"I am trying to investigate the communicational regularities in the biosphere, assuming that in doing so, I shall also be investigating interwoven regularities in a system so pervasive and determinant that we may even apply the word "god" to it.  The regularities we discover - including regularities and necessities of communication and logic - form a unity in which we make our home."  Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred.

I keep coming back to Bateson's work.  The shift in perspective, in the underlying habits of thought of perception, that his work articulates is, well, I don't have a word for it, but it's a big deal for me; this idea that one is inside of an environment which is thinking by means of on-going interactions/communications - between rain, grass, grazing animals, for instance, and, again, this is not something you learn about so much as something you inhabit.
It's a humbling shift in perspective because we humans raised in Western industrial nations really like to think of ourselves as gods, as divine beings somehow above all of the stuff that goes on in the non-human world.  We've been told all of our lives that we are so important that we're not supposed to die and flow back into the cycle of content.  We have technology and therefore we are above all of those nasty and demeaning biological cycles.  We're always talking, talking, talking, to shut the world out - praising or fighting or ordering or planning or persuading...just like I am now.

Ethos

• Life  -  Success, whether as an individual or a civilization, is manifest in the diversity and vitality of life that we protect, nurture, and help to thrive.
• Flow - Functional living systems flow and cycle freely, whereas systems that allow the accumulation and concentration of resources and power within nodes or subsets of the system are not functional in the long run.
• Responsibility - Humans are global apex-consumers and therefore responsible for maintaining the functionality of the living systems of which we are the apex. 
• Ethical Knowledge - Fulfilling our responsibility depends upon knowledge, however the means and methods for acquiring knowledge are as responsible to life as any other activity. 
• Interaction - Knowledge lives in active engagement and not in the numbers and words which represent this living interaction.

There you have it, my manifesto for the day, week, month, or whatever.   A work in progress, for sure, but a useful exercise.  It isn't logical in a philosophical sense, more poetical than anything, although not poetry either.   But I do believe that I stand behind or within or somewhere in the vicinity of this bit of philosophico-poetic-ness.

The Amazon Alternative to Victoria's Secret

"Though they were long believed to be purely imaginary, overwhelming evidence now shows that the Amazon traditions of the Greeks and other ancient societies derived in large part from historical facts.  Among the nomad horse-riding peoples of the steppes known to the Greeks as "Scythians," women lived the same rugged outdoor life as the men.  These "warlike tribes have no cities, no fixed abodes," wrote one ancient historian; " they live free and unconquered, so savage that even the women take part in war."  Archeology reveals that about one out of  three or four nomad women of the steppes was an active warrior buried with her weapons."  from The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, Adrienne Mayor.


Now that just makes me so happy.   Just because the arrogant, destructive, and really very lame civilized world is so seemingly all-encompassing these days, doesn't mean that it is the only reality that has ever existed or can exist.  Somewhere in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tuva or inner Mongolia, there were Scythian women.  And I bet they still are there, doing their thing, beneath the radar of civilization - our wondrous techno-civilization that still wants to put women into high heels, pencil skirts, thongs, push-up bras, and lipstick and tell them that is a power outfit.    It's just so ridiculous.  

National Geographic interview with Adrienne Mayor

We Keep Doing This To Ourselves

My daughter takes me out of my comfort zone and into Ala Moana, the premier shopping playground in Hawaii.  It really is an alternate reality, especially coming straight off the plane from Ka'u.  It's dazzling.
The bleeding starts at Levi's which I am silly enough to think is a place that sells jeans and therefore possibly reasonable in its demands on my credit card.  That's funny, right?  It's 10 am and all the highly fashionable and attractive sales people say: "What are you doing up so early?"  That's funny, too.
Eventually we go into Pink, which, my daughter explains, "is like Victoria's Secret, just less intense." She finds some stuff to try on, and it turns out that the fitting rooms are next door in Victoria's Secret, so we go through the little passage way that leads from perky cute Pink to glam, sexy VS.  I wait in the waiting room on the slightly grungy hot pink and lace sofa.  There's a teenage girl there already and she is gazing at the wall fixedly.  On the wall are dozens of photos of VS models with their long curly hair, their slippery perfect bodies, their fake eyelashes, their pouty lips.   She is downloading all those images.  The girl is fashionably dressed with a pierced nose but slightly plump, in a way that would be considered ideal in the Victorian era (ironically).  For a second I watch, appalled, as her brain gets screwed up by unattainable body images.  It is a terrible thing to be there, in that moment, seeing it, and knowing it was just one moment in a lifetime of brain-washing that we all go through.
Yesterday I was in line at the  supermarket and all the cover pix on the women's magazines were of overmade up and super-thin white women, Lena Dunham among them.
Normal, fucked up.

What I Do

Mostly, I fret about grass.  About pasture grasses and shrubs and ferns and their regrowth rate and the relative predominance of certain desirable species versus the less desirable species. I fret about pasture grasses but I am also inspired by them.  Also by the movement of animals.  Also the shape of the mountains and their relationship with clouds.   When I say that I am inspired by these things, I don't mean inspired to write about them or paint them or worship them.  I suppose you could say that they inspire pleasure in me at their very existence.  They inspire me to say: yes, this is what I believe in, this is what I love, this is what I want to fret about.

Another Reading List

Sand  County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
Let's just say that it's not every day you get to read a serious contender for Most Useful and Beautiful Book Ever Written.  I'm reading it very slowly.

Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach

A Utopian novel written in 1975 based on the premise that Northern Cal, Oregon, and Washington secede from the Union in order to establish an ecologically sound, steady-state economy and society, while the rest of the US continues on with status quo.  Well-thoughout, entertaining, and insightful.  Interesting to see what smidgens of progress we've made that are forecast in this book, and where we're even more retrograde than could probably be imagined in 1975.   For instance, no mention of the internet or wireless technology at all which has become almost a necessity of life, for better or worse.  He does mention picture phones but these seem to be landline-based.  He does foresee the shift towards a biology-based science and society as carried out by the leadership of women, and from what I can see this is how it is going to happen, if it happens at all.  Also he makes a very strong point of describing how the shift to Ecotopia changes how people experience and live in their own bodies in a positive way, which is probably not something you can ever track qualitatively but makes a huge difference in quality of life, and is something I value immensely about living in Ka'u, where you can go to the post-office in your pajamas or with spiders in your hair and nobody thinks the worse of you.

A Druidry Handbook, John Michael Greer

One of the dozens of books, it seems, written by the author of the famous and excellent blog The Archdruid Report, the first part of which is an excellent quick and candid introduction to the Druidry tradition in the West, and makes a strong case for the importance of this alternative religion and philosophy, which stresses relationship to nature, personal, sensual experience, and creative ritual making.   Discovered some backstory on one of my favorite words "pantheism," which I discovered one day in the dictionary while in middle school at a time when I needed a word to help articulate what I felt to be true.  Pantheism is an invention of John Toland (1670-1722), an Irish writer involved in the Druid Revival movement of that time (and the first person to be called a freethinker!).

Is there a Word for the Opposite of Anthropomorphism?

"By sun-up every squirrel is exaggerating some fancied indignity to his person, and every jay proclaiming with false emotion about suppositious dangers to society, at this very moment discovered by him.  Distant crows are berating a hypothetical owl, just to tell the world how vigilant crows are, and a pheasant cock, musing perhaps on the philanderings of bygone days, beats the air with his wings and tells the world in raucous warning that he owns this marsh and all the hens in it."
- Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Makes me think of the Legislature...