all get around Oriental carved wood designs were always enough to fight off the chill.

Today I sipped the tea, reminiscent of my past olfactory escapades, and perhaps for the first time fully realized that I'm living my life right now. Beyond my heartbeat, pulse, and brain functions, I'm choosing things all the time and these choices make up my life. Why is this thought significant?

I think we are told that so much of our lives is the time leading up to our lives - that after some point it will actually begin. Is it the B.A., the B.S., the Ph.D., the MBA, the J.D., the Salinger, the MSW, the MFA, the diploma of any kind? Is it moving away from home? Is it finding the person you are going to get hitched with? Is it when we make real money? Is it when we carry debt and prove that we can pay interest on it regularly? Is it when we suffer and therefore discover some of the Facts of Life?

I have no answers to these posited possibilities of lines in the sand. I do know, however, that it felt different today to think of my life. Liberating, scary, warm, introspective, and many other things as complex and simple as the tea I sipped. It's not going to start in the future. It's starting at every moment, and carrying forward into the future like ripples on the surface that are consonant or dissonant with the ripples of everyone else in my life and in the world. Today I took life with no cream or sugar, just hot and clear and full of the aromas of the journey across the Pacific and North America to my teacup. Tonight I hold it warm in my hands against the cold stars in the sky, and look at them both a little differently.

learn one, teach one, do one, transcend your own angst

2006-10-26T10:52:00.000-07:00

Circling hands like clouds, I step slowly across the gazebo in the cold afternoon wind. One hand circles in front of my abdomen, the other passing in front of my face. I can hear my teacher's voice in my head, though I haven't seen him in five months. His tone of voice and manner of speaking help me focus in on the details of my tai chi practice. In an ironic twist, he is from Guelph where I practice now, though he lives in Palo Alto where I learned the form in the first place. In the irony of history, neither of us are little old Chinese men but we both have dreams...

In all that I do, when I'm mindful, I try to honor my teachers that have lived and attempted to share their life lessons with me. I think of my tai chi teachers as I relax my shoulders, retreat my lower back, and iniate movements with my waist. I think of my 12th grade English teacher when I see grammatical mistakes in books or websites and wince, wishing I could correct the work that isn't even mine. I think of my former partner from Dallas, who told me that I was sometimes too judgemental. I think of my friends at Magic who showed me that the majority of our culture is not what it seems. I think of Chuang Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher who said that small turtles and giant eagles don't see the world the same way (?...). I think of my mom who showed me over the years how to host an entertaining party. I think of my dad who aimed to not sweat the small stuff. I think of my friends who have encouraged me not to be so black-and-white but look for the sweet, velvety grays of life.

Though I aim to honor my teachers, sometimes I still wish I had a guru. Some dred-locked Indian mystic on a cushion on a mountaintop, or a small Japanese monk in a wooden templeat the foot of Mt. Fuji, or a kitchen goddess with a big flour-dusted apron in a farmhouse on a soft June morning. Someone who tells you what to do, someone who you give yourself over to wholly because you so trust their sagacity. Sometimes I wish for this because free will can be a pisser - what if I don't want to choose? Ha - choose. What if I get stuck like Hamlet and inable to act? Ha! - act. I'd follow the footsteps in the snow in front of me, except that they run every which way and seem to go in all directions. How to choose? How to evolve? How to change?

I've been told that keeping love in my heart will be enough. I hope so. I hope I can keep it in my heart, and I hope it will be enough. Where I'm at, the food is good, laughter is not uncommon, and new friends share good life with me.

Soft amber leaves twirl
down to rest on my feet, while
I ponder swift clouds.

Pear Sauce Recipe

Pick 30 kilos of pears from your friend's tree. Load them in the car, bring them into Canada (nothing to declare, carry on, carry on :-) Let 'em ripen for 10 days. Peel and quarter them into a big 'ol pot (maybe a quarter of the total at once). Steam/boil them in that same big 'ol pot with brown spices reminiscent of warm stone hearths, and a cup or two of water at the bottom. Mash 'em. Boil some more. Follow your bliss with a spoon :-)

Doing dishes after the long, dark tea time of the soul

2006-10-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

We hosed down beets and carrots, loaded them in 10 lb. bundles in plastic bags, and tossed them into my sweetie's car with Ontario plates. Frost cold in the morning, pancakes digesting warm slowly my belly, we plan to drive them to Ipswich to deliver to a friend's farm. Twisting through Massachusetts countryside, car wants to fishtail with 700 lbs of root vegetables in the trunk, look at the imperial yellow and fading crimson leaves. Sun shines bright and almost defeats the cold, I sip fresh pressed apple cider and chat in a cross-section of time with dear friend in California, a lifetime away, pacing the grass under tall settled pines. We walk trails amongst trees and crops, dust crunching under stroller sleeping baby full of vigor. I imagine life among the fields, stone walls marking things ancient to me, roads twisting and not crowded. People gather and smile in the thick wooden barn, chilly and warmed by potluck, speak of farm seasons past and the baby eats a solitary pinto bean off my spoon, pacified.

