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.
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Living Integration, or Small Axe Break Up Big Pavement
What am I up to these days?
Yeah, that's about it.
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.
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.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Metaphor! or, Busting Old Patterns Like White Collar Criminals
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....
Sunday, July 12, 2009
whisked away to stillness
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.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Rolling out a New Project
The time is now. Can you feel it?
I can.
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
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!
Monday, June 15, 2009
juicing the long days for every drop of goodness
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...
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...
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Sunlight in the Shade
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?
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?
Thursday, April 09, 2009
chambers and champions of the heart
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!)
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!)
Friday, March 27, 2009
Volumetric flow rate, or the Curious Incident of the Blog at the Right Time
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...
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...
Monday, March 09, 2009
Difficult to believe story
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...
"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...
Monday, January 12, 2009
Amble on down the road
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
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
Friday, November 14, 2008
Take that Road Less Traveled By
I had a dream last night, beneath the soft marmalade pool of the sodium streetlight, somewhere between here and a beautiful future of global cooperation. On my thin, pale sheets, snuggled under a thick spread of pillaged goose feathers, I dream of charting a new course for our culture on the rocks.
I dream of converting auto factories into bicycle manufacturing plants. All this talk of subsidizing the auto industry to keep it alive kind of makes me ill, not the least of which reason is that for several hundred years, western capitalist advocates have jeered and pointed up the failures of other systems' failures, from Maoism to communism to fascism. Now, when you can see the nails popping and the plumbing leaking in this shaky suburban tract house that capitalism built, the old white guys get together and say that we need to bail it out to keep it afloat. Watching rich people help out their other rich friends who just recently were involved in fraud investigations makes me a little ill. It seems extra-infuriating because Marx predicted it over 150 years ago, when he said that capitalism will follow a path of ever-deepening crises if everyone is allowed to maximize his or her own personal wealth and self-interest.
Back to cars. Why subsidize a dying industry, that is increasing the rich/poor divide while manufacturing the instruments of climate change that we are all shamefacedly addicted to, when we could forge a whole new direction? Imagine what a beautiful thing it would be to turn out thousands of well-made, moderately priced, mechanically simple bicycles each year in the rusty heart of an empire dying from its own antiquated excesses. No one has to lose their job after 20 years on the line machining engine blocks - teach 'em how to weld tube steel, aluminum, titanium. Let their powerful hands true the wheels and work the handlebars of our transportation successors. Cuba converted much of their petroleum transportation to bicycles in the wake of their sudden loss of oil imports after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, with pretty amazing results. The automobile has made us fat, paved, asthmatic, and frustrated - what do we owe it? Melt them down, roll them up, and lug weld them into real two-wheeled alternatives. Ride on the Ford forks and Saturn seat tubes. Steal the tires (can you rework vulcanized rubber? I don't know, someone tell me), cut up the leather from the BMW luxury sedans for some fine saddles, and take the Porsche bucket seats for your baby bike trailer. Imagine a new Flint, Detroit, Cleaveland, Pittsburgh, all turning out the soft click of freewheels that take to the streets of America and the world. It'll be like some fairy tale - just like... the Netherlands. It is time to think outside the four-wheeled, oil-powered box.
I've got other crazy ideas that might just make sense. How about getting a discount on the amount of taxes you pay into health care based on how much distance your feet travel each fiscal year? You could have a pedometer that simply tells how much you walk each day, and if you meet a minimum you get a tax break. You can earn more if you're even more active, up to perhaps a regular marathon runner who might represent the upper limit. Am I just saying this to subsidize my own gym membership? Heck yes, and to be more scientific in the fact that exhaustive studies show that we are healthier when we're more active, and therefore cost The System less in the long run.
How about electricity costing MORE for each unit more that you use? Right now it is often the opposite - after a certain amount of time it gets cheaper for the additional kilowatt hour. This is not really helping us into a conservation frame of mind. Pricing schedules like this reinforce our illusions that resources are limitless and relatively inconsequential. If we treat scarce things like they are scarce, I know we'll beat a more direct path to a better future.
I have other dreams that may take a little longer to bring into being, but will be nonetheless satisfying and worth the effort. I'm excited for real dialogue around energy, pollution, resources, and whether or not we actually have a large-scale social contract that seems to be working for everyone. Recently I've been seeing ads on the TVs at the gym (oh there's another wish for my Christmas list - gyms without TVs... mmmm...) that tell me about clean energy options for the future. You want to know what they are? Coal and oil. Hello?? I thought I grasped that concept really well back in... let's see... kindergarten. Coal and oil release climate-changing greenhouse gases when we burn them. Our sandy castles are built (literally) on the non-thinking premise that there will always be an infinite, relatively cheap supply of these. Recently we have discovered that the crazy, bearded, wild-eyed guys who have been writing for decades about peak oil aren't as quite as mad as one of Dostoevskey's characters. Now we are slowly beginning to face the truth that all the black stuff in the ground will run out sooner or sooner, and we will do well to plan with that in mind.
SO... what's with the pictures of kids running through green meadows in white cotton dresses, smiling and tumbling in the daisies while their parents loving stroll along like L.L. Bean models? It's not just for dish soap and feminine hygiene products anymore - coal and gas are the new clean energy. We need to sit down and have a real talk with ourselves about the difference between 'clean' and 'not quite as dirty.' If you catch a few more particulate pollutants on the way out of the smokestack, and bury the CO2 in the ground using an untested sequestration technology that many experts have questions about, does that make you 'clean'? I've got questions. And watch out for the nuclear folks - they're waiting in the wings for their renaissance, and it's on the way. Does it count as clean if you bury it really deep in the ground? How about we build their CEO's mansion on top of that mountain first, and wait to see what happens?
