The power mountains

Ka'u is the largest district on the largest island in Hawai'i.  It lies on the sprawling slope of the shield volcano Mauna Loa, which in winter often wears coat of snow upon its perfectly curved summit. Along its slope and standing guard over the heartland of Ka'u are the beloved "power mountains:"  Ka`iholena, Makanau, Pu`u Iki, Maka`alia, Pu`u One, Pakua, Wailau, Ka`umaikeohu,among others. They are remnants of the ancient volcano Ninole. In terms of size they are not imposing - over-grown hills really -, but they have a enignmatic presence about them. Their sheer slopes, strange shapes make them, quite clearly, wao akua,  realm of the gods.  They also harbor some of the best preserved native forests in the district. Even the pig-hunters respect the mountains, and try not to wander on their slopes after dark. Having heard many a story of  the spirits - nightmarchers, shape-changers, and obake - in childhood, a mountain is not just a mountain.  

Each of the power mountains has its legends. My daughter learnt them from her grandmother while still in pre-school. Makanau, the flat-topped mountain, was where the cruel chief was crushed to death by a great log that he had forced his people to drag up the mountain.  Wailau is the mountain where the sweet potato demi-god lived and died.  Ka`iholena is where Kumauna, the ancient traveler from Kahiki, planted bananas and was courted by Pele, who turned him into a great stone in her wrath. 

One Way to Go About It

Among the Navajo and, as far as I know, many other native peoples, the land is thought to exhibit a sacred order.  That order is the basis of ritual.  The rituals themselves reveal the power in that order.  Art, architecture, vocabulary, and costume, as well as ritual, are derived from the perceived natural order of the universe - from observations and meditations on the exterior landscape.  An indigenous philosophy - metaphysics, ethic, epistemology, aesthetics, logic - may also be derived from a people's continuous attentiveness to both the obvious (scientific) and ineffable (artistic) orders of the local landscape.  Each individual, further, undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape.  To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health.
- Barry Lopez, Landscape and Narrative

Step away from the asphalt machine

"You could probably get rid of eighty percent of the paving in Los Angeles and make it infinitely more habitable."
- Carl Anthony, Ecopsychology and the Deconstruction of Whiteness in the anthology Ecopsychology.

On a total ecopsychology kick right now.  Love David Abrams.  Bill Plotkin seems a bit ethereal but interesting.  Have about seven Gary Snyder books out of the library. About to dig into Chellis Glendinnig.

And then there's Lewis Mumford weirdness: The Myth of the Machine. He argues for a larger definition of technology than is currently current. On-board there.  He points out that the first machines had human parts (think building the pyramids). Check.  He thinks domesticating (and castrating) animals led to castration anxiety. Umm, losing me... "But woman, freed from her masculine obligations to work and govern, no longer crippled physically by excessive muscular effort, became more enchanting not just for her sexuality but for her beauty." Really?  That's just creepy, even for a guy born in 1895. 

Rained a little at night on the last day of September, after not raining hardly at all in the month. 

Bamboo patch has turned brown and gold, wind, heat.  Grasses desiccate.

In which I meet a lord of the forest and a flower fairy, all within 24 hours

You are going along following your trail through the woods (the dark woods of the middle of life) and then kabam! you go through a portal or something and what was just an ordinary sort of day struggling along to keep your head above water turns into a mythic encounter that leaves you bewondered for days and days. 
Yes, in an ordinary office building at a routine meeting I met a lord of the forest, in whose grey, calm eyes I saw the depthless, wild night and in whose gentle voice I sensed the wheel of life and death unfolding as we talked of ordinary things. 
Then, less than a day later, I was buying some coffee to fuel me through what would turn out to be a very treacherous day, when I asked the young  woman behind the counter if the roses for sale outside were hers and all of sudden she transformed from a sweet hippie-chick to something entirely more passionate, as she introduced me to her roses by name and parentage and I saw that her soul and those of the roses had intertwined. 

All you really need to know

And my new Zen koan:

Meow means woof in cat. - George Carlin

The Renaissance

We have come through that terrible time when we were the slaves of money and marketing-brainwashing and the stupor of being governed by a stuporous bureaucracy. 

We have come through in tatters and ruin, not in triumph, but that is not a bad thing.

