This morning I had to stop washing the dishes for a minute because a triple rainbow of such intensity appeared against the black mountains. Then the light of the rising sun hit the creamy white underwing of a hawk gliding in an arc above Ka`alaiki hill.

Will James' Smoky the Cowhorse

With me, my weakness lays towards the horse.  My life, from the time I first squinted at daylight has been with horses.  I admire every step that creathure makes, I know them and been thru so much with 'em that I've come to figger a big mistake was made when the horse was classed as an animal.  The me, the horse is man's greatest, most useful, faithful, and powerful friend.  He never whines when he's hungry or sore-footed or tired, and he'll keep on going for the human till he drops. 

Two Simple Things

Feel your own body.
Locate physical reality. 

You would think that we could take these two simple things for granted, but, no.
The American Selves that we construct have no bodies and no place in the world.
It makes us Crazy.
Also Rational.
Ghost-like, God-like Orphans. 

Nothing is any Good
Until You Are Home.

Two Faces of American Maleness

I got emails from the two extremes of the ideological spectrum this morning, one from Free Market Carnivore, the other from Yes! magazine.  Despite their violent differences, there are actually quite a few commonalities:  suspicion of the powers that be, suspicion of the stimulus plan, and the most egregious mis-use of words and concepts so as to overpower their straw-man opponent.  Makes me want to laugh and cry. 

Here's the carnivore quoting from Michael Reagan's book on Reagan versus Keynes:

"The fundamental assumption of Keynesianism - the belief that government drives the economy - defies logic. All wealth is created in the private sector and the government can only tax or borrow that wealth out of the private sector and shuffle it around," he said. In conditions like those around the corner, the government will be competing with the private sector for money.

Of course, that belief that government should run the economy fits in with the left's big government theory. If they convince people that the government should run the economy, then it is easier to explain to them that the government needs more money to do more for them, that tax cuts are a "cost" to the government, that reallocation of the wealth of society should be "fairly" handled by the government and that the levers of regulatory power should be in the hands of the government to make sure no one gets out of line.

Heres the liberal perspective on male psychic mutilation under consumer capitalism:

As in the workplace and war, men’s bodies are also exploited in the marketplace. It is here that powerlessness in the sphere of production is compensated for symbolically. Any consumer product sold as a symbol of manhood can function in this way. Many such products are innocuous; some are not. Millions of men have died in the last 50 years, yielding many millions of dollars of profit, by seeking manhood in a pack of Marlboros.

Teaching males to seek feelings of worth through displays of power, toughness, and competitiveness turns male bodies into readily exploitable generators of profit. The costs to all but the tiny few who appropriate these profits are enormous: ruined bodies and minds, premature death, perpetual war, depression and drug use, interpersonal violence, and the abuse of women and others who are not men in good standing.

What the two also share is the vitality of the argument.  That is a good thing, not something that we should bemoan.   I love peace and harmony more than most, but argument is a vital human pleasure.  If only we would listen to each other, rather than trying to drown each other out.

The Mermaid and the Minotaur

Reading Dorothy Dinnerstein's now almost 40 year old book The Mermaid and the Minotaur.  It is not an easy book to read because it make you so uncomfortable.  It opens up old wounds.  Dinnerstein was a tough minded woman.  You could say that this is a feminist book, but it isn't really; it is a humanist book, a book that goes to the root questions of how we, the human species, might be able to shape a way of living on this earth that is sound; that will last; that will not destroy the sources of life and health; that is not fatally flawed.  And gender issues are at the core of those questions, at the core of how we organize our way of being as humans. Dinnerstein's argument goes something like this: exclusively female early childcare perpetuates a cultural pathology that has driven men to construct history and to build a machine civilization so as to accumulate money and status (with which men seek to please the women/mothers who they worship/hate as the source of life) and forces women into the bitch/goddess/sexual object role that leads into another round of exclusively female childcare by frustrated women leading to another round of hungry, angry men.  As crappy a deal as it is, women have enabled and consented to it; we've allowed it to happen. By allowing ourselves to be the sole provider of early childcare, by agreeing to it, we maintain the imbalance in human psychology that perpetuates the destructive elements in our civilization.   Has there been some change in gender roles in the last 40 years?  Perhaps. But that progress has been, if anything, linear, whereas the engine of civilization is burning exponentially hotter.  As the pathologies of our global civilization become ever harder to ignore, Dinnerstein's book is ever more relevant.

maybe best speech ever?

