dawn:
pink
blue
pastels holding portent of rain, percent chance: 20,
and poop, 100.
outside the rising sun sets afire the elm, the sagebrush,
sending embers of burning rimrock sailing
across the Okanogan
through the open window
bouncing off the floor-level mirror
and alighting on the cheeks of our 10-month-old:
light, alight, delight.
later
after breakfast perhaps
will come the inevitable bonk
the innumerable slings and arrows of unpredictable countertops,
shiftless laundry baskets, wily carpets—
percent chance of recovery: 99,
while outside the sagebrush, the river, the vigilant eagle
bear insults more predictable and less forgiving
development, diesel fumes, the thoughtless Coke bottle—
percent chance of recovery? shhh.
for a moment
I yearn
with every cell of my body
for a paintbrush, big enough to paint over our past,
undo the last decade of war, the last century of carbon emissions,
the last millennium of unchecked growth,
to make the world outside
as whole again
as my glowing son
written the day after the OLT poetry night, 2013
Okanogan River Watershed, Omak
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Thursday, February 28, 2013
New Year's Day
for LL, the love of my life.
New Year's Day 2013
Today I fell on the ice and hit my head.
Apparently, it was not hard enough:
what I want is to get out of the same path,
and move into a new one--a path that is not
my path,
but our path--
this is the work to be done,
this is the important work,
and it does not start here with my pen
on this page.
It starts when I put this pen down
and walk up the stairs
and tell you that I love you.
Today I fell on the ice and hit my head.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
New Year's Day 2013
Today I fell on the ice and hit my head.
Apparently, it was not hard enough:
what I want is to get out of the same path,
and move into a new one--a path that is not
my path,
but our path--
this is the work to be done,
this is the important work,
and it does not start here with my pen
on this page.
It starts when I put this pen down
and walk up the stairs
and tell you that I love you.
Today I fell on the ice and hit my head.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
300 revisited
On 1/11/10, I wrote a blog titled "300", referring to the number of emails in my inbox.
I have dropped below 300 for the first time since then. (A month ago I was at 729.)
What I have realized--having just completed my second training from the Center for Mind-Body Medicine--is that I was distracting myself from dealing with life (and life's emails).
It feels good to be back. Maybe more on that in an upcoming blog.
For now, I'm going to simply hang up (as it were), finally paste in my completed blog for December (which I finished around the 10th), stop using parentheses,
and go to bed. It feels good to be back.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Writing at the end of the world
The end of the Mayan Calendar has come and gone. As tsunamis and firestorms have not yet entirely engulfed the world, the onward march of days tempts us to pat ourselves on the back and conclude that everything will be right as rain.
If only that were so.
While I was on the board of Real Change, editor Tim Harris was accused of using his column to write the same rant over and over. I couldn’t agree more. And I thank Tim for doing so.
Real Change challenges a vision we hear expressed so universally that we never think to question it. Author Daniel Quinn pointedly identifies this vision in his novel Ishmael: man exists to take from an Earth made just for him. Always will the crops grow, the fish multiply, and the rains fall. Every billboard, TV ad, political speech serves this one idea: you deserve more, and there is more to take. The voice of our shared world culture, says Quinn, lulls us to sleep with such false reassurance. Harris challenges us to wake up and see the truth.
Why must we challenge this vision? Because is not viable. Whether with a bang or a whisper, a world built on such a vision will end. Not only is limitless consumption impossible on our finite planet, but in the meantime it guarantees two things: growth and inequality. Excess food results in population growth. Growth supplies labor well beyond that needed to grow food, and said labor is exploited to produce goods hoarded by the few. The two are inextricably linked. Unchecked, this vision has played out in a population that has grown from one billion to seven billion in the last 200 years, compared to the 10,000 years it took to grow from a mere 10 million, to that first billion. And it has produced the greatest gap between rich and poor in human history, in which the world’s three richest men have greater wealth than the 48 poorest countries.
Once again: the world’s three richest men own more than the 48 poorest countries.