Where was I before this sidetrack? Oh yes, public dialogue. If you take the box we're so often stuck in in our thinking, and set it on the ground, it makes a mighty fine podium for local get-togethers where we can all share our ideas. Let's talk about where our water comes from and whether the aquifer or snowpack is a safe reliable source. How can we make it more so? Do we want to sell it or dump paper mill effluent in it? Or do we want to kick back and read our Danielle Steele novels by the lake while our kids swim in the clean, blue goodness of it?
Let's talk about buying local goods. I'll sign the letter to China where we assure them that we mean no ill will towards their fine people who produce EVERYTHING that we eat and utilize, but that in this less-stable 21st century they will surely understand our move towards local resiliency and self-reliance. We'll post pictures on our blog so they can see our projects, and we'll look at their pictures too. It'll be great. Say it with me... bicycle-powered grain grinders. You'll grow to like having quads like Lance Armstrong.
Let's talk about the elephant in the room too - population. Yes, there are a lot of us on the globe. Yes, perhaps with some heavy-duty tweaking of the whole global system of food production and distribution, we could get food to everyone who needs it right now. My big question is: Do we want to do it into the indefinite future? It seems crystal clear to me that our system is overburdened, and will continue to be even with serious redistribution measures. Do we want to maintain the current population? How about if we don't have any global agreement about growing the population? Do we still want to support everyone who wants to have four or five kids in their family? Do we want to address the inequality that exists now globally as the result of hostorical oppression, slavery, and exploitation? I'm not lining up to be the first to force other people to behave a certain way. However, it seems that as the global population swells, and the voracious middle class bloats along with it, our lifestyles and the number of people who live in affluence are affecting everyone in more and more interconnected ways. The poor folks in Africa aren't using reams of bright white, perfect paper but they've got dioxin in their blood from the mills just like we do. We don't have to live next to the crowded Beijing factory neighborhoods, but their pollution comes across the Pacific and ails our lungs while brightening our sunsets. Steel is expensive because everyone in Asia wants it too. Vietnamese coffee is so successful that it flooded the market and it's own price bottomed out, so the American guzzlers get it cheaper while the farmers get poorer (this is an advertisement: buy fair trade coffee, and drink it in moderation). The web of connections is vast and runs in all four dimensions - three in space and one in time.
We are linked even if we don't want to be, and that is becoming a huge problem. Why is this problematic? Because we don't have any agreement about how many of us we want to feed, how many of us get to have their own automobile, how many of us get to live in a tract home with a chemlawn, or how many of us get to have cork floors or copper plumbing. Now, I'm not talking about rectifying this with all the terrible ways that humans have invented to wipe each other out. If you're still feeling on edge, read that sentence again and repeat until you're not thinking of fascist Germans, crazy Cambodians, or gritty Rwandans. What we need, however is to at least TALK about it. The link between population and resource use is the major one facing our planet today. In many ways, it is the root of other problems like global warming and food shortages. Let's talk amongst ourselves, and see what we can do to CONSENSUALLY and THOUGHTFULLY address this problem now. If you think it doesn't affect us here in the developed world, think again. This is the problem of expanding cities/pavement/electricity use, the loss of farmland, the increase of acid rain, the price of our food, the decrease in measurable happiness over the last generation, the feeling of more competition and less cooperation, and numerous other shadows in our lives.
Whew! That was big. Where to begin? Smile and breathe deep. Yoga and tai chi are nice. Regular exercise gets us feeling better and thinking more creatively. As we take care of ourselves, we live richer lives and are more able to imagine positive and optimistice possibilities. We don't even have to sit and bit our nails about this stuff all the time (those of you who know me are possibly laughing right now... I'm working on getting better :-). Just being aware and informed is an infinitely better place to be than with our heads in the sand. Those of you who are excited to see Obama take the reins from Bush know what I mean. The road may be long and rough, but we'll make it. I just think it will be easier to face that long, quiet highway if we've got friends who share common ground and a bike trailer full of wool sweaters, rice cakes, and peanut butter. May it rise up to meet you...
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...
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
inward ode
Still morning holds the cold
green leaves and bright grass,
seen through the steam off
my mug.
My pen wags the dog
these tired,
beautiful days.
I'm sifting, sorting,
composting my inadequacies,
shredding my tell-tale
documents of doubt,
kept under my bed in
the dark
like a plaid canvas
suitcase from my dead father.
I think of snowy summer
mountains out west,
and my own space-time
stretched like taffy
across 3000 miles,
thin as a spider's silk
between my memories
and who I am.
If it snaps, I'm sure
I'll be lost
as old lovers and
well-worn friends
float away, untethered
by my clinging.
My four walls collapse
outwards, and silence
comes over me as I
step out into alpine
meadows of melting
ice and rich purple flowers.
Stuck in solipsism,
I picture myself
alone,
free to be me with
the small, infinite
price of solitude.
Love and Home take a chisel
to my stone mountain,
driving steel all flesh
sweat brown toned
muscular singularity
and chip away
at my old reality,
the song of the steel
welcome like a
terrifying healer,
to sublimate my
winter into a
new spring.
Friday, August 01, 2008
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."
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."
Friday, July 11, 2008
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.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
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.
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.
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