2008 Commencement Address by Barbara Kingsolver

The following remarks by Barbara Kingsolver, titled "How to be Hopeful," were prepared for delivery at Duke's 2008 commencement ceremony May 11 at Wallace Wade Stadium.

  

May 11, 2008 |

 

Editor's Note: Barbara Kingsolver is a novelist, essayist, non-fiction and short-story writer. An audio version of her speech is available on iTunes.

Durham, NC - The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.
Let me begin that way: with an invocation of your own best hopes, thrown like a handful of rice over this celebration. Congratulations, graduates. Congratulations, parents, on the best Mother's Day gift ever. Better than all those burnt-toast breakfasts: these, your children grown tall and competent, educated to within an inch of their lives.
What can I say to people who know almost everything? There was a time when I surely knew, because I'd just graduated from college myself, after writing down the sum of all human knowledge on exams and research papers. But that great pedagogical swilling-out must have depleted my reserves, because decades have passed and now I can't believe how much I don't know. Looking back, I can discern a kind of gaseous exchange in which I exuded cleverness and gradually absorbed better judgment. Wisdom is like frequent-flyer miles and scar tissue; if it does accumulate, that happens by accident while you're trying to do something else. And wisdom is what people will start wanting from you, after your last exam. I know it's true for writers - -- when people love a book, whatever they say about it, what they really mean is: it was wise. It helped explain their pickle. My favorites are the canny old codgers: Neruda, Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing. Honestly, it is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
If I stopped there, you might have heard my best offer. But I am charged with postponing your diploma for about 15 more minutes, so I'll proceed, with a caveat. The wisdom of each generation is necessarily new. This tends to dawn on us in revelatory moments, brought to us by our children. For example: My younger daughter is eleven. Every morning, she and I walk down the lane from our farm to the place where she meets the school bus. It's the best part of my day. We have great conversations. But a few weeks ago as we stood waiting in the dawn's early light, Lily was quietly looking me over, and finally said: "Mom, just so you know, the only reason I'm letting you wear that outfit is because of your age." The alleged outfit will not be described here; whatever you're imagining will perfectly suffice. (Especially if you're picturing "Project Runway" meets "Working with Livestock.") Now, I believe parents should uphold respect for adult authority, so I did what I had to do. I hid behind the barn when the bus came.
And then I walked back up the lane in my fly regalia, contemplating this new equation: "Because of your age." It's okay now to deck out and turn up as the village idiot. Hooray! I am old enough. How does this happen? Over a certain age, do you become invisible? There is considerable evidence for this in movies and television. But mainly, I think, you're not expected to know the rules. Everyone knows you're operating on software that hasn't been updated for a good while.
The world shifts under our feet. The rules change. Not the Bill of Rights, or the rules of tenting, but the big unspoken truths of a generation. Exhaled by culture, taken in like oxygen, we hold these truths to be self-evident: You get what you pay for. Success is everything. Work is what you do for money, and that's what counts. How could it be otherwise? And the converse of that last rule, of course, is that if you're not paid to do a thing, it can't be important. If a child writes a poem and proudly reads it, adults may wink and ask, "Think there's a lot of money in that?" You may also hear this when you declare a major in English. Being a good neighbor, raising children: the road to success is not paved with the likes of these. Some workplaces actually quantify your likelihood of being distracted by family or volunteerism. It's called your coefficient of Drag. The ideal number is zero. This is the Rule of Perfect Efficiency.
Now, the rule of "Success" has traditionally meant having boatloads of money. But we are not really supposed to put it in a boat. A house would the customary thing. Ideally it should be large, with a lot of bathrooms and so forth, but no more than four people. If two friends come over during approved visiting hours, the two children have to leave. The bathroom-to-resident ratio should at all times remain greater than one. I'm not making this up, I'm just observing, it's more or less my profession. As Yogi Berra told us, you can observe a lot just by watching. I see our dream-houses standing alone, the idealized life taking place in a kind of bubble. So you need another bubble, with rubber tires, to convey yourself to places you must visit, such as an office. If you're successful, it will be a large, empty-ish office you don't have to share. If you need anything, you can get it delivered. Play your cards right and you may never have to come face to face with another person. This is the Rule of Escalating Isolation.
