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.)

Enchanted Forests

In college, I majored in “Saving the Enchanted Forest.” That was the title of my thesis.

It seemed like a good idea when I barreled out of a semester in the woods and created my independent project merging environmental studies, philosophy, and creative writing. My plan was to examine how the history of Western philosophy has landed us with the environmental crises of the present day. I read enough Edward Abbey then to fall in love with wild places, never mind immersing myself in whatever wild place I could find. 

I thought if I could write well enough about how lovely the woods, the mountains, the ocean, the night sky, the world truly is, maybe I could re-work the enchantment of the forest, undo the evil spell of historically mistreating the natural world as our rightful resource, and bring everyone as under its charm as I was and am still—then we could all together protect the wilds of the world for itself and ourselves.

By the end of college, I became embarrassed to admit that I love the world, that I could be so naïve and hopeful as to believe in the power of stories and fables and enchantments. I had bookcases full of reports of environmental statistics and ecosystem degradation and pollution levels and climate change data and Superfund sites and all sorts of mean nasty scary things that seemed more pressing, more urgent than the innocent hope of charming people back into love with the world as a means of salvation. Protectively or snidely, I was the first to laugh at the title, when I wasn’t mortified by the nakedness of my heart those words alone exposed. It wasn’t cool, by the time I was all of twenty-two, to still cling to that. It seemed babyish, like hugging a doll or crying or believing in magic.

These days, I believe in sunlight and love, which amounts to the same thing as believing in magic. But I come by it pretty honestly, and not for lack of putting in the hours of searching for magic, anywhere. 

When I was six, my mother read me The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I’ve been checking the backs of wardrobes ever since, just to see if I could find a way into Narnia. I played dress-up and make-believe and lived out a thousand separate fantasy lives with my sisters growing up. I read nearly every book I could find, and then acted them out, somehow. We set up tents in the backyard, found secret best places in the woods, and I always hoped that I would some how fall through into someplace where good and evil were clear choices, and where the good guys—fawns, hobbits, wizards, pirates, sleuths, elves, mice with swords, boys with hatchets, girls with wolves, dragons and princess-librarians—all found each other and beat back the darkness. 

I’ve been beyond lucky to find—in pockets of this world—enough of those places and people to rekindle what was almost lost—the ability to witness wildness and my core belief in the enchantments of the world. The moments of beauty I have collected, the string of pearlescent memories of light and love and laughter and the faith I trust as much as my own hands that such magical times are not fairy tales to be put away and forgotten. These are ways to live, if you’ve able to look and live parallels between worlds.

We don’t get to fall through rabbit holes or walk through wardrobes or sail to the Undying Lands or cut into other worlds with subtle knives to meet our souls—we can’t live in fictions and fables. But we can live here better, and with more of the lightness that comes from storybook worlds.

I loved what Salman Rushdie wrote in a New York Times Book Review after Gabriel Garcia Marquez died:

“The trouble with the term ‘magical realism,’ el realismo mágico, is that when people say or hear it they are hearing or saying only half of it, ‘magic,’ without paying attention to the other half, ‘realism.’ But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy—writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It’s because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works.”

There are books and worlds I have been so immersed in and enamored of that putting the book down was like drowning. This spring I read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and came gasping back to reality, feeling off balance and squinting at piles of burlap beside a farm field as if they would become bedraggled hobo magicians with shifting prophesies on their skins. Not as such, but that burlap is now decomposing in a compost pile, in the wings of another stage of being, of filling something like prophesies. Or at least stomachs. That is the magic of reality. 

I believe we must allow ourselves the grace of enchantment, of stories and fictions and possibilities within this world. 

The other pieces of my studies, the ones that look at how we’ve treated the natural world—and why we divided the world into natural and us, in the first place—leads me to believe that when we strip mine and dissect the woods, the mountains, the oceans, when we tame anything wild, we put everything from our souls on out in great peril.

