Life & success (that’s all)

First there is life. That is all, life. Life in the very broadest sense. Life and being, much the same. Rocks have life, as does plastic.

Then there is animate life. With all the attendant drama of moving, stopping, living, dying, reproduction, transformation.

We, with our fine minds, our powers of invention, like to make up stories about how things are supposed to be, but after all there is only life. It is the most important thing to remember. If we could keep that in our mind we would not chase dreams so much. Those dreams that have led us to spin stuff out of oil and metal like crazy fools.

What is it that we wanted with all of this stuff that we have made? A warm place, enough to eat, to be clean and healthy and happy in our families, however constituted. Everything else is just the means to those ends, or a detour. Everything.

Isn't it absurd that we cannot understand even our own needs? Do we define success by fulfilling our needs? No, success for us is about being better than everyone else, or trying to be. Much good that does. In fact, it does much evil. We hardly recognize the world we have made anymore, it is so over-built.

Our heroes of late have been engineers and physicists. We have all manner of machines. Now we live in order to keep the machines running. We work in order to pay for rent, food, water, for electricity, for the car and gas that goes into it, for the cell phone, cable-TV, internet connection, for the airplane, the airport, the shipping vessels, the delivery trucks, the factories, the tractors, the hospitals, the oil-rigs, the shopping centers, the cities! We have to keep all those machines running, each of us, otherwise we will be going backwards!

We can't imagine that, going backwards. We are terribly afraid of going backwards. Because going backwards means having less power, means being vulnerable, means, perhaps, failure. Failure to be better than everyone else. To do away with what is not really necessary, with what no longer works, is not failure.

Perhaps if we understood that seeing ourselves and our needs very clearly is a way forward. If we can see what we truly want and need, we will not expend energy, increasingly precious energy, on anything that does not get us there directly. What gets as much of the world as possible there, to what we truly need.

So one must challenge the idea of that false, invidious success, in the name of life, a good life, a good world. It is not so difficult, to get to the world we need.

 

Death in the Afternoon

Chicken-fighting is one of the past-times of winter and early spring while the roosters have their tail-feathers. Some people think that cock-fighting is cruel and perhaps they are right, but if you have ever seen what roosters will do to hens, it makes you a lot less sympathetic. Chickens are some of the most vicious creatures on this earth. We can all just thank the Creator God that chickens are not 10-feet high, because us humans would have been extinct a long, long time ago. So there is quite a bit of practicality to fighting roosters. You only need so many.

I've only been to one cock-fight in my life and that was with my Filipino grandparents. My grandfather had an island-wide reputation as a breeder of fighting chickens and when he was in his prime his yard was filled with huts and cages for his chickens, with roosters tied out by a string around one leg, gazing down their beaks with imperious fierceness. The chicken-fight that I went to took place in the old Filipino camp in Pahala, under the shade of the giant, ancient mango trees. This was in the 80's when the sugar plantation and mill were still in full operation, but the Filipino camp was quite broken-down already. I don't remember much about the chicken-fight. There were crowds of people and my grandmother took me around to show me off to her friends. For some reason I ended up getting a hair cut there in someone's living room.

I watched one chicken-fight: first the round of betting with much yelling and money held high in the air, then the chickens were let go. Being a "let-go man" is a special skill -and dangerous, as the roosters have knives tied onto the spurs of their legs, and they waste no time going after each other. There is also a "knife-man" who specializes in tying on the knives. Then there is the owner, anxious. He has bred or bought the rooster, fed it a special diet, groomed and massaged it to build up its muscles, trained it with sparring matches. The two roosters circle each other with ruffs open like angry lizards, then fly at each other clashing in mid-air. They peck and bite at each other, and slash with their bladed legs. It's over in minutes. One combatant is dead or nearly, the other is triumphant and deadly. Each chicken is collected by its owner. Money is redistributed. Another pair of roosters are matched.

More often than not a fight erupts between the humans as well, or some kind of drama. Everyone is jacked up on money and surrogate battle. Someone is caught stealing or cheating or not behaving the way they are supposed to be. There are threats, yelling, posturing. Perhaps it comes to blows. Usually not. Just blowing off adrenaline. It is a Sunday afternoon. A past-time that takes place in clearings in the forest or fields - it is illegal - but that doesn't stop anybody: some things are older than laws.

Community Concerns About the Biofuel Project

People I know stop me to talk about the biofuel project quite a lot these days. Some of the comments that they have voiced to me:

The honeybees in Ka'u are just starting to recover. Will the feedstock be grown using pesticides? If so this could have an effect on my honeybees and my livelihood producing honey. What assurances do we have that this will be taken seriously?

Do the project planners understand that they cannot just strip the fertility out of the soil again? It has taken this long to build anything back up after sugarcane. What are their plans for maintaining fertility in the soil?

If, as stated at the County Council meeting, this project will provide 200 permanent jobs and it takes 20 people to run the plant, what exactly are the other 180 jobs going to consist of?

I want to support biofuels but I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this project.