And so we find ourselves in the chapter of history I would entitle: Isolation and Efficiency, and How They Came Around to Bite Us in the Backside. Because it's looking that way. We're a world at war, ravaged by disagreements, a bizarrely globalized people in which the extravagant excesses of one culture wash up as famine or flood on the shores of another. Even the architecture of our planet is collapsing under the weight of our efficient productivity. Our climate, our oceans, migratory paths, things we believed were independent of human affairs. Twenty years ago, climate scientists first told Congress that unlimited carbon emissions were building toward a disastrous instability. Congress said, we need to think about that. About ten years later, nations of the world wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our carbon emissions. The US said, we still need to think about it. Now we can watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity go out, the oceans reverse their ancient orders. A few degrees looked so small on the thermometer. We are so good at measuring things and declaring them under control. How could our weather turn murderous, pummel our coasts and push new diseases like denge fever onto our doorsteps? It's an emergency on a scale we've never known. We've responded by following the rules we know: Efficiency, Isolation. We can't slow down our productivity and consumption, that's unthinkable. Can't we just go home and put a really big lock on the door?
Not this time. Our paradigm has met its match. The world will save itself, don't get me wrong. The term "fossil fuels" is not a metaphor or a simile. In the geological sense, it's over. The internal combustion engine is so 20th Century. Now we can either shift away from a carbon-based economy, or find another place to live. Imagine it: we raised you on a lie. Everything you plug in, turn on or drive, the out-of-season foods you eat, the music in your ears. We gave you this world and promised you could keep it running on: a fossil substance. Dinosaur slime, and it's running out. The geologists only disagree on how much is left, and the climate scientists are now saying they're sorry but that's not even the point. We won't get time to use it all. To stabilize the floods and firestorms, we'll have to reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent, within a decade.
Heaven help us get our minds around that. We're still stuck on a strategy of bait-and-switch: Okay, we'll keep the cars but run them on ethanol made from corn! But -- we use petroleum to grow the corn. Even if you like the idea of robbing the food bank to fill up the tank, there is a math problem: it takes nearly a gallon of fossil fuel to render an equivalent gallon of corn gas. By some accounts, it takes more. Think of the Jules Verne novel in which the hero is racing Around the World in 80 Days, and finds himself stranded in the mid-Atlantic on a steamship that's run out of coal. It's day 79. So Phileas Fogg convinces the Captain to pull up the decks and throw them into the boiler. "On the next day the masts, rafts and spars were burned. The crew worked lustily, keeping up the fires. There was a perfect rage for demolition." The Captain remarked, "Fogg, you've got something of the Yankee about you." Oh, novelists. They always manage to have the last word, even when they are dead.
How can we get from here to there, without burning up our ship? That will be central question of your adult life: to escape the wild rumpus of carbon-fuel dependency, in the nick of time. You'll make rules that were previously unthinkable, imposing limits on what we can use and possess. You will radically reconsider the power relationship between humans and our habitat. In the words of my esteemed colleague and friend, Wendell Berry, the new Emancipation Proclamation will not be for a specific race or species, but for life itself. Imagine it. Nations have already joined together to rein in global consumption. Faith communities have found a new point of agreement with student activists, organizing around the conviction that caring for our planet is a moral obligation. Before the last UN Climate Conference in Bali, thousands of U.S. citizens contacted the State Department to press for binding limits on carbon emissions. We're the five percent of humans who have made 50 percent of all the greenhouse gases up there. But our government is reluctant to address it, for one reason: it might hurt our economy.
For a lot of history, many nations said exactly the same thing about abolishing slavery. We can't grant humanity to all people, it would hurt our cotton plantations, our sugar crop, our balance of trade. Until the daughters and sons of a new wisdom declared: We don't care. You have to find another way. Enough of this shame.
Have we lost that kind of courage? Have we let economic growth become our undisputed master again? As we track the unfolding disruption of natural and global stabilities, you will be told to buy into business as usual: You need a job. Trade your future for an entry level position. Do what we did, preserve a profitable climate for manufacture and consumption, at any cost. Even at the cost of the other climate -- the one that was hospitable to life as we knew it. Is anyone thinking this through? In the awful moment when someone demands at gunpoint, "Your money or your life," that's not supposed to be a hard question.
