Birnam Wood

I led a Leave No Trace (LNT) course for some teenaged trail workers a few summers ago. LNT focuses its efforts on getting visitors to public lands to visit as lightly as possible. I started the course by handing out little plastic tags emblazoned with the 7 Principles of LNT. Smart-ass Kid #1 raised his hand, “Um…like, these are plastic and we’re supposed to be leaving no trace and like, protecting the environment, so why are you giving us these?”

I was glad the kid asked. It made segueing into my personal queasiness about this somewhat twisted view of environmentalism a lot easier. I would have felt dishonest not mentioning the double-standard of ethics inherent in that moment, and better to have the student ask the question than for me to wail on and on like a disgruntled harpy.

It bothers me that we continue to separate woods and not-woods worlds, and that we treat them so differently. I own an LNT instructional DVD (came wrapped in plastic), several LNT stickers, three training manuals and textbook type publications, and a pint glass—presumably to be used for drowning my sorrows at the entire trinketry connected with leaving no trace. I think that you can get water bottles, hats, t-shirts, fleeces, bumper stickers, and I don’t care to know what else, all emblazoned with the logo. And I’m all for protecting public lands. I’m just equal opportunity world protection. But it’s high time—as storms wash cartographic distinctions away, as boundaries are eroded—that we stop pretending that protection, that awareness can start and stop at the trailhead.

Despite everyone I know having a story of some hellacious trip to the woods, I still think that most of the people who go to the woods would agree that life is better there, or at least in a calmer, deeper key. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” wrote Thoreau. In part, I think that this is why anyone goes to the woods. Life outside the woods, if we let it, becomes a maze of expectations and requirements. It feels as if our lives and choices are no longer our own. And so, when we can, if we are the people who must, we throw a few things in a backpack and run away for the wild hills and hidden woods, for deserts and oceans and jungles and any place beyond the bounds of normal life.

Almost without exception, my dearest friends are people who have sought out and known wild places. I’ve lived with many of them in strange little pocket communities tucked in among mountains and valleys and lakeshores. I know that the wild places answer something deep within myself, and I suppose that I take on faith that anyone else in the wilds, in these communities, has something resonant at their core. I love these people faster because I suspect our hearts are forged similarly. Perhaps our hearts and souls do not always match exactly—and I know that the words I grasp at barely scratch the surface of what I’m out there for—but there is a sense of  “you and I, we are seeking and finding something similar out here in the wilds, beyond straight roads and power lines and day planners.”

What I find in wildness is the closest truth I know to what holiness might be. To have a sense that personal and sweet in common with a stranger is beautiful.

And so, I’m friendlier to people I meet on mountaintops than at subway stops because I think we’re similar. Also, perhaps, because I’m meeting them in a place and in a way where I am at my best. This isn’t to say that I fall in love with and befriend every stranger on every trail, or that I don’t have bad days in the woods, or that I suddenly become an angel around stunted balsam fir trees. But I am more likely to be kind in the woods. When I start to get peeved at strangers in the woods, it helps to remember that there is a sliver of commonality between them and me. And I hate them a little less, humor them a little more. (Mostly.)

When I worked on a mountaintop summer camp in the White Mountains, we read this Rene Daumal passage to campers before they descended to their non-camp lives. The words remain in my bones: “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.”

It is the art of conducting oneself that gets me. I’ve been beyond lucky to have lived swaths of my life in wild places. I swear there is something better out there than pursuing the normal American Dream of dangerous and hollow consumption and the itching feeling of being controlled, and of never being or having enough.

But now, I have descended from my woods and wilds. I live in a city, although I doubt this is permanent. But, I am guided by the memory of what I’ve seen as possible, of what I have known, and I find pieces of that goodness here. I’d like to think that I put a little of that goodness into this world, too. Something as a balm against the often frustrating pursuit of cultural expectations, a wild force against the clutter and bad chaos and violence of the so-called civilized world.

In Macbeth, the three witches prophesize that Macbeth will rule Scotland until Great Birnam Wood comes to high Dunsinane Hill, where his castle sits. As forests are not noted for their mobility, Macbeth assumes he is invincible and becomes a despotic tyrant—the play is Shakespeare’s shortest and bloodiest. Heads are rolling left and right, chimneys toppling, horses screaming, women and children slaughtered, thunder, lightning, and Lady Macbeth loses her cookies over her part in bringing on the horror. Never mind Denmark, shit is rotten and bloody and crazy in Scotland.

The Thane of Ross has a great line, when the awesome Macduff asks how Scotland is faring: “Alas! poor country, Almost afraid to know itself.” So beaten down by the powerful that the country has almost forgotten its strength. The key, I think, is the word “almost.”