If growth and inequality are the predicted consequences of unbridled consumption, then healthy relationships are its first casualties. Taking more than necessary establishes the unavoidable hierarchy that some beings are worth more than others. This hierarchy is easier to maintain the farther apart are those taking and those being taken from. We avert our eyes from the homeless; we willfully ignore the children who sew our shoes and the rainforest cut to raise beef for our burgers. Real Change erases that distance. It forces us to consider the disastrous human and environmental consequences of our actions—which can occur even with the best of intentions.
As an example, consider the Grand Coulee Dam, touted as a pinnacle of both green energy and equitable wealth distribution. When my wife and I moved to the town of Omak two years ago, this concrete monolith 40 miles away fascinated me. Completed in 1942, it was supposed to not only light up the West with clean electricity, but also provide over a million acres of land to small family farms. It was the crowning achievement of FDR’s New Deal and it promised the dream of more to all.
Welcome to the desert of the real. People created loopholes such that the 40-acre family farms disappeared into parcels of 80, then 320, then 960-acre factory farms. The electricity is discounted preferentially to distant corporations while local power and infrastructure rot. The seventy-plus dams across the Columbia and its tributaries have brought one of the world’s largest salmon runs to the brink of extinction. In doing so, they have decimated a tribal nation built on these fish. Blaine Harden’s A River Lost documents how Native rates of suicide and homelessness soared after Grand Coulee’s completion. Downstream of this “clean energy” machine, the Puget Sound orca population is dwindling. And yet it gets worse: even if all the dams were removed, the salmon and those that depend on them may not survive this century. In a 2006 New Yorker article titled The Darkening Sea, Elizabeth Kolbert explains the new threat of ocean acidification. Even if we had ceased all industrial carbon dioxide production seven years ago (we haven’t), the resulting drop in pH as the oceans absorb what is already in the air could cause the extinction of all shell life (shells dissolve in acid). If shells die, coral reefs die, as does half of the phytoplankton that is the base of the entire marine ecosystem.
Imagine a world without salmon, orcas, sea turtles, penguins, dolphins. Without fish. Without fishermen.
We need voices such as Real Change to demand that we pursue a different vision, and not merely because the consequences of growth and inequality are becoming ever more horrific.
In challenging a vision built on endless consumption, we must also demand a vision built specifically on what we’ve lost: the healthy relationships whose sum is a community. Humans are one part of the web of life we call Earth. Using an approach of education, empowerment and love, organizations such as Real Change transform a commerce of taking and being taken from into a mutually beneficial exchange between equals. In a community, every relationship counts. For millions of years the basis of sustainable hunter-gatherer societies was that all members of a tribe—and of their environment—were valued, precisely because they all were needed. A UW physician, Stephen Bezruchka, has shown in numerous studies that the more egalitarian a society is the healthier it is, in every outcome that can be measured. A vision of community will serve us well in the future as it did in the past.
If Tim Harris’s editorial repeats itself, it repeatedly challenges an untenable vision of taking until there’s nothing left to take. It challenges this unfolding nihilism with the only viable alternative: a society built on community, on a love for the world, for all the world.
That, to me, sounds like a new beginning.
If only that were so.
While I was on the board of Real Change, editor Tim Harris was accused of using his column to write the same rant over and over. I couldn’t agree more. And I thank Tim for doing so.
Real Change challenges a vision we hear expressed so universally that we never think to question it. Author Daniel Quinn pointedly identifies this vision in his novel Ishmael: man exists to take from an Earth made just for him. Always will the crops grow, the fish multiply, and the rains fall. Every billboard, TV ad, political speech serves this one idea: you deserve more, and there is more to take. The voice of our shared world culture, says Quinn, lulls us to sleep with such false reassurance. Harris challenges us to wake up and see the truth.
Why must we challenge this vision? Because is not viable. Whether with a bang or a whisper, a world built on such a vision will end. Not only is limitless consumption impossible on our finite planet, but in the meantime it guarantees two things: growth and inequality. Excess food results in population growth. Growth supplies labor well beyond that needed to grow food, and said labor is exploited to produce goods hoarded by the few. The two are inextricably linked. Unchecked, this vision has played out in a population that has grown from one billion to seven billion in the last 200 years, compared to the 10,000 years it took to grow from a mere 10 million, to that first billion. And it has produced the greatest gap between rich and poor in human history, in which the world’s three richest men have greater wealth than the 48 poorest countries.
