Uncle Abel Versus The World

Uncle Abel is not really my uncle.  You call almost everyone of the older generation uncle or aunty in Hawaiʻi.  In the twenty years that I have known Uncle Abel we’ve been on the opposite sides of the question more often than not, which is to say in enemy camps, although not exactly enemies.  But the differences don’t matter as much as what we have in common. What matters is that we love the same place.  We have a shared history with a small bay and section of land called Kawā. He lived there for years, and I worked there for years.
Kawā might not look like much at first glance.  It's a small bay with a rocky, pebbly beach where the wind is usually blowing briskly.  There is no white sand and no palm trees.  The surf is  rough and the water cold. However, on a small bluff above the bay at Kawā are the spectacular ruins of an ancient heiau (temple) and on the flat below the foundations of a village site.  These are what we used to call “archeology,” and what we now refer to as “cultural resources." Not long ago relics such as these were considered of minimal significance compared to the demands of commerce and progress, but now they have become links to the pre-contact, pre-industrial past.  There is a large brackish pond behind the beach that is considered an important wet-land  for multiple species of endangered native birds.  Kawā also has one of the few surf-breaks in the district and that in itself makes it precious to surfers of all ages.
I worked with my family on the ranch lands above the bay where Abel lived. We both impinged on each other’s realm with a casual, lawless tolerance that is nearly un-imaginable now-adays.  We pumped brackish water out of the pond and his crew of hippie-hangers-on set up camp on a piece of land inset within the ranch.  They had a Rainbow Festival one weekend and a number of the visitors stayed on for months in a constantly dwindling camp.  We thought they were funny and harmless.  None of that would be possible now.   You have to do everything by the book even out here.  You have to have all your permits in order these days.
We haven’t spoken much, Abel and I, over the years, but we’ve been on the same land. We’ve known of each other as distant neighbors. Weʻve both heard stories of each other, as one does in a small community; we’ve seen each other coming and going for a couple of decades now.
Abel is politically radical, a native sovereignty activist who camped for years near the beach at Kawā.  I’m politically centrist, non-native, middle-class, highly indoctrinated into conventional life.  I can count on my two hands the nights I’ve slept anywhere but on a nice, soft bed.  I’m on the slightly unconventional side of conventional; Uncle Abel takes unconventional to a whole other level.
Uncle Abel has the long gray-white hair and the thin, high-cheek-boned face of a Chinese sage, but his skin is dark brown, mottled with sun spots.  His eyes, somewhat rheumy now, can glare at you with a manic insistence. Today he is wearing two ti leaves around his neck which he has tied together and shredded.  Also he is wearing a pareau in black, green, gold and red.  All of these things have a specific meaning: the two leaves - a minimalist ascetic lei  -asserts his pure spiritual authority; the pareau echoes the colors of the flag of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.
We are both at a county government hearing - an advisory commission that recommends lands for preservation.   Abel is giving one of his famous speeches. He is protesting everything.  I’ve always admired his gift as a speaker.  He had the dramatic genius of a Shakespearean actor. When he was in top form, he was a public enemy to those in power and a cult favorite for those who were not.  He was able to keep large crowds spell-bound by his unpredictability and mad prophet oratory.  Even if you did not agree with him, even if he made you uncomfortable, Uncle Abel meant “action” - as in quite possibly police action.  It was high entertainment.
Abel has a signature line that he uses in every speech I've heard him give: “Ka’ū (the name of our district)” he intones meaningfully, drawing out the last vowel, “ has never been conquered.” He says this in a dramatic whisper,  turning around to confront his audience his eyes wide, daring anyone to contradict him.  His voice rising in volume, he continues: “I no recognize no government: county, state, federal.  We was never conquered you see? We the government. We, the people.”
Technically speaking he is wrong.  Our district was conquered over and over again by various ancient chiefs, but we are dealing with political myth-making here, not pedestrian historical facts. And his favorite line expresses something that is, in a mythical sense, essential. Ka’u is the hinterland of the island.  It has always been sparsely populated and poor.  This is mostly because there are few sources of fresh water, because the district is downwind from the volcano, because the soil is rocky, the climate arid, and the oceans rough.  It is a difficult place to make a living.  Nevertheless, the people of this district, Ka’ū, are passionate about their land and fierce in their politics.  Ka’ū is known as a land of rebels.  We don’t bend the knee.
But Abel had the calling to take it quite a bit farther than the rest of us.  He wonʻt go along with our modern conveniences, like private property, representative government, hot showers and refrigerators, and in his passions he calls shame upon all of it and all of us. (He does have a Facebook page though, of course.)  In his radical rejection of all modern forms of life, we part ways with Abel, and yet not completely.   We say to ourselves, “Well, he is crazy.”  And yet he humiliates us in our acquiescence and opens up a space for questioning the status quo.
He has heart.  Even his most ardent detractors would have to give him that.  And there are plenty of people who dislike him intensely.  Mostly people who he has challenged in their position of public or private authority.  My friend who works for the county parks department has had many run-ins with Abel.  He says: “Abel doesn’t like me much, because I made him spend his seventieth birthday in the county jail.”
He loves to make trouble to those in power.   He’s good at it. Once when the County evicted him from Kawā he planted a taro patch on the lawn in front of the big glass windows of the Mayorʻs office.  He is a political performance artist, a show-boat, an anarchist. But I’ve never heard of him doing anything low-down and dishonorable. At least recently.  Well, he used to shake down the beach visitors.  From what people have told me, including he himself, he would demand things - hoʻokupu (small offerings) like toilet paper, or money - to support his occupation.  He once asked my father if he could kill one of his cows.  My dad said no.
There was a rumor that he had murdered somebody in Honolulu a long time ago.  Thatʻs why he  holed up in Kawā in the first place.  And then somehow he decided that it was his to guard.  I would be very surprised if the rumor was true.  There is an Old Testament madness to him, but no malice and no sneakiness. He might say outrageous things about you but he’ll do it straight to your face, which is better than some people. Heʻs not a violent person - well, there was that one time that he and his sister got into a doubles wrestling match in the brackish pond with Kyle Soares and his wife.  The police had to break it up, evidently. And, well, Iʻm sure there was plenty of blame to go around on that one.  But other than that, Abel is peaceful, as far as I know.
Having named himself the konohiki, or guardian of the place, Abel lived at the beach for years, and kept a close eye on all goings on.  He was famous for confronting anyone who showed up in an official-looking vehicle and chasing them off.  As konohiki he considered it his right to do so, as they were threats to his authority.  He also grew native food plants and organized surfing contests at the beach in the heyday of his self-appointed reign as guardian.
Other people in the community had better documented familial ties to the lands of Kawā than Abel. They considered him a usurper and a fraud. Some people found his retinue of penniless hippies distasteful. But they mostly tolerated Abelʻs antics because his occupation threw a wrench in any attempt to develop Kawā and helped to maintain their native, familial claims to the land without actually having to live on the beach themselves.
Abelʻs advocacy for Kawā may have backfired on him. His term as konohiki of the beach at Kawā ended when it was purchased by the County of Hawaii for public space and natural resource preservation.   At first Abel refused to leave and there were many tense confrontations between he and his followers and County officials. Eventually Abel was evicted. On one level he failed, in that he is no longer the konohiki of Kawā. On another level he succeeded in his very failure - the public purchase of the wild beach and ancestral sites of Kawā protect it for the foreseeable future from the commercial developments that transform  shorelines all over the world into resorts and other artificial paradises.
Is Abel a saint or a fool? A visionary or a clown? One thing is clear: he long ago stopped worrying about how to make a living or being respectable or playing the game.  He gave all that up in a way that makes me slightly vertiginous just to think about.  He walks a wild edge of the mind with only the place, Kawā, to return to, to keep him centered.   He is a brave person.