Because, a few lines later—after learning that Macbeth slew Lady Macduff and all the Macduff children—Macduff assembles an army and lead them up to Dunsinane Hill to kill Macbeth. Of course, as camouflage, the army will cut down and carry the trees of Birnam Wood before them.

To Macbeth, it looks as if the forest itself has revolted as the army swarms up the hill. The trees arrive, bloodshed ensues, and Macduff relieves Macbeth of his head.

Not a traditional ecological or world-saving text, I know. But, if we could learn to be how we are in the woods, out of the woods, I suspect that a lot of the pseudo-powerful forces that seem to control our lives outside the woods would start to fall.

And so, we must try to live more deliberately, to plan and prepare ourselves for what we may come across, to live with only what we need, to be aware of our surroundings and our resources, to take time to do nothing but seek our happiness, to be silent at times and to speak our minds at others, to see beauty, to be capable in and aware of our bodies and more self-reliant, and to be as kind to the strangers at the grocery store as we would be with the strangers on the ridges. Those who have been to the summits and descended, those who know the principles of living lightly on any landscape, those who have hidden their hearts away in the woods, now is the time to come forward and live those better ways that you know are possible. You might be happier, too. I hope so. The closer I pull my life here back to the themes of life in woods, the happier I am. That I know.

We're Gonna Win

The report from day six of landscaping is that there are a lot of weeds out there. They grow around the ornamental flowers, in the cracks of the sidewalks, up through the bark mulch. Insidious, a pain in the ass, unsightly, unplanned, and more successful than any other planting.

Life, like the truth will out, it seems. The weeds are set up to thrive, biologically, hurling their seedlings everywhere and growing crazy, snarled, impossible to eradicate roots. By and large, the beautiful annuals that are set in these decorative gardens are not capable of reproduction. Ergo, the humble would seem like the winners, the flowers the also rans.

That is the life. Here is the truth: we’re gonna win. Scratch that: we’re winning. We, the people who think that there is a better life possible than the socially isolating and climatically destructive model largely foisted off on us by mass-marketed ideals of cultural norm. You know, we, us, the “alternative,” Blue State, liberal hippy nerds.

I’d be among the first to agree that we’re not doing enough, that the world is more dangerously close everyday to a complete and utter meltdown. The increasing temperature of the ocean is now melting Antarctica from below, leading me to believe that rather than pick fire or ice as the end of the world, we may just get both. Additionally, this country’s government seems to be increasingly corrupt and asinine and unpleasant every day, and hell-bent on making a country full of rancorous, paranoid citizens who can have access to crazy guns, but perhaps less access to education and healthcare and the privacy of a telephone call, and who are managed like cattle on a strict diet of fossil fuels.

So, yes, I agree that there are some problems with the world. Often, I get so overwhelmed by the weight of all the troubles I see the world as having that I can’t figure out how or why to get out of bed, or, once up, what in the name of all that is holy, I should do with my day, with my life, in terms of mitigating the rather daunting ills of it all. Days like that, it seems that the news cycle is taunting the good people of the world that we’re all going to lose, that there is no point in going on, that the game is rigged, over, and we should just tuck in, move to higher ground, and prepare to ride out the Apocalypse.

I don’t believe that. In pockets and corners of communities, I’m finding increasing signs of life, of evidence that we are winning, that the handbasket to hell is being actively unwoven. It’s not that we’ve won, it’s that we’re moving in the right direction. I thought of this while walking from my parents’ house to the local ice cream store. Twenty years ago, the property was an active dairy. Then the farmers decided to stop farming (I hear it’s exhausting). The land was put into conservation protection, and now the ice cream store, nature trails, a corn maze, petting zoo of farm animals, a CSA, an independent middle school, and a community meeting space all share the turf, along with a few cows still browsing around the fields. This is an amazing step in the right direction!

One of the problems with the current environmental/social “Save the World” movement is that we don’t celebrate our successes well. Admittedly, the task before us is Sisyphian, and it seems bad luck and premature to throw a party for every few inches we nudge that rock upslope. It’ll be better if we can, though. This is a movement of passion, of joy, of wanting to save places and traditions and things we love in our lives. I think using that as a starting point may be a better rallying cry and battle song than fear and doom and destruction.

I attended a letter writing party last night, put on by the Massachusetts branch of www.350.org  (www.350ma.org.) As a small group, clustered in the corner of a basketball court on the third floor of a Baptist church, we wrote letters to State legislators, begging them to support divestment. In inviting friends to come along, I had an interesting exchange with one friend. He asked, if—as he believes—investments by outsiders is the smallest third of the fossil fuel companies, then what was the purpose or expected success of pressuring schools and towns and churches and any institution that can to divest from fossil fuel interests.