A lot of people, in fact, are rethinking the money answer. Looking behind the cash-price of everything, to see what it cost us elsewhere: to mine and manufacture, to transport, to burn, to bury. What did it harm on its way here? Could I get it closer to home? Previous generations rarely asked about the hidden costs. We put them on layaway. You don't get to do that. The bill has come due. Some European countries already are calculating the "climate cost" on consumer goods and adding it to the price. The future is here. We're examining the moralities of possession, inventing renewable technologies, recovering sustainable food systems. We're even warming up to the idea that the wealthy nations will have to help the poorer ones, for the sake of a reconstructed world. We've done it before. That was the Marshall Plan. Generosity is not out of the question. It will grind some gears in the machine of Efficiency. But we can retool.
We can also rethink the big, lonely house as a metaphor for success. You are in a perfect position to do that. You've probably spent very little of your recent life in a free-standing unit with a bathroom-to-resident ratio of greater than one. (Maybe more like 1:200.) You've been living so close to your friends, you didn't have to ask about their problems, you had to step over them to get into the room. As you moved from dormitory to apartment to whatever (and by whatever I think I mean Central Campus) you've had such a full life, surrounded by people, in all kinds of social and physical structures, none of which belonged entirely to you. You're told that's all about to change. That growing up means leaving the herd, starting up the long escalator to isolation.
Not necessarily. As you leave here, remember what you loved most in this place. Not Orgo 2, I'm guessing, or the crazed squirrels or even the bulk cereal in the Freshman Marketplace. I mean the way you lived, in close and continuous contact. This is an ancient human social construct that once was common in this land. We called it a community. We lived among our villagers, depending on them for what we needed. If we had a problem, we did not discuss it over the phone with someone in Bubaneshwar. We went to a neighbor. We acquired food from farmers. We listened to music in groups, in churches or on front porches. We danced. We participated. Even when there was no money in it. Community is our native state. You play hardest for a hometown crowd. You become your best self. You know joy. This is not a guess, there is evidence. The scholars who study social well-being can put it on charts and graphs. In the last 30 years our material wealth has increased in this country, but our self-described happiness has steadily declined. Elsewhere, the people who consider themselves very happy are not in the very poorest nations, as you might guess, nor in the very richest. The winners are Mexico, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the kinds of places we identify with extended family, noisy villages, a lot of dancing. The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
You can take that to the bank. I'm not sure what they'll do with it down there, but you could try. You could walk out of here with an unconventionally communal sense of how your life may be. This could be your key to a new order: you don't need so much stuff to fill your life, when you have people in it. You don't need jet fuel to get food from a farmer's market. You could invent a new kind of Success that includes children's poetry, butterfly migrations, butterfly kisses, the Grand Canyon, eternity. If somebody says "Your money or your life," you could say: Life. And mean it. You'll see things collapse in your time, the big houses, the empires of glass. The new green things that sprout up through the wreck -- - those will be yours.
The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, "We already did. We have made the world new." The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on. If you run out of hope at the end of the day, to rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason you won't give in, burn what's left of the ship and go down with it. The ship of your natural life and your children's only shot. You have to love that so earnestly -- - you, who were born into the Age of Irony. Imagine getting caught with your Optimism hanging out. It feels so risky. Like showing up at the bus stop as the village idiot. You may be asked to stand behind the barn. You may feel you're not up to the task.
But think of this: what if someone had dared you, three years ago, to show up to some public event wearing a big, flappy dress with sleeves down to your knees. And on your head, oh, let's say, a beanie with a square board on top. And a tassel! Look at you. You are beautiful. The magic is community. The time has come for the square beanie, and you are rocked in the bosom of the people who get what you're going for. You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don't attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world. Look at you. That could be you.
I'll close with a poem:
Hope; An Owner's Manual
Look, you might as well know, this thing
is going to take endless repair: rubber bands,
crazy glue, tapioca, the square of the hypotenuse.
Nineteenth century novels. Heartstrings, sunrise:
all of these are useful. Also, feathers.
To keep it humming, sometimes you have to stand
on an incline, where everything looks possible;
on the line you drew yourself. Or in
the grocery line, making faces at a toddler
secretly, over his mother's shoulder.
You might have to pop the clutch and run
past all the evidence. Past everyone who is
laughing or praying for you. Definitely you don't
want to go directly to jail, but still, here you go,
passing time, passing strange. Don't pass this up.

