New Directions

Hey all, just wanted to announce that I am planning on resurrecting this blog, and turning its focus more towards outdoor adventures, trip reports, bushcrafting tips, and the like, rather than all the philosophical ramblings. There will likely still be some of that, because that's just who I am; but hopefully I'll be having more posts and photos referencing my doings in the great Florida out-of-doors. I had thought to create a new blog, but this one has the right name for where I want to take this project, so I'll just stick with the tried-and-true rather than start a new one. I know I've surely lost all my old readers after two or three months of inactivity here, but anyways, that's what I came to say today.

Get Off The Mountain

Get off the mountain--
we are not wanted up there.
To climb is only an offense
to gravity, to the earth
and the sea which birthed us.

Feel this truth in your bones
with every heavy step uphill,
hear it with every pebble
skittering down the slope;
we are not wanted up there.

Even the sages have left,
back down to the valleys
where life is made, their only answer
to the seeker's many questions--
we are not wanted up there.

What We Leave Behind

I picked up Derrick Jensen's book What We Leave Behind the other day. As always, I find him hard to read. I respect him for what he's saying, and I know he's just being honest and unrelenting in his condemnation of our ravaging civilization, but it's still very gloomy reading. He's definitely a glass-half-empty type of guy:

Back to this morning. I step outside, napkins in hand. I hear the birds singing back and forth, and I'm reminded of the ongoing destruction of the planet.

There's Derrick, being his usual cheerful self. Like I said, hard to read, though he's right on target and has a lot of good info. Especially the first part of the book, much of it about waste, garbage, feces, and so forth. The historical perspective was interesting, about how people viewed garbage (really, they didn't, since garbage was not waste, but a resource, and was utilized). Made me think about my own.

For starters, human waste. The napkins he's holding were for toilet paper, as he now prefers to poop outside in the forest. As I pondered, I remembered something I wrote long ago as a teenager:

I feel so cut off from the jump and flow of life. I am totally disconnected from almost every part of my life. I have never seen the plants or animals that produce my food; I don't usually even know what country they come from, let alone what specific farm or farmer produces them. I do not know where my water comes from, where it has been, or where it goes. I don't know the people who made my tools, furniture, clothes, or electronics, I don't know the trees, plants, and mineral deposits where the materials came from. They show our leaders on the television, but I've never met them. I do not know where my urine or feces goes, or what is done with it. And the heat for my house comes from fossil fuels I've never seen burned in plants I've never seen.  

I wrote that when I lived in Michigan, and it still applies today, in Florida. I've looked into some of these things, for this post, and learned about a few of them. For example, I know the water here comes from reverse osmosis plants pumping water from the aquifer under my feet. I could go see the plants if I wanted to, all three are in this very city. My garbage ends up in an incinerator -- pleasantly called "waste to energy" or, even better, "resource recovery" plants --  from which [some of] my electricity also comes. The sewage, hard to figure out, it seems that after treatment, the dried sludge used to go to a landfill, then Cape Coral started turning it into humanure, but something changed this year and I can't find out if they still do that or now send it to a landfill; all the newspaper links are inaccessible, and this article is ambiguous. 

So it's not that I can't find these things out, though some are rather more difficult to find than they should be. No, the real problem is that I have to ask at all. Shouldn't it be painfully obvious to an organism where it's shit goes? I mean, it's my shit, I put it where I put it; but we've built a system in which the shit doesn't stay where it's put, it goes somewhere, is acted upon by others. That's weird. Of course, it always was acted on by others, but those others used to be merely soil organisms, or maybe a hungry dog. And to not know where my water comes from? Or my food? This is a matter of grave concern, all of it. 

Because (I skipped ahead in the book) Jensen talks about fighting back. But I think he's deluded. On the other hand, this may be why he's so sad. Of course in the end people know the Earth supports them. But our experience (and Jensen even says this himself) is that water comes from a faucet, food from the supermarket, shit goes somewhere else. Everything is abstract. And when it comes down to that, one will fight to the death to defend it; not to overthrow it. No one is going to work to destroy that which supports them. Which is weird to say because that is what modern civilization is actually doing, but it's removed from experience, a mere abstraction. Our immediate reality tells us that to fight back is to fight against getting food, water, sanitation, and all the rest. 