Once again: the world’s three richest men own more than the 48 poorest countries.
If growth and inequality are the predicted consequences of unbridled consumption, then healthy relationships are its first casualties. Taking more than necessary establishes the unavoidable hierarchy that some beings are worth more than others. This hierarchy is easier to maintain the farther apart are those taking and those being taken from. We avert our eyes from the homeless; we willfully ignore the children who sew our shoes and the rainforest cut to raise beef for our burgers. Real Change erases that distance. It forces us to consider the disastrous human and environmental consequences of our actions—which can occur even with the best of intentions.
As an example, consider the Grand Coulee Dam, touted as a pinnacle of both green energy and equitable wealth distribution. When my wife and I moved to the town of Omak two years ago, this concrete monolith 40 miles away fascinated me. Completed in 1942, it was supposed to not only light up the West with clean electricity, but also provide over a million acres of land to small family farms. It was the crowning achievement of FDR’s New Deal and it promised the dream of more to all.
Welcome to the desert of the real. People created loopholes such that the 40-acre family farms disappeared into parcels of 80, then 320, then 960-acre factory farms. The electricity is discounted preferentially to distant corporations while local power and infrastructure rot. The seventy-plus dams across the Columbia and its tributaries have brought one of the world’s largest salmon runs to the brink of extinction. In doing so, they have decimated a tribal nation built on these fish. Blaine Harden’s A River Lost documents how Native rates of suicide and homelessness soared after Grand Coulee’s completion. Downstream of this “clean energy” machine, the Puget Sound orca population is dwindling. And yet it gets worse: even if all the dams were removed, the salmon and those that depend on them may not survive this century. In a 2006 New Yorker article titled The Darkening Sea, Elizabeth Kolbert explains the new threat of ocean acidification. Even if we had ceased all industrial carbon dioxide production seven years ago (we haven’t), the resulting drop in pH as the oceans absorb what is already in the air could cause the extinction of all shell life (shells dissolve in acid). If shells die, coral reefs die, as does half of the phytoplankton that is the base of the entire marine ecosystem.
Imagine a world without salmon, orcas, sea turtles, penguins, dolphins. Without fish. Without fishermen.
We need voices such as Real Change to demand that we pursue a different vision, and not merely because the consequences of growth and inequality are becoming ever more horrific.
In challenging a vision built on endless consumption, we must also demand a vision built specifically on what we’ve lost: the healthy relationships whose sum is a community. Humans are one part of the web of life we call Earth. Using an approach of education, empowerment and love, organizations such as Real Change transform a commerce of taking and being taken from into a mutually beneficial exchange between equals. In a community, every relationship counts. For millions of years the basis of sustainable hunter-gatherer societies was that all members of a tribe—and of their environment—were valued, precisely because they all were needed. A UW physician, Stephen Bezruchka, has shown in numerous studies that the more egalitarian a society is the healthier it is, in every outcome that can be measured. A vision of community will serve us well in the future as it did in the past.
If Tim Harris’s editorial repeats itself, it repeatedly challenges an untenable vision of taking until there’s nothing left to take. It challenges this unfolding nihilism with the only viable alternative: a society built on community, on a love for the world, for all the world.
That, to me, sounds like a new beginning.
Monday, November 19, 2012
The place where love shines through
Arguably the most self-injurious act I commit on a semi-regular basis is to give myself a haircut.
Semi-regular, because when I have the time, I don’t mind patronizing a barbershop. Sometimes my schedule just makes it difficult. Not precludes but delays it long enough that my exasperation outgrows the hair itself, especially on the back and the sides—we won’t speak of the thinning top and front—and out come the scissors. I look forward, albeit with some trepidation, to the time when the hair doesn’t grow back at all and I can save myself the trouble.
Self-injurious, not because I draw blood, but simply because the results are, well, patchy. Sometimes a loving family member insists on a bit of clean-up. While this is never refused it should be noted that I and I alone take full responsibility for an end that is occasionally beyond rescue.