I don’t know if falling in love with the world, if permitting ourselves and relearning the emotional grace of enchantment, can truly undo the damage centuries of dissection and separation have wrought. I can’t prove that this will work.

That, though, may be the root of the trouble. We’ve become overly reliant on logic and proof, rather than trusting the magic before our eyes.

How can anyone look at the world and not be enchanted? What better proof and reason that our eyes and hearts?

When I look at the light of sunset or the stars, when I smell balsam fir or salt water, or hear white-throated sparrows or hawks or any of it all, I cannot imagine how I could have let myself throw that enchantment even briefly aside.

As an environmentalist with an active heart and informed mind working for the salvation of the world, I am stronger with the hopeful eyes of fiction and magic, than I am without.

I believe we all are.

(colored in drawing of Lucy and Mr. Tumnus from www.theguardian.co.uk)

Organic and Sustainable

Let’s split hairs.

I’m delighted that labeling any product “organic” seems to be the greatest thing to hit food marketing since sliced bread. That Walmart, for example, is using its position as a powerful economic bully to mass market what amounts to thousands and thousands of acres of organic fields is superb. Think of all the chemicals, fertilizers, and overall crap that are not being leached and run-off into the global water cycle, into the skin and lungs and eyes and endocrine systems of field workers across the world! That cleaner, cheaper food is also getting into more people is also a great success and relief.

However, it still feels more than a little gross that a megacorporation gets to use the word organic. Sure, an increasing number of their vegetables are produced in accordance with national standards of organic growth practices, but there is something about an international giant business model built on expansion and growth and profit and world dominance and denial of workers’ rights that seems decidedly against the spirit of the word. The organic certification process is a strangely regulated minefield, and often, too expensive and absurd for smaller farms to participate in. Agribusinesses, however, have little trouble making the grades, and I imagine that the agribusiness lobbyists are rather more aggressively persuasive of our national policy makers than the organic lobby.

A few nights ago as I listened to several architect friends—all of whom have a strong interest and background in sustainability and green design—swap horror stories about various firms in their field, I got hung up on how misused “sustainable” is as a term. It may be officially green and sustainable to ensure the VOC levels of the paint and the new carpets in your LEED and historically certified restored structure, but when employees are working 80 hours a week, eat at their desks, and maternity leave is scoffed at, it seems dishonest to use the word “sustainable” or “eco-friendly” to describe the work. I am all in favor of creating more energy efficient spaces to live and work, but light bulbs and solar panels alone are not enough.

It may come down to the fact that I just don’t trust anything that seems based primarily on profit and status, rather than on kindness and common sense.

In pointing the misappropriation of these words and good intentions out, I am being fussy, persnickety, elitist, snobby, greenier-than-thou, and best of all, idealistic and demanding. What do I want the world to be, perfect? For food to be grown in ways that is safe for the workers, the planet, and the consumers—in that order—by workers who are paid a living wage and have appropriate voice and agency in their workplaces? For consumers to be self and world aware and make the best choices their souls and budgets allow? Do I want all companies to treat their employees as humans first, and as employees second, so that there is time and money to be informed and make those choices? Do I want the fossil fuel, coal, and natural gas industries to wither and die from disuse as we turn towards renewable, cleaner and more efficient ways to power our way of being within the world?

Yes.

I don’t care about buzzwords and labels. In fact, when those words start to get bandied about, I tend to get quiet and angry. Or I just leave, and go about my life, refusing to buy into and be judged by a set of beliefs that I find harmfully ridiculous. It’s Walt Whitman, leaving the astronomy lecture to go look at the stars.

What is actually green, organic, and sustainable cannot be quantified or labeled or certified by a third party, or by any temporarily powerful authority. Is it more sustainable and better for the planet to ride my bike to Whole Foods and stock up on organic everything, or walk to the Shaw’s with the solar panels on the roof? What if I take the bus to Market Basket where the prices are cheap and any random aisle is alive with more human diversity than my entire hometown? Or I could do research and drive to whatever grocery store treats its employees best and pays them decently. Shall I only eat what I can grow, hunt, forage, and barter for in my eco-system?