In the worst of times, you will have to pass it off.
Park it and fly by the seat of your pants. With nothing
in the bank, you'll still want to take the express.
Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse that are sleeping
in the shade of your future. Pay at the window.
Pass your hope like a bad check.
You might still have just enough time. To make a deposit.
Congratulations, graduates.

giggle

big bird ad on youtube

Struggling with Reality and QEn

Read this:

The War Between Credit and Resources

Similarly, in ethanol policy, instead of reconfiguring transportation systems or investing in rail, the U.S. foolishly wasted billions trying to produce more liquids when the real problem was the quickly escalating cost of oil supply. As we now understand, agricultural production is not free, but instead tied very much to fossil fuel costs. So the dream of escaping from high oil prices by running large-scale food-to-fuel programs is destined to fail.

As we now understand
...well, maybe not all of us yet.

Economix as Thought Bubble

In other words, even if we can, at the personal level, manage to feel fulfilled under slower economic growth, it is not compatible with how modern politics is structured, namely as a ravenous beast….Big government and big business have long marched together in American history.  You can call one good and the other bad (depending on your point of view), but that’s missing their common origin and ongoing alliance.  – Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better

I like these three sentences from Cowen’s book, one of three books on economics  I read yesterday, which is another thing that will make you sick.  One was about how we need to balance our crazy debt between nation-states, and the other about how we need to balance our crazy debt  over generational time.  Cowen’s is about how we need to balance our crazy debt by growth through technological breakthrough.  All three say the same thing: we have screwed up big time and continue to do so, by using fake money to pretend that we are richer than we are.  “Fake money” is a little bit of non-sequitur, because it is the point of money to be fake, but there’s symbolic function and then there’s  just silly. Not one of the three even mentioned the fact that we are trashing the planet with our obsession with economic growth, with our hydra-headed “ravenous beast” of a civilization. In other words there is no reference to anything outside of an exclusively human-defined reality - floating, completely self-referential, high complex but invisibly enabled by mutual and unquestioning consent to the brutal extraction of natural resources.  But perhaps it’s there, all our bad faith, in the unconscious of the arguments, in that inassimilable  beast named Debt.  It’ all there in that newly repugnant phrase “low-hanging fruit.”

Reality In Question

It sometimes happens that when you're hard at work making fiction, you get invaded by the feeling that what's important is happening elsewhere -- something much more powerful than the story that you have been creating, with care and obsession. Human beings today need their daily dose of fiction, it's true; without it, we would not know how to live. But it is also true that, on many occasions, the rumblings of reality that come across our TVs and computer screens are so powerful that they knock the air out of you and leave you with the feeling that a film is something insignificant in comparison.
-Pedro Almodovar, Reality and Narration 

I adore Pedro Almodovar's films, especially Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and I don't mean to pick on the famous director when he is calling attention to an under-reported story, but to be surprised that reality is more significant than fiction?  Really, we have to rediscover this concept?    Also, do we all really "need" a daily dose of fiction?  In other words, we can't live without being fed some spin on our situation?  Of course, yes, one watches TV or reads and all of it is pure construct, even if it is a form from the Office of Personnel Management (perhaps especially so), so he is correct about the daily exposure.  But is it truly the case that we cannot deal with reality any more; that we need a daily dose of mental conditioning? Darn, we're in pretty bad shape.  Maybe it's only the intelligentsia that have become so self-referential.  That would explain a lot.  Unruly, ugly, scary, glorious, fatal reality: it doesn't come through the TV or computer screen, or even off of an old-fashioned page of paper, but it is there, waiting. 

Model

My daughter, the fashionista, opened up a copy of In Style magazine and said, "These models mostly all look like robots."

Oh Woman

Oh woman

remember who you are

woman

it is the whole earth

-Joy Harjo

I speak to women now because there is a time to speak woman to woman, but that does not mean that I am not speaking to everyone.  Women, we know that there is something not right in the way that the world has gone; that we all live as aliens - almost it seems - in a world that is not a home, that is becoming ever more rigid and lifeless, ever more superficial.  I thought about all of us, with our knowledge that is hidden in our bodies, in our dreams, and it seemed that there was nowhere for this knowledge to go, that we were powerless.  How are we to find the power to bring our knowledge up into the world?  Would we form a political party?  A Union?  Some other kind of organization?  How are we to counter the strength, the deadly will, of those who have lead us to these industrial waste-lands of concrete and asphalt, from which life has been banished and which turn all of our souls, piece by piece, to stone? 