This was my answer:

“I like that the Fossil Fuel divestment plan stems from the Anti-Apartheid movement. It's high time for social and environmental movements to merge, and that modeling this strategy on something that worked, rather than on continuing to have the Sierra Club lobby against Exxon in Congress is likely a better solution. Or at least, a better path towards a solution. 

And here is the other piece: it's easy to grasp, it's easy to target, and so, it's easy to get people involved. We're, most of us I think, wandering around feeling lonely and frustrated and scared and unsure about what we can each do, what tiny drop in the bucket will one individual's actions make. I see divestment as a way to both get some money out of fossil fuels, and to rally the fuck out of the base. I don't know what solutions and changes will come out of all this rallying, all this sharing of ideas and the partial erasure of loneliness, but I trust, very much, that something will. 

If we can use the new, climatically empowered communities built around divesting and then start to knock out shit like government subsidies and increase fuel and energy efficiency and advocate for better public transportation and community design and all the rest that we need, then that seems like a good enough start to get behind. For me, at least. I'm feeling very Churchillian about this: Divestment is not the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning. But! There is so much worth sticking out a long battle FOR!!!!!”

I used to have a scrap of paper over my desk that read “What would you do if the world were saved?” I lost it, but have absorbed the idea into my litany of personal pep talks when the boulder gets heavy and the mountain steep and I become frustrated and heartbroken and terrified by what still needs to be done. We spend a lot of time hunkering down, trying to both prevent and prepare for the worst. In doing so, it seems like we’re admitting defeat, which I fear may beget defeat. But, in some ways, we’re already doing so well! It's important that we take note of that, absorb and feed off our successes. I think of the weeds, unstopped by pavement or transplanting or crowding out by showier species. So, let’s start acting like we CAN win this. And then, let’s.

(Video is from A League of Their Own, obviously.)

Pranks and Fairy Tales

There is an innocent glee about a good prank that makes the whole experience feel like a combination of a snow day, your best birthday wish ever, and discovering the secret to a magic trick. The disbelief, the wondering, the reveal, and all of this sweet mischief happening outside the bounds of expectations makes it seem as if a different reality than the one of logic and reason. Through the subversion of normal that a good prank requires, something alternate seems briefly possible.

Think of the Loch Ness Monster photos from the 1930s, or the Cottingley fairy photos of the 1910s (above, from wikipedia.) Much as my childhood nightmares were (almost) soothed by the rationale that Nessie was not real, that the photos of a dinosaur’s head and torso appearing out of murky lake waters were not real, it makes the world seem a little dull if we do not have sea monsters and fairies. I’d like some places on the maps where dragons could still lurk, where adventures with the unknown and alternate realities could happen. Where a door to something, anything outside of the normal— which can seem stiflingly dull and predictable—opens, just briefly enough that you can slip through. The fairies may be paper, the monster may be glued in place, but how lovely, for a moment, to think otherwise.

But, how would it be to live otherwise? Not that one leaves bowls of milk out for fairies (although, really, why not?) or expects witches and goblins to fly across the full moon, but that one lives outside the bounds of what seems dull, predictable, and logical. This is Robert Frost’s oft quoted “road less traveled” writ large. Which ever road one takes, we’re all heading to the same end point, it’s just a matter of how we get there, and how we go about our living these lives we’ve got, stretching through the yellow wood. That I am living now, and that I won’t always be, I find this thought not morbid in the least but rather a reminder to spend my days better.

Most times, this better-living doesn’t look like what I thought being an adult would look like. Despite all odds and evidence to the contrary, some little piece of me has had a bizarre Rockwellian vision of what adult life should be. (Also, Rockwell’s psychiatrist apparently told him that he painted, rather than lived, his happiness.) I’m now 31, which seems like a comfortable age to start thinking of oneself as an adult. Someone who should put away fairy tales and not be afraid of hoax-monsters, who should reconcile naïve hopes of saving the world with what is possible, who should start being a productive member of society and the economy. I should work from 9-5, find my one true love, marry him with a large diamond ring, buy a house, have some kids, vacation for two weeks a year, contribute to retirement funds, and so on. Traditional wisdom and the lore of modern American media both promise me that this combination of actions will make me happy.

I am suspicious. While many may find happiness this way, I doubt the universality of this being the only true path, of any happiness being one size fits all. It seems like a hoax, which in my mind has a darker intent than a prank. A prank is lighthearted, and makes you laugh, after that brief glimpse of the door to elsewhere. A hoax is like a methodical con, where someone more powerful dupes someone with less power and calls it a success. Maniacal laughter can ensue on one end and feelings of self-doubt on the other. This is not kind. I do not wish to participate in that sort of game.