No one can answer that for me—there is no third party for these questions. There is only me to answer to and for. And, among those choices I am lucky to have, there are no bad or wrong or lesser answers. No one best answer, either—there are no platinum, gold, or silver certifications for how to be. The right answer is what I find to be right, that day. All answers are better than dithering in indecision, waiting for someone else to say what is right for you to do.

True metrics of sustainability are pretty close, I find, to the metrics of our morals—what is sustainable is what feels the most right to how we each wish to be in the world, and how we wish the world to become, and what small steps are part of the larger journey towards that goal. While, chemically at least, organic does have a more distinct meaning, in the larger and smaller sense, what is organic is also more personal, what is organic is what feels most appropriate and natural for you, trying to maintain a connection to the big beautiful everything.

What is more organic than trusting and following your own heart out into the world?

It is a knife-edge between self-awareness and narcissistic-aggrandizing. Cleaving devotedly to the joyful path of your heart is the sweetest thing, but there is a danger in becoming blind to how your life and choices and path interact and crisscross others, how everything collides and connects. People who fuss about only eating organic, or only feeding their children organic food, irritate me in this way. They focus so much on the precious temples of their own bodies that they don’t seem to have energy left to see how their being fits in with the rest of the world. When we all “discovered” quinoa a few years ago, there was a shortage in the Andes, where it has been a staple basically forever. (And, yes, there is quinoa in my pantry and organic milk in my fridge—I am a little of what I despise. Aren’t we all?)

Friends, the revolts against the green-washing and untrue articulations of the words are sprouting. The revolution is, sweetly and practically, in progress. The farm I work on is organic, but at present the farmers seem disinterested in pursuing the official label—the price and process takes too much time and energy away from the work itself, of growing the vegetables in the first place. My architect friends have mostly left the firms with rigid hierarchies, where the young are eaten by the male dominated leadership, and have forged greener pastures in workplaces where families are supported and collaboration and creativity are valued. In academia—from kindergarten to Phd. programs—other friends find and make and teach more interdisciplinary and connected worldviews. And so goes the quiet shift of paradigms, of values over profit, of doing right things for our own right reasons.

Everywhere, in so many ways, we are putting our hearts first, and refusing to play by rules that are twisted away from what we each know to be right and true. What we’re building and growing by doing so, each of us in our different fields and ways, with the decisions of our hearts and talents, is beyond any label or standard. We are organically making the defiant and joyful worlds that cannot be defined and will be sustained.

Compasses, Choices, and Happiness

“To secure one’s own happiness is a duty,” are about the only words I remember liking from Emmanuel Kant’s Groundings for the Metaphysics of Morals.

Skimming through the furiously highlighted copy I’ve saved from my first philosophy class, I am trying to remember what it was that rubbed me so far the wrong way about Kant. I think that it was, probably, all the talk of duty and law. At least, that is my gut reaction when I hold the thin volume between my thumb and forefinger, like I do a horn worm in the tomato patch.

It seems that I have long taken issue with authority, with any attempt for an outside force to dictate my moral compass or how to be in the world. Granted, there is a great deal of Kant that takes the golden rule and transposes it onto society—and I’m completely on board with that and wish mightily and try a little to live more kindly and treat the world more as I would like to be treated—but he has a preachy tone of what one “should” do that just sets unsettles my stomach and clenches my fists.

And yet, lately, as I weigh and balance the choices I am making in how I live, the steps I take as steps themselves and as steps along a path towards something always better and kinder and cleaner, I have been thinking of Kant and securing one’s own happiness as an ultimate duty.

