Time management, experience of and death

I imagined a lot about life when I was younger. I thought about all sorts of options, diplomat (not real self aware with that one), wandering waitress/bar tender with a motorcycle driving my Harley from town to town, or some organizational job in some far off locale.  All of them ensured no attachment to place and non stop adventures to reminisce about in my old age. They all seemed possible and there was a deep appeal to being a vagabond.  But alas, that is not at all how it turned out.  I have a partner, a mortgage, a stressful job and never enough time.  Life is officially occurring at light speed and as far as I can tell, there is very little one can do about this.

Birthdays

The past weeks has been awful. Unremittingly terrible and tragic and has caused me to have sharp shooting pain behind my eyes all day everyday. The chaos, loss of life, disproportionate and lack of response combos have diminished my capacity to believe that there is any point to our species except to offer a lesson to hopefully more intelligent and thoughtful species of what can happen when you fuck it up so royally.

But tomorrow is my birthday. 37 years old. What I have to answer is have I done what I meant to do while I am here? Have I been who I want to be and done the most I am capable of doing with the time and resources available to me? Not sure, but will need to keep trying, because what else can you do in the face of all of this evidence?

I am not a Mom

I have been thinking about my decision to not have children.  It is something I have thought about with varying frequency and intensity over the past two decades, but I'm a few months from my 37th birthday and it is only now starting to sink in as a reality.

To offer some context as to why that is happening, I should point out that I am, by nature, a planner and my life story is the plan I spend the most time on.  I decided in high school, that whatever I did or did not do, I would get to 80 years of age with no regrets. A lofty ambition to be sure, but it has enforced a specific sort of discipline in my life choices i.e. "Will this little adventure be a great story in the old folks home that brings laughter and knowing sighs to your peers or will this be something you don't talk about because you wish it had gone another way."  As you can imagine, that particular barometer has led to certain decisions that have lead my father to declare with conviction, "The fact that you are still alive is purely accidental."  Happily it has also provided great protection from all the bromides about what makes a life a life worth living.  While some cliches may be true, some are total crap. So in this vein, I realized early that I had a strong ambivalence about having children and decided two things: 1. I would only have children if I felt deeply called to and 2. That I would need to make the decision definitively by the age of 35 due to maternal risks and a general figure your shit out in a timely basis ethic.

Then last weekend I attended a recently resurrected tradition called non-family Thanksgiving with friends from college.  Of the attendees, myself and my partner and one other set were the only ones without children.  All of the children of my peer group are now in the walking/talking stage and therefore constitute their own small people society whenever their parents hold get-togethers. I hope for their sake, that we are able to maintain non-family Thanksgiving, because I'm sure it will provide an excellent extended social network to all of those children that they otherwise wouldn't have, but I digress. There were several moments during the afternoon as I watched the milieu of children, all of whom I have known with some level of frequency since they were born, that I recognized the impact on me, that none of the stories of these little people's lives were descended from me.  I began to observe that I  knew the location of some children, but not others. I smiled at some interactions, but was oblivious to most of them as I talked to the adults.

 It began to sink in that not only did I have favorites, but that I was deciding, to some extent unconsciously, that some of them meant more to me than others.  I suppose this is to be expected, but it still struck me as odd that I was picking which little people to invest in, as if they were mine for the picking. They are not. They are whole individuals with whole stories that literally have nothing to do with me. I will be at most the crazy friend that showed up at their parents parties who never had kids but no one talks about why.

And that is what has me thinking so much about this. With the benefit/horror of the world wide web, you can now find every nightmarish thought humanity has ever conjured about any given topic with a quick search. It is enough to make one feel ambivalent about being human and specifically the desirability of our continued survival. But life, LIFE. Life is amazing and it is so overwhelmingly apparent that life is being created moment by moment when you watch a gaggle of children interact and impact each other. And I will not be creating life, by choice.  It is to some extent just another choice, but really it is the odd choice. Who chooses to not create LIFE if given the opportunity? I did and even after all of this time and discernment about that decision, which I feel strongly is the right decision for me, I can't really answer why I choose not to create life.

