Climate, Change, Commitments and Love

As per Margaret Mead’s storied advice, I have never really doubted that “a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.”

Along those lines, I am nearly (but not entirely) sure that I didn’t do an involuntary victory fist pump in the grocery store parking lot when I walked by a poster for the 350.org People’s Climate March this morning.  I deeply hope that it will not be a small number of people who gather in New York City and in solidarity around the world this September 20^th and 21^st. Because, if a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world, just imagine what a LARGE group of thoughtful, committed people can do! Anything. Everything. 

Whatever the political goals and gains of a people’s movement, I believe that the greatest true success of such actions is the awareness of a community, of being one of many who believe and act in joyful expectation of what ways of being can yet be brought into the wider world. I am hungry for this sense of being part of and party to something greater than myself, for the reassurance that my hopes can braid into others and, together, we can bring about the sorts of changes necessary to enable the systems of the world and the patterns of our daily lives to stop harming and start healing the planet for all our sakes.

With of this hope-glittering belief, all of my midnight worries and sunlit bursts of dazzling joy regarding the better world I strive towards in all things, with my own aforewritten admonishment to just show up for such things where merely being a numbered participant really does matter, and all that I want to not feel so alone in wanting to change the world, I feel a little bittersweet that I will not be marching in New York, or anywhere else, that particular weekend to demonstrate for the causes of thoughtful love and committed passion that are necessary to change the world.

Instead, I’ll be witnessing the wedding of some dear friends. It is impossible for me to even think of their wedding without smiling, so I am sure I have made the right choice. There is no choice; their commitment to each other is simply where I must be present.

I say, too often and not often enough, that I am friends with the greatest people on earth, but it is in the lives of my loved ones that I see how many good and glorious actions and ways of being there are in the world. Most simply, my people know themselves and are true to those selves—such joy and honesty are the best tools I know for building a better world out of the best parts of our present reality. Most of the good being done in the world spirals out from well-aligned love and self-awareness. I believe this amalgam is what Margaret Mead meant by “thoughtful.”

I am absolutely in favor of all kinds of nonviolent actions and movements and protests to draw attention and educate and advocate for environmental and social issues. By any and all means—from letters to the editor to Twitter to running off to the wilds to joining a CSA to street theater and marching bands to poetry to blockades to parades to living as simply as Thoreau to donating your corporate muckety-muck wages to the causes of your heart to whatever sparks your soul that “YES! What I want and believe and hope for is possible and I am part of making it so!”—I love to see people rising up and coming into their own, of waiting only as long as it takes to hear the truth of their heart and act in the light of that clarity.

To me, a marriage between wonderful people is as great an act and action of faith in the better world we can build as anything public and political. It is an act of love, a thoughtful commitment to the unknown future, and an honest articulation of changing one’s way of being due to the truth of the individual heart. In truth, I believe all our actions and uses of time and treatment of the people around us are manifestations of an individual’s way of being in and hopes for the world.

To that end, as much as policies and politicians and fossil fuel executives and cultural nasties who foment the feelings of inadequacy that pressure us into lives that are untrue to our hearts and souls and whoever else shapes the world, whoever and whatever we protest against and demand change of, regarding the climate and everything else, what most needs to change is us, each of us, individually. This will lead to collective change—see above regarding small groups and social change—but it is on our own shoulders, souls, and ways of being that changes must happen. We need, each of us, to come to a marriage of sorts between our hopeful hearts and our corporeal lives.

Change is hard and messy and uncertain. It is one thing to advocate for divestment from fossil fuel industries, and another to divest oneself of unquestioning reliance on fossil fuels by riding a bike more and using computers, phones, airplanes and microwaves less. It is, perhaps, easier to commit oneself to a political ideology than a personal code—I will never forget the people I knew in college who bought cheap materials from Wal-Mart to make anti-capitalism shirts for a WTO protest. Anyone can justify their actions to themselves, of course, but I such hypocrisy makes me physically uncomfortable. 

I dearly hope that the People’s Climate March turns some important tides. That political leaders watch and listen and join, that change is wrought on deep levels in everyone’s souls and we come around in a year’s time to more and more solar power and public transportation and simpler lives with fewer, but more useful, long-lived, meaningful and beautiful possessions, that we come together to create a more perfect and just world. That people have come see their own lives in the rising tides and erratic weather and square their fears with their hopes and act kindly, honestly and accordingly to build lives around what they hold dear. When there is news coverage of how this particular weekend in September is something like a Freedom Summer or Stonewall or March on Washington, I will perhaps regret that I was not present for a big moment in The Revolution.

On the other hand, I keep a note on my wall that reads: “life is the action.” We do not have just a handful of times to show up and demonstrate our commitment to bettering the world. We have a lifetime of committing to the love and truth of our hearts and the life changes required to be faithful to those ideals. I believe the smaller and personal will likely, in the long run, trump the big and public acts, both in terms of how we truly change the world and in where we find our satisfaction and joy.