And arguably, because I have gotten myself into enough tight situations that outside inspection might suggest not only a will to self-destruction but a pattern thereof. From jumping off of a 100-foot cliff into water at age 17, to being rescued by helicopter from a 1000-foot cliff above water at age 32, there has been an irregular but spectacular incident log. In college, for no reason that I can recall other than to prove to myself that I could do it, I swam across the Connecticut River and back at 3AM. In the Peace Corps, I very nearly spent the night alone in the middle of the (South African) woods after taking a few detours on a bicycle and then getting a flat just as the sun set. And more recently than I would care to recall I did spend the night in the woods—unplanned though not alone, on top of a mountain in the dead of winter, with new snow falling to cover any ski tracks.
If any such pattern existed then I am happy to report that it is over.
In a deeper way than even marriage confers, becoming a parent has bestowed on me a sense of caution. Not a timid or constricting caution but a joyous and life-affirming caution. An awareness of world beyond self in a way that celebrates the physically small but emotionally staggering risks of raising a child.
This may seem a truth so obvious as to be trivial. Yet until recently, when an unexpected event led me to realize it, I think I had been unconsciously mourning the loss of—what? A secret swagger of invincibility? A false sense of spontaneity?
The event, thankfully, was nothing life-threatening. Rather, it was a moment of clarity in the middle of a conference on mind-body-medicine in which I recalled the words that the most amazing dance teacher blessed me with at age 18: “you are the place where love shines through.”
In that moment of recall I saw the swagger and the spontaneity for what they were: a carefully and secretly nurtured feeling of superiority. Nothing overt. Plenty of moments of self-deprecating laughter along the path. But there nonetheless. A feeling of, “it’s up to you to save the world! You are the one! If you can’t do it no one can!”, coupled, irrationally, to “you can do whatever the heck you want to.” And I think until I acknowledged that, that there was a part of me, which, recognizing that I could no longer be physically reckless (never mind that I was falling short of world-saving), felt cooped up inside.
And just like that the naming of it caused it to fall away. To fall away and allow me, hopefully, to continue on the journey of being the parent, partner and person that I want to be. In that moment, in the midst of a hundred strangers going through the same conference, I felt confident enough to stand up and share my story. I do not have to be the strong one, the consistent one, the family doctor who stands up for his community and for the world—not that these are things I couldn’t and can’t strive for. But I don’t have to prove anything, least of all to myself. There are no more physical cliffs to ascend; the real cliffs, after all, are just beginning.
In that moment I could be comfortable with who I have been, who I am. I could just breathe in and out and be the place where the love shines through.
Granted, there may always be a streak of recklessness alive and well in me. Hopefully one that at its worst will only be cosmetically injurious—my apologies in advance if the love shining through is a bit patchy.
Semi-regular, because when I have the time, I don’t mind patronizing a barbershop. Sometimes my schedule just makes it difficult. Not precludes but delays it long enough that my exasperation outgrows the hair itself, especially on the back and the sides—we won’t speak of the thinning top and front—and out come the scissors. I look forward, albeit with some trepidation, to the time when the hair doesn’t grow back at all and I can save myself the trouble.
Self-injurious, not because I draw blood, but simply because the results are, well, patchy. Sometimes a loving family member insists on a bit of clean-up. While this is never refused it should be noted that I and I alone take full responsibility for an end that is occasionally beyond rescue.
And arguably, because I have gotten myself into enough tight situations that outside inspection might suggest not only a will to self-destruction but a pattern thereof. From jumping off of a 100-foot cliff into water at age 17, to being rescued by helicopter from a 1000-foot cliff above water at age 32, there has been an irregular but spectacular incident log. In college, for no reason that I can recall other than to prove to myself that I could do it, I swam across the Connecticut River and back at 3AM. In the Peace Corps, I very nearly spent the night alone in the middle of the (South African) woods after taking a few detours on a bicycle and then getting a flat just as the sun set. And more recently than I would care to recall I did spend the night in the woods—unplanned though not alone, on top of a mountain in the dead of winter, with new snow falling to cover any ski tracks.