My friend and fellow rabble-writer, Laura, posted a sweet response to the previous Granite Bunny ramble. I think her words are brilliant, and made me see so sharply how all of our lives are built out of our choices and priorities. She’d love to farm, but does not, in part, because of her rich community in the city and moral stance against cars. And so, she does paid work that doesn’t satisfy, yet leads a life that is rich in different ways than my own. She is jealous of my farm work, I am jealous of her centralized and rooted community—my glorious people are scattered like a wonderful and expansive constellation but I never have quorum of my dearest ones all in one place, and I wander a lot looking for the right fit—geographically, socially, personally—to root and grow with.

The grass isn’t greener on the other side of anything—it’s all green, all the time. And it is important to remember that, I think. That the choices of your life are because of the loves and quests and answers you’ve currently got.

For example, my need to put hands in dirt and body in service to something tangibly greater than myself so that my heart and brains and fingers can pound out these words to offer what I can to the world trumps all other priorities at present. There have been times when I have needed to wrap myself up in the people I love above all other needs, and times when I have shunted myself as far off a grid as I could find. Like all things, these choices and balances will shift, and I am coming to expect changes and not try to anticipate what they will be. I do not know where I will be one year from today, what adventure the priorities of my heart will have sent me on. To me, today at least, this is more exciting than frightening. 

To be poetic, I say these things are matters of my heart, my soul, my moral compass. However, it is my graceless stomach that is the real ethical barometer. There is a certain feeling of unbalance and sickness when I am doing the wrong thing, my wrong thing, when I cannot put my daily actions in context of my deep beliefs of how to be in and a part of the world. When I “secure my own happiness,” as Kant would say, my stomach is calm. When I am off my course, I feel it deeply, physically. In this way, I don’t always feel like I make my own choices, so much as my choices make me. If I made my own choices, if the compass of my guts didn’t drive me, there are a host of things I would likely have done differently. If I didn’t listen and adhere as carefully to my guts, chances are my life would be more secure and predictable and perhaps less overwhelming. I can hope that I would be happy with that, but there seems to be something I inescapably love about being kitty-corner to whatever normal milestones and benchmarks are for our society.

I don’t think I could be me if I did anything other than obey my moral compass and choices of my heart, soul, and stomach.

And so, I follow my instincts, because at all costs, the priceless joy and satisfaction is worth the struggle, and the worry and pain I may—with extreme regret—cause anyone else. It is worth my own dark times, bouts of loneliness, sleepless nights and scrounging months. And, I know the smack of selfishness that rings through this—if anyone other than my dog were dependent on me, my life would need to be different. But sustaining anyone that close would have become the right thing for my love and energies, I suspect.

My dear friend Shannon advised me recently to “treat everyone as if they have Asperger’s, and a broken heart.” As a somewhat tactless person with bleeding hearts pinned all over my sleeves, I do love this—it helps to swath interactions with a gentleness that is often lost and always needed. Too, I would add to assume that everyone is doing the best they can by whatever compass their morals abide by, that they are making choices, and being made by choices, in ways which make intricate sense to their soul, but perhaps not to the outside world.

I recognize that my efforts at farming—where I drive about an hour a day, alone, time which could be spent nurturing relationships closer—run afoul of my desire to rid the world of the scourge of fossil fuel dependence. I am not trying to justify or balance this: 120 CSA members at the farm times X pounds of carbon kept out of the atmosphere due to people shopping local and organic divided by 5 hours of driving plus 37 kinds of sunlight on 1,038.2 shades of green in the fields…there is no equation. Joy does not compute.

What I am doing, though, for now, is reminding me that I am an active part of something greater than myself. There are so many ways to do this. I believe it is the sweetest duty and happiness one can attain, however the effort manifests itself in your own life. As long as my daily life can be placed in context of, in compliment to, the demands of my soul, I think that happiness is present. I will likely not farm forever, but I will forever seek this sense of being in and of and engaged with the world. This is the happiness that is my duty to secure. And I am happier still to share it.