Choices

I had a conversation today with my friend, the remarkable chef Mark Noguchi, about ambition, talent, and choosing the place where you are. Our conversation was part text, part cell phone - frenetic and staccato, like most conversations in these days.
Mark is a passionate soul in the very best sense, he is all about sustainable food, local communities, native culture, restoring the 'aina and the people.
It started with Mark calling me to see if he could get a hold of 6 pounds of beef fat to render for next month's Kanu Hawaiii Eat Local Challenge. That's a real good, grounded place to start a conversation: availability of beef fat.
Then I opened my email and saw the Food Network had a casting call for chef talent. I thought of Mark with his big personality and unquestionable charisma. He would just kill it: imagine the Mark Noguchi TV show, cookbooks, signature restaurants, merchandise empire. I texted him asking if he was going to try out. He said that he was too busy and happy doing his thing in the 808.
Which I get, totally, completely. There's all that stuff and then there is what you love to do, madly, completely, all in. And sometimes ambition is just a temptation to sell your soul right down the river.
Choosing the place or places that you give your life to defines who you are. To choose a place or be chosen by a place and to give yourself entirely to that choice is a powerful act of love and creativity. You become bigger than yourself in that moment. You become part of a living place. There is no end and no beginning, as Su Dongpo said.

I went out just before twilight, and turned to see two hawks circling above the hill behind my house. I thought of what my friend Palo said, watching an ‘io circling above the ‘ohia forest on the slopes of Mauna Kea: “And we think we are the most advanced species…”

It's true that we can hardly fathom that there might be intelligence anywhere outside of ourselves. We still look down on people who see intelligence in nature: the animist, the shaman, the primitives. Our culture - the Christian and scientific rational culture - says that we are the only ones that matter. The world is for us. It is a powerful idea. Also, it becomes clear, a dangerous idea.

Because we are the only ones that matter we isolate ourselves from life in concrete apartment blocks and office buildings where we go spiritually insane and that is somehow normal and desirable. Our intellectual concepts, our concept of intellegience, have become our straitjackets, instead of our tools. We have developed our capability to lay asphalt and to process information but forgotten how to be a part of a living world.

We are advanced alright, but it seems that there is a point where advanced turns into its opposite.

My “Imagine”

Imagine this: that we loved energy more than we loved things.

That we could see the luminescent and invisible dance of energy through our lives,

And this was our great delight and reward.

Imagine that we treasured life above gold and silver, above possessions and security;

And that we treasured death as the transformation of life into energy.

Imagine that we renounced power, renounced control, renounced wealth,

And sought to make free and joyful lives for ourselves and all other beings.

Imagine that we left behind the manipulation of money as a pointless, circular game;

That we understood mindless success as a destroyer of life;

Imagine that, above all else, we sought to understand and to nurture the jeweled network of life:

The dance of people, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, all the invisible ones;

That we valued machines as tools to a radiant planet, not as ends in themselves;

Saw ourselves as citizens of nature and stewards of life on earth, not as consumers.

Imagine that our greatest achievements as people would be a richer, more finely balanced planet;

That our greatest glory was to bring back life into our dead places;

That always before us was the vision of a beloved place, a beloved country, a beloved world.

Without Names

I learned today that my grandfather, Eustaquio Ganda Galimba, may not have been born with that name, exactly. That name may have been borrowed from a cousin who was a year older, and who had signed on to immigrate to Hawaii, but when the time came to board the ship was too ill to travel, so my grandfather, then only thirteen and therefore too young to contract as a plantation worker in his own name, took his place and his name. Did his real name stay behind in the Phillipines I wonder? What was that name?

I know who my grandfather was. It doesn't matter so much whether he was born with the name or not, or what the story was. I knew who he was. I knew his flaring anger, and his great kindness, his restlessness, and his relentlessness. He had a violent temper, was arrested and jailed for abuse of my grandmother more than once, and was admired by the young men of the district for his spirited pursuit of the opposite sex well into his eighties. He was a chicken fighter and a marijuana grower. He gambled and he drank whiskey. He also raised five children, building his family up from the poverty of his childhood to the affluence of the American middle-class. He gave his children every opportunity. He was a scrambler and a person that enjoyed life. He constructed magnificent gardens in which my daughter, his great-granddaughter would wander, picking and eating delightedly. This was when he was in his nineties.