It's the holidays, and that's a good thing

Hah, I just realized that I quoted from this very speech in a previous holiday post.  Terrible to think how long it takes for a change in life to sink in, but poignant just the same.

[T]he real value of a real education [has] almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
‘This is water.’
‘This is water.’
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.

-David Foster Wallace

 I noticed this morning that I was enjoying the holidays.  It had been a truism for a long time that the holidays were something to be survived, never enjoyed.  I am mostly posting to acknowledge the work that went into getting to a place where I can enjoy the holidays. The boundaries that were established, the rules of engagement that had to be articulated and fought for and the awareness to say, "I don't want to fear the holidays anymore."  It took me a long time to embrace as true that internal work that accomplishes nothing but bettering my experience in life is worth the time and effort and is worth prioritizing.  No one will notice that this has changed but me and that is enough.

 Honestly, even writing that sentence, a nagging voice of doubt pops up, "Was it really worth all that work?"  Life is mostly work, struggle and frustration. The moments of transcendence are rare and fleeting. So yes, if there will always be work, then working on breaking down the distortions of my mind, my fears and biases is worth the effort.

samsara-the riptide

This past year has been a difficult one. It is really hard for me to acknowledge that. I tend to participate, against my better judgement, in the Olympics of oppression. In the pantheon of suffering, this past year doesn't register at all. I have far more to be grateful about than I have to be upset about. I live a life of incredible fortune, friendship and opportunity, but I have suffered badly this year. More than I have in awhile. There has been tremendous, nearly overwhelming sorrow. death. grief. close encounters of the impermanence of everything and the incredible discomfort that truth causes me. So I came to Kripalu to try to readjust or reset or do something to change the feeling of sorrow and grief.

 I just went to a great workshop on the meaning of yoga. Several things pinged me deeply.

You are what you came from. Begin again. See the beauty. Yoga is the practice of tolerating the consequences of being you. Begin again. Act in ways that make you feel more alive. Surrender to the mystery. Begin again.

 It occurred to me at some point in the past 5 years that I was accomplishing things that I thought I would spend the largest chunk of my life trying to accomplish. I thought achieving power would be this tremendous and fraught journey that would culminate in me getting a glimpse into the heart of what makes the world tick. Instead I ended up an observer in the room and felt mostly disappointment with how people wielded power when they had it. I possessed it in moments of crisis because of a role and power felt cold, not intoxicating. I traveled and I took a path that I tried to write as it came. And still I end up back on the beach, watching the waves and feel afraid. I have to begin again, knowing what I know now and with a new understanding of just how much I don't know and will never know. I have to let go of the idea that knowing will protect me and walk on anyway. I have to accept this sorrow, stop comparing it to other people's. Accept that it is real to me and that I have something to learn from it. Begin again.

Sifting through the ether

Sometimes I come upon a paragraph like this and want to jump into another person's brain for a little while so I can feel what it feels like to think a sentence like the first one.

Fortuna's Wheel, it seems, is a chaos-proliferate fractal of perpetual hurt. The fate of others (and ourselves) is providentially unknowable. The present moment opens before us " so astounding to behold that we feel we can go on forever, held in beauty " emboldened by evanescent grace. 

There is birdsong that enswathes the air of the graveyard. " Joined with the chorus of the dead, it pierces the heart with more precision than prophesy. This song " of the living's eloquence and the deads' abandon " carries us towards evening. 

Its melody wends through Time, through Fate's indifferent landscape. No mathematician can map its course nor calculate by statistical prediction its destination.
             -Phil Rockstroh

Moving

    I have mostly finished moving into a place I intend to live in for a decade.  I am not good at the idea of permanence. I like to plan for all possible options and outcomes and not commit to any.  So now I sit in a house I have a mortgage on and wait for it to feel like something.  It was an enormous and exhausting effort to find and buy the place, so I expected it to feel like something when I moved in or shortly thereafter, but it does not. It feels no more permanent than any other place I've ever stayed.  It is possible that it doesn't feel more permanent because I am incapable of relying on anything to be more than a temporary state. Or maybe it is something that takes the time passed to sink in.