Then I realized that we, women, already have all the power we need.  It is a hidden power; it has been hidden from us for so long we don’t even recognize it anymore, much less know how to use it.  Or if we do use it, we use it wrong, we use it against each other or for small and petty purposes: for seduction, for sexual manipulation, for stealing, for competing against each other in a game that only turns us into objects of desire -  objects, powerless.  That is what we use the enormous power of our bodies for, to make ourselves powerless.  That is what we have forgotten, that is what has been hidden from us.   Still it could not remain hidden forever, and it rises.  Our mothers have struggled for generations now  to become strong again, to win back control  of our own bodies, to have a voice.  We have raised a generation of young women who are stronger than ourselves.  In remembering who we are, we clear the way for them.  

We are the axis of life around which the wheels of civilization turn.  The glow of life hidden deep in our bodies is what civilization tries to forget  and obliterate, and then re-invent, but cannot, and grows sick with longing.  We are the home of the human species: its mothers, its aunties, its sisters, its foundation.  We are the ones that have kept faith with our bodies and our children, with giving birth and making milk, with the house-cleaning and the laundry, with the blood and bone, the sunlight, the garden.    We must remember who we are, now, remember all the wisdom hidden in our bodies, wisdom that our men and children sorely need, now, at this moment of choosing.  Our bodies know what is real and essential: food, shelter, kindness, gardens and forests, a world that is clean but not sanitized, a world in which many different kinds of animals, plants, bacteria, insects, yeasts, lichens, fungi can exist, because they are all part of the world-body.  We must give voice to our longings, support each other in bringing the beauty of bodies and animals, of life, back to the world, back to the center of our daily lives.  

Khadak

Yup, a YouTube music video link, from me! Weird, right? Khadak is on Netflix. Altan Uraq is the band, I believe. Khadak music

We have inherited a civilization in which the things that really matter in human life exist at the margin of our culture.  What matters? How birthing takes place matters; how infants are raised matters; having a rich and active dream life matters.  Animals matter, and so does ontological security and the magic of personal interaction and healthy and passionate sexual expression.  Career and prestige and putting a good face on it and the newest fashion in art or science do not matter.  Coming to our senses means sorting this out once and for all.  It also means becoming embodied.  And the two ultimately amount to the same thing.
- Morris Berman, Coming to our Senses

Not OK

I went to Honolulu to get my collarbone fragments bolted together last Wednesday.  The surgery center at Kaiser's Moanalua hospital was furiously busy.  I'm fortunate not to have a lot of contact with the medical community, so it's all completely fascinating when I do spend time in that world.   The equipment is impressive but what gets me are the people: the medical professionals.  These are very competent, caring, diligent people. To support highly specialized medical professionals is one of the main reasons we all, implicitly or explicitly, consent to our political and economic system.

My mother and I were there early so we waited quite a while in our curtained area of the prep center. Another patient came in on the other side of the curtain to my left.  The nurses started prepping him for his procedure.  He was going to get his stomach stapled to try to help him lose weight.  He had that sweetness of a laid-back, gentle local boy.  He was forty years old, and he was on dialysis.  The list of medicines he took daily numbered in the double digits.    The nurses had a terrible time getting an IV  in him because his veins were so scarred up already. He was not OK.  It was not OK. His was a hurt that went deep.  Yes, his injuries were the result of his own choices to over-eat.  And to choose to do so is his right.  I don't know anything about him but what I heard in that half-hour.  I don't know why he chooses to over-eat.  But I would guess that it was because he was hungry and sad and frightened.  That food was and is his joy and comfort in a world that is so furiously not OK. That would be my guess.

How far back do we need to retrace our steps in order to give him shelter in his world?  So that he and all the others would not need to eat themselves to death, to drug themselves to death, to escape in all the ways our civilization is so eager to provide?

We are crushing humans in our great machines and we say that this is how it has to be.  We say that the technology is the future, that we must have growing economies and we must compete against China and we must have more tourists and build more houses, and educate our kids in STEM subjects or we will be left behind.
What is a human?  What is life? What do we get to at the end of our days?

Shelter

It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. - Irish proverb from DailyGood.org

Retracing our Steps

It's becoming more and more clear that we've gone overboard with the perpetual growth/hyperactive model of civilization.   Retracing one's steps is not a bad idea when you've gone astray and see that you're about to go over a cliff.  It's not about going "back to the land." It's not about being a Luddite or nostalgic, it's a practical decision, a strategic decision.  It means that we draw upon the rich heritage of past cultures and present cultures other than our own very "sucessful" Western model of cultural and economic imperialism. 
Our culture tends to view the past as something that we have transcended, as something that we have improved on.  We like to think of all the ways that we have made progress, and there is nothing wrong with that.  But if it means forgetting or rejecting the past to the point that we no longer know who we are or how we got here, then we put ourselves in a very dangerous mental bind.  If to retreat means defeat and failure, if our culture must be the best and only culture, the winner, the greatest country on earth in every possible way, then we limit our ability to adapt.
Remembering who we have been can help us to imagine other paths into the future, to create new ways of life that will not reduce our world into a wasteland, but rather grow its beauty and vitality.