All the same, if you can get to New York City, please do. Sign up here: http://peoplesclimate.org. Thank you. 

(Poster by Josh MacPhee, grabbed by me from www.justseeds.org) 

Potatoes & Prophecies

My first day on the farm, we planted potatoes.

A few weeks later, the dark green leaves cracked through the thick crusty dirt. Then came the delicate and fragile purple flowers. We hilled up the potatoes with a BCS implement that fought us almost every step of the way. Then came the ravages of potato beetles, where we spent long hot afternoons picking the beetles and their larva off the leaves, squishing them between our fingers, and dropping the carcasses into buckets of increasingly slimey, filmy water. Then there was the use of an organically approved spray to keep down the ravages of leafhoppers and the shriveling burn they bring to the leaves. And then there were weeks of watching the potatoes disappear into the fields of weeds as the rest of the farm had more immediate and pressing needs.

It is not uncommon, I know, to mark time by the changes of the plants around oneself. We look at new leaves popping out in spring and find hope. We look at the fruits of summer and feel rich with the abundance of life. We look at the reds and golds of autumn with a snug appreciation for what is, what was, and what comes next. We look at the stark black fingers of leafless trees in winter and are reassured in their constancy—under all the costume changes, there are eternal shapes that bend and bow, but it takes a great deal to break them beyond recognition.

I came to the farm in May with a bruised heart and a flagging sense that the work I do and long to do in the world is possible, matters to anyone other than me or will make much difference. Against what feels many days like long political and lonesome personal odds, the truth that does not leave my heart lately is that we can make a better world, that we can salvage a lot of what has been lost and broken in ignorance and entrenched cruelty. I believe, like I believe in sunlight, that we do this when we recognize that our outward actions are reflections of our inner most motivations and priorities.

What do I want the world to look like, and is what I am doing part of making that vision real, are my near constant guiding questions. The answer—I want the world to be kind, honest, responsible, and loving—frame how I treat the homeless man sleeping at the church down the street, how I try to be with myself, my friends and loved ones, what choices I make about my consumption of goods, services and fossil fuels, what efforts I put into the world and what rewards I seek from my labors, and by what metrics do I measure my success or failure at being true to myself.

It’s a frequently hard and weird and extremely self-centered way to go about life, even if my goals are not just for my own contentment but an empathic bettering of the world. But, simply, I feel vomitously unwell when I stray too far from doing my right thing, and that’s a good enough reason to take risks in what feels like the right direction.

The farm, though, at the start, I was afraid that I expected too much of it. I was looking for some combination of personal salvation and affirmation. I wanted my heart eased through physical labors, through watching the changes of the seasons, through seeing good things grow from the time and attention lavished on them by human hands and sunlight, and I wanted—desperately—to not feel alone or crazy that lifestyles outside the churning systems of environmentally, socially, economically, spiritually and culturally degrading “Normal” were possible. I’ve been called Peter Pan-ish at times, and also impractical, radical, and idealistic in ways that are not meant as compliments. I do not want to live in an imaginary, magical land, though. I merely want to make this real world more like the sweet worlds I know are possible, because I’ve been there so many times and ways and in such beautiful company. It’s not living outside the margins—I want expand and make porous the margins until they disappear.

I wrote earlier that the night before I started at the farm, I stayed up too late finishing Susanna Clarke’s epic novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, about the resurrection of magic in Napoleonic-era England. One of the characters has a prophecy from one of the ancient books of magic on his skin—his father ate the book in a drinking contest so, naturally, the son was born with the symbols of the prophecy written on his body. Throughout the book, the prophecy comes to fruition. At the end, though, the oldest and most storied magician who had written the prophecy reappears, and touching the near dead character, rearranges the signs and symbols on his skin to spell out a new one.

The old ways and quests end, and something new begins, must be learned and read and done.

My time on the farm, for this season at least, is growing to a close. It is fitting, then, that we have started to harvest the potatoes. A dear friend says that her potato harvest is always like Christmas morning. I agree. To dig under the dirt—frantically clawing like poorly evolved moles—and to come up with grape like bunches of tubers is utterly delightful, and joyfully satisfying every time. We were all giggling and shrieking and singing like little kids at a birthday party as we pulled up the hundreds of pounds of potatoes, more than the farmers had expected, almost more than they had hoped and dreamed would come from this planting.

I know that the darknesses of the world have not been stopped by my actions. The climate is still changing at a rate that makes me cry often, injustices and cruelties abound, and too many people I love have spend these same months struggling with great challenges and sadnesses and fears and losses. As have I. But, my hope with the farm was to see if I could be part of practical, small-scale solutions to some of the more surmountable ills of an insane economic and cultural model of how we treat each our bodies, each other, our foods, and our landscapes. I have found the farm a way to make those hopes gloriously and joyfully manifest through good work. And the joy doesn't balance or cancel out the sorrow, but does deepen my love for the world and hopes for what can yet be done.