   Nearly simultaneously, I became aware that my sense of time passing has shifted significantly. The time is near for there to be more history behind me than there is in front of me and the need to do accounting on what my life is and what it could still be seems to both more urgent and harder to focus on.  I appreciate that the absence of children means that I don't get to see time pass slowly on a daily basis the way parents do, so markers of progress or change are inherently less visible for me.

   So while I want to notice the moments and I know the power of being mindful in my life, it seems that the dissonance between moving and everything being in flux with the intent of creating stability is causing me to exist outside of myself for the time being.  Wherever you go, there you are seems true and yet impossible.

It continues to not be what I expected

My friend sent me this link to an article of people who never marry. It was intensely strange to read the article as someone who is in a relationship. One of the quotes:

she wrote: “It can be marvelous to be free; it can also make you wince with pain when people tell you they envy that freedom.”

seemed particularly familiar to me. I was single for 7.5 years. I dated, but never seriously and honestly assumed that couplehood was not in the cards for me. I got the comments about being too picky, difficult, lesbian etc and thought who isn't picky about the person the fall in love with and what is so admirable about being "easy"? Those comments seemed strange to me. I have largely always been who I am. I never thought it was cool to not care, I talk too loud and I have what can only be described as a byzantine set of rules for people in my life and an easy set for keeping most new people out of my life.

But alas, the universe continues it's consistent streak of guaranteeing that nothing can be planned for in my life. I'm nearly 3 years with the same fellow and I am in love. So now I'm reading that article from the other side of the pool and it continues to not be what I expected. I remember the freedom fondly and I wonder what I would have done with this time had I stayed single. I suspect it would have looked a lot different than my awkward attempts at domesticity that make up my current day to day narrative.

The hope is for a constant companion who will bear intimate witness to our lives. Who will heighten our joy and ease our suffering. Who will be our designated collaborator and caretaker, sparing us the effort of constantly fending for ourselves.

The meta narrative says companionship is better than being solitary. The day by day ruler likely confirms this, but I sometimes do wonder about the overall story. It is very likely that I would have traveled farther afield and possibly have lived in another country over the past three years had I not fallen in love with a total homebody. There would have been many hours spent above the earth contemplating big questions, reading deeply and being more present when I had the luxury of being with friends. Instead time passes by in chunks, seasons and unnecessarily involved discussions about how we both feel about money, time, family etc. I assume that is how one achieves a constant companion to bear witness, but I still remember the freedom of not having to explain, of knowing what was true for me being enough all the time. And a petty version of me wants to ask all the people who told me that I was being too picky, what their thoughts are now that I have someone and am just a picky and just as difficult as ever.

But really, all I ever really deeply wanted from life was to never be bored, to never be predictable and so far life has offered that in spades. heh.

I spoke in meeting today

I have been home from Africa/Turkey for three weeks now and I have gotten flummoxed every time someone asked me how my trip was except when my family asked how my brother is and then I just got annoyed. In general though, I traveled across the most intensively different landscape I have ever traveled and felt tongue tied to explain, describe, refer to or anyway capture what that means. A travel writer I am not. That was true until today.

I go to Quaker meeting. I am not a member so not actually a Quaker, but I have attended meeting fairly consistently since October 2007. It is significant that I remember the date or time period as I have an epically awful memory for the timeline of my life, but I remember starting attending Quaker meeting because I went to see if something, anything could help abate my endemic cynicism. The Philadelphia meeting was literally around the corner from my apartment so I could not claim inconvenience for not going, there is no hierarchy to the Society of Friends or a requirement to believe in "God", so I could not claim oppression of belief structure. The purpose of meeting is to listen. You can interpret that any way you would like, but that is what you are there to do and I needed to listen.