Jensen quotes someone saying something like "do not have a revolution until you are prepared to eat rats." And this is the crux. One might fight back against a regime, or even a type of economic system, as they have done for all of history. But even the communists didn't want to destroy civilization, not even industrial civilization. This is a whole other order of problem which we are being asked to fight against. Something right down to the core of our lives. No one knows how to live without civilization, except a few pockets of indigenous peoples around the world. In fact, to overthrow civilization would be to doom billions to starvation and death, because you can't support that many without it. 

Which is tragic, because of course this is what the Earth needs most, an overthrow of, at the very least, modern civilization as it works now. I don't know if civilization in any form is sustainable, let alone if a high tech one is, as the techno-futurists fantasize. But we're going to hit limits eventually, probably soon, or maybe already. And that's going to hurt, and things will change as a matter of course. I've read that Native American civilizations like Cahokia, when they got overpopulated and teetered over the unsustainable cliff, just went back to hunting and gathering and small farming, having never lost the skills totally. They were never so many, or so estranged, that this was impossible; this is not true for us. 

The other tragedy is, of course, that of human dignity and self-determination. A man used to be his own sanitation engineer, by moving his outhouse now and then (actually, this isn't sustainable either, read this). He didn't have to delegate his power out to specialists and technicians. He grew or hunted his own food, drank from a local stream, which didn't need reverse osmosis plants, made his own clothes, tools and furniture, or knew the men and women who did. His garbage decayed and enriched the soil, and so was not garbage. His body would eventually do the same. 

I have to admit, I was especially irritated to not be able to find out where the sludge solids go around here. Here we are, mining the worlds soils of nutrients with our agricultural model, never adding anything back but poisonous fertilizers, converting it into feces, and then, where do those nutrients go? I hate the thought of them being stuck in a landfill, or incinerated (the ashes to go to a landfill), to mix with heavy metals and toxic chemicals (which they've already done in the sewers and incinerators). It's like taking the world's fertility, mixing it with poison, and burying it far from the access or use of any living thing save some extremophile anaerobic bacteria. Same goes for human bodies, for that matter. We're running 200 species extinct daily, stealing the Earth's productivity to make human flesh, then, when they die, soaking them in embalming chemicals for burial in hermetic concrete vaults. 

Madness. Madness. How can this go on?

Was It Worth It?

I'm reading Alan Watts' book The Supreme Identity again. It's one of his older works, and one of the best books I've read on metaphysics, because it is a very reasoned argument he makes, building up on some pretty solid premises. It's a pretty hard read, therefore, for both that reason, and the fact that he takes a lot of time explaining things, to try to make clear a subject that is inherently hard to talk about. I will also note that he wrote this while still an Anglican priest, and he admits in the intro that, because he was still "in the system" as it were, trying to match Vedanta and Christian theology, it is, perhaps, "somewhat torturous." Still I find it illuminating. Not a good intro to his writing, though. 

I'm on the part where he's discussing the Problem of Evil. I won't get into the arguments here, I haven't the time and it'd be better if you just read it (the whole book, that is), for I'm sure to ruin the argument in trying to simplify it here. But briefly, he argues for a God that, rather than being absolutely good, is the source of both good and evil (in the finite, relative realm), while Himself transcending both. Towards the end of the chapter he says something like how, from our limited perspective, evil seems absolutely terrible, yet, from the standpoint of the infinite, it is an integral part of the finite duality, and even the most atrocious acts are worth it, for the overall beauty of the whole Creation. He likens it to standing with your face pressed to a painting; stepping back, you suddenly see that those ugly shadows are what give shape, form, balance, and identity to the light and color.

Now, I talk a good deal on here about civilization and it's pitfalls. I've long sympathized with the Daniel Quinn/Ishmael position that civilization has been the cause of many of the negatives we see in the world today: war, poverty, starvation, disease, environmental degradation. These may exist at a basic level in all humanity, true, but civilization grows them to a scale unimaginable at that level.