If any such pattern existed then I am happy to report that it is over.
In a deeper way than even marriage confers, becoming a parent has bestowed on me a sense of caution. Not a timid or constricting caution but a joyous and life-affirming caution. An awareness of world beyond self in a way that celebrates the physically small but emotionally staggering risks of raising a child.
This may seem a truth so obvious as to be trivial. Yet until recently, when an unexpected event led me to realize it, I think I had been unconsciously mourning the loss of—what? A secret swagger of invincibility? A false sense of spontaneity?
The event, thankfully, was nothing life-threatening. Rather, it was a moment of clarity in the middle of a conference on mind-body-medicine in which I recalled the words that the most amazing dance teacher blessed me with at age 18: “you are the place where love shines through.”
In that moment of recall I saw the swagger and the spontaneity for what they were: a carefully and secretly nurtured feeling of superiority. Nothing overt. Plenty of moments of self-deprecating laughter along the path. But there nonetheless. A feeling of, “it’s up to you to save the world! You are the one! If you can’t do it no one can!”, coupled, irrationally, to “you can do whatever the heck you want to.” And I think until I acknowledged that, that there was a part of me, which, recognizing that I could no longer be physically reckless (never mind that I was falling short of world-saving), felt cooped up inside.
And just like that the naming of it caused it to fall away. To fall away and allow me, hopefully, to continue on the journey of being the parent, partner and person that I want to be. In that moment, in the midst of a hundred strangers going through the same conference, I felt confident enough to stand up and share my story. I do not have to be the strong one, the consistent one, the family doctor who stands up for his community and for the world—not that these are things I couldn’t and can’t strive for. But I don’t have to prove anything, least of all to myself. There are no more physical cliffs to ascend; the real cliffs, after all, are just beginning.
In that moment I could be comfortable with who I have been, who I am. I could just breathe in and out and be the place where the love shines through.
Granted, there may always be a streak of recklessness alive and well in me. Hopefully one that at its worst will only be cosmetically injurious—my apologies in advance if the love shining through is a bit patchy.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Up
Climbing to 30,000 feet appears to be the only means I have to escape, long enough to write, the earthly concerns that have so occupied me this month. So it would seem appropriate to write about matters less terrestrial than I otherwise might. Plainly put: when awake with both feet on the ground I’ve been overwhelmed, and my mind has no desire now to dwell there when my body doesn’t have to. As Morpheus advised Neo, “Free the mind!”
This is easier said than done. Maybe the conference that LL and I are flying to, a conference on Mind-Body Medicine, will help. But letting go—allowing my thoughts to rise above such matters as upcoming patient visits, our baby’s sleep poop laughter growth and development schedule, or the forest fires consuming eastern Washington, to name but a few items—is as difficult as it is necessary.
When I advise patients to meditate I give them something to focus on: I have them breathe slowly in and out and say the number “one” on every out-breath. So perchance I must give myself a focus. Something not of the earth. Something up.
What is up? Trees, of course, though these are bound to the earth, and immediately I think of Gandalf, Bilbo and the dwarves awaiting treetop rescue by eagle from the goblins lighting fires underneath, and from there I go to the aforementioned fires scouring the arid West in which I live, while pumps siphon off snowmelt to feed neon lights and artificial fountains from Spokane to Phoenix, and then I think that we must be the goblins in this story. This will never do! What is above trees?
Sky. Wind. Clouds. Ahhh…forest-fire smoke. Radio towers interrupting sandpiper migration patterns and jet-fuel trails from unmanned drones marking dubious targets. Higher, higher!
The stratosphere. Ozone depletion and satellite junkyards falling into the Pacific, even as ever more machinery is commissioned by multinational corporations to zero in on the untapped niche market of left-handed preschoolers who don’t yet own iPhones. Higher yet!
The moon…1969 landing, one small step, American flag. No good. Mars. Land Rover. Pluto. Voyager, Carl Sagan, whales singing ad infinitum into the void.
It seems that even leaving the solar system I struggle to be free of the tedium of human preoccupations. Is there anything else out there?