But to go outside the bounds of expectations, I’ll gladly play that game. I have six years of advanced education and two degrees and am about to start working as a low-level landscaper. A friend recently said “You’re going to get paid to do what people do for fun in their spare time?” That’s an incredible perspective, because it is true. I feel like I’m playing a huge prank on the world, or, rather, on the systemic expectations of our country’s culture. Let others scurry off to their cubicles, leaving home early to avoid traffic on the commute, wearing pantyhose and neckties. I’ll just be here, in their gardens, planting flowers. I can't even write that without smiling, without feeling like David or Jack playing a prank on their respective oppressive giants. It's like I've gotten away with something. And whatever that thing is, heart or soul or sanity, it's priceless.

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.” Such was Edward Abbey’s advice to environmental activists at an Earth First! rally. It’s pretty good advice for everything, though—pull your heart of out the safety deposit box, use your best self for what you love, be mentally and physically active, and you will be victorious over people who are stuck in the ruts of bad systems and unkind hoaxes.

These folks with their locked hearts and desk calculators, maybe they’re not willfully bastards. Maybe they just don’t know how to believe in anything else, how to live any other way. We’ll have to lead by example, then, like fairy tales being passed down by fireside traditions until the archetypes are burnt into our bones. To subvert the crushingly dominant power structures, to exit the tired game we’re not winning, this is the greatest prank I can think of, the best trick I want to be part of pulling off. And, like any good prank, this is more fun with gleeful co-conspirators. Robert Frost, taker of twisting paths, thought so, too:

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf

That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I sha’n’t be gone long.— You come too.

-The Pasture, by Robert Frost-

Yoga and Montana's Tongue River Valley

I live on the line between Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. This geography means, among many other things, that on weekend mornings, the streets are crawling with young, hip, well-educated seeming people, all wearing yoga pants/black tights and hurrying around with yoga mats poking out of their bike baskets/Timbuktu messenger bags/Patagonia backpacks.

Now, I get it. Yoga is great. Heck, wearing a pair of paint-covered shorts and a ratty sweater and intensely supervised by my dog, I just spent a lovely thirty minutes with an online yoga lesson, in the privacy of my living room. I stretched my leaden hamstrings and lengthened my cramped back and side body. And I feel much better than I did before. Similarly, I have many friends who have found enormous comfort and strength from consistent practice of the discipline. It’s helped with chronic back issues, allergies, pregnancies, pulled muscles, depression, body image issues, and a host of others slings and arrows that our flesh is heir to. So I’m not knocking yoga, itself.

But I am concerned, when I see the army of hipster yogis flocking to class all at one time because it seems like an army of sad robots, blinded to the world by an intense yearning for personal enlightenment, for personal peace. I’ve attended yoga classes on and off, and what increasingly disturbs me is how little connection is made between the practice of bodily-awareness and anything beyond the yoga studio. They look just as frantic, as stressed, as harried leaving the studios, largely, as they do streaming in.

So, what is all this glorious, heightened awareness of our chakras, our inner eyes, and our abilities to move the energy of a deep breath into heretofore unknown nooks and crannies of our bodies…what is all this for? Because the armies of Cambriville yogis I see commuting with yoga mats and canvas grocery bags seem no happier or more peaceful than their weekday counterparts running for the T in business casual. The majority of these people are rushing, yammering into their phones, and barely keeping their outer two eyes focused on the present, let alone their inner, third eye. All of this practice, all of these practitioners, and we’re not raising the collective consciousness an appreciable amount.

The problem may lie in the blurriness of the line between selfishness and self-awareness. Yoga, as practiced by the yuppies, hipsters, and hippies of my observation, seems to dance this line fairly consistently. The Deep Ecologist in my soul wants more. First you must become aware of yourself, then your community, then the wider world, until your empathy and awareness extends through everything. But these are not clean, linear steps—you can think and act a little more empathetically in the world, regardless of how perfect your crouching warrior or happy baby poses are. Thinking a little harder, practicing a little harder and more consistently about the everything beyond the body, everything to which we are a part, I suspect that this could lead to some pretty great individual and collective happiness, and possibly, greater peace, global and personal.

Here and elsewhere I have written about my commitment to the landscape that I love. If you get enough place-based folks together, it begins to sound like a revival tent sermon. Everyone bearing witness to their land, speaking in tongues and raising hands and hearts and practically swimming in the mutual love of individual landscapes.

And, to this I say, heartily, Amen and Hallelujah and Shalom and Insha’Allah and any other words of sacred peace and joy. Bear your witness, love your land, your communities, your home.

But, it is not quite enough anymore just to think of ourselves, our own lands. We’ve largely, found our voices, found the strength to speak our truths. And, having done so, the time is well nigh to listen to others, and to speak up for others’ truths. A bunch of individuals saying different things is noise—a bunch of people speaking together, this feels a little more powerful, a little more effective.

