No can help…

I’ve not been feeling quite right lately. I forget what I am doing, lose track of my car-keys, wallet, credit cards all the time - it’s comical. There is constant unease to everyday life, different than I’ve experienced before. I don’t know how to deal with it.

I am theorizing that this is not just a personal failure, that many others are feeling something similar, but perhaps expressing it differently - in the variegated forms and degrees of depression, anger, or numbness. We are all worried, distracted, drained, unclear how to proceed, how to get through this.

Out of one eye I see our magnificent (it is!) American civilization continuing with its usual business: people drive their cars to work, buy their groceries, watch television, go on trips. There is noticeably less activity, but in general everything seems sort of normal.

In my other eye is a vision - an intuition that our civilization grew beyond its own structural support and, what is worse, began preying on itself. We've taught ourselves to take advantage of each other whenever possible. With that ingrained in our values, it will be a long time until we figure out how to build something larger than net worth again.

Right now no one feels very good. Even if you still have a job, there is anxiety and uncertainty. Will the situation improve soon, or will things get much, much worse? What will much, much worse look like, be like? No one knows. It makes everyone a little crazy...not themselves.

Work

I went to dinner last night with a beautiful (inside and out) lady originally from Cambodia. She was pregnant with 4 children when the Khmer Rouge took over and sent them all to work in the rice paddies. She gave birth without medical assistance and survived on starvation rations - one bowl of rice per a day - "I lived on coconuts." After the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge, she lived for six months in a Red Cross refugee camp. She made it to Oregon but there her Cambodian husband left her. But she survived it all. She remarried and she and her husband produce some of the most beautiful vegetables and herbs you will ever see. She works very hard even though she is in her sixties. She is as tough as my own mother, maybe tougher, and that is saying something. And she does it all so gracefully. The walls of her home are adorned with gorgeous Hawaiian quilts that she makes at night.

When we were driving to dinner she said, "They should only make one kind of car, one color." I think she's right.

We don't need shiny cars to make us feel good. We need more people like she and her husband - they are practical people who work fiercely hard and smart but they are also extremely creative. They have very high standards in what they do. They are willing to do new things, test the boundaries, take chances. They are, above all, tenacious.

beauty

Everyone (I hope) has been graced by one of those moments when the most everyday sight is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. If you have children it's almost common - those moments that take your breath away. It is one of the rewards for the unremitting labor of being a parent. It is love that makes such moments possible; the vulnerability of love. The revelation of beauty that love provides is graced by gratitude. You realize how much you have, what a gift it is to be there witnessing whatever it might be.


It is such a different kind of beauty than which is constructed to stimulate our desire to consume. That beauty is all about surface gloss, ownership, power or the wish for power or status or some kind of momentary feeling of success. It is not about love at all. It is a chimera, and the pursuit of it, even if momentarily successful, is never satisfying.

Honolulu Green

I spent the last couple of days in the upscale urban heart of Honolulu, an environment so relentlessly artificial it might as well be on the moon, and I began to understand some things. I began to undertand where city-dwellers come from a little better.

With every view-plan dominated by right angles and every foot-step paved no wonder the denizens of this world crave "green." I imagine that most everyone that lives in such a world is haunted by a sense of loss - a vague desire for more life in their life, for a reconnection with "nature." The easiest way to assuage this sense of loss, as well as all other discomforts, is by... shopping. That is where green products come in.

The white-collar urban life is so physically un-demanding that being a vegetarian makes a whole lot of sense. Instead of physical work, city people have "work-outs." Honestly, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for an actual creature to lay down its life to provide calories for work-outs.
Someone needs to figure out a way to capture all of the "work-out" energy and transform exercize into a renewable energy source.

One of the reasons that Honolulu seems so artificial is that it is a resort city. It is an apex organism, a money-making machine that serves a semi-parasitic role in the world. In exchange for providing a fantasy environment the city reaps the disposable income of the tourists that flock from East and West to escape from their overly-mechanized lives in other money-making machines.

sustainability

As futurist Lowell Catlett wisely pointed out, there is still a LOT of disposable income out there in the US. We still are ridiculously rich. Most of us have multiple vehicles per household. We may be in a low but only relative to the crazy highs of recent years.

The danger in this situation is we will damage the foundations of our economy in the downdraft. The re-assessment of our economy and society that is going on at every level is a good and necessary thing. We all knew we were in a bubble. We also all know that the stimulus funds are just a temporary cover for the real work that needs to be done. The danger is that much of the stimulus funds will go towards one-time projects, however worthy, that don't strengthen a critical capability or seed new businesses.

We have worshipped growth, out of fear that if you are not growing, you're dying. Brute growth, growth for its own sake, leads to bubbles, but we do need to make progress, keep getting better, grow in quality and not necessarily quantity. We do need to make progress and fast at finding a sustainable source of energy for our civilization. Without energy we will all need to start studying the Amish.

The concept of sustainability has its own problems. First of all, one meaning of the term seems to be about finding a stasis between available resources and our economic appetite. The dark side of statis is rigidity. Sustainability itself should not be the goal of our civilization. It is the means of the long-term survival and well-being of our communities, cultures, and natural environment.

Second, what we take for granted in the term sustainability is the assumption of a first world, middle-class lifestyle. What is coded into the term is the birthright to interact with the world at the level of products and brand names, of services and trends.

It isn't really about sustainability, but sustaining the lifestyle to which we've all become accustomed

LAX

LAX is the polar opposite of Ka'u and that's why I like passing through there.

It's an antidote to my own little not-even-rural anomaly of a world. It's like getting a slap in the face.

Any other large, completely artificial, utilitarian, and business-like installation would create the same effect. I admire the vision, will, ruthlessness that created LAX, the Burbank cargo airfield, LA in general. Maybe admire is too strong a word. Awe-struck?

