Gardening

Not very long ago I had a bit of a personal epiphany. I was over at my uncle's house, trimming his hedges. The sun was shining, but had just rained a few hours before, so the leaves were dripping wet. And as I went down the row of bushes, manually shearing off the excess, I realized that I really love doing this. The sharp yet quiet sound of the shears, the fresh coolness of the rain against my skin, and mainly, working with the plants. There is something about gardening that really appeals to me at a deep, soul level.

Seems like most of the other jobs I've had has been somehow anti-life. Certainly the home remodeling of recent times, which is hugely energy and resource intensive, very wasteful, polluting (with toxic chemicals), etc. Even retail jobs produce a lot of waste, and encouraging consumption doesn't quite appeal to me. Generally our economy is anti-life, speaking broadly, which is why we say it's unsustainable. This of course filters down to the lowest level, where everyone contributes to it.

I don't feel like I'm contributing anything positive to Life, not even really to the human world; I'm helping some investors make their unholy profits, and managing to feed myself on their scraps. If I were merely providing housing for people, fine, that's honorable; but we can all be real about this. No matter how used to them we are, our 2000 sq ft houses are wildly out of proportion to human needs. Unless you have a very large family, who needs such a big house? The way we arrange ourselves, everyone having their own room, typically at least 10'x10', it's pretty gluttonous in terms of space and housing. Certainly it is not the only way things can or should be. Indeed, humans evolved living in tents and huts, or large but communal long houses or lodges.

I visited, on my way to Utah last spring, some of the ancient pueblos in Arizona and Colorado. It is incredible how small those things are. The buildings seem large, but the actual rooms are claustrophobic, hardly enough space to fit a man's body laying down. Yet this is how they lived, for centuries, them and their families cuddling in these small spaces. Why do we all sleep separately (save for couples)? Why do we need so large a space for a bed room, where the chief activities are sleep, sex, and general rest? Many of our basic assumptions on this and other aspects of every day life are so clouded and myopic it sickens me.

It's the same thing with most fields of work these days: everything is tainted by the profit motive, even such basic and honorable things as farming and medicine. I've never been afraid of hard work, but I do hate knowing that my work has, inseparable from it, this threading of dishonor, the sleaziness of greed, corruption, power. Nothing is pure. This is the stuff Marx and Engels talked about. How can I really love what I do if I know that, even if I'm farming and feeding the world, I'm also poisoning the soil and rivers, or keeping livestock in barely livable conditions? I've never been able to find a fit for myself, because everywhere our system is corrupted, and I'm looking for truly honorable work.

With gardening, I am able to encourage and produce life; at least if done right. For example, trimming a bush doesn't hurt it, because it will just come back twice as hard. You can grow food and also build the soil and biodiversity as you do. In this there is still some true honor. And as I stood there in the sunlight and the rain-wet leaves, I realized that I need to be doing something with plants in my life. I'm almost thirty years old and I think I've found my calling, in general at least.

So I've been brooding on this a bit. Brooding is kind of dark sounding; call it musing, pondering. Trying to figure out which way to go with it, while realizing all the more how right this epiphany is. I mean, since I can remember I've loved plants and gardens. My parents say I used to play under the bean poles as a small child, they were like teepees, and even as I grew older I preferred being outside. I loved helping my dad in our massive flower gardens as I matured still more, propogating plants, helping design new plots, turning the soil, adding truckload after truckload of compost. Never felt like work to me. We'd smile and attribute it to our Irish blood, which makes us love to have our hands in good soil.

There was this one corner of the garden, it was my spot. It was a fairly large, lush bed on our side of the fence; meanwhile, the neighbor behind us had a big hedge, like a green and living wall. The neighbor to the side had let that part of his yard grow wild, as it was out of sight out of mind, behind his garage. There was a huge Norway spruce growing there, a good sized white cedar, tons of weeds, and a thicket of some kind of bamboo sort of plant, which spilled over into the yard behind him, also a forgotten place of decaying firewood and weeds. It's pathetic, because I'm talking about a very small area, but it was the wildest part of the yard, and I was drawn to it.