So, has it been worth it? Much as we hate war and genocide, crushing poverty and tyrannical rulers, plagues and pollution and extinction...do things like high art, advanced medicine, the internet and global communications, justify it? I have a hard time here. Human history has been a bumpy road, full of inhumanity and horrors that we in the West can hardly imagine, given our plush lifestyles. No living American has had a war happen in their own backyard, we really have no idea. Though there are systemic problems, the vast majority of us don't know true poverty, true starvation. These things are everywhere in poorer places, a vast suffering of masses of people. They would still be living at peace if it weren't for civilization, close to the Earth, in communities where no one is left behind. If it weren't for agricultural surplus, expanding populations, and urbanization, there could never be slums and shantytowns.

But I must admit it hurts my very heart to imagine a world without Ode To Joy. Whenever it plays, I feel like I want to burst with happiness, and tears often come to my eyes. Or Starry Night, by Van Gogh; my favorite painting. A perfect case in point, actually; the man, like civilization, was tortured and half-insane, yet look what came of it! Or, appropriate to today's topic, Edvard Munch's The Scream; a creepy painting, yet it stirs the soul. What about all the poetry, the great novels and plays, the elegance of higher mathematics? What about telescopes revealing the heavens, microscopes showing us worlds within? What about the rush of foreign money and help when a disaster strikes a place like Haiti? Before such a thing would be impossible, if ever we learned about the disaster in the first place.

One can narrow it down to religion, as they did in one of the Intelligence Squared debates. We all know of the bigotry, the crusades and jihads, the suicide bombers on buses, the gay-bashing and abortion clinic bombings, the strife in South Asia, the Troubles in Ireland. They are terrible. But religion has also brought us the stained glass at St Denis Cathedral, in fact all of the great cathedrals, mosques, temples, and shrines. Most of the art down the long centuries has been religiously inspired, if not overt iconography. And what about the joy and giving at Christmas, the pillar of Islam that requires charity, the ideals of love and brotherhood, compassion and kindness? It hasn't been all bad, you know?

Tribal equality is a wonderful thing, and clearly mankind evolved to fit that lifestyle. We certainly have problems squaring a tribal mind to a globalized world. Yet, we have grown, stumbling, into something more. Tribes are isolated, closed within themselves, extremely conservative and narrow. Today, we have ideals of universal brotherly love, individual freedom and innovation. Such things would never occur to a hunter-gatherer, because it is born out of the long march of history, which has slowly built upon our awareness.

Is this all we've become?

I'm also reading Lord of the Rings (I usually have several books going at once), and think of the elves in this case. Immortal, they watched as evil first came down into the world, and watched as many great and lovely things died or faded. At one point, Merry, a hobbit, states that he has never until this quest been outside his country, and, had he known the perils that awaited, he should not have had the courage to do so. Haldir, an elf, says in his reply, "The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."

It grows perhaps the greater. The play of duality in the world is inevitable, and is what gives us joy and love, even if it also requires we know sorrow and hate. And of course, civilization is, and all this discussion is rendered moot by that fact. We are here, and there's no going back. Even if we had the deepest, darkest collapse from modern society, we would have the memory of civilization, would still almost surely continue agriculture, metallurgy, the use of animal labor, and other such advanced things. I doubt we could ever slide all the way back to the sort of natural tribal state that the Cro Magnon lived within.

I'm not sure we should want to, either. I've never been too sure about "spiritual evolution" but in some sense, we have in fact matured as a species. Many things have been discovered within ourselves that likely would not have been under the simple tribal conditions. We needed a more complex substrate, that of civilization, to bring it out of us. Emergent properties. We often do a lousy job exhibiting these higher things, of course. But they are there, waiting for each one of us.

To those of you who have read this far, I beg you to reply. This is one post I'd be very interested to have a discussion on, to hear your opinions and thoughts on the topic: Has it been worth the pain, to walk this road of civilization? Would we have been better off remaining stone age adepts, wise in a simple way, in tune with Nature? Or is it a good thing, in spite of all the hurt and horror, to have come this way, and to have found the more refined aspects of heart and mind?