This is our world, too big and complex for any one person (not even the sage of Omaha, I suspect) to comprehend. It's too big to fail. It's not working too well lately but even the smartest of us can only nibble around the edges hoping for some kind of miracle.

People can say this stuff about "this is your world" but it's only very slightly true. The world makes us. We try to find someplace where we can do our thing, pursue our dream of acclaim, prosperity, security, or whatever and hopefully won't get smashed in some turn of the gears.

I wish we could do better for ourselves.

Perhaps we need to learn to make the distinction between necessities, improvements, and entertainment, prioritize our choices, and build our economy based on these distinctions. We have to "see" all parts of our civilization, not just the finished consumer goods - the steel that goes into engines, the naptha crackers that make the plastics, the machine that plants the carrots, and the water-system that irrigates them. We need to see where the raw material comes out of the ground and the people and machines that mine, grow, transport, transform them. We need to see the value-chain of materials and labor that make up our world. We need to see these things but not in hysterical, sensationalistic, guilt and recrimination-driven "exposes" but in a serious and respectful way, so that we can see the connections between our lives and the resources that go into making them.

It is too easy to slip into a lame finger-pointing pseudo-radicalism that forgets that we are all just people doing the best we can in a world that any one of us, honestly, only partially grasp.

Rural

I'm reading a book called "Rural by Design" by Randall Arendt. If you're interested in land or community planning it's a valuable resource, providing fairly specific antidotes to the suburban sprawl and commerial strip patterns that are so obnoxious a part of modern life. This is all good stuff.

The funny thing for me is that the word "rural" means quite a different thing than it does to the author. To me "rural" means a community that still is fundamentally connected to the land. To the author, and there's nothing wrong or right about this, "rural" means rural residential lots and subdivisions, basically pre-suburbia. Farmland and open space amount to the same thing. It's something you set aside and preserve not something that is has anything to do with the residences that will go onto the landscape. At the most you might have some "community gardens" in the plan.

I find this really odd. It's an indication of how marginal my point of view is, because I know the author has the numbers on his side.

Truly rural people need a spokesperson. Lots of them, actually. What we've got out there talking for us are a bunch of omnivorous foodies.

It's a brave and beautiful thing to live with the land, to find a spot to work with and then create some piece of a working paradise. In a world that has lost its way chasing dreams of "wealth," facades of "power," and the glamour of "high" technology, it is something rare and beautiful to be strong and wise enough to be able to feed other people.

You don't make a lot of money at it, but you get rich.

Connected

Sometimes when I meet people and they'll ask "where are you from?" and I'll say "Ka'u." Then I get this look that says "why would you do that?"

I like living in Ka'u. Most other places seem a little dead to me. Which may seem like a very strange thing to say, but I'm not talking about night-life here. (Night-life is fine, I like getting really drunk in dark places with strobe lights as much as the next person.) No I'm talking about another kind of dead, dead as in disconnected. I feel very alive and connected here in Ka'u. You could say this aliveness is spiritual, cultural, and social, but mostly it is an environmental connection, and here I'm defining "environmental" my way, since I'm no kind of environmental activist.

Imagine living in a place where the winds have names. Imagine living in a place where you get most of your food by growing or catching it for yourself or as a gift from friends and neighbors. Imagine a place that makes your heart sing like a tuning fork.

When (first world!) people start going off on needed to save the planet and save this and save that, I think that this is what they are looking for: a life that is connected to the land.

But they've long ago lost the path to here. Choices were made long ago about what the world is like. Most people are prisoners to a job, a mortgage, car payments, tuition, but most of all, prisoners of what is perceived as success, what is expected of them, what is normal. They inherited a world, an operating system that floats above, disconnected from the strength of simple things.

And yet feeds off of these "natural resources" without acknowledging them. And so there is this movement to set things right, and yet it comes mostly from inside this disconnected "dream space", this operating system that is so comfortable, clean, and shiny. There is a "demand" for "green products" and "green packaging." There is this frenzy of recrimination, environmental self-righteousness, green life-style tips. It's all just noise inside a bubble, because it doesn't take into account the realities that make all that frenzy possible. Food, house, paycheck - where does it come from? If you don't start from that, if you don't have quite a bit of humility and integrity about that, you are being deeply dishonest. The wilderness is not just something to be enjoyed and preserved, it is also where we came from.

Here's the heart of it: find out where you live and live there. That is the basis of everything. You cannot have a whole and healthy society, economy, culture, environment without knowing, loving, and contributing to the place where you live. What is the wildness of it? How would you make a living here, if this place is all you had? Go out and do something if possible - build a rockwall, catch a fish, dig in the earth. Strip away all the layers of civilization and find the kernel of life that connects to a place. Then you will begin to come from someplace real.

Ka'u culture

Ka'u is a kind of island within an island. Hawaii is, so I've read, the most isolated islands in the world, and Ka'u is one of the most remote spots in these islands. We have our own world here, our own culture, and much of that culture is entirely invisible initially. We don't have colorful traditions or costumes. We don't speak a different language.

What there is - a feeling for each other that comes from shared lineages. Sometimes these are lineages of blood or marriage. Sometimes they are lineages of memory - stories and adventures that were shared however long ago. Most of all there are lineages of service to each other - kindnesses (kokua) that are never forgotten and pass on to the next generation as legacies of goodwill. That is why family names are so important.

We go on and on, weaving these stories together against the magnificence of our landscape, the sweep of the land from Mauna Kea to the brilliant dark ocean. This is the art form that we love, where the landscape, the winds, the shining grasses, the ocean, and the people are all mixed up together, so we hardly know what is what. We keep on making it and loving it, despite everything.