I know also that I've been missing having a garden for years. Every spring I wish I had a plot to put some seeds down in, and every summer and fall I simmer in jealousy at a few of my friends' pictures they post online, of their produce. Seems like every year, I'm not situated somewhere that I can do this for myself. Part of that is, of course, me following my other loves: camping, and, later on, hiking. Wilderness has always called me, but I'm realizing that maybe half of that call was the call of plants. To simply be in places surrounded by the vegetal world. The wild-freedom-call is another thing aside, and not to be ignored here. But plants... they are strange to me, mysterious. Living beings so far removed from my human experience that they rather baffle me. Alive like me, but mostly foreign. Their body form is different. Their senses are different. Their life cycles, different. Gardening is a conversation with this mystery. Even hiking in the forest is a sort of communion with kingdom Plantae, though it goes beyond that into general ecology too.

I think even the way I get all fired up over sustainability and permaculture and all that, is largely fueled by this. There are many good things to be done in those fields, and I'm not saying I'm purely all about the growing of plants. I'm fascinated by many aspects of sustainability, the basic philosophy of it, the science and ecology of it, and specific fields, like urban design, new building materials and methods, and new energy sources and methods.

But those will have to be for other people. I want to have my hands in the dirt, somehow, some way. My part in all this, I think, must be working with plants. I titled this "Gardening" but it could be anything: farming, working in a nursery, or as an arborist, or a conservation forester. I hardly know where this could take me.

Filter Bubbles

::wipes dust off of blog::

Wow, sorry for the absence. I keep feeling like I want to write, but don't. I've been too busy working (12 days straight!), plus two classes and in my off-time, just consuming too much media to produce any of my own; a serious problem, but the product of low energy. Part of it, too, is a sort of depression. I think I may be having inklings of a midlife crisis here. Nothing full blown, but it's there.

One thing is that I'm getting to the age where I'm beginning to realize that my life is not going to be some epic thing, I'm probably not going to change the world, write the next great novel, do anything seriously earth shattering. Youth has that boundless optimism, but experience comes along and proves it wrong. I am an ordinary man, not some maverick, not likely to be a creative genius or do anything too amazing. I am likely to be one of the nameless massmen of the dustbin of history, who did nothing more noteworthy than to simply struggle to stay alive until he died, forgotten. It's kind of a disturbing notion to accept.

Plus, I'm starting to realize just how self-centered my life is. I've been stressing for more than a decade about what I'm to do with myself, both big stuff and little stuff. What to study, what career to choose, which trail to hike, which book to read, TV show to watch, etc etc. I've talked plenty about ego on here, but it's becoming distressingly clear just how caught up I am in myself. My life has become a sort of monument to my self. Here I read all these books, trying to learn things that have no actual application except to aggrandize my own self-image as a know-it-all. I live for myself, which is to live for nothing at all, yet I don't know how to get out of it. I feel I've gone too far that I've forgotten how to get back.

Partly, the problem is that my love of knowledge has become a sort of addiction to information. I remember back in the day, between 18 and 21, discovering Eastern religions, waking up to the political world (9/11 was my coming of age in that respect), learning about Peak Oil, inklings of cultural collapse, and all that stuff. It was like a punch in the face, everything seemed to open up and be illuminated. But the glow has worn off. I keep hoping that the next beautiful idea will change my life. Yet, it has largely devolved into a pointless addiction. The internet is especially bad for this. I can lose hours on Wikipedia without realizing it, following links. It is no different with books, though. And it's all a reflection of my own selfish interests.

I recently watched a debate on PBS, a show called Intelligence Squared, debating this proposition: The internet is closing our minds (podcast here). Interesting debate. I fell toward the "pro" position, though with some reservations. It seems to me (and those arguing the "pro" position) that often the internet becomes sort of a hall of mirrors, a giant narcissistic image of the self. Do we not more often search out things we agree with? I never go to FOX news website, but have often gone to places such as CommonDreams, alternative news and information. People filter their own information intake in this way.