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you are looking for reassurance that your way of being in the world is correct and possible (for you), everything looks like a sign from the gods or a dark omen (depending on your mood). I don’t believe in pre-written destinies in this world, but I do believe in cleaving to truths and following though on hopes. Hammer or nails or magical signs, then, I’ll happily take the potatoes and lived-out prophecies of this summer and go forward, quite literally fed and fortified by what hope, risk, love, work, and laughter brought into the world. 

(Photo from http://firstrootfarm.com, by local celebrity farmer Laura Olive Sackton)

The Family of Things

(http://community.havahart.com)

I killed a woodchuck today.

I don’t mean to be trite and predictable, I know that wrestling with and coming to terms with animal pests and life and death and food and one’s part in it all is pretty standard territory for neophyte farmer-writer types.

Possibly because it is traumatic and shakes up a lot of the smug assumptions that one is only doing good by hoeing beans and harvesting tomatoes for the kind local people who buy our veggies.

At the lovely farm where I am lucky and happy to work, several fields have become nasty little dens of woodchucks. We see their paw prints in the dirt, their teeth marks in the beets, the gnawed off carrot tops, along the squash and eggplants, and so on.

If they weren’t eating food that needs to be sold in order for the farm to remain operational and solvent, I would have no problem with the animals. But, they are. Whole plantings have not yet been lost to the woodchucks, but we are losing more that anyone would like after the investment of hours and labor and CSA members’ faith in our abilities. By virtue of my opposable thumbs, large brain, and upright posture do I also have the utter right to dominion over this landscape? Do my needs for survival—a paycheck and food—supercede the rights of the woodchuck clan?

I am not quite sure. It seems arrogant to say yes, and self-denyingly stupid to say no.

Yesterday, using my thumbs and curious, capable mind, I put a rotting tomato in the very large Havaheart trap and set it up outside one of the woodchuck holes. This afternoon, I found a woodchuck in the trap. It was shaking with fear and its nose was bloody from bashing against the door of the cage.

I don’t know who designed the Havaheart trap, but I gravely doubt the actual size and scope of their heart. For most of the unwanted animals—mice, rats, chipmunks and woodchucks—that I can think of people trapping, carrying the caged animal to another location and releasing them, alive, doesn’t really solve the issue. The animal could well be so traumatized by the experience that, like a deer almost hit on the road, it’ll stumble off and die of stress, possible more traumatically than a quick snap of the spinal cord from a traditional mousetrap. If you drive the cage far from the catch sight, there are other troubles. I know pet cats and dogs who get carsick and I can’t imagine that automotive travel is an experience that most groundhogs would enjoy, either. Or, let’s say your trapped mouse lives through its ordeal. It will come back to dine again in your pantry, leaving you with the same problem you started with. The Havaheart idea seems to embrace a certain NIMBY/ “out of sight, out of mind” mentality that irks me with its ease, with its lack of ethics to be questioned and answered for and cleaved to.

Through the years, I have killed more mice than I can count. Pest killing is something that I feel somewhat obligated to do personally when and where the need arises. If my way of being in the world requires the death of another being, I’d like to make myself aware of the death. It seems, to me, to be the responsible, mindful and empathetic thing to do. I don’t like to insulate myself from the unpleasantness of the hard or dirty work. I feel dishonest.  A quick death seems like the most practical, ethical and the kindest way to deal with unwanted varmints.

However, at the farm, there are no firearms to be discharged (even if that were in keeping with the land use agreement with the Park Service), and we certainly don’t want to poison a woodchuck, only to have the poison leach into the ecosystem we grow organic food in as the creature decomposes. Neither could we figure out how to slit the throat of the squirming and terrified caged woodchuck. And we could let it out in a tub and then bean it with a shovel or something, but that seems like it could quickly go wrong.

Which pretty much leaves drowning. While the other farmers filled up the biggest receptacle we could find with water, I put on thick rubber gloves so as not to get bitten and walked down to the field to bring in the cage and critter.

While I’m disturbingly capable at killing pests, I don’t enjoy it. I feel terrible, in fact. The bigger and more charismatic the animal, the worse my moral compass and imagination spins. And, if they aren’t munching on your beets, woodchucks are pretty cute. They look like little beavers, without the paddle-tail. And I was on my way to end the life of one of these chaps, simply because it was trying to live its life on the same patch of land where I am trying to live mine. Really, does my humanness trump their woodchuckness? In all reality, they cause less damage to the world than I do. Their carbon footprint is admirably small, they are very family oriented and community involved, they provide their own housing using only green technologies, require no electricity or fossil fuels, and they certainly do seem to eat predominantly local, organic food grown by well-treated workers.