Closing my eyes and breathing for a few minutes in the noisy, crowded airplane, I am transported, not to nirvana, but to a place of focus amidst similar chatter. I am in college again, in the café on the top floor of the Wesleyan Student Center, my nose pressed into texts on Chemistry and Physics. At the other extreme of the scale, I burrow into molecules and atoms and the even smaller bits that make them up.
The parallels to the cosmic are actually striking. For starters, everything we can see or smell or touch is made up of particles that are themselves 99.9% empty space. The more we try to zero in on the actual “stuff”, the less it looks like matter and the more it looks like energy. Predicting the outcome when bits of these energies collide is expressed in matters of probability. The ability of such interactions to coalesce into clusters of existence that taste sweet on our tongues or bounce off our soccer cleats into a goal or grow from a seedling into a sequoia is no less amazing than the ability of clouds of dust and gases to coalesce into a green and blue planet.
Seen from this level, the idea of something as complex as life itself is absolutely, mind-blowingly staggering. And retracing my journey into space in the face of this miracle, humans and our concerns seem no more and no less important than the named types of the smallest subatomic particle, the quark. We can be quite strange, and we can be all charm. We can be top or bottom, or just plain down. And we can be up.
This is easier said than done. Maybe the conference that LL and I are flying to, a conference on Mind-Body Medicine, will help. But letting go—allowing my thoughts to rise above such matters as upcoming patient visits, our baby’s sleep poop laughter growth and development schedule, or the forest fires consuming eastern Washington, to name but a few items—is as difficult as it is necessary.
When I advise patients to meditate I give them something to focus on: I have them breathe slowly in and out and say the number “one” on every out-breath. So perchance I must give myself a focus. Something not of the earth. Something up.
What is up? Trees, of course, though these are bound to the earth, and immediately I think of Gandalf, Bilbo and the dwarves awaiting treetop rescue by eagle from the goblins lighting fires underneath, and from there I go to the aforementioned fires scouring the arid West in which I live, while pumps siphon off snowmelt to feed neon lights and artificial fountains from Spokane to Phoenix, and then I think that we must be the goblins in this story. This will never do! What is above trees?
Sky. Wind. Clouds. Ahhh…forest-fire smoke. Radio towers interrupting sandpiper migration patterns and jet-fuel trails from unmanned drones marking dubious targets. Higher, higher!
The stratosphere. Ozone depletion and satellite junkyards falling into the Pacific, even as ever more machinery is commissioned by multinational corporations to zero in on the untapped niche market of left-handed preschoolers who don’t yet own iPhones. Higher yet!
The moon…1969 landing, one small step, American flag. No good. Mars. Land Rover. Pluto. Voyager, Carl Sagan, whales singing ad infinitum into the void.
It seems that even leaving the solar system I struggle to be free of the tedium of human preoccupations. Is there anything else out there?
Closing my eyes and breathing for a few minutes in the noisy, crowded airplane, I am transported, not to nirvana, but to a place of focus amidst similar chatter. I am in college again, in the café on the top floor of the Wesleyan Student Center, my nose pressed into texts on Chemistry and Physics. At the other extreme of the scale, I burrow into molecules and atoms and the even smaller bits that make them up.
The parallels to the cosmic are actually striking. For starters, everything we can see or smell or touch is made up of particles that are themselves 99.9% empty space. The more we try to zero in on the actual “stuff”, the less it looks like matter and the more it looks like energy. Predicting the outcome when bits of these energies collide is expressed in matters of probability. The ability of such interactions to coalesce into clusters of existence that taste sweet on our tongues or bounce off our soccer cleats into a goal or grow from a seedling into a sequoia is no less amazing than the ability of clouds of dust and gases to coalesce into a green and blue planet.
Seen from this level, the idea of something as complex as life itself is absolutely, mind-blowingly staggering. And retracing my journey into space in the face of this miracle, humans and our concerns seem no more and no less important than the named types of the smallest subatomic particle, the quark. We can be quite strange, and we can be all charm. We can be top or bottom, or just plain down. And we can be up.
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