Furthermore, there are filter bubbles (a TED video, whose speaker was also in the I2 debate), thanks to the "personalization" of Google and social media. Google tracks the sort of stuff you search, builds up a sort of database or rubric, then when you search something new, guesses at the sorts of websites you want to see. A liberal and a conservative will get different results when they search "Obama," the latter getting more stuff slanted towards the birther "debate" and Obamacare. Up to 60% of first-page links on a Google search will be personalized this way. Yet it is not generally known among internet users that this is going on, because you have to put two computers side by side to see the differences.

Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter can be bad in this way too, or worse. They are watching what you're watching, and helping tailor your internet experience. But basing the future on the past, so to speak, is idiotic. It is probably more important that we don't just keep plodding down the tracks of our old ideologies, but that we are exposed to new ideas.

Of course, you can still find anything on the internet, read any viewpoint you want, and expose yourself to all kinds of new ideas. And it is a wonderful way for people to connect. Atheists used to be all alone, usually; but now, they can get online, meet whole forums full of other atheists, and not feel so isolated. People into paleo-skills can find people with like interests and tons of resources to further their skill set. It's pretty amazing, really.

But this was my reservation against being on the "pro" side; basically the internet isn't closing the American mind, certain web companies are. Filter bubbles do exist, yet they aren't absolute. This is my experience. I've learned tons from the internet, though I also admit that I tend to gloss over dissenting viewpoints, often dismissing them out of hand as closed-minded conservative shills for big business. I read some of them, and enjoy a good debate, but I don't always have the time or inclination. And like any human, I prefer to have agreement than dissent. And with all the trolls and flamers out there on the interwebs, a good serious debate can be hard to come by, and the comment threads under an article are not conducive to anything but making quick sniping comments. It's just not the right format.

In the end, the "pro" position won. It was an good debate, proven by the fact that at the end I was less sure of my position than at the beginning; but I'm not sure it deserves the status of being called "Oxford style" debate. I feel that at Oxford, the debaters would present more clearly, define the question and their terms more strictly and explicitly, and be less informal. But it would be great to see political candidates debate that way.

Purpose of Life

Just what is the point of life, what is the meaning, why go on? Well, every nature program I ever saw seemed to take the stance that the point of life was reproduction. You know, bagging the hottest doe in the herd, passing the ol' genes on, the circle of life. I can see the logic behind that, but, well, it rings rather hollow, just not all the way there. Certainly it is a requirement of higher life; no sex, no more species. I follow that far.

But so little of an animal's life is actually about mating. I mean, the act itself for most creatures is ridiculously brief; though even then, there may be marathon sessions. Tigers are quick in bed, but will mate every five or ten minutes for days. Craziness. That bastard must be freakin' exhausted, and the female? Tore up. Especially considering the tiger's penis has barbs on it. So much for sex evolving to be pleasurable, so as to encourage the continuation of the line....

But what about the courtship process, the wooing, the fighting between males? True, take that into consideration and the time involved increases. But mating season is what, a month, six weeks at most for a deer? Far less for most other creatures; a dog or lion comes into heat, and pretty quick she has a mate. The actual percentage of their life involved in this is minimal. We humans are different of course, taking things to new levels of sexual involvement, but I'm trying for perspective here.

(You can try to factor in the time it takes a buck to grow his engery and nutrient intensive antlers, but that is somewhat of a stretch, and a thing largely unique to the deer family. Other ungulates don't shed their headgear yearly. And of course most animals don't have any such anatomical analogue.)

So, sex isn't the main focus of the day to day. What is? Eating. Nature, red in tooth and claw, the battle for survival, that's what it's all about. Well, we run into problems here too. Sure, a weasel will starve to death on a cold night if it doesn't get up and eat, thanks to its ridiculous metabolism, and yeah, herbivores do spend most of their time grazing, but what about the predators? Let's face it, the struggles of the hunter are few, and very brief, over quite quickly. Dogs, lions, these creatures spend most of their time doing... nothing. The social ones play and socialize, all of them sleep a lot, or just stare contentedly into space.