Ka'u CDP passes the County Council

The Ka'u Community Development Plan was approved yesterday by the Hawai'i County Council.  A Community Development Plan is a document that attempts to express the vision of the community as to planned development and conservation.   Our CDP has one provision that is unprecedented in Hawaii as far as I know  - a stipulation that strongly dis-encourages building within 1/4 mile of the shoreline.  It is, understandably, not a popular idea among  prospective real estate developers, but most people in Ka'u love it.  The almost entirely undeveloped shoreline of Ka'u truly is our common pride and joy; something that everyone in the district can glory in whether they are from an old Ka'u family or newly arrived, whether young or old, rich or poor.

When the Community Development Plan process started in 2008 my daughter was seven years old, a second grader, still learning to read.  Now she's doing trigonometry and driving.  How crazy is that? I'm not complaining, mind you.  I've gotten used to government stuff taking a decade or two.   Those hours of attending meetings after a long days work, the minor psychic trauma incurred  from being yelled at during contentious decisions or when people had perfectly legitimate concerns but no other venue to express them, the stacks of reading material - all of that was a privilege and an honor, as is always the case in getting to be a very small part of representative democracy.   

I am super-proud of our County for sticking up for it and for us. A lot of time we grumble about the corruption and inefficiency of government but sometimes it can be a wonderful, hopeful thing.  Not perfect, usually infuriating, but overall, a very good thing.

Anima/Soul

So, dear readers of Kuehu Lepo, the wiliwili is in blossom (which traditionally meant that it was also the time that the sharks were having their babies, so not a good time to go swimming, since mama shark in mother bear mode, not good) and I have started a new blog collective thingy called Anima/Soul: A Gathering Place. Come on over, check it out, and contribute a comment or a blog post or a quote or a photo.  No sked, do it!  :)

George Helm

Nohealani Kaʻawa in testimony supporting the preservation of Waikapuna quoting George Helm at the PONC (Public Access, Open Space and Natural Resouces) Commission:

A native Hawaiian man can sit on a spot at the beach and feel the ocean and the wind and sky and sense their ancestors there in that place with them, and know that they must care for the place so that their descendants can also experience these things.

A Western man will sit in the exact same place and say: “How can I make this work for me?”

(my paraphrase)

Henry Curtis in the House!