As I was heading down to the field, thinking thick and self-hating thoughts, a ragged V of Canada Geese took off from the neighbor’s mown-down sunflower field. They flew over the beets, over the caged woodchuck, and then wheeled off towards the backfields.

Every time I hear a goose honk, I hear Mary Oliver’s voice, an echo announcing my place in the family of things.

Thankfully, today was no different.

I don’t believe in Destiny or fate or coincidence or karma. I do believe in finding peace in reality, in whatever meaning you can derive from the randomness of the world, whatever faith sustaining comfort comes from interpreting the circumstances before your eyes and fingertips. So, yes, it was just the geese's time to take off and there were probably better sunflower seeds available the next field over. Their presence was not a natural-world sanctioning of the murder I was about to commit. Nor was it a fleeing censure, or a thing with feathers abandoning me because of my earthbound inhumanity.

It was just geese being geese, playing their part in the family of things.

And reminding me of my own. That I have as much right to life as a woodchuck, as a goose.

That we all do, and that the trade for our lives is often the death of something else beautiful, something else just as worthy of life, that the family of things is a constantly shuffling deck of cards.

Certainly, it helps to have opposable thumbs for much of this shuffling and reshuffling. Which is why I actively participate in the killing of mice and woodchucks. I want to take responsibility for my power in this world. I do not see the cost of so much of my life. I do not see or know the lives of people mining the heavy metals inside my computer, or know what terror it is to live wherever my gasoline comes from, to be almost the last of my species as my habitat and homeland is violently removed, or any of the rest of little distant murders our lives and lifestyles beget.

The woodchuck hyperventilated and scurried around its cage as I carried it to the waiting tub and the ambivalent and practical farmers. The heft felt like taking an angry cat to the vet. Because I’ve read a thousand and one books with talking, sentient animals, I muttered an apology as we walked along. I thought of my dog, if there is some animal telepathy that would let him know I killed something cute and furry, much like himself.

I do not think that, to the woodchuck, any of this mattered. But it mattered to me, in trying to be present to what I was doing—ending a life—in a way that was as respectful and mindful as I could manage. People often say of the hard things to just not think about it. That’s like a Havaheart trap for the mind, I believe. Better to think about it, to be honest and aware and present, and if it is awful, question why and learn from it and go forward cleanly and clearly.

It was terrifically unpleasant to sink the trap into the water, to watch the woodchuck try to paddle about in the cage, clawing at the water and helplessly tipping its bloody nose towards the surface. I saw its eyes roll back and go white, I saw its claws drop its grip on the cage. I saw it go still.

And then I reached in, hauled out the cage, and took it to the woods. For the ease of whoever is next in the food web, I threw it as far into the woods as I could. Something will find it, eat it, and life will go on, as it always does. Matter is neither created nor destroyed—we each just borrow it for the duration of our lives. I'd like to live ever more respectfully, joyfully and uniquely with the eternal molecules I'm borrowing and being.

But something has shifted with me. I am more aware now of the cost of what we do, of the responsibility that comes with being the human, having the thumbs. I want more and more to minimize the devastations I participate in, although I understand I am not a ghost and harm to others will ripple out from my life, by the very nature of life. Even small friendly organic farms require the deaths of other beings. We have a place within the webs and chains and systems of the world—we are none of us separate or above.

After the killing, I went to the flower field and picked a large bouquet of riotously wonderful flowers. Because life goes on and if I am going to be present for the unpleasantness, mindful of the cost of my own life, then I am going to be eternally certain to be willfully attuned to the good and beautiful parts of this same life of mine.

They are splendid and infinite. In truth, I see the light more clearly when I am awake to the darkness, of life when I look death squarely in its scared little eyes and know my place in the family of things.

Being Present, Being Mindful

(I found Christopher Weyant's cartoon in July 28, 2014 The New Yorker when I was already contemplating mindfulness and the terms frequent misuse by whoever in society is lucky enough to have the time to think about such things.)

I understand mindfulness as the awareness and balance of personal action and larger reaction. Things and thoughts and other people come and go, and one tries to be both true to oneself and engender as compassionate reactions rippling out from oneself as possible. The word gets thrown around a lot in circles I dip in and out of—we are all suddenly attentive to “being mindful” of our relationships to the world and “being present.” We meditate, we practice yoga, we talk about the intentions we put into the universe, we squeeze our carbon footprints into smaller and smaller shoes, and so on.

There is much good reality and potential here.

When I think deeply and deliberately about all the ways that a single moment of my life is tied to, responsible to, and the product of any number of complex relationships, interactions, and reactions—ecological, chemical, biologic, industrial, political, familial, emotional, cultural, personal, etc.—I am absolutely overcome. Not always in a bad or overwhelming way—it is a beautiful and complex world with as glorious and bizarre a past as a future and I am absolutely delighted to be so much a part of it all, to be connected in so many ways.