It's passing my hand over something well-made from solid wood, it's a pondering vegetarian petting a vacant-eyed cow over a fence, it's hot cream of potato soup when you arrive cold and hungry, it's a bulky wool sweater pulled on first thing in the morning, it's your eyes telling me you'll be there, it's Occam's razor telling me to look again close to home, it's all these sentiments piled up in a picnic basket under a tree with us chillin' on the blanket

only living boy in Ontario

2006-10-06T07:36:00.000-07:00

cold weather is creeping back in, without fanfare or being too pushy because it is eminent and inevitable. the trees bend gently in the colder winds, while the leaves twist lightly and twitch in the late morning sunshine. there is no resisting it, just like last and next winter. cold, dry, and bright for now, headed for cold and wet in a month or so.

I remember it, and feel strange at needing to remember it. It has been years since I've been around the bright, simple reds, yellows, ochres, oranges, rusts, and golds. The smells of dead plants and cold earth are sweet to me, perhaps because I've glossed over my childhood memories and carefully removed the bits about cold hands and feet, the flu, and shorter days...

For now, I'm basking in the sun coming through the window, not dozing but wide awake and dreaming of nothing in particular. I know the other side of the glass is cold - I don't need to go outside and prove it. Many cups of tea keep me warm inside, and I wear my scarf indoors to the amusement of my Canadian friends.

Where am I headed? Inwards, tunneling and burrowing in search of roots. I eat pumpkins, beets, apples, carrots, and other earthy vegetables. Brown spices color the soup that steams in front of me, giving me strength to wonder where my life is headed. I find it takes strength to wonder, to let go of my preconceived options, to recognize the fears that steer me, to see where my attachments really lie and why, to see what visions of the future I cling to with or without reason, to find out where my heart longs to go or stay...

May you be finding autumn warmth, wrapping the blankets closer to you as you reflect on the last year and where the next one will take you

10 days that shook my world

2006-09-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

Frankly, I'm amazed at my own mind. As I sat on the cushion, hour after hour, day after day, I never failed to come up with bizarre, spontaneous, and sometimes even enlightening things to think about rather than calm my mind and just be in the stillness.

I'm a person with a mild addiction to music, my drug of choice for enhancing or steering the mood that I'm in or the one that I want to create. That's fine and dandy, until I'm resting on my gluteals on that little meditation cushion, in a dimly lit mediation hall on a converted farm in rural western Massachusetts, trying to just chill. Then, my own music comes back to haunt me. I'm sitting there, legs crossed, imagining myself to be looking as cool and serene as the Buddha, the ripples on my mental lake have finally settled, and I can smell the enlightenment cooking in just the next room. What happens next? Like someone put a quarter in the jukebox in a quiet central Pennsylvania roadhouse, the little arm of my tiny primate brain slides over, pulls one record from the many possible selections (curse my iPod, curse it for expanding my musical boundaries!) and drops it on the turntable. Next thing I know, clear as day, I'm nodding my head slightly to Fool in the Rain (Led Zeppelin classic), and wondering where my serenity went.

Throughout the 10 days, many songs came and went in my head. Perhaps the most frustrating ones are the ones that play over and over, or even worse just snippets of them on repeat. Some of Chris' Top Ten Neurotic Hits?

1) Fat Bottom Girls by Queen - hello?! where did that come from? I barely recognized it myself
2) Hard Candy by Counting Crows -not bad, wouldn't have minded it if not meditating
3) Guava Jelly by Bob Marley - classic, one of his original recordings, underproduced sound of just him and a guitar, great anytime you're hanging with friends in a chill setting, just not good for meditating in Massachusetts
4) Going Back to Georgia by Nancy Griffith w/the Counting Crows - another great one, good little ballad with harmonizing, boy I wished that would have gone away by day 5
5) Such Great Heights by the Postal Service - love that song! just not at 4:30 in the morning at the first mediation session
6) Here We Go - This is embarrassing, it's the unofficial/official rallying song for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Souvenir in my hippocampus from watching the Superbowl with 'Burgh friends in San Francisco. Thanks to Jeremy for stopping me from reaching nirvana...

Outside of the times that I wasn't too focused on wishing I was not in pain, or wishing that I had been deaf my whole life so I didn't have to hear the music, or trying to not go crazy, I think it was a wonderful experience to be there. 10 days of silence is very intense. It wasn't actually 10 days of silence for me. On day 2, I whispered to the teacher in answer to a question, "Sometimes." On Day 4, I said, "I think so, but sometimes my back hurts a lot." On Day 6 I said, "I'm feeling tingling sensations all over my body." Other than those moments I was totally silent. My roommate confirmed at the end of the course that I did not talk in my sleep.