I was super-honored that Henry Curtis (who is an all-around legendary force to be reckoned with in the sustainability and energy arena here in Hawaii) attended the session I moderated at the Hawaii Ag Conference, but not only that he wrote a blog post about it.  You should read it because the three panelists that I had the honor of introducing are amazing young thinkers and do-ers. Thank you, Henry! Thank you, Life of the Land for always showing up with the hard questions for the powers that be!

http://www.ililani.media/2017/08/climate-change-and-indigenous.html

Also, if you are a Ka'u person, please testify in support of the Ka'u CDP (Community Development Plan) on Wednesday, September 6 at 9:15 in person at the County Council Chambers in Hilo or by video-conference at the State Office Building in beautiful downtown Na'alehu.  The CDP will help to keep Ka'u's coastline undeveloped and its lands in agriculture.

Never Enough

'Tis the sickness of Western civilization.  Nothing is ever enough. There always has to be more. The sickness makes us unstoppable because we cannot stop.  We always win because we cannot stop, but we can never win because it's never enough.

We have to keep building in order to keep winning. We have to have more because we have nothing.  Everything was taken before we knew what it was.  How could we know what was being taken?  How could we know that our animal bodies, mute and humble, were our greatest treasures?  How could we know that we would learn the fear of death along with our name? How could we know that every word would be a wall between us and our animal bodies?  How could we know that it was all a trap? How could we know we could get so lost?

But there is always the daylight and the night, and what we lost is right there before us, waiting for our return.

Borderlands II

Without realizing it you might find yourself in the borderlands between the citadel of civilization and the outer territories - those states of chaos and truth that we long ago built a wall against and left behind. It is an invisible wall, of course, a psychological wall, a wall that is as much a cutting as a building, both bulwark and wound simultaneously. It is a wall of words, and of what came before words, the first intention, the first plan of attack or of defense, the first knowledge of fear, of life and death. I want to go there, back there. You can never go back, and yet you can, not in innocence, but in a non-innocence that is neither cynical nor wise.
Our civilization wants to shut out the experience of open-ness, of open space. Cut out and box up. This is a short-term fix to our fears and anxieties. Our words harden and we forget that we live in the boxes of civilization by choice, that we choose our duration in the rooms and hallways, the enclosed mental and physical spaces, of civilization.

Say its Name, over and over again,
Naming what is beautiful and what is dark,
Standing under the mountains:
Pākua, Makanau, Kaʻiholena, Puʻuiki, Puʻuone.

Borderlands

I am in Phoenix - in the Valley of the Sun - in a hotel room with the air conditioning blasting full out. It is so different here from my usual environment, I hardly know what to think, I hardly know who I am. The “American way” seems overwhelming - the buildings so massive, the machines so pervasive, the wastefulness so ingrained. There doesn’t seem to be any alternative.  Do your job. Don’t ask questions. Try to keep up. Keep the wheels turning. Drive faster.

It is a kind of artificial paradise, a dream world. I believe in it and disown it at the same time. I believe in it practice. I rent a car and drive it through the tangle of freeways, air-conditioner blowing hard because the heat outside feels deadly. I take a long shower in water that has been pumped up from a depleting water-table.

I disown it in theory - in a kind of future tense. It can’t go on like this, right? This city keep growing and growing: more people, more houses, more cars, more water consumption, more air-conditioning. Perhaps it can, into infinity. Perhaps I don’t have a big enough imagination.

I see a headline in a newspaper: Arizona is growing faster than the national average.

***

I meet Bella, a white woman who is married to a Native American chief. She says to me: “We need a way out of this nightmare that we live in.”

I agree: what we need more than anything is a way out. A viable direction that does not lead to destruction. We have a direction - what we call civilization or The Way Things Are. But civilization is what drives us to destroy the very environment which we need to survive and thrive. Civilization makes us keep on driving and flying and buying and building. Civilization - at least the current version - is based on compulsive competition between humans.

Our plan is non-viable because it is partial, incomplete, and increasingly dysfunctional. It, perhaps inherently, lacks the ability to see the entire picture of human existence within our physical and biological environment.

It is a strangely disembodied approach to life. We have been captured - enslaved even - by the words, images, and sign systems that we ourselves created. We are polluting our own habitat, the actual world, in the pursuit of symbols and phantasms (money, profit, fame.) We are destroying the physical world - and harming our own bodies - in the name of fragile, transparent virtual worlds.

***

The plan we call civilization worked for a while, when there were not so many of us humans and an abundance of natural resources to discover, but that time is past and our plan is outdated.

The old plan was about individually and collectively figuring out how to discover, extract and process natural resources for human consumption and prosperity. The old plan only sees human needs. It is blind to the necessity of maintaining a non-human environment. It is all about taking - about being better at taking from the environment than everyone else.

The new plan has to come to terms with the concept that we are on a finite planet and that we need to share it with other forms of life. The old alternate theories of communism and socialism and even libertarian anarchism did not go back far enough: they all still assume that natural resources are dead material to be disposed in the sole interest of humankind. None of them question the foundations of civilization. None of them question human self-interest. None of them ask us to share our world with non-humans

Why do we need to share it? For the selfish reason that we probably won’t survive otherwise, but also because a living, flourishing world is better than a dead, destroyed one, and all other forms of life have an inherent value. We cannot value our own life without valuing it in other living beings.