Yet, when I go down my rabbit holes of connectivity, where I try to muddle out how be in ways that are truest and kindest and most in keeping with my moral compass, I find that I am playing out a thousand and one “what-if” scenarios, and doing historic math backwards to understand how I arrived where I am with the choices before me at any particular time. This all can snowball to the point where I am not alert and in the present moment, where I am, instead, thousands of miles away thinking of fuel stations being blown up in Gaza while I drive in my car, or seven generations in the future hoping that the repercussions of how I live will not have made theirs impossible, or putting my interpretation of the complex needs of others before my own whims.

There are good merits in all those avenues of thought and action I believe.

And opposite from fostering connections to things beyond my immediate scope is being present, trying to both live fully and savor the acts of doing so. This provides a particular vibrancy and appreciative joy. I like a few quiet moments to check myself to sit still, look around, and take stock of how I am at any moment in the world and the space where I am. The chugging trains of connectivity, stories and theories of origins and destinations of any piece of the moment melt out of focus and the sum total of what I can absorb in the moment comes a little clearer. Usually, that boils down to seeing the people around me more deeply as the authors of their own stories and not characters in mine, and the fact that everywhere has a little beauty in it. My head and heart are often too busy to be still, to be quietly present is not my first nature. Yet, I do see the merit and I try to make that time. It provides perspective, and the space around the heart to fall a little more in love with the world and whatever part I play in it.

However, despite all this goodness, there is a sharp side of me that finds grains selfish oblivion in all the mindfulness and a hint of isolationist egotism in valuing “being present” above living in any other tense. I spent forty-five minutes on a train recently, listening to a woman bray at length about how she is trying to be mindful in her relationships. Apparently, strangers don’t count as people to be mindful of. I am easily frustrated by people who prioritize being present, but have the memories of goldfish, as if the lofty attempt to be present absolves them of listening deeply and retaining others’ words. I do not believe that our own quests for enlightenment trump the need to be kind and to live into the truth that our lives impact, if not the world, the lives of those close to us. 

Mostly, though, what I cannot figure out is how to be at once mindful of my actions in the world—and the equal and opposite reactions that Newton promises—and fully awake to the present. These seem like opposite forces and I get stymied in my attempts to reconcile them and move forward into the world.

Fortunately, I work on a farm, which abounds with living examples of balances and transitions and how the present moment truly is a bit different from whatever came before and whatever comes next. When things seem to change so quickly—covercrops mowed down to be tilled, to be shaped into new beds, to be planted, weeded, thinned, tended, harvested, mowed again and so the cycle goes until the season is over and the land is retired and tucked up for winter—it becomes easier to see the immediate preciousness of each stage, and also the interactions, reactions and transitions between each phase.

Or, it would be easy to see those things, to place each plant in mindful context, if there were time to look up from the pressing needs of almost each moment of the actual present.

I begin to think that the only what anything in this world functions is the interaction of contradictory forces in balance with each other. I sat by the ocean recently and watched the sailboats go by, all wind and water balanced for forward momentum. I am reading a book where a peg-legged captain stalks his ship with footsteps of life and death. I think of bike gears, toothily grinding against each other, or the absorptions and interactions of heat and sunlight to become electricity and eggplant. Of heartbeats and footsteps and seasonal constellations.

The most beautiful things I know are in that sweet spot of tension between opposites, what pulls apart and pushes forward and onward. When I start to wonder how to possibly go on with the weight of the past, the unknown of the future, and the beauty and terror of the present, with the pull of the personal along side the push of not being alone in the world, well, I need only to open my eyes, take a deep breath, and act accordingly. 

(As a side note, if the economy is to actually improve mindfully—the local ice cream shop traded my farm cucumbers and dill for ice cream this week. Two locally owned businesses, exchanging their goods within a five miles of each other, enhancing a good community relationship and agreeing that something other than numbers can be currency…I believe we are both present for, heirs of and en route towards something grand.)

News and Poetry

As I drive my fossil-fueled-from-who-knows-where car into work at the farm, I listen to the radio. The reports from Gaza make me cry every time.

Particularly last Thursday—the funeral for an Israeli adult civilian was contrasted with the funeral for two Palestinian boys.

When I first moved to Cambriville, I had an unpleasant temp job in the basement of the Harvard Business School doing data entry. The thin—though horrifying—saving grace was that the data was at least interesting. I was going through Federal reports and entering how much money the United States has given other countries in foreign and military aid every year since 1950.

Since its creation, Israel was consistently one of the top recipients of aid—both foreign and military. (Egypt was the other biggest recipient of both.) Palestine, by contrast, was one of the lowest recipients of any aid, and I am almost certain that they never received military aid.

I am only a tepid student of the crises in the Middle East. What I do know is that I hate to think of people being killed and fighting for a homeland. I hate worse to recognize that the government that represents me funds one side of a fight and not the other, as if Might could make Right. The prevailing myth that this is a faith-based battle and the rest of the world is uninvolved is violently inane. 