This morning, on the way to meeting, I was thwarted by a 10K that had blocked off the roads that would have brought me to meeting. I got siphoned into Chinatown and had to break out the Android to help me get to meeting. I arrived deeply frustrated.

So I tried to listen and tried the chant my friend taught me to get me to a better place. It only kinda worked. Then people in meeting started speaking and it made me think about what it took to get there. That made me think about being in Nairobi and the matatu nearly running my friend over and the checkpoints that were just as likely to be bribe takers as they were to be security checkpoints and I realized that as I was annoyed at being siphoned off into Chinatown by police along with thousands of other car drivers who didn't know how to get out of there without worrying that it was a fix or there to annoy Sunday drivers, it was in fact a moment to reflect on the fact that we do it well. That we can give thanks that there is enough trust and faith in our system that we believe that roadblocks serve a greater purpose than to get us lost and that we can figure our way out of the unfamiliar neighborhood and that we have created a society where the above is the assumption and that is something to notice and be grateful for.

So I spoke in meeting today, trying to convey that and I hope I feel less flummoxed when someone asks me how my trip was. It was amazing.

Victoria Falls

We spent yesterday morning touring the Victoria Falls power plant. It was fascinating to see the turbines and the buildings. Everything about it is enormous and a feat of engineering. The original turbines built by the british in 1938 are still there and are still running. After a mediocre game drive we had dinner by the river and watched the sunset. I have been travelling for 2 weeks now and have one more to go. Home feels very far away.

Bulawayo and a train

We took the train from Bulawayo to Victoria Falls. The train is over 100 years old and the details in it are amazing. It is also surprisingly comfortable. We slept easily to the rocking of the train that made several stops seemingly in the middle of nowhere that people got out and started walking across fields. The stars were breathtaking. I think it will make me sad to look at the stars in Boston for awhile after seeing that sky. You acutely feel the smallness of the earth in an unimaginably vast galaxy. I can see why people miss their African skies.

Leaving Nairobi

I fly out to South Africa today following a week in Nairobi. I have been to see baby elphants, giraffes and the masai market. It has been awesome, from the matatu buses to the death defying street crossings. Life in Nairobi is not for the faint of heart. I can see why westerners get addicted to here. Life feels more immediate and edgy. Life also moves slower and yet much more seems to happen. I wish I had more time.

Nairobi

I have landed in Nairobi. Kenya is a long way from Boston. A really really long way. The things I have forgotten so far, my hat, my immunization record and enough pages in my passport. Apparently I have traveled enough since 2004, that I am at risk of running out of pages during this trip. Never even occurred to me to check. That should be glamorous. That should mean an adventurous life, but alas, a huge chunk of the stamps are trips to Canada. I also appear to have forgotten how to sleep. I slept a few hours in London but not since. Hopefully soon and then hopefully I will have more interesting things to say.

Travels

I haven't blogged in awhile. Life has managed to completely overwhelm me and time and space to think about things has been nearly completely absent. Fortunately I am taking a three week break and going on an amazing trip to Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana and Turkey and I am hoping to capture my thoughts here. If I really pull it together I will even post photos!

Christmas

I used to really hate Christmas. It was always a time of extreme stress and difficult human dynamics compressed into a short time span. Now, finally, Christmas exists as the time I get to see good friends and hang out with family and friends. That said, the holidays are still exhausting, because often you only have a few scheduled hours to see people, you don't get to see very often. Those scheduled hours are all scheduled back to back and my ability to be fully present in them declines as the holiday goes on, leaving me sitting on a couch exhausted.

It has made me realize that in some way the holidays are what I thought real life would be. Seeing friends, hearing their stories and either commiserating or congratulating them on some new step in life. Instead, real life seems to be working, driving places, chores and bills and the holidays are an exception to that reality. So then I end up trying to squeeze real life into 4 short days and of course it is exhausting and somehow unfulfilling.