What is the difference between the old plan and the new plan that we need to formulate? It is the difference between extraction and regeneration, the difference between exploiting and nurturing, between taking and giving. A viable plan will actively nurture Life on this planet: Life in all its variety and resplendence of species and natural systems.
The new plan, quite simply, is to nurture life. Starting exactly where you are. The new plan will call each of us to turn all of our human powers of strategizing, organizing, competing, and innovating from exploiting life to nurturing Life.
It starts with letting go. Letting go of the old idea of what it means to be a successful human. Letting go of the idea that you have to be better than anybody else in the terms of the old game. Letting go of the fear of death, weakness, and vulnerability. Letting go of the idea that only human selves matter. It starts with letting go in order to get bigger.

To be human means to be more than human, or at least it should be. Our challenge is to expand beyond the boundaries of our skins and the enclosures of human culture. We cannot be simply human, simply our species. Our humanity does not exist without the non-human. We are both dependent upon and enmeshed with the environment that we live in. We are our environment. That is the bigger self that we could strive for.
In becoming bigger, we can see more broadly and therefore more truly. Bigger, wiser, more engaged. In becoming bigger we can see farther and find a direction, a way out.

Barbarian at the Gates of St. Peter

I have been mulling something that I read in the Meditations of Thomas Traherne, the English poet and priest.  What he says is that faith in God is to the soul, as the soul is to the body.  This schema has helped me to understand religion in general, and monotheistic religions in particular.  That hierarchical vision of mind/body dualism that we all know so well from the history of Christianity, in which the body is a kind of animal controlled by the higher power of the soul has another layer, in Traherne's schema. Faith governs and inspires the soul as the soul inspires the body.  To put it another way, faith in God gives the faithful a kind of super-power.  A spiritual and moral super-power.  No wonder religion is so appealing! This individual super-power is on top of the social power that is concentrated and organized by religious institutions and shared by those who belong to a church, etc.  Traherne's formulation might not be so revelatory to someone with a better religious education than I, who was only lightly exposed to religion as a child, and never truly understood the appeal of the Abrahamic religions.  I can grasp a little better how important faith can be in a person's life.
What I love about Traherne is that he is an uncommonly honest and paradoxical mystic. He speaks of the amorphous with brutal clarity. He sees the violence that is half-concealed in Christianity and owns up to it. For him, universal oneness is not a nice feeling but a never-ending and total responsibility to all the world.

Climate Change and Indigenous Culture

Climate change is here, like the Old Testament God, with thunder and brimstone, hurricanes and drought.  I have a friend who is of the distinctly denial-ist cast of mind, and he can only say "well, what are we going to do about it?"  There is nothing we can do about it.  When your planet is raining judgment on your ass, there's nothing you can "do about it", as in try to get it to stop.  There's no bargaining with a planetary system, at least by such paltry beings as we are.
But we can mend our ways, not because it's going to "arrest" climate change, that isn't going to happen, but to start on the long, long road to making another way of life that might be viable in the long, long run.  A way of life that respects the inter-relationship between civilization and biology, rather than our current way of life that is based on us civilized humans shamelessly and short-sightedly exploiting biology (and geology and each other and everything that we can get our hands on.)  We've been refining the machine for thousands of years now - the civilizational machine that let us crush every indigenous culture that ever humbly co-existed with an environment.  "We" "won."  And in winning, it seems that we lost as much as we won.
I'm re-reading Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which is a fine book that presents an environmental explanations for why "the West" could crush every other culture in the world.  His explicit purpose is to counter the white supremacist argument, so common until relatively recently and still lurking out there at present, that "the West" "won" because white Europeans are better at everything.  Diamond's argument is convincing and necessary.
But I'm also arguing with the book as much as I am agreeing with it, because Diamond can't seem to help siding with the conquerors. Can't blame him, it's a long tradition in our culture to side with the winners,  because we're that kind of culture.  But being able to conquer and annihilate another culture is not winning.  This is becoming increasingly clear as our conquering machine of a civilization has come to the end of its leash, having poisoned all the wells and enslaved all the people.  So here we are, with the Arctic and Antarctic breaking apart, struggling to figure out how to live, when all those native peoples that we ran over maybe had some insights on the question.

BTW, come to the Hawaii Agricultural Conference y'all, where there will be multiple sessions on indigenous agriculture.

The Passion and Prejudice of the Newly Woke

I discovered feminism in college and for a couple of years that’s all I wanted to think about. Once I got my head around how to use it, I wanted to exercise that intellectual hammer to pound on anything that even vaguely resembled a nail. I came home on break and made incisive observations about my parents’ relationship, some of them out loud even, I’m embarrassed to remember. I’m still an ardent feminist but I’ve stopped being so childishly judgmental about it, I hope. It’s a tool to use, and actual people and their actual relationships are more interesting and a thousand times more complicated than any -ism ever invented. My radical feminist stage has matured to an ongoing practice that is less about judgement and more about compassion for everyone, both men and women, who have been ill-served by the age-old patterns of patriarchy. We can build better patterns, I am certain of it, and that certainty is more powerful than my old insurgency. But it will take time, that slow daily grind of making something real as dirt.
I try to remember my own fervent embrace of feminism when faced with people who seem a little drunk on ideology. For instance, those who, having recently become aware that their food doesn’t magically appear in the grocery stores, denounce “industrial agriculture” or “corporations” every time the existence of the modern food system comes up. Or that denounce “profit” and “corporations” because they’ve recently discovered capitalism and the kleptocratic patterns that it creates. The newly woke have to draw and enforce bright lines between good and evil, us and them, in order to consolidate and confirm their own understanding.
Likewise our species, homo sapiens, having created a new tool - a peculiar form of consciousness built around linguistic symbolism - are drunk as a new born feminist (or communist or nationalist or evangelical) on the power and possibilities that our ideological distinction seems to offer. We draw bright lines between us and them - us humans and all other forms of life that don’t have our kind of consciousness.
Only we humans matter because we are conscious; this is  the ideology we’ve lived by for thousands of years now, but a thousand years is nothing, a blink of the eye on the timescale of biology and geology.
It is a childishly selfish way to look at the world, an absolutism that hides our deep uncertainly. We are uncertain of the existence and meaning of our own consciousness. We know ourselves to be but newly woke, and that our time as this consciousness, this Me awoken from the darkness of all the ages that have come before, to be limited, imperiled, uncertain. It is a fragile, intricate, miraculous thing - this consciousness that we inhabit, that is all that we know.
Knowing this we are afraid for it.  We are so afraid of losing what we just got ahold of. We want to define and defend it, against all that is not conscious, against death, against our own mortal, biological bodies - even if that defensiveness doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s understandable, we’re new at this.