10 days of silence is powerful. It really enables you to create a break in your life from all your ordinary routines, allowing you to make space for reflection and calm. Noble silence in the Vipassana meditation tradition means avoiding eye contact or physical contact with anyone else as well as vocal silence. You feel very much like you are on your own to cultivate a practice of inner work. There are past students of the technique there who help run the course so that you don't have to do much besides eat, sleep, brush your teeth, and meditate. They cook tasty vegetarian meals, set them out, do dishes after you, stock the bathrooms with necessities, and take care of any other material issues that arise. They do this because they feel that they got benefit from a Vipassana retreat for themselves, and want to facilitate that for others as well.

What did I discover? Hard to say in exact terms, but I ruminated on certain ideas again and again. I revisited the idea I've had before that I feel a strong need for security, and usually seek it by working to have other people like me and affirm me a lot. Out of this is growing a new dedication to work on develop a sense of security and meaning in my own self-worth - a path that I'm glad to be focusing on again. I had that moment where I realized that in general, I only really love myself, but I also had good moments where I felt like I could move beyond that at least temporarily and see a world greater than myself. I have taken home a good grounding in the recognition that everything in the world arises and passes away, and we can end so much suffering in our lives by remembering that and reacting less to the ups and downs of our lives. By reacting I mean aversion to unpleasant feelings and cravings for the pleasant ones, and the addiction cycles that begin with these aversions and cravings. I find it to be a powerful insight into the human condition, one which I had studied academically before but had yet to integrate into my life in a thoughtful way.

That's the basic rundown of my 10-day Vipassana experience. I highly recommend it, especially if you have at least a little bit of curiousity about self-examination through meditation. I can't say much more, except that in some ways, you had to be there. Oh, and I had the greatest roommate ever. Never kept me up at night, very accomodating, I hardly noticed he was there most of the time. Not very talkative, either, but seemed like a really nice guy.

sometimes a metaphor

2006-09-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

Jazz is the music of our lives. Rich and complex, even in it's simplicity, gifted interpreters weave the message from slim black scribble to unpredictable tapestries that express countless faces if you just change the lighting a bit. It's music that is at times easy to approach, and at others complex and inscrutable. If the solo is slow and we want it fast, it's still going to be slow coming, and we can resist or trust and enjoy the flow, trying to tune in to the mind behind the thoughtful hands meandering down the piano. If it's sweet and warm, then we are blessed and it carries us through our own avenues of memories and hopes like a friend guiding us through a sun-ripened afternoon field. When it's dark, rough, and dissonant, we can dig deep for the experiences in our lives to understand, process, and grow into appreciation of this change of tune. After a good session, we've been taken everywhere and have come back to the silence that was there when it all began.

Pop music is what we wish the world was but can never be. Repetative, forced up tempo, catchy but with so little variation that we can't grow and mature. It's addictive in it's simplicity, glossing over or skipping completely the subtler complexities and sadness that we find throughout our lives. It starts warm, carries us high, and wraps up without having addressed anything bigger than our desire to avoid pain. We cannot grow with this being the rhythm of life - there is no challenge and no way to revisit it while renewing ourselves at the same time.

To grow we have to acknowledge the sadness without wallowing in it, feel the pain and let it pass. We must also avoid addiction to the joys, for they will pass as well. Everything changes, nothing lasting forever, least of all ourselves. In this process of letting go of our attachment to both the sweet and the bitter, we begin to transcend and recognize the process that carries all of us onwards in the rushing stream of the beautiful mysteries of life. I think there is joy to be found in this process of letting go and beginning to watch the intensities of life from at least a little distance away. Lessons aren't lost, and it's not a life devoid of feeling and meaning. Rather we avoid losing ourselves in the attchment to the ups and downs. The beauty of life beyond our narrow sense of self is tangible all around us, in the eyes of friends, family, and strangers who are all the same. We can feel it laying in the sunshine and green grass, when a cloud passes over and we feel the faintest chill for the first time each September. It's the same as the buds pushing out in April, tender and destined for a luscious summer before falling and decaying in the street. It's the feeling of being made of the same basic elements as the stars in the night sky, just arranged a little differently in space and time.

May you find a little detachment, a little peace, a little quiet space on the side of the river to pull ashore and eat peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat while your kids play in the warm afternoon.

at a loss for words

2006-09-06T06:25:00.000-07:00

So I've reached the sunset on my summer travels, the last planned event of my meandering. Today I'm headed into a 10-day silent retreat in Massachusetts, from which I will return on the 17th of September. I'm a bit nervous, but very excited for self-discovery and doing something that is so new to me. I don't even have a regular meditation routine in my daily life, let alone for any length of time. Thanks to the friends who recommended it and steered me towards it - may I come out as sane and thoughtful as you.

Also thanks to all my friends who I've been spending good life with here on the east coast. It's been wonderful and heartwarming to be amongst loved ones so much. I'm already looking forward to the next time around...