I don't know what his mother's name is. My grandfather died some years ago and now nobody remembers what her name is. I reproached my father, he said that they hardly spoke of her. It makes me think of a beautiful, powerful book of poems that I once had by a Filipino-American living on the California coast. The book was called "Without Names," I believe.

And that, as I like to say, is so Filipino. So Filipino, like eating every part of the animal, like living together as a multi-generational family, like having big dramatic domestic disagreements, like participating in illegal but fairly harmless activities, like living culture with a small c, like having a very fluid sense of identity.

It is entirely consistent with the Filipino esthetic, if there is such a thing, to take on the name of one's cousin for life, to resist or ignore the attempt to fix thing and people with names, to control, define, and perpetuate. After all, a name is the most gossamer of veils – a pattern of sound or dark marks, a point of light that might mean something, or something else. The ancient Chinese understood the double-edged power of names – the Confucian tradition was obsessed with fixing names, the Taoists with subverting them.

Filipino Women

I woke up this morning thinking about Filipino women. Filipino women are strong. They are presidents. They run businesses. There are a lot of cultures where women are like that. The men don't mind, are not shamed by being bossed around by women. They would rather go hunt, fight chickens, or whatever anyway. And make garden. That is what we say: make garden. "What are you doing these days, now that you are retired?" "Oh, you know, I am making garden." Filipino men are hardwired with the green thumb.

On the other hand Filipino women are known worldwide as sex workers and cleaning women. Is there a conflict in that? Perhaps not. Perhaps it is only a certain perspective that sees sex and cleaning up as degrading. Both arts are, can be, an honest living. Both arts are very much a part of honest living.

Then I realized I'd read this a few days ago from UKL i.e. Ursala K. Le Guin (who I've been mad in love with since grade school) :

…like that woman we all know who's been pushed so far over by cultural bias that she can't stand up and crawls around the house scrubbing and waxing and spraying germ killer on the kids. But even on her kneebones, where you and I will never join her, even she has been practicing as best she knows how a great, ancient, complex, and necessary art. That our society devalues it is evidence of the barbarity, the aesthetic and ethical bankruptcy, of our society.

As housekeeping is an art, so is cooking and all it involves – it involves, after all, agriculture, hunting, herding…So is the making of clothing and all it involves….And so on: you see how I want to revalue the word "art" so that when I come back as I do now to talking about words it is in the context of the great arts of living, of the woman carrying the basket of bread, bearing gifts, goods. Art not as some ejaculative act of ego but as a way, a skilful and powerful way of being in the world.

From: Bryn Mawr Commencement Address, Dancing at the Edge of the World, 155.

There is another kind of culture and another way of being in the world, waiting there in the wings, already there but not easily visible. Already being practiced but without fanfare, without being on the cover of magazines. It is the same kind of thing that gives (Filipino) women their strength.

Art/daily life

Why is it that the only Culture that seems to matter is the one that has broken free from biological responsibility, and exists in a shining, fragile, parasitic bubble. Why does Art have to be so dysfunctional?

So much of Art & Culture seems like the rage of caged animals at their confinement. Like gilding the bars of the cage. Or covering them with grafitti. The same cage that is closing in like a garbage crusher.

Beauty is free. That is one thing I know.

Things I like: the small acts of making by gentle but independent people, the cadences and melodies of daily life.

Everyday life, unfathomed yet. We don't even know how to eat in a way that is beautiful and respectful of the great world.

The Silence

The long silences of herder are not empty, but represent their blending into the cyclical processes of this land, a oneness for which words seem superfluous even in the Eveny language which was fine-tuned for use here. From Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. This seems to capture a kind of silence that is not really silence but a listening to the music of the world, listening as it passes through you and is all around, and maybe with the one(s) that you are being silent with. It is not silence but no one is speaking.