Sangria

I fell in love with a steer, my daughter's 4-H project steer Sangria. This was not a wise thing to do, since I knew from the start, from the day we brought him home, that he was going to the slaughterhouse on a definite date.  But I couldn't help myself - he was so sweet-tempered a creature there was no getting around getting attached to him.  "Getting attached" when you are a rancher/professional predator is never a good idea.  It makes things complicated and messy.  It is emotionally dangerous.  It is even intellectually dangerous.  Not to mention impractical.
And yet "getting attached" is quite possibly the kernel and core of what it means to be alive.  If you are not helplessly attached to something, someone, someplace or even some idea, then maybe you aren't really living.  That's where I  have a fundamental disagreement with the Buddha. Avoiding suffering is no way to live a life.  Non-attachment is not the goal, even if attachment causes suffering. Attachments make the heart sing, and I'm happy to suffer for my attachments.
Now, you might say, "if you were so attached to that steer, why didn't you save him from his fate, from being slaughtered?"  But that would be to turn him into a pet and that, strangely enough - from my point of view - would be a form of disrespect.  It would be to deny the biological relationship between grass/herbivore/carnivore, which is the much bigger context.  Of course, that biological relationship has been massively twisted and even perverted by our civilization/economic system but deep under all the complexities and alienations that our civilization allows and imposes is an ancient relationship that is more significant than the individual lives of the plants and animals tangled together within it.
Which is all perhaps a long-winded justification, but here is the challenge: can we eat as if every bite of food had a name? As if every article of clothing or electronic gadget came from a cotton plant or vein in a mine that merited a name and all the attachment that a name implies?  Can we privilege the vitality of broader ecological relationships over a concept of prosperity that only values human prosperity?

Civil Wars

I sing the civil warrs, tumultuous broyles,
And bloudy factions of a might land:
Whose people hauty, proud with forain spoyles,
Upon themselves, turne back their conquering hand:

-Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), quoted in David Armitage's Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017)

This is an English poet echoing the literary and military heritage of Rome to write about the civil war in England between the houses of Lancaster and York (which we are revisiting on HBO as Lannisters and Starks),  as well as presaging the imperial quandaries of our American present.  Are we not in the midst of civil war (with votes, thank god) in US?  Are we not a "people hauty" in our consumerist excesses made possible by our conquering super-power status?

David Armitage's elegant and compact book Civil Wars is both subtle and, for me at least, novel in its analysis of the distinctions between "regular" war, civil war, rebellion, revolution and insurrection.  I'll not think so casually about the deployment of such terms ever again.   And thinking clearly about these distinctions might be helpful in understanding where we stand as global citizens in this moment that seems so fraught with incoherence and instability.

Thomas Traherne 1636-1674

Last week I discovered Thomas Traherne, the English priest, poet, and essayist.  If - and its a big if - there is a new consciousness being born on the edge of ruin, he is one of its most luminous and strange ancestors.  

22.

It is of the nobility of man’s soul that he is insatiable. For he hath a Benefactor so prone to give, that He delighteth in us for asking. Do not your inclinations tell you that the World is yours? Do you not covet all? Do you not long to have it; to enjoy it; to overcome it? To what end do men gather riches, but to multiply more? Do they not like Pyrrhus, the King of Epire, add house to house and lands to lands; that they may get it all? It is storied of that prince, that having conceived a purpose to invade Italy, he sent for Cineas, a philosopher and the King’s friend: to whom he communicated his design, and desired his counsel. Cineas asked him to what purpose he invaded Italy? He said, to conquer it. And what will you do when you, have conquered it? Go into France, said the King, and conquer that. And what will you do when you have conquered France? Conquer Germany. And what then? said the philosopher. Conquer Spain. I perceive, said Cineas, you mean to conquer all the World. What will you do when you have conquered all? Why then said the King we will return, and enjoy ourselves at quiet in our own land. So you may now, said the philosopher, without all this ado. Yet could he not divert him till he was ruined by the Romans. Thus men get one hundred pound a year that they may get another; and having two covet eight, and there is no end of all their labour; because the desire of their Soul is insatiable. Like Alexander the Great they must have all: and when they have got it all, be quiet. And may they not do all this before they begin? Nay it would be well, if they could be quiet. But if after all, they shall be like the stars, that are seated on high, but have no rest, what gain they more, but labour for their trouble? It was wittily feigned that that young man sat down and cried for more worlds to conquer. So insatiable is man, that millions will not please him. They are no more than so many tennis-balls, in comparison of the Greatness and Highness of his Soul.