Of course the real answer is to be more present and aware during the rest of the year. Focus on what is being said in email and phone calls. Live life deliberately.

I am glad I no longer hate Christmas. That is progress. Now I only need to fix me the rest of the year:)

From David Foster Wallace:

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

Constructive activities

Alas, it has been forever since I last posted. Life has gotten overwhelmingly hectic and complicated. I chaperoned a BAGLY dance last night, which felt good but also had the effect of reminding me of just how much adolescence sucks ass. On the upside, I also went to my first woodworking class, which was kind of awesome. I highly doubt that I will ever be a master craftsman, but it felt cool to actually use power tools and get over how scary they sound.

Constructive Ideas

I have been thinking in terms of activities that I can do now to lower my carbon footprint (getting off of airplanes was a huge leap in that direction) and improve the quality of my food supply. I am thinking that it will be crucial in any food constrained situation to know how to preserve food that you grow during harvest season. I found this:

NOFA/Mass is a community including farmers, gardeners, landscapers and consumers working to educate members and the general public about the benefits of local organic systems based on complete cycles, natural materials, and minimal waste for the health of individual beings, communities and the living planet.

So I am going to start incorporating into my schedule efforts to learn real skills that help the environment and help me feel like I am contributing to possible alternatives rather than just being complicit in the problems. Other items on the list: woodworking, sewing and possibly refurbishment.

New Direction

So I spent a week on a third world beach and came back to my beautiful home, good friends, family and proper soap. I also realized that the daily onslaught of the end is near news is too overwhelming to digest and not really helpful. So for a little while, I am going to try a new direction. I am going to post the best ideas that our out there on how to change the direction we are going. Links to books and articles of people who are thinking through possibilities for the future. I hope you enjoy. Here are some starters.

In effect, deep-down we all want to be told what to do, and to be part of a cause or movement which is greater than ourselves. This could be the Armed Forces, an organized religion, a political party, a global corporation, a Central State or one of its many fiefdoms.

Do we cling so tightly to these ideologically appealing, quasi-religious failed ideas because we fear not having any replacement ideas? Or do we cling to these failed ideas because we fear the decline of the Power Elites and the Empire? Or are we suffering from a grand failure of imagination, as I have suggested here before? Questioning "Progress" and the Poverty of our Imagination (June 11, 2010) .

Points one and three are related (and point two is a product of fatally identifying our well-being with the interests of our oppressors, i.e. Dow Jones = "our economic health"). Our fear of not having replacement ideas (and not knowing how they may work in advance) is cutting off our imagination. Without the fear and with a dose of analysis and creativity, many of the innovative ideas are really pretty obvious. They just require a kind of dynamic work and thinking ethic that most people are not prepared to make at this point (at least until they are forced into it, which is coming soon).

We need to have some guideposts in place about what CANNOT work and what CAN. The "cannot" is taken care of by rigorous observation and effort over mere convenient and lazy wish. The "can" is taken care of by creativity, initiative, and perhaps most importantly a new ethic for living which sees challenge as desirable, spontaneous communal commitment and innovation as fun and fulfilling, and social well-being as the point of individual effort rather than personal aggrandizement.

The system is broken

Sometimes you sit in your house with the electricity running, clean water coming through the pipes, food in the refrigerator and think how fcuked up can it really be? Really fcuked up is the answer.

Berry writes in “The Peace of Wild Things”:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

You fcuking a**holes

Seriously?

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn't capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana's marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company's expense. "If there's a country that's experienced with building dikes and managing water, it's the Netherlands," says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with "Thanks but no thanks," remarked Visser, despite BP's desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer --the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment --unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

Read more: http://www.financialpost.com/Avertible+catastrophe/3203808/story.html#ixzz0sTETX3FC

Read more: http://www.financialpost.com/Avertible+catastrophe/3203808/story.html#ixzz0sTEEFAgL