The best thing I have ever come across relating to the Israeli-Palestinian horror is from “Before There is No Where To Stand,” a book of poetry by Israelis and Palestinians. The poet Vivien Sansour was asked to write an introduction, and refused. Her refusal is beautiful.

“Please accept my sincerest apologies for being so late in responding to you. I have been reading the manuscript and really struggling with it to be honest. For the sake of full integrity I would like to share with you a couple of things. I do not feel a just representation and I am afraid that in the context of an unfortunately misunderstood political reality the anthology, although I know and trust that it is well intentioned, perpetuates an idea that I am very uncomfortable with and that is of framing the situation as two people who just need to get along and who just don’t understand each other. …The people of Gaza are imprisoned with no access to sea or land to run away to even. I do not want to focus on these details, I just want to explain why in the struggle to achieve justice, which is the only way to peace, I am growing more and more convinced alongside my Israeli and international colleagues who are also struggling for justice, that it is important for us to present the situation as it is: A military occupation and not a conflict between two people. Jews, Muslims, Christians have lived together in Palestine before 1948 and it was not until a European colonial project was started in the beginning of the 1900s that we started ‘not to get along.’”

And, for what purpose where the Colonial projects, all of them, if not to gain access to resources for countries and cultures who has outstripped what their landscapes could provide? The Colonizing powers divided, conquered, and stole the riches of the world for their own, sowing the seeds of scarcity, discontent and entitlement to boundless resources behind them. For all the horrors still lingering in the wake of Colonialism across the globe, for all the cultural scars and racism and fury and social ills and beautiful lost and broken ways of being that Colonialism engendered and fomented and normalized, the root was a few cultures needing and feeling entitled to take the resources of others. And we still live this way.

I don’t want to be angry. I know that anger without purpose, rage without empathy and proactive vision will get us nowhere good. All the same, I feel white-lipped with fury when I think that the patterns of life in my country are cluelessly part of the patterns of fear and violence ripping the world apart. It is not a matter of limply begging forgiveness as we know not what we do. In the interconnectedness of the world today, there is no excuse for ignorance, for not having even a bare grasp of understanding the ramifications of how we each live. We are frequently, violently selfish, and then wring our hands over world crises, wondering how these things keep happening, without checking ourselves first. Our “need” for resources, for cheap plentiful products, for a global variety of foods in all seasons and geographies, for cheap fuels, for constant electricity, for the ability to fly across the world on a moment’s whim, to live constantly as comfortably and cosseted as selfish despots…if anyone truly wants to bring about peace and justice in the world, we must look at ourselves and our lives, even as we work for the wider world.

And yes, I know that we live (and sometimes trap ourselves) in patterns, that people are bound by different iterations of love and hope and faith to choices and ways of being that are different from my own, that it can be suffocatingly impossible to change, to live more cleanly, even if your heart is crying out for something different than you have always been.

To begin the changes, here is my advice: make your life small, and your heart big. Turn off your phone and remove your watch. Make time, not money, your primary currency. Spend it well and freely among the people you love, and the people who love you. Listen and remember what is said. Spend equal time absorbing the news of the world and the beauty of the world. Encourage dynamism and evolution. Ask questions that lead you fumbling through life for answers. Learn and act on the difference in your heart between need and want. Use less of everything that you suspect of being uncleanly linked to the sadnesses of the world—you will disconnect from the sadness, but proactively, joyfully reconnect to the world.

This will carry you farther in the right direction than anything else I know how to say.

As much of this as I can do, it does not stop me from crying while listening to the news. I do not plateau and think that because I write and work at a farm and strive for utility and simplicity in my possessions, that I am absolved of all responsibility, or that I have ever done enough. The horrific struggles go on.

And so do the hopeful labors towards bettering the world. As Walt Whitman says, “the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

You have agency in the verse you contribute. Live into that.

Necessary Actions

Facebook, the present-day harbinger of all things bright, beautiful, disturbing, joyous and enlightening, informs me that there is a climate rally of sorts at the New England Governors’ Conference this weekend. The hope is to gather enough popular support to urge the governors—all of them—to ban tar sands oil from New England. I support that action.

This meeting is being held at Bretton Woods, at the base of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains and just across a thin ridge from the Pemigewasset Wilderness area.

I came to know my best self in those mountains, came even to the concept that I might have a best self that could be better striven towards, cleaved to. I never sought to leave my mark on the mountains, but I now and continually seek to do justice to the mark they left on me. It was in summer camps and mountain huts and winding trails and long conversations on porches and roofs and under stars that I learned how to get along with people, how to treat and be treated, and how to hold something sacred and unspeakable in common delight. At least, I like to think that whatever drew each of us to the hills was coordinated if not near identical.