It Is What It Is

It is what it is. 

Man am I sick of this phrase. I used to joke that this was the most common five words on a construction site. Probably true. But I'm starting to think it less funny. It's actually rather depressing. What is this fatalism that seems to be sweeping the nation? Everyone is saying this, or things like it. I hear it in class, on the radio, from friends, and from strangers overheard in diners and coffeeshops. Everyone seems to be throwing up their hands at the world and saying, "there's nothing I can do." 

I heard a story on NPR the other day, about teaching strategies, East and West. Here in the West, kids are taught that smart kids are the ones that do well in school. In the East, kids are taught that it's the hardworking kids that succeed. An experiment was done, some years ago, where children from Japan and from American were given a math problem far above their ability. The Americans gave up after, on average, thirty seconds, saying "we haven't had this yet." The Japanese children worked on it for over an hour. 

We deride the East, saying they are robots that learn only by rote. Somewhat true, their creativity is less pronounced. But it seems that Americans are helpless without being told exactly how to do things. We don't work for things, we give up. They said it was because failure in the West is taken as a personality flaw, not merely a lack of effort or even luck. So when confronted with an insurmountable problem, we turn away. What has happened to us?

I said to my uncle that back after WWII, there was a surge in energy, a sort of collective testosterone rush after having won the war. We were invincible, unstoppable. Just as in any contest, the victors go home, full of optimism and pride, have lots of sex (baby boom) and build lots of things (suburbia, highways, etc). The post-war boom. Things got stagnant more or less in the 70s, and now we're on a downswing it seems. Oh, there's been GDP growth, but that means little, especially to the common man, who's wages have stayed stagnant for decades. 

I think the fatalism is a defensive strategy for this decline. Things are failing, and people are stepping back from it in a sense, as a way of insulating themselves from it. That's the way things go, they seem to say, and as it falls, they try to remain separate. When things slip downwards, there is no collective energy for doing things. It is a period of waiting, to see which way things are going. But to wait too long is to fail entirely. And anyways, insulating yourself from the failure of the world is to cause the failure of the world: if no one does anything to sustain, to build, to keep alive, then, it will not be sustained, built or kept alive! It's a positive feedback loop, also known as a vicious cycle. 

Not that it's all bad, this accepting of reality; in a way it is a good thing. In remodeling homes, a specific case, you see that there's nothing you can do about the shoddy work that went before, or the fact that the wall studs are warped. The baseboard is going to have gaps between it and the wall. You grab your caulk gun and go to work. But too often I see, even in myself, an unwillingness to go the extra mile, to put in the effort and time and care to make things right. Money rules the day, and working quickly in some ways trumps doing things precisely. The evil profit motive ruining things once again. Again with the baseboard: if the corner joints aren't perfect, even when the walls were, it's okay, caulk will hide it. You say things like, "good enough for paint-grade," "can't see it from my house," and "spackle caulk and paint make a carpenter what he ain't." 

True enough. In the end, we make it look good. And often, as I said, you just have to fudge things to make them work. A good carpenter is one who can hide his mistakes, they say. One must work with what is there, must be able to see clearly what is. 

Of course, for myself, very often I rage internally against the standards some people hold. They want their walls smooth and their woodwork perfect, even in an old house, every joint hidden, every nailhole covered, and so forth. The smallest defect, they freak out over. (They also want it done for next to nothing, and as fast as possible). I may not have the patience for finish carpentry. These Euclidian ideals do not square with the world, they do not follow the curves, so to speak, of the earth. Thus the old man wastes much energy picking every leaf off of is lawn, though more fall every day, and becomes bitter and obsessed. 

So in a sense, the fatalism is a positive response. We are awakening to the reality around us, seeing it clearly, and in a sense realizing that certain things cannot be altered, and do not need to be. We are tuning in a bit better to what's there to be tuned into, ditching these Platonic ideals for a more empirical reality. This shall be the birth of the new world, as the old crumbles. 