DailyGood

 Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anais Nin

DailyGood: The Recovery of the Sacred, by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD:

Seeking the Manuscript in DC

Mission: to see the Chu Silk Manuscript in the Smithsonian’s Sackler collection.

First call, discovered that I would need an accession number, which I might find at the research library.

Librarian was nice but nervous, self-conscious in that way of high-end librarians.

Found beautiful images of the manuscript in their catalogue:

Three-headed man, twined serpents, the script all vines and flowers

Chris asked me: what is it about?

About the mythical significance of the turning of the year

About the meaning of time and the natural world

About dreams, visions, monsters

About the pleasure we take in our own minds and in silk, writing, painting

About a story we tell ourselves.

In Senator Inouye’s waiting room in the Capital:  animals of the zodiac painted all around the lower edge of the vaulted ceiling.

Animals and spirits are the same thing:  Anima, soul, animism.

The twelve gods of Chu dance through my dreams. 

I proffer my doctorate to propitiate the guardians & on my last day in Washington DC am granted access.

Seeing the manuscript is like meeting the finest edge of a forgotten world.  In the warp and weft of the silk is the wear of its two thousand years  of waiting in the dark.  Pigments have migrated, edges have frayed, dissipated, been lost into nothingness.  I am stunned by the beauty and precision of the calligraphy, how the ink has not faded but must be nearly as clear as the day it was written.  Also by the geography of each character, how much closer these characters seem to speaking of a numinous world.  They are graphs of concepts, not so much linguistic representation, but closer to the grail ­- to a drawing of cosmos in time, space, imagination, intellectual structure.  Each graph is a talisman and a knowing, a recognition of the possible structure of the world.   Each one has been won by a great effort of thought.  Each one is a theory. 

Flight to Albuquerque.   Beneath the airplane the vast landscape of the Mid West slides by.  Endless fields.  It is stunning to think that less than 2% of the population of the US farms these uncountable fields.

Great Conversation

http://www.chrismartenson.com/page/transcript-charles-eisenstein

Generation X represent!

Family Traditions

I'm lucky I only broke my ribs on the right side in 10 places, snapped my collarbone, and collapsed a lung.  It could have been much worse.  I hit the ground at very high speed and from a bit of an altitude after things went suddenly very wrong while riding a young horse this weekend.  It hurt much worse than giving birth, I can tell you that.  I count over the places where I might have decided differently and avoided the experience.  And yet this too is what it is all about, my life.  My parents and I compare notes on broken collarbone, broken rib experiences. My mother took a big spill chasing wild goats at South Point when I was about five. My father got bucked off his big red half-draft mare (the ranch's all-time top bone-breaker) and went back to work in two days, back to roping cattle two weeks later.  He's unbelievably tough, but he didn't break as many bones as me.

Warhorse

It is dusk and rains come across the Ka'u Desert.  The horses stand at the gate, hoping I will open it onto the new pasture, but they must wait.  This morning I went to see if the old gray mare, my father's "warhorse" in former days, had passed.  I hoped so.  She had fallen and could not get up.  Her time had come, but she had lingered, lying there under the sky.  I had put my hand on the gun to put her down, to put her out of her misery, there on the ground.  But a voice inside me had said no, that she would find her own way to the other side. Strong-willed horse, you were never afraid.
When I told my mother, who had fed her daily for the last three or four years and who could not bear to see her dying, that she had indeed gone, she said: "So she made the leap."
"Yes," I said.

Multi-dimensional

That is ranch life.  The day before yesterday I spent the entire day saddling colts.  Today, blessedly, it is raining.  I celebrate by gathering electronic and paper documents for our annual workman's comp audit. Click, click, click, scan, convert, download, send.  Resend.  Usually I turn Pandora on to get through the robot dimension. "God Doesn't Take American Express."
My daughter and I have decided that there are a lot of similarities between Pomeranians and I Pads.  They are both amusing, clever little pets.You buy them so that you can take them around and show all your friends.  You buy them cute  and expensive costumes and accessories.   Marketing genius. 
I have a lap-top.  It's not so cute.  It's more like a hound dog.