And what about plants, and the other kingdoms? Life is not limited to Animalia. A tree spends half of its life in the dark, and in cold regions, months in dormancy. Or this-- I read an article years ago, about these chemosynthetic bacteria (archaea, actually) living in the mud on the continental shelves. Chemosynthesis is vastly less energy efficient than photosynthesis, leading to a far less productive metapolic process. Thus, these bacteria sit there in the deep muck, slowly turning the sulfates into methane hydrates. So inefficient is their metabolism that it may take a thousand years for them to store enough energy to divide once. And there's enough methane down there that if it all defrosted and bubbled up at once, the atmosphere would catch fire, and that'd be the end of life on Earth. So they've been down there some time.

Tell me, what is the point in this? I can see none. None of these explanations really get to any meaning, they simply say, one survives in order to survive, one has children that one's children may have children. This is not meaning, this is description (thus, never look to science for meaning). I mean, one could say that life is about reproduction, even if it's not the daily focus: creatures eat so they can eventually reproduce. But you could just as easily say they reproduce just so they can eat for longer, via the generations.  It all feels so empty. Like the wheel of samsara, after many lives, the sex, the food, the power, and the thrills eventually become tiresome; so too do these circular explanations leave one unsatisfied.  And the end, it doesn't make sense to live for any one thing, right? To go about eating, sleeping, fighting, all so you can mate and pass on genes. So really, my parameter of "whatever a things spends most of its time doing" doesn't really relate to the purpose of their life.

I'm reminded by the movie Dead Poets Society, a specific scene where Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams is instructing his class as to the purpose of learning poetry. He says, "We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering-- these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for." A great scene from a great movie. But here I am, in agreement with that, yet also looking for a deeper perspective, an evolutionary perspective. Certainly life didn't just go on with circular logic of surviving to survive for 4 billion years, waiting for humans to evolve so meaning could finally be found... did it?

But, wait, let's go back; just what are those bacteria doing down there in the ocean's mud? What about those lions staring at the horizon, or the trees dreaming in the winter's night? It's hard not to see them as the original meditators. Whatever the point of life is, it's found in the present moment, whatever moment that happens to be. And does a dog have Buddha-nature? How can it be doubted?

Life and Death

Life is good

It seems, sometimes, that there much more death out there than there is than life. Most creatures, from trees to frogs, from beetles to mice, produce enormous quantities of offspring, but most die or are killed and eaten long before they mature to adulthood. All those dead sea turtles, all the seeds fallen on hard ground, the million sperm that die to make one human. How dismal, how wasteful.

But, consider a truth. Life and death are perfectly equal: every living thing dies, while that which is not alive cannot die. Nothing is added, but nothing is lost. Balance and harmony. 

This pic is here because,
well, it just cracks me up.

Then again, death is momentary, but life is prolonged. It endures, if only for a little while. A tadpole dies in an instant, but may have lived for three whole days. Who knows how long a seed may last before it is no longer dormant but truly dead. And, all that dies, every last bit, becomes food for other life.

So. There is far more life than there can ever be death.

Further, if the vast majority of organisms die before reaching maturity, then adulthood is the exception. Most living things that enter and exist in this world are, as it were, children.

So why so serious?

Aliens

I believe in aliens.

I don't figure they've visited us. No human can keep a secret, not really, and certainly not one that big, and certainly not a group of people. Someone's gonna leak it. Anyways, you don't travel the light years of space to sneak around anally probing rednecks and hillbillies. I think it's more likely to be top secret military jets and spy craft, or natural phenomena.

The universe is... unutterably, unfathomably, ineffably huge. The number of stars in our galaxy alone staggers the mind, but there are as many galaxies in the universe as stars in our galaxy. Many of those stars have planets. How can we be the only planet with life on it? Any life, intelligent or not.