Pastor Martin Niemoller was imprisoned in two concentration camps for his vocal opposition to Nazi control of German churches. When he was released, he wrote these words:

“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—


because I was not a communist;


Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—


because I was not a socialist;


Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—


because I was not a trade unionist;


Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—


because I was not a Jew;


Then they came for me—


and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

A good friend of mine, Beth Raboin, wrote to me a last week to tell me about a project that she is working on. Beth lives in Billings, Montana and writes for both her own blog, walksonstilts.worpress.com, and for www.hothouseblog.org. Beth’s latest project is to go around the Tongue River Valley of Montana and find the stories that aren’t being told, the stories of the people of that magnificent landscape.

The West has a mythos of being a hard and beautiful landscape. The phrase “The West” alone inspires an admirable panoply of images of the American mythos. But the truth of the place, the true stories of a landscape that demands equal parts love and work, these are better than any fiction. And the West is not simply big mountains and cowboy hats, any more than New England is a Red Sox game, with some maple syrup on the side. Our places, wherever they are, are known and defined and held through the stories, through the human history as much as they are by anything else.

And Beth knows this. Her rationale for going into the field, for knocking on the doors of local cowboys and Indians alike, armed with her tape recorder, notebook, her irrepressible humor and willingness to listen, is because this land is under direct siege. I write a lot about how I fear something in me would die if the alpine zone or rocky coastlines of New England disappeared. And while climate change is a real and terrifying burglar, casing the security of my loved places and prepared to enter and rob me, and the world, of them, what the Tongue River Valley faces is far more direct, far more immediate.

A coal train is proposed to cut through the Tongue River Valley, to better connect with the coal mining in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana. The mining area is likely to be expanded, also, ruining other landscapes that are sacred to people, that are home to a wonderful variety of flora and fauna. I’m vehemently opposed to coal as a power source, so this whole “at least the coal is American and providing jobs” line is moot, with me. There are jobs in putting up solar panels and wind turbines, and the Powder River coal seems to largely go to China, so this train has no bearing on our country’s best interests.

Beth and the stories she will collect like a magpie are tools to stop the coal train. She aims to dig in, to find the stories of the people, the stories that tie them to this landscape, to tour the ranches and burial sites, and to mine the land for its better riches. More information about this project is at the Tongue River Legacy Project’s website. I hope in my bones that a collection of stories about how precious the land is will stop a coal train’s construction. The land is being revalued through these stories, re-known, learned and shared and its pride and the power of the people dusted off. Change has come from smaller seeds before.

In this battle for a better world, these words are my best tool. Beth wrote to me, asking, essentially, to hire my guns for the campaign to save a land she loves, that I barely know. She asked because I love places fiercely. All she was asking was that I transfer some of that love, some of that awareness, out of myself and onto a different place. Try it. Imagine your most beloved landscape, with your beloved people, ancestors and descendents and the living, all on the brink of being plowed under by a coal train. Or becoming a desert before your newborn baby is your age. Or your grandparents’ graves being washed out to sea. And know that somewhere, at any given time, these things are happening to another person’s beloved. The Tongue River Valley is one such place. It is not the only one.

One of my favorite yoga poses is Warrior. I like it because it stretches my back and my legs, which, after years of traipsing around the mountains, are chronically tight. I also like the name. It is time to take the strength and dedication and peace of such practices and make them real through our actions outside yoga studios. The world needs us to listen, and to speak out.

Convictions

I have been thinking lately about the plurality of meanings for the word conviction.

One reading of the word leads to images of quiet strength and courage. Rosa Parks, for example. I was pleased to learn—finally—that her act was not a snap decision of human weariness winning out over senseless laws but the fruit of the long growth of the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, of which she was a vital part. Wonderful that she sat, better still that such a force and solid movement of humane ethics and organization stood behind her actions.

I find it suspicious that I was taught, essentially, that she just “got tired” and sat down. Technically, that is a true statement, but the full story of what she was tired of wasn’t made explicit. That my education divorced her actions from premeditation, from her convictions, from the hard truth and long hours of preparation and planning and logistics and harnessed passion of a group of people who were compelled to break laws to obtain a better, more just existence. We assume, I think, that the legality of a law supplants the morality of the law. It takes a deep knowledge of one’s own truths, and an impressive amount of courage, to tell the difference. To me, this is the definition of conviction that pulls my best intentions back into my bones and allows for forward movement.

But, blink and read the word again and the images lead to courts and prisons and Australia and Abel Magwitch. For those who aren’t familiar, Abel Magwitch is a strangely glorious character from Dickens’s “Great Expectations.” He is a convict (embezzlement, debts, attempted murder, chained to a ship, etc.) whom Pip helps, out of fear of this wild, shackled man who attacks him in a graveyard. When Pip grows up, Magwitch returns and Dickensian high jinks ensue. I laughed out loud through “Great Expectations” so don’t want to spoil another word of it, but Magwitch’s morality is no simple matter.