Enough of triumph.  Only children think you can win anything.

Wiser, we have come through, wiser to our own childishness, and wishing for something else. 

Let us not take planning as a substitute for doing, let us not take bureaucracy as a substitute for cooperation.  Let us choose a chaotic life over an orderly morbidity.  Let us choose freedom but not over compassion.  Let the good people of the Heartland join hands with the good people of the Coasts for the sake of the good hearts that they share however differently articulated. 

Let us go fearlessly towards peace, towards a brave peace, towards a poetry of courage and a gentle honor.

Let us understand death again, so that we can be alive.

Let us build only as much shelter as we need and no more. Let us clothe ourselves only as much as we need and no more.  Let us eat only what we need and no more.  Let us remember the making in all that we need.  Let us remember the body of the earth in all that we partake of.

Let us celebrate life and create a culture of life.

Full of good and happy things, full of honest work that we can be proud of, in which the good person is understood and let to flourish in that goodness.  In which our animal natures are not teased and  tormented for the sake of culture and money and glory and leadership. 

Let us not tease and torment each other.

With marketing.  With pornography.  With entertainment.  With fantasies that lead us to destroy the earth in their pursuit.  With social competitions that are empty and destructive, with the dire infection of consumerism.  Let us not inflict it upon each other. 

Teased and tormented we are, with the idea of being a leader; with the idea of business success; with the idea of sexual domination; with the fear of each other; with the images of ideal bodies that we are supposed to look like in order to be accepted, loved, safe; with the withholding of approval until we conform to a dead obedience; with vague threats of a misery and poverty and darkness if we do not also strive to consume the earth as fast as possible.  Let us not inflict this upon each other.

Let us walk free, run free, walk under starlight again, in our own humble and utterly unique and fragile bodies, among animals, as one of them again.   

The Bridge to the Future: A Fairytale

We all sense the abyss across which this thing that we call our civilization has been strung.  The abyss was supposed to be filled in.  But it never was.  We just kept adding more weight to the bridge.  It became more complicated, had more amenities: the bridge.  Actually we even undercut the rock at the base of our bridge in order to add amenities to the bridge.  To build a Starbucks.  There are gaps in the boards making up the walkway of our bridge.  We can see that we dangle in air.  For a time we thought we were fine, that the bridge would be held up by machines.  Then we realized that the machines ran on electricity, which required oil, which is running low.  But we still believe that the bridge will never fall, because how could it.  Because we are standing on it, and it has never fallen before.  Or at least not much.
And we think that we can fix it by meeting and discussing the ways to fix it.  So that is what we do.  We go back and forth on the bridge, running, flying, driving, lots of driving.  To go to meetings to talk about fixing the bridge and appropriating funding to fix the bridge.  But we don’t like going down into the abyss to actually see what is going on down there.  Because it’s messy and dirty and scary, and incomprehensible.  When we see what is wrong with bridge we don’t want to fix it because we would get dirty and we would miss some meetings, which are very jolly and the food is good.  So we tell the trolls that live under the bridge to fix it, but the trolls really hate us, although they’ve learned to smile and agree with us, and take the money that we give them to fix the bridge.  They spend the money on beer and cigarettes and don’t fix the bridge because why should they.  Or they do pretend repairs on the bridge, that look like a fix but is just paper mache that looks great for a while.  Some of the trolls are really good at telling us what we want to hear, about how wonderful the repair is and how wise we are to give the trolls money to fix the bridge.
After a while we notice that the bridge is as shaky as ever, no actually shakier and more decrepit, and we see that the paper mache has rotted through again.  So then we are very angry and send the police down to deal with the trolls.  But the trolls are all high on ice or weed and cannot be made to fix bridges.  They’re completely useless.  In fact they demand to get paid for not tearing down the bridge.  So then we have to pay them.  We send out an army to try and find new trolls and to make sure the oil still flows.   There are no new trolls and the oil is running ever lower.  The bridge is looking somewhat tattered but still impressive.
Some of our young ones get sick of our bullshit and go down to live with the trolls on the solid ground.  We think they are crazy.  Why would you abandon the bridge while it is still standing.  There’s still a lot of money in it.  It’s much cleaner on the bridge and there’s Fashion.  Down on the ground people just wear any old thing and not even clean.  Down on the ground they have to work. 