30.

Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world. Till you more feel it than your private estate, and are more present in the hemisphere, considering the glories and the beauties there, than in your own house: Till you remember how lately you were made, and how wonderful it was when you came into it: and more rejoice in the palace of your glory, than if it had been made but to-day morning.

Centuries of Meditation

Rojava update

Rojava is probably the most fascinating, unlikely thing going on in the great big world right now.   I can hardly believe that it's a real thing, and not a fairy-tale - a scary, amazing fairy-tale of women taking up arms against ISIS amidst all the danger and destruction of Syria. 

Here's the latest from the Guardian.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Look up now, feeble creature, and see what you are.  
- The Cloud of Unknowyng, anonymous, 14th c.

What do we know?
Honestly, almost nothing really useful.
We know a lot about exploiting each other and the environment, how to make war and entertainment, how to construct bubble worlds and get lost in them.  We know a lot about all of that and it's all short-term stuff.
How to live honestly, clear-sightedly - we know almost nothing about that.
It's making us crazy.
If we've made any real progress at all (and it's very uneven), it's that we know that we don't know, even if we don't want to admit it.
It's making us crazy not admitting that we don't know how to live.
It's hard to remember, to keep clear about, because we just get carried along.
To succeed in the short-term, forget about the long-term.
Doesn't that sum it up?  The trap that we keep falling into.
Almost everything we think we know is just rubbish.
"mistaken ideas that were preventing man from using his brains."
A whole lot of that.
It's pretty funny.

The Obscure Charm of Civilization: Rene Magritte on Descartes

Descartes's work, exciting as it was when it first appeared, is now merely used as an antiquated reference system for academic philosophers, when it is hardly more than an elegant example of the art of writing. But Descartes did have the audacity to try to rid the human mind of mistaken ideas that were preventing man from using his brains.  Descartes made use of the "material" of his times - i.e. God and the existence of the real physical world - as subjects for intelligent meditations.  While on the one hand exerting the intelligence was valuable, on the other, the unsatisfactory "material" at his disposal could only produce a miserable result, such as the logical proof of the real existence of the physical world.   Rene Magritte, Selected Writings, trans. Jo Levy (2016)

On migration, invasive species, and the concept of enough

I am the product of two very different economic-cultural-political migrations of people meeting in Ka'u.  My mother, who is from upstate New York and of Northern European descent (mostly English and Dutch), came to Hawaii as an elementary school teacher.  As the single mother of a mixed race child, she was very consciously searching for a multi-cultural, tolerant place in the United States where she could raise her child.  Here she met my father who is the descendant of people imported by the sugar plantation from the Philippines as agricultural labor.  His parents had worked long and patiently in field and mill to provide college educations to their children.

Of course both of the migrant groups represented in my parents moved into a physical and cultural space of decimation.  The native Hawaiian culture and its people that had existed here for centuries had been nearly destroyed by aggressive economic and political forces that came with European explorers, missionaries, and whalers, and by the Old World epidemic diseases that they carried with them. If the native Hawaiians or other native people had been more suspicious of outsiders could they   prevented some of the destruction visited upon them? Perhaps, but it might have meant succumbing to the worst in themselves - aggression, violence, hate.

Although relatively light compared to the impact of Western culture, the arrival of the Polynesian explorers and settlers with their canoe plants and animals also caused serious environmental impacts and was responsible for the extinction of many species. Even before that, in the time before humans ever found these remote islands, there were earlier species of plants and animals that were over-run by later arrivals.  On a long enough timeline our human self-obsession vanishes in a puff of insignificant smoke.  We're no different than the little fire-ants or purple miconia or coqui frogs that we love to lament and decry and attempt to exterminate.

Today the French are holding the first round of a presidential election in which the issues of cultural and ethnic purity and priority are a defining factor, as they were in the Brexit vote and the rise of Trump.  Who gets to migrate where? Who gets to define what borders? Who gets to live where?  Who makes the decisions and on what criteria?  What is the carrying capacity of an area and who gets to decide that? These are the brutal questions that are being asked at this moment.

On the one hand this brutality is un-necessary at this point in time because with even a slight decrease in wastefulness we can well afford for any of the seven billion humans on this earth to find a place to live away from war and drought.  On the other hand, even if we were to make that slight change in how we do civilization there will come a day when there are flat out too many humans everywhere.  We are a very aggressive invasive species.  We reproduce too easily and we live too long and we consume too much.

We in the US especially have forgotten the concept of Enough that older, less technological cultures, especially those on islands or in arid environments, had to learn.  What is enough - what are the limits?  How do we live and work within those limits?

Instead we always want more.  More money, more stuff, more beauty, more time, more power, more influence, more business, more market-share.  This is not to say that the older cultures were perfect and that we must "go back" to their ways, as if that were even possible.  It is simply to recognize that they do have something to teach about finding the place of enough.