I freely agree that there are horrible people who are guilty of terrible things. I’m not trying to dismiss all criminals and convicts as misunderstood by exploring the word conviction. But I do begin to wonder what is the relationship of truth and action and law and crime and punishment that meet in this word.

Last week, I mentioned the duality of conviction to a friend. It was in the context of an act of protest regarding climate change that he had participated in. (Specifically, he and another man used a small boat to block a large boat full of coal from docking and unloading at a coal burning power plant. Details about this are at: www.coalisstupid.org). Their action falls into the slightly murky territory of civil disobedience, although it remains unclear what—if any—laws were broken by their actions and it all sounds quite civil and obedient, really. I said, “I’m impressed with your conviction,” and meant the personal truth and active reckoning that finds a gap between legality and morality.

We talked over the two meanings, and then he mentioned a third, that conviction also means “to sit quietly and thoughtfully with oneself and to convict oneself of living in a condition of immorality and participating in a great wrong—or even evil.  As if there were some higher moral and internal judge, and the truth of how to be a good person in the world were a code of law, and you must try yourself and you find your self a part of an immoral system.”

To follow the chain here—and chains seems illustratively appropriate for this conversation—convictions arise from an internal recognition, which lead to external actions, which can lead to reactions from the wider world and its legal articulations of a society’s moral code and ethics. Once you have found yourself part of the system, you must work to change either yourself or the system or both. Thoreau says: “things do not change, we do change.” But, we can also change things. And should.

With my sunny and Romantic ideas that the laws of this country were based on the inner convictions of a group of very flawed, but very well-intentioned and thoughtful and intelligent men, I am upset at the gaps where our society’s laws—the legal articulation of our priorities and morals and ethics—seem to have grown so distant from our humanity, from the places where convictions originally arise.

I believe in good governance, in just laws that protect, educate, and assist people in their lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness. I further think that everyone has a right to be governed thusly, and for all voices to be heard in a representative governing body. As near as I can tell, this is what we are supposed to be here in the United States.

But we’re not. Somehow, business and corporate interests crept into the gap between our personal convictions and our laws. In the last month alone gun-lobby money has stopped popularly demanded legislation surrounding gun control; our Supreme Court sided with Monsanto regarding the Indiana farmer who purchased second-run seeds that contained Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds from a source other than Monsanto and is deemed to have stolen Monsanto’s property; and the Keystone Pipeline continues to be considered by our representative government to be a good and viable project, despite the obvious detriment to many lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness of citizens that the pipeline would entail. This morning I heard that Gina McCarthy, who is in the confirmation process to become the next director of the EPA, told senators that the EPA has no plans to limit emissions from existing power plants.

Without becoming a screaming harpy, a one-trick pony, regarding the constant issue of profit over people, I cannot say enough how horrible all these things seem. I find it criminal that our government guards corporate concerns above the lives and well being of its citizens. Life—we’re complicit in a system that values guns over innocent life. Liberty—we’re letting corporations dictate the seeds a farmer can grow, by extension, the food we eat. Pursuit of happiness—we are sitting by as our silence destroys the planet with more fossil fuels and power plant emissions. Many of my own sources of greatest joy and happiness are threatened with certain extinction by fire or flood. So are yours. All of these actions are legal, perhaps, but they are not moral and they are not kind. We must bring those words into greater alignment.

I have sat, and I have listened to my heart. I have read a great deal, and I have traveled widely and kept my eyes and mind open. I know in my bones some of what I am complicit in, responsible for, and I do not like to be part of such horror. I want to change. I want to be and do better by this planet and its people. I may know just enough to get myself into trouble, but what is at stake is worth making a little trouble over. I have convicted myself to live within the bounds of an ethos and morality that respects, champions people and our battered, salvaged, beloved planet over corporate profits. I get the sense that it’s a life sentence, and that there may be some hard labor involved in living striving to remake the world along these lines, but this is my conviction. 

Making Peace

It is a beautiful, hot May afternoon in Cambridge. The air is ripe with the smells of new leaves and drying dirt and flowers, almost in bloom. I like the lilacs best, but that might be a product of my granite roots. If you've read the last few posts and perhaps think that I am a font of spewing rage, wanting to clash violent pedagogies against sheer fury in a riot of destruction, I am not. I actively seek and enjoy happiness, I find the world more beautiful than terrible. The fury doesn’t negate or overshadow the beauty. The world is wonderful, but it is not perfect. Like Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius, the point is to do something to make the world more beautiful. And that can include admitting and working against injustice, which is bound to make a bunny a bit angry at time. The smell of the lilacs…this is both balm against the fury and something to fight for.

And so, making peace. No, I don’t know exactly how to do this. But I am trying, as many people are in a gorgeous variety of ways.