Saddling Colts

This is as close as I get to a spiritual activity.  It is also emotional, physical, and intellectual.  It is something that you do with your whole body and mind.  With your energy and your alpha waves.  With your compassion, your creativity, and your strength.
You are offering them a culture.  Your personal cultute.  Your version of reality.  Your way of life.  It had better be a good way of life.  So getting a saddle on a colt reaches deep into your life. The young horse will question you in their wordless way, and you must have something to say for yourself, for your species, for the order of the world. 
They come to this willingly.  They give you the benefit of the doubt.  That is the miracle of horses.

Doing It

Rode hard for four days last week.   Blissful, punishing. On Wednesday we moved herds, on Thursday we sorted cows that had gotten mixed up and moved them back into their proper pastures, Friday we walked 400 mama cows and calves 3 miles to new pasture, Saturday we had a little branding -- 125 calves or so, lots of British Whites.    On Sunday I cleaned tack and in the late afternoon rode some of my young horses that are not quite ready for the high pressure situations that come up routinely in ranch work.
Yesterday, Monday,  did Honolulu, a farm-to-table demo with Chef Mark Noguchi and farmer Shin Ho for the American Farm Bureau annual convention. Met Andy Tranh and Amanda Corby.    Mark broke down a short-plate on stage, which is a little bit like mud-wrestling only with tallow.

culture cont.

I repeat myself, I realize.  But perhaps the best kind of thought is the one that comes back.  That circles the  words that it is trying to herd into the light like a sheep-dog. 
The so-called soft disciplines of culture go much deeper than we grasp at this point.
We have valorized the engineers and the economists, the financier and the venture capitalist, the scientist and the system analyst, the statician and the adminstrator for so many long years. 
We defined what was serious by its dollar value.  Then we systematically destroyed the values that gave the dollar its value.  Now we don't know what to do.
More grieviously we don't even know why anymore.
The why never was something that you could just say and be done with, like the ubiquitous mission statement.
Why was where you came from, who you loved, the beloved horizon where your dreams and fears lived, the possibility of a world made by your own hands.

Boots, Culture

Wore through another pair of my favorite cowboy boots - Olathe Muleskinners - yesterday.  These lasted me about 4 years.  I used to wear through a pair a year, I was cowgirl-ing so hard.  Actually these could have lasted a couple more years if there was a shoe repair shop on the island.  I send a pair like this to Drew's Boots in Oregon to be re-heeled.  They told me they were beyond repair.  The thing is they are still pretty much water-tight.

It occurred to me this morning that we don't have any kind of energy crisis, food crisis, water crisis.  We just have a heck of a culture crisis.  We adapted our culture to cheap energy.  Now we are going to have to re-adapt.  I'm sure we will bitch, moan, and fight every step of the way.  But material reality does not change; we have to.  And my god, it's not like the culture we have now is all that perfect.  A less wantonly industrial culture will be quite a relief to most people and to the planet.

New Year, Ranch Life

This year started very auspiciously with my father's annual New Year's Eve Party -- lots of family and friends in my parent's garage, lots of kids setting off fireworks, lots of huli-huli pig.  We played Texas Hold'um for brass rivets and laughed at each other.  The New Year came, we were all a bit amazed to still be awake, hugged each other, helped to clean up, and went sleepily into the new year.
Yesterday we had a branding.  We worked about 125 calves - vaccination, castration, and worming.  It is probably the worst minute of a cow's life, but it is all done for good reasons and as quickly as possible.  Then they go straight back with their mothers.  We had a skeleton crew so the ranch kids really had to pitch in, which is a satisfying thing to see, the next generation hard at work.  My father roped calves on Kualii, my brother's black Apaloosa, and roared encouragement at the kids.  It was so hot that no one had an appetite for lunch for a long while after we were done.  In the afternoon a great bank of cloud rolled in from the east and mist raced across the mountain pastures.  My puppies got lost, and then I found them.  In the night it rained.
Today I replaced the tire that I shredded last week driving the flat-bed.  That was a bit of a wreck.  I still need to get the fuel line re-attached properly, that and the driver side mud flap. Everyone who saw the tire was impressed.  The guy at Lex Brodie's said, "Ho, you no fut aroun'!"