But that it is a fatalism, and not mere clarity, is what makes me think it is an example of a greater problem. We are getting soft. We have had it too good, been too insulated from real work and real things. We have fewer than ever people entering into the trades as apprentices. In 20 years, who is going to be doing the work that will so desperately needed to be done, as we recreate our society? Mexicans, I suppose; such work has always gone to the latest wave of immigrants, from the Irish, to the Italians, the Polish, and so on. Yet as goes the prosperity, so go the Mexican immigrants, I bet. I'm sure they'd rather be poor in their own land with their families nearby, than poor in a foreign place.

Even our wars, we are loathe to fight. The hoopla over the Benghazi attacks. We are fighting a global War on Terror, however misconceived, people. Do you really think there will be no casualties? Do the Taliban or al Qaeda, after a drone strike, freak out and lob investigations and controversy at their commanders and leaders? No. These are men who know what a war is. They know about suffering, they know about effort. They mourn their dead, and go right back to the fight. 

If we are going to fight wars, which I'm not saying we should, we should do it 100%. I agree with our military leaders in this. Clear goals, and support your commanders. If you can't do both, it's time to pull out. There will be mishaps, there will be pain, there will be death. If you can't handle that, don't fight a war. 

So while I'm all for recognizing reality, we need to ditch this phrase and the attitude behind it. We are not mere slaves to fate. Perhaps the government is corrupt, business self-interested and insane. Fine, but don't submit to it with fatalism. Fight! Build something new! We can't wait for the old to fall before we work to make the new, we must start now, with hope and energy. Otherwise we're going to be stuck with some dystopian future we really aren't going to like. 

One Night

I worked my way around the small pond, pushing the willow branches into the soft, damp earth along the margins. The world around me had fallen silent-- muffled, perhaps, by the dew already settling on the grass. The stars shone clear high above, the silky wash of the Milky Way spanning the velvet dark; and as I finished up, my eye was caught by a sudden light to the east. It was the moon, heaving its luminous bulk over the horizon like a revelation. It hung there, unreasonably still, as if this waning gibbous moon longed to remain, to hold on to what light it had left. But incrementally, it lifted over the trees, accepting its nature and the changes of time. 

Soon my backpack full of fresh branches was emptied, and I took to roaming the night, glorying in what I had done, ignoring roads and property lines as I strode across the soaking fields and lawns. Boundaries of all kinds were falling away. All my usual reference points were gone, swallowed by the dark maw of night,  and elation surged in me, my awareness sharpened, expanding laterally. The world dissolved into a mysterious enormity which I drifted through, a singular point of perception made whole, and joining with the rest, as much as my feet were soaking in the chilly wetness, and my lungs the misty air. 

Something had transformed the trees. Trees that, by day, seemed isolated and dwarfed by the spaciousness of these open fields, a place that was, in fact, former forest, long ago bulldozed. Now, under the cover of night, they rose up before me, looming against the moonlight, phantom spirits of the forest this land, in its hidden heart, even yet remains, though long held down by the mowers. 

They seemed to rise, physical manifestations of the very night itself, the growing soul of darkness itself. But not darkness in any evil sense, no-- dark only in the way of things unknown, unfathomed, but very much alive. One pine, as I wandered free over those fields, seemed itself to walk towards me, though of course it was I who, by no design of mine, was steering straight for it. A large, two-trunked pine, feathering dark branches out against the star littered sky, each needle singular in its existence, glistening in the moon. It was a silhouette of pure presence. 

It seemed to hold a quiet wisdom, a strong sense of knowing, and as I drew nearer, even seemed to hold the moon itself between the tongs of its split trunk. A living memory, random remnant from a bulldozed wood, survivor of wild storms and man alike, standing quite alone in a vast sea of undeveloped property. This tree remembered a different owner, and this, I knew then, in a way I cannot quite recapture now, was the tree-lord of this patch of ground, one of the sovereign sentinels who wait, wait... wait for the day the mowers come no more, ready to tend a fresh growth of seedlings, the someday lords of a forest yet to be. 