I went to The Massachusetts Poetry Festival this weekend. Driving past the ocean in Lynn, NPR informed me that the body of deceased suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has been removed to a funeral home in Worcester. This funeral home, Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors, specializes in providing funeral services to the unpopular dead. The owner, Peter Stefan, said on air that he believes everyone deserves a respectful burial, and so his funeral parlor takes in poor people, murderers, criminals, and other dead bodies of unsavory origin. 

I love this. To me, Peter Stefan is as much a hero as the citizens who ran towards the explosions, hearts and hands open to help the broken.

The night before the Boston lockdown—in those stranger hours after the suspects photos had been released and the desperate rampage from Cambridge to Watertown began—I attended a vigil in Somerville. Along with the runners who spoke, a man stood at the podium and yelled into the darkness and the assembled crowds that “this terrorist act was committed by people of hate, we are people of love. They should know that we will never change and be like them, these people of hate.” There was vitriol and hurt in his voice when he spoke the word “hate.” And there was applause from the vigil.

I did not clap. If we are people of love, truly, then how can we even speak of these “people of hate” with such hatred? And, if we are to not change, how can we learn? And if we do not learn, how can we stop filling the world with hate, with terror?

I thought again of this man, saying that we are people of love, as the radio tells me of people protesting outside the funeral home. What possible benefit can come, to anyone, of protesting the dead? All it does is fill a crowd with useless, directionless ire. Someone said to me, “ that is what he wanted, he wanted the hate.”

I do not know what this dead man and his brother wanted with their violence. But, if we could know, and know that they wanted hate, why are we giving into the hatred? Why are we, in response to hurt and fear and confusion, giving the terrorists that victory? We are better than this, America, Boston. If I am going to claim you as my city, keep you as my country with any pride, we must be.

I’ve been turning over some of Mariane Pearl’s words. For those who don’t remember, her husband was the journalist Danny Pearl who was kidnapped and decapitated by terrorists, on film, while Mariane was pregnant with their son. In her book, A Mighty Heart, she writes: “The task of changing a hate-filled world belongs to each one of us.” I read somewhere that every time she is happy, or their son smiles, she feels a hint of victory, that the terrorists have failed and not corrupted her ability to be happy, to love. If she can refuse to be corrupted by hate, who cannot try?

Currently, the dead body that was Tamerlan Tsarnaev cannot find a resting place. No cemetery in Massachusetts is yet able to take it in, to bury this body in the dirt where it can do no further harm. There are a few cemeteries that are willing, but the towns and cities of these cemeteries are unwilling. 

This is egregious, just as egregious as attempting to kill innocent civilians at a marathon, really. 

Denying anyone’s right to a good life and a peaceful death is a crime. If we do no different, we are no different.

It is not that I do not understand hurt, do not understand anger and shock and sadness and loss. I’m human, after all, and loss of life and limb and the punctured innocence of all involved in the Boston Marathon bombings are horrific.

But we cannot answer hate with hate. This is eye for eye, tooth for tooth. I need my eyes to see the lilacs, my teeth to tear into strawberries.

I was thinking all these swirling thoughts of hate and overreaction and how we’re forgetting our best selves, forgetting ourselves as people of love, how to make the dark parts of the world sweeter, how to heal…all of this as I attended the Poetry Festival in Salem.

At the keynote reading, the incredibly wise and dynamic poet Jill McDonough read her poem, “Accident, Mass. Ave.” You should read it here.

In the wake of this, our accident, we are just scared. The inability to let a body rest, this comes from fear of what was, not any recognition for what is. Its hard to admit to being afraid, but that seems a truer word. I do not know how to banish all hatred and fear, but it seems like making peace and meeting hate with love, truly, might be a better start than protesting the dead. One way will not change the past; the other may change the future.

Violent Pedagogy

“You with your violent pedagogy, and me with my broken heart!” A dear friend of mine has spent years howling these words at me in a variety of situations, for a variety of purposes. He says, now, that the words first came from an intense desire to have people—myself very much included—embrace the reality that there is more than one means to any end, that adhering to a rigid dogma ignores the beating, breaking hearts. Ignore those, and we will get approximately nowhere we wish or need to go.

I think about this a great deal, especially lately. I moved to the Boston area because I thought that what I wanted to/should want to do was put my graduate degree to work at any of the non-profit organizations ringing the city. It’s been nearly three years since I left Montana with a Master’s Degree, tucked in among my dog and books and skis, and returned to New England. I’ve spent too much of that time thinking that my goal ought to be putting that MS in Environmental Studies to good use for the betterment of the planet through traditional structures. As if the words on a diploma were the magic key that would let me into doing the great work of the world. I’ve complained countless times that I just want a job that will use my brain. And so, still, I clung dogmatically to what was linear and logical and expected. And willfully ignored that such adherence, such expectations, would never heal my broken heart at the state of the world.