When I get hot and bothered about the scourge of climate change—which is regularly—the thing that drives me forward against the despair is the idea that this place, and all that it has ever meant to me and to those I love, could be lost. When I can spiral that out further, to imagine that the soul-identifying places and landscapes of strangers are similarly threatened, then I have a larger more urgent fire in my heart. If nothing else, I want to preserve the places where such wonder and awareness can bloom.

By rights, then, I should be the first person pounding on the door of the Governors’ Conference. What they do, by not banning tar sands, by not acting with the power citizens vested in them to protect the lands they represent and lead, is to allow dangerous ways of being to continue. To not actively reject tar sands or coal burning or fracked gas is to passively, permissively accept to the fuels that are violently destroying the world as we know it.

However, I am sick of being schooled in anger. In writing formulaic letters that talk about the beautiful and meaningful places that are threatened—letters that will not be read, in chanting “no” on street corners, signing petitions begging legislators to oppose bills and movements and factions, I am sick of being scared into action by new studies, by new photographs, by the new reality. Fear is not a sustainable fuel; it burns through our hearts and leaves us exhausted without hope. 

Let’s try this, instead: Imagine if the politicians, the power industry bigwigs, the fossil fuel barons and whoever else is dirty with power, whoever else we would rally against, try to push towards righter action, imagine if they all walked out to the climate activists, large and small, and said, “Okay. You win. Tell us what to do.”

What would you say?

I would take them by the hand and bring them to the mountains. I would sit them on a mountaintop at sunset, and have their loved ones draw near. I would have them walk, alone, through a glowing birch glade in September. I would let them feel the wind on their face, the peculiar delight of not quite outrunning a hail storm. I give them a wrench and ask them to fix the loose bolt on a solar panel. I would have them live for a time with only what they can carry on their back, among strangers who become friends. I would hand them a pitchfork and rake out a composting toilet. I would take them to places in this world where people live so differently and love so similarly to each of us. I would have them watch closely as an osprey dives into the ocean, popping its wings out of joint to avoid breaking on impact. I would have them awaken to the prehistoric call of a single loon before dawn. I would have them sit by the ocean and watch a full change of tides. I would stand them in the moonlight, holding hands and singing under the night sky with friends. I would show them pipes that connect a mountain spring to a faucet, and the frogs that live near the spring. I would bring them to the farm, bid them dig and plant and watch how things grow from the labor of their bodies. I would dress them warmly and bring them into the frosty beauty of the morning after an ice storm in the mountains.

I would do anything, everything, possible to imprint on their souls how precious—not rare—beauty is in this world, how varied. And how much more we are each capable of—our bodies, our hearts, our minds—than is ordinarily assumed. I would show them the places where I have found joy, where I have learned to put my one little life in perspective, to be at once capably self-reliant and interdependent on the people around me, and all the things I know about how satisfying it is to live off kilter from normal. I wonder what laws and policies and business plans the (allegedly) powerful people would enact if their hearts where known and free to be followed?

I do not think that anyone can witness the beauty that is out there and remain as they were. The challenge, as ever, is how to hold that truth once out of the woods. How to connect the dawn chorus of Bicknell’s Thrush with the rising sea levels in the Pacific, and with the habits and routines of your own life. I write this on my computer, with the lamp on beside me, the fan going across the room, my phone plugged in and charging, and my car gassed up outside. In the winter, my apartment is heated, and in all seasons the gas stove runs, the lights flick on and off every day, and hot water is boiling and abundant. My life is normal, in these ways, but I know I could be happier with less. I know I have been happier with less of these “necessities.” I feel cleaner and sleep easier. I try to live more and more away from the lulling, devastating ease of normal. I can want this, because I have seen it, know it is real and viable.

How we live, each of us, does matter. Why is there a “need” for tar sands oil, for natural gas, for coal burning power plants, for wars over oil in holy lands?

The answer is in the choices and traditions and habits we have formed as a people. We cannot ask our leaders to make changes we are not prepared to make ourselves.

It is not just about keeping tar sands out of New England or the mountains whole in Appalachia or the water inflammable in fracking country or about letting fossils rest in peace. It is not about who signs what paper and what law degrees what degree of pollution is acceptable and what is not. It is not about what banner you make, what march you join, what rally you attend, whose ear you pour what plea into. It is about learning how to live without dirty fuels, without always cars, without relying on entities larger than your heart to make the shape of your life. It is about learning the truth of less is more, about the priceless nature of one wild moment, of a lifetime of such moments strung together. And it is about sharing what stories we have of all those gorgeous ways in which we each know what is possible out there.

Our lives are the truest protests and rallies and actions. 

Oxen

Here is how I understand the Zen Ox-herding Pictures. They were explained to me when I was studying Zen life in Japan on a college trip. I have being actively interpreting their influence ever since.

They are close as I have for a blueprint of how I live and what I try to bring into the world.