In a sense, the concept of enough is at play in todays election in France in that it is a referendum on migration.  But whether or not we can hold artificial nation-state borders with walls, weaponry and deportations is a brutal, simple-minded and temporary formulation of the concept.  Whatever walls we built on our borders will be built inside ourselves as well.  Whoever we exclude becomes a monster in the dungeon.  Enough should not be about closing doors.  Enough should be about learning to live within the limits of place and planet. That is the long, difficult, perilous journey in which we are all migrants no matter who we are and where we live.

Rosa Brooks, Badass Defense Policy Chick

Little wonder, then, that “the international community” struggles to respond effectively to the challenges posed by “failed” states. From the perspective of an alien observer from another planet, the “international community” of the planet earth would surely appear like a failed state writ large; it has proven consistently unable to control the violence of powerful actors (whether states or non state entities such as terrorist organizations), control environmental catastrophes such as climate change; remedy astronomically large economic inequities between individuals and societies, constrain the devastating scramble to exploit the earth’s dwindling natural resources, or address crises such as global epidemics.
Just as Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq are fractured into numerous competing ethnic and religious groups dominated by warlords and other regional power brokers, the international order still better resembles a Hobbesian struggle for survival than a coherent system of governance. If there is some sense in which all the world’s people constitute a society (and why not insist on that, in this era of globalization and human rights?), it is hard not to conclude that the international community is simply a failed state on a global scale.

Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (2015)

Rosa Brooks just kinda kicked me in the butt. I have to admit that when I read about the Middle East/North Africa there's a part of me that says: "Well, thank whatever, I don't live there, it's far away, they've been fighting at least since the end of WWI and what can I do?" But Rosa Brooks says: "Wake the hell up, hello? Airplanes? Internet? Global trade networks? It's one world and we just have to deal with that fact whether or not the mere idea of a global government gets your panties in a twist or not."
Being an American rancher, I do know quite a few people, who, although fine individuals on a person to person basis, do get panicky at the mere idea of a global government. And I understand some of their fears: a global government evokes visions of more urbane suit-wearers and "cultural creatives" who don't understand the brute realities of agriculture or the other lowly extractive occupations and who are basically living off the sweat of our brows while making up all the rules and norms (and accumulating all the QE money.) I get it.
But that kind of resentment is short-sighted, to put it nicely.
"It's never to late to be brave." Rosa Brooks again. Brave enough to look straight at the fact that we are one society and have been for some time. And the sooner we act like one society, the less of a failed state we'll make for ourselves and our kids.

It's an excellent book, that I never would have read if I didn't have a completely awesome though tiny (about the size of a shipping container) local library.  Which, right there, is a small, mundane, miraculous example of what a successful society looks like.

I almost missed March all together

I've been tangling with weird post-concussive after-affects.  My taste and smell have got all messed up.  For most of March I've had the taste of gasoline and ashes in my mouth.  At random levels of intensity.  Which is distracting.
At first I thought there was something wrong with my mouth, like I had a gum infection maybe.  But it would come and go.  And was worse when I was under stress, for instance sleep deprivation.    So I realized it was my brain.  I checked the internet, and, yup, it's a thing.
Most all intense smells and tastes get translated into that one taste/smell: somewhere between ammonia, gasoline, and ashes.  My daughter postulated that I'd got banged out of the Matrix and so was taste/smelling the world as it actually is.  Which is not true because...it's not that kind of world.  At least not yet. It's still riotously multi-smellular.  Hopefully it will always be.

Dream Horses

The worst thing is to have an answer.  That means something died in you, when you have an answer.   Life doesn’t have an answer, just more questions. The worst thing is to find an answer that will make you right.  That is the worst mind trap.  It is better to not be “right.”  It is better to be quite mistaken.  That is where life is, it is never right.  Life is one big mistake. 

Writing can be a form of humility.  I always thought of it as prideful, attention-seeking, boastful, and it can be that way, but it can also be a way of paying attention to the world, of admitting one’s ignorance and of offering what little one has to something greater than oneself.

When I am riding I am in an older and less tame place and that is my happiness.

To the degree that one is domesticated and civilized, one is trapped within structures and parameters, as surely as any other domesticated beast.  To the degree that one is safe one is also trapped, to the degree one is willing to wager life and comfort, there are choices.

We are not the beings that we think we are.  We think through the body of the brittle star or the sparrow as much as through our own - through the body of the dirt on which we place our feet, the polyester or cotton or silk of the pillow on which we rest our head, the metal of our machines, the air we breathe.  There is no Nature in itself - no Ding an sich - because we are things ourselves.  There is no line that separates us from death.  Everything reverberates.  We exist through that which would destroy us as much as what brings us health.  The idea that our own personal selves matter very much is a silly fixation.  We are part of something much larger than our physical selves, even our social selves; that is the being that we are.

Last night I dreamt of my old grey horse.  I dreamt of his massive, gentle fleshliness, his kindness.  I was trying to strap a saddle to him but it was not fitting right and I kept having to redo it. In my dream he communicated with me, as horses do, with the bend of neck and brush of whisker, with a quality of presence that is as clear as words.  Perhaps clearer.  Love reverberated between us.  I woke up and realized he had died last year.  