My death grip on that violent pedagogy is loosening, finally, this spring. Because, the closer I cleave to the linear and expected and traditional path, the farther away from my heart I feel. I have a file on my computer labeled “Cover Letters.” It contains 156 different cover letters, numerous versions of my resume, and other detritus of my years of running West, looking for a sunrise, job wise. This number doesn’t include the multitude of online application forms I have also submitted. By and large, I hear nothing from most of these schools and organizations and programs where I have applied for communications or outreach or research assistant or donor relations or any of these jobs titles that stick in my throat, that feel as constricting as the pantyhose I’d likely have to wear. But, according to the pedagogy of our country and education system and our metrics for success, these are what I should do. And so I continue, having been told that this is how one makes it, that this is the path towards success, towards happiness.

Doing what I feel obligated to, what I feel that I should, what is supposed get me an A+ in  American Dreams…I begin to suspect that this will not make me happy. And, while my memory of Philosophy 101 led me to believe that I would never agree with Emmanuel Kant in any regard, his line that “to secure one’s own happiness is a duty,” has been ringing in my head for the past few months as I stumble though, striving to figure life out.

Currently, I waitress three days a week. If I think about this too much one way, it hurts terribly. I have something better to offer the world than a  (barely) passable cappuccino, and it burns that I cannot find the right context to give what I so desperately long to share. But, clearly, the traditional structures of American life are not that into what I have to give. The job market for creative writers with a burning passion to guide people towards loving the world enough to save it, is, surprisingly, nonexistent. Funny, because I can’t think of anything we need more.

And here is the deeper rub of the violent pedagogy of the American Dream, educational structures, and job market: student loans. In a nutshell, too many others and I are in heart-stopping debt because of our educations. The rules of the game, as I understood them at the outset of college, of graduate school, were: swallow the bitter pill and take the loans, get a good education, and that education will land you to a job where you can pay back those loans. (Ideally, in time to buy a nice car, a house, a lot of short-lived, disposable crap, marry the flawless love of your life, and start popping out more little Americans, who in turn with require more expensive educations and who will consume an unholy amount of MORE ephemeral gadgetry.)

Partially because I was unable to find a job with my undergraduate education that would enable me pay back my undergraduate debt, I attended graduate school, where I re-entered the same game. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and I admit that I should have looked more closely into the financial realities of a MS in Environmental Studies on the American job market. But, again, with over 156 job applications over the course of the 153 weeks since my graduation, and thirteen part-time, temporary, and seasonal jobs since obtaining my degree, I begin to suspect that failure does not lie solely with me. Or perhaps it does, but it is not a failure of effort or hard work. This is another piece of the American mythology I take issue with, that breaks my heart—that education, hard work, and committed determination will result in success. I have been triying, as best I can by the lights of my education, to adhere to that ideology, to play that game, as I understood the rules. But it isn’t working, on any level.

And, part of this struggle may come from the heart and subject of my particular education. In college I studied Environmental Studies and Creative Writing and Philosophy and Outdoor Studies and African Studies. I’ve never been on track to be an international financial analyst or, really, anything other than the sort of dreamily indignant writer that I am, hoping and striving to make the world a better place. I believe with every fiber of my being that this is why we are here. And I cannot fathom how this goal can fall outside any pedagogy, any path towards or metric of a successful life. Regardless, the definition and direction of my education was never mentioned as part of the student loan bargain—nor should it be. Should education be fueled only by what will net the student the highest salary? Should poorer students not be enabled to pursue their passions? Are we, as a country, to lose or limit the love of learning? That is a truly violent and vile pedagogy, and one that feels more cruel and more real every time I have emails from my student loan companies sitting alongside job rejections in my inbox.

As this system is broken, I see fewer and fewer reasons to cling to it. There is a time to leave a sinking ship, and for me, as much as I am able (while avoiding default on my loans, because I cannot abide the sick feeling of indebtedness), I believe that this time is now. This is what makes my waitressing job bearable, this feeling that I can drop out of the system, exit the argument, and refuse to play by the violent rules of a broken system. My employment need not be, should not be, the source and food of my passions. (As another friend says, “you shouldn’t make a whore out of your true love.”) The violent pedagogy does not understand passion, and if it cannot, then at my core, I have nothing in common with it. Outside the boundaries of expectation, the ruts and routines that catch us, drag us down in a keening of frustration and unkind sense of failure, outside these structures this is where the broken hearts will come together, this is where the strength of humanity is. And here, with our hearts cracked and bleeding with joy and labor and love, is where we can start down our intersecting, uniquely passionate and effective paths towards something better than what we have known. I suspect that it will be more wonderful than we can yet imagine.

God knows there is enough violence in this world without visiting it upon ourselves.