Some of the other young ones don’t even know that there is anything but the bridge.  They have plugged into the bridge.  They have only vaguely heard of the ground.  They are all highly medicated.  Some of them are extremely good at going to meetings and discussing the bridge.  Very sharp.  Some of them are extremely good at manipulating the bridge.  Some few live both on the ground and on the bridge, but no one believes them when they talk about  how badly undercut the bridge is.  Everyone just ignores them because they have gone down to the ground, which is just an odd, romantic, strange thing to do.  Everyone finds their tales of their life under the bridge very interesting and they admire them for their quaintness, but life goes on on the bridge and business is business.  Parts of the bridge are melting at this point, and this is pointed out, but life on the main parts of the bridge is so busy, so frantic.  Everyone is working so hard to stay on the parts of the bridge that still work (it’s like a game of musical chairs) that it doesn’t even matter anymore.  The fighting for the last bit of territory on the bridge is fierce and no one knows when their piece is going to collapse.  It’s all very interesting.  And of course there are more and more meetings to go to. 
I don’t know if the bridge will collapse or how.  It’s just a silly parable. 

The Ka'u News

It's raining now and it rained all night, gently but firmly.  Which is the biggest news since C got bit by a dog at Jimmy's house. 

Late Hayden Carruth Poem

After Television

I wonder continually about that time when we
Broke off from the other animals.  What were we
Thinking, if anything? Were we trying to toss
All of our aunts, uncles cousins into the
Dumpster in one grand renunciation? I wouldn't
Be surprised.  And was that the moment when
Our centuries of egomania began? Oh, my dears,
The Bengal tiger, the biggest cat in the world,
Who was our friend and protector on the plain,
In the tall grass and under the squirmy trees,
Is now down to a population of only 400.
Where did all the others go? Of course we know.
We gave the command that drove them out.  And then
So many, many thousand and thousands of other
Wonderful beings, whose minds and hearts we knew
In our earliest perception, knew and loved.
That knowledge and love tinge our thought
Today, and fill us with this inexhaustible sadness
Which we acknowledge in our mumbling days
And which cause us to nod our heads slowly
And stupidly when moonlight shines on water.

Sainkho Namtchylak

Doing annual accounting (not my favorite thing) but just discovered on new favorite singer Sainkho Namtchylak on YouTube.   And it's raining!!!

Country Zen

To imagine the thoughtlessness
of a thoughtless thing
is useless.
The mind must sing
of itself to keep awake

-Wendell Berry, from "Design of a House" (1969)

I think Berry and Dogen would get along just fine.

Energy

Met Prof. Charles Hall last week, which was fun.  He is all about EROI (Energy Return on Investment) and about getting the social science of economics to recognize the existence of the "biophysical" realm of stuff, which is to say embodied energy.
He mentioned that he had received his training from one Howard Odum , and lo and behold, here's a very lovely scientist-guy who saw the world exactly as the transformation of energy.  And you know he looks a bit like the wise old farmer in "Babe."

You might say, well of course economics is about stuff, but they, the Economists, don't talk about stuff, they talk about money - about interest rates and commodity prices and consumer confidence.  And you might say, well of course the world is composed of the transformation of energy, but you would be surprised how fixated we are by the thought that, no, energy is something you put in a gas tank or that runs in wires. 
That's how deranged we are by our own concepts.

New Year, Old Weather Pattern

Today the Wind came back.  It's a formidable wind out of the northeastthat beats that against the flank of Mauna Loa like a flail from 9 am until 4 pm, approximately.  It had stopped for a couple of weeks, for Christmas and New Years days, when it rained gloriously and gently on the wind-whipped land and green sprouts sprang up everywhere.  It is such a pleasure to be inconvenienced by rain: to have to run my back-up generator because the batteries on my solar-system run dow, to have to remember to roll up the truck windows, to have to wear rubber boots in the morning, and get splattered by mud in the corrals, to find out where the roof leaks, and where the road is pothole-d.  All of those little inconvenieces are a welcome change from the constant, gut-churning fear of running out of feed and water for the cattle.  I hope the Wind does not stay long.  I have hopes that 2013 will be a kinder year.