A Prosperity Calculus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

It's A Question of Balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tiny update, nothing earth shaking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be Your Own Talking Head

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End transmission.

Farenheit 4.51 - the Temperature at Which Bike Tires Freeze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

render the old world

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

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

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

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

indelicate delicacies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...