This is a little boy, who wants go and find the ox. 

The ox, as I see it, is the great big whatever we’re each of us searching for, the kernel of our souls feels unfilled, unplumbed. It may be deep self-knowledge, it may be full Buddhist Enlightenment, it may be an awareness and surety of what we are individually here on earth to do, it may be something else entirely. I don’t know what you seek, and neither may you, but the ox is a stand in for whatever that may be.

Second, the boy has found some tracks to follow. He doesn’t know where they lead, but off he goes, trusting that an ox will be at the end of this trail. Is it his ox? Is another’s? No way to know but take off and see.

Third, the boy spies part of the ox. He can’t see the whole thing, just enough to suspect that it is what he was looking for. He sizes the ox up, readies himself to try to know it, find himself equal it, to bring it home.

Fourth, they struggle. The boy has to hold on, the ox—so happily found, so long sought—has no cognizance of being object of the boy’s quest or destiny. I love this; there are no easy answers. Truth, though obvious, may be hard to reconcile. I believe there is greatness in our attempts, in the trials of struggling with and for what is precious.

Fifth, the boy has a hold of the ox and they are walking onward. This isn't some sort of Taming of the Shrew type situation—the ox is still separate and the boy is easily, but thinly, connected with what he sought.

Sixth, the rope is gone. The boy and the ox move as one creature. There is no need to struggle or control, they are merged.

Seventh, the boy is at home and unconcerned about the ox because he knows its whereabouts as well as he knows himself.

Eighth, the emptiness of life and the world. I think of this as the sort of big picture, long view, the recognition of how brief a time we have to live and how enormous and eternal the world is, and your insignificance.

Ninth, the fullness of life and the world. This is the intricacies of it all, of the small scale, the daily life, the immediate, the visceral, and your significance.

The Zen scholar, Robert E. Carter, who explained the pictures to me the first time said that he tried to look at the world by aligning these two—full and empty—as two lenses of a telescope, to be in the world through both scales. You live within the tension between the two, focusing one now, then the other.

It is the tenth ox-herding picture that I think of most. The old man here is the little boy who sought the ox. He has aged, fattened, and lived a full life. A different kid approaches him to say “I’m looking for the ox; have you seen it?”

And the former ox-searcher’s only advice is, “Well, this is where and how I found it…”

It’s not that the new boy will find the same ox in the same place, but that one of the greatest things we can offer each other is the truth of our own experiences. When I was nineteen and in Japan with my college philosophy professor, Erin McCarthy, it was timemelting to have Carter, who had been her college professor, explain this linking of searches. 

Part of why I write is because I don’t know where the marketplace is, or who might be looking or asking for guidance, but I know that I am far from the only person who wants to salvage the world, who wants to build a better system to be human within, who has been to the mountaintop and seen that we don’t have to live in the ticky-tacky boxes and sneakily rigid expectations and assumptions of our society. I offer my words from a place of hope and humility, a "this is what has worked for me, use it or no, and good luck to you finding your happiness!” idea.

When I have the various discussions about if anyone is doing their right thing, in searching for their heart and the courage to follow it, about how to start and sustain The Revolution, about how to live well and happily in the world, there are so many questions. “Is this right? What do I want? Is this what I really want? Is this what I am supposed to be doing? If this isn’t wrong, does it have to be right? Is this enough? How come if this is the right thing to do, it’s still so hard? Am I enough? How do we get all of ‘them’ to join in? Do we want ‘them’ to join in the first place? Should we change the system from within, or rebel and make something new, or run away and tend the fires of our hearts fully and exclusively far from the maddening crowd of it all?” and so on.

I wouldn’t have even thought to ask these questions in the first place if I hadn’t started, early, turning away from whatever passes for normal. I left high school after three years and worked and traveled, I went to college and lived in the woods and traveled more, I stuck to the mountains and wild places as much as possible, I read a lot, I strive to own only what I find useful or beautiful, I work on keeping my heart and mind open, I am grateful to be well loved and aware of the honor and responsibility it is to be loved, I make mistakes, I get my heart and bones broken, I take risks but am not reckless, and—perhaps most importantly—I surround myself with people who are better at exploring questions than accepting answers.

That’s the best way I know to find everything worthwhile. Because it takes a certain amount of courage to even ask the questions, to come to the market place as the little boy does and say “I suspect there is something better than what I see, what I am told to believe—I cannot be the only one who thinks this. Does anyone agree? Can anyone help me, reassure that I am not crazy, that there are deeper and cleaner and happier ways of being in the world?” It's nice to know we are none of us alone in this.

We have to find our own oxen, build our own herd of truths, but it doesn’t mean we need to search alone. Rather, I think, the opposite. We need to ask questions, and the truths we're all and each in search of deserve all and every reassurance and support we can give each other.

(Copies of Tomikichiro Tokuriki's woodcut prints are from www.4peaks.com.)