Guerrilla Gardening

So, as I said in the last post, I'm realizing I'd like to work in a nursery or something, to have my hands in the dirt; merely designing landscapes or whatever isn't enough. But in the meantime, this past weekend I struck out into the world of guerrilla gardening. I've started planting trees. Trees are some of my favorite plants, because they often have that freedom thing going. Aside from some of the lower branches, they tend to grow as they will. They are impossible to ignore, towering over you. They are in themselves wildlife habitat. And, they live a long time, so planting them is a lasting effort. I could see myself becoming an arborist, a tree planter of some kind, maybe even a forester, but from a conservation angle. 

So, guerrilla gardening. I've been collecting acorns from the live oaks in the yard, and planted over 130 last weekend while house and dogsitting for my parents, mostly in a wildlife management area and in a bit of neglected, undeveloped land. I have also been planting willow cuttings. Willows are amazing because you can cut any old branch, stick it in some damp ground, and you'll get a tree from it. Their bark has loads of rooting hormone in it, and you can make "willow tea," and with it get cuttings of anything other tree to root and grow themselves.

For starters, let's just say that, though still young, I'm well on my way to being that weird, "eccentric" old gentleman stereotype (as much as you can stereotype eccentricity). I went out one afternoon to a drainage ditch by that neglected bit of land, where a few willows grew (specifically, native Coastal Plain Willows). Cut over 30 branches. I had to walk a half-mile back to the house, and watched as passing motorists slowed down to bend their necks at the weird guy with a huge bundle of leafy branches walking down the road, with more sticking up out of his backpack. I looked ridiculous. 

Later that night I made my stealthy way, dressed in black, out toward the park area in the middle of this partially developed subdivision, where there is a man-made pond. See, one thing I hate about southwest Florida is the lack of trees. It's all so newly developed here. Everything that isn't still pine forest looks bald and naked, literally scalped, and the houses just sit there, starkly dominating the scene. Horrible. So I'm working on remedying that. Also, I hate that a park has so few trees, and that this pond has no shoreline vegetation conducive to wildlife. The whole shoreline is just lawn and weeds growing a bit unruly beyond the reach of mowers. No reeds or cattails, even, which I find strange. May have to remedy that as well... 

But for the moment, I just started setting the willow branches. I put about 20 there at the pond, in select locations; another 8 or so along the ditch draining it, and the remaining 10 or so in another smaller pond that forms part of the ditch system. I figure they have a great shot at growing, given that the soil was all quite damp; and as we're heading into the dry season, if it's damp now, they'll be fine the rest of the year. 

So, this isn't quite "traditional" guerrilla gardening, which is to beautify neglected areas, especially in urban zones, or to plant food crops in the same sorts of places. Well, I think the delicate willow branches growing up there in the sun-baked park will help a lot, shading the waters a bit, sheltering frogs and minnows and birds, waving gently in the wind. That's beautiful in my book. 

I keep true to the guerrilla aspect by not asking permission, and plan to put in more trees when the time is right, probably oaks and pines. May make some seed bombs as well, though since the grass is mowed regularly it might be wasted there. I have wider plans for the trees I'm growing (I have a ton of acorns started in pots here at the house, as well as some found-seedlings). There are many places I'd like to plant acorns, but with the mowers, it is necessary to have an actual tree to put in, with stakes for a warning, or any seedling coming up will be mindlessly destroyed. 

And of course I'm still working on aligning my life in better accord with my new understanding. For now, this is a mere hobby, but eventually I know I've got to make a living this way. I just had to get started right away, in some manner, because who wants to wait, once they've figured out what they're supposed to be doing? 

(A note on seed bombs, for any who are interested: in sunny, drier climates, such as Florida in the dry season, or in the Southwest US, I hear that seed bombs made with clay may bake solid. Because unless it rains a good bit, to soften the clay, it will sit there in the sun, basically firing itself almost into a ceramic, and therefore becomes useless. I read that instead one can use a recipe of seeds, compost, and a bit of egg whites as a binder. These will come apart better when the rains do come.)