KO

I love being a rancher because every day is different. Sometimes it means patching fence and fixing water-lines.  Sometimes it means working in the office all day.  Sometime, a lot of the time, it is peaceful and beautiful.  Sometimes it's a little like going to war.  Last Monday was the war-zone.  I got knocked unconscious by a seriously enraged cow while trying, stupidly, to keep her from damaging my ultra-sound equipment.  She hooked my leg with her head, and sent me flying to hit the back of my head on the concrete floor and gash my chin on something. There was blackness, and then golden stars, and the roar of the generator as I struggled up out of the dark knowing that I had to get up off the floor and behind the generator where she would not likely want to come to finish me off.  I couldn't see but I could hear and I knew where I needed to go and somehow I got there, climbing onto a bench where at least I would not be as easy for her to see me.  And that felt like all I could do.  I was barely conscious, dizzy, weak, nauseous, helpless. It was humiliating the way being beaten and broken, even if only temporarily, is always humiliating.
Luckily she left the area as I clung, terrified, to my perch - the rest of the crew got her away, vowing to make hamburger of her at the earliest opportunity.  I'm in complete agreement on that plan.
Since then I've been in pain almost continuously, except when asleep.  Raging post-concussion headaches have made it painful just to have a short conversation and impossible to read or write.  My world contracted to one desire - to find even a momentary respite from the pain.   Today I'm  feeling better, life will go on, get back to normal,  but I'm not so stubborn that I don't recognize it as a turning point.  I'll have to change my risk exposure permanently. Just a bit anyway.
Now some persons might say: well, I don't think you're a very sincere animist animal-lover what with wishing that cow to become hamburger at the earliest opportunity.  And I would say that I don't see the contradiction.  Me and that cow, we're about equal in vengeful spite.

Some thoughts on POTUS 45 and the Resistance

As much as I loathe the guy, I must say there are some unexpected upsides to all of this. In calling into question some of our most cherished values and institutions (e.g. checks and balances) and making us all articulate and fight for them, there is a gift. Sure, it’s a unfortunate that we have to expend energy defending values that we once could take for granted instead of working on implementing those values, but to be honest it’s probably just taking the time we would have spent watching Netflix anyway, so really not a loss. And we’re unified by a common enemy and that’s a surefire trick for focusing the mind.

On full display for all the world to see are the darkest secrets of the American, and even the Western, psyche: the rampant greed, the aggressive appropriation of “facts” to serve the purposes of power, the strategic racism, the utter disregard for the environment that is the support system for our very lives as well as all other life on earth. All the stuff that made America “Great.” There it is, he is us, or at least that part of us. Maybe it’s good for us to see it up there in all its raging immaturity. Maybe we’ll learn something about ourselves in the process. So let our resistance be tempered with gratitude, our anger with the acknowledgment that what we fight is also part of ourselves. 

Also, this resistance thing is like a vacation from having to come up with all the damn answers all the damn time.  And that's why Obama is smiling and you should too.

Here is

the name of the place on any deep-tinted pastel morning where the sea mist is telling its stories and the birds theirs, where the wild boys go home with their dead pigs and battered machines and dogs and tales of the night, when the off-shore wind picks up and the little birds wake up and the dung beetles fly.  When the calves go looking for their mothers before the day is bright, where the clouds float up out of the forest and the pillar of smoke that marks the volcano's open heart is lit by the sun rising out of the ocean.

Far-flung fellow travelers

So I went to Salt Lake City for a couple days for a meeting of WSARE - Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education - and it was exhausting but worth it because these were my Peeps - wonky serious conservation minded hard-core Aggies still with dirt under their fingernails a little bit though they tried to clean up for the meeting.  Some were kinda conservative, some were kinda radical left,  but all good hearted, generous-minded people working on some really important stuff and modestly, humbly, skeptically trying to make agriculture and therefore civilization more sustainable. Ranchers, farmers, NGOS, land grant university educators from every western state. Here's the quote from the  WSARE home page today:

The future of humanity in these uncertain times depends on the thoughtful, caring, and committed people who choose to live and work on family farms. - John Ikerd

Nice.  I've never heard of John Ikerd before, but he's got a website johnikerd.com and he looks to be a wise elder of the Missouri branch of my new-found tribe.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

So in love with this woman, whose writing in this book makes me cry with happiness every time.

https://youtu.be/Lz1vgfZ3etE

Holy Shit!

"Ebell insists studies showing climate change poses a serious risk to human civilization are bunk. Though he now accepts global temperatures are increasing, he claims that the warming will be beneficial for most Americans — providing milder winters and longer growing seasons.
“The fact is that in modern society we have the technology to deal with environmental challenges, and that’s why people live in Phoenix,” Ebell said. “Because warm is good, as long as we have air conditioning.” 

Star-Advertiser/AP

Myron Ebell is/was the head of Trump's transition team at the EPA and looks like a ghoul. Serious. I'm sorry, I know the liberal elite, because we lost, are supposed to shut up and take the alternative facts now, but I can't.  Warm is good. Because we have air-conditioning.  Holy shit.

This is a whole new ballgame, my good people. We must have strategies! We must find pressure points! Even my 81-year old mom who, by common agreement, is the most angelic person you will ever meet, is up in arms, and quoting Women's March signs. "Re-Sister," she said, "I liked that one. It says so much, doesn't it?"