But here's the thing. What I just said may not be true. The things we know, are not actually things we know. People used to know that the sky was a hard firmament upon which moved the sun and stars, the Earth in the center. People used to know the Earth was flat. People used to know that flies came from spoiled meat. Science changes often. Sometimes radically, major paradigm shifts. Science is relative, not absolute, and could be a laughable myth that will some day be the butt of a future society's jokes.

Conditions conducive to life are pretty narrow and specific. I'll admit we only have Earth life to study, and maybe it could take other forms. But we don't know that. Maybe the universe is not actually so ineffably big, maybe we have it wrong. Or, maybe it is big, but the dice were thrown and somehow only came up sevens here. Good ol' Earth. Possible.

So, belief or not, the belief is empty. Doesn't matter. We know very few things, really, one of which being that we are alive. We don't know about the stars or even what live is. Only that we are alive. We will probably never know of any other life. We could truly be the miracle of the universe. I guess I'm saying, let's take some care of it.

No, say not "it." Say rather, "us." We are one Life, after all.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

One of my supervisors at work asked me the other day if, five years ago, I ever would have dreamed I'd be living in Texas. I thought a minute, and said, "a thousand times, no." We both laughed.

Not that it's so bad here, really. All I mean is that five years ago I never would have dreamed what directions my life would take. Back in 2006, I was living a hopeless life. Stagnant. College dropout, just working at a dead end job which wasn't terrible, but wasn't great by any means. No goals. I had an online journal back in my late teens early 20s, which I'll never post here, but I look at it sometimes, and try to remember what it was like then. I always find it amazing how depressed I was.

That spring, I embarked on a cross-country bicycle trip, my first hope of breaking out of my doldrums, with no plan but to make for the coast. On the ninth morning of the trip, I was creamed by an 83 year old lady driving a Buick in New Ulm, Minnesota, breaking my bike and very nearly me. I wore no helmet, but was lucky; I survived with only some bad contusions and road rash, but had to limp on back home via America's favorite traveling option: a Greyhound bus. Truth is I wasn't enjoying the trip that much anyways. I was trying, and naturally failing, to run from my demons.

After that little changed for a while. I got a second job to fill my hours up, moved out of my parents' house. Tried returning to college, lasted about two weeks. Finally in the winter of 07 I finally decided to hike the Appalachian Trail, which in 2008 would prove to be the catalyst to finally change my life, to teach me what happiness was and to rekindle my spirit. Since then I've been travelling a lot, working seasonally, three times in jobs involving hiking or trails.

I look back at myself, and at myself now. When I was 17 I would have laughed if you said 10 years from now I'd be some kind of hippie-ish*, hiker-trash guy, living in Texas of all places, hiking these long distance trails, working occasionally, and, the kicker, writing a spirituality-laced blog. I was a pure, strict athiest back then, looking towards graduation and college, assuming I'd have a career someday, a stable, normal life. No one would have said I had it in me for living this way. While I've always loved the outdoors, I was the shy kid who didn't go out much, never the risk taker, the adventurer, and certainly don't conform to the "adventure sports guy" persona. I'm not even very athletic, never was the "physical" type. I'm not the type at all to be living this way.

Yet here I am about to go hike the Pacific Crest Trail. And I don't know where I'm going after that. It's a little scary. I find it amazing that a reserved and cautious person like me is at the same time living this totally unsecure life. Very curious.

But it all just goes to show that you never know where life will take you, what it will make of you. Look back 5 or 10 years in your own life, and ask yourself if the path you've since taken was at all obvious back then. It probably wasn't. The raw material of us, our deep-seated loves and likes, those few core personality traits, can find very unforseen expressions as life plays out; the interplay of variables shuffles your life in a new and unexpected arrangement.

Whatever there is to be said of life, at least we can say it's very interesting.

(*I am NOT a hippie.)