Reasonable actions and individual responsibility

Excerpt from the Roger Barnes book "The Dinghy Cruising Companion"

On land we inhabit an increasingly artificial environment. Although we enjoy the comforts of modern civilisation, perhaps we feel that something has been lost. Or why is it that so many of us take long aeroplane flights to distant lands, where life seems simpler and less artificial? It is as if we want to chase down the last remaining scraps of primitive authenticity before they too are lost, and in doing so we contribute to their inevitable destruction.

a River, the Sea, the Rain

If I reach down and scoop up a handful of water
is that the River?
If I climb up on a nearby mountain and look down upon just a mile of shimmering water that flows from north to south,
am I seeing the River?
When the rains come and the banks are topped
is that the River?
In August, the dry season when sand and stone are exposed and the water is shallow
is that the River?
If an oil tanker goes up and runs aground spilling that thick black toxic sludge and trapping and killing all life
is that the River?
At what point does a rain drop cease to be a rain drop and become a particular river?
At what point does the river become the sea?
At what point does the sea become the cloud?
At what point does the cloud become the rain drop?

If I am a river, then how can I be separate from every other river, separate from the sea, from the rain?
How do I exist here and not also there, and then?
Can a part of me be scooped up and taken away and still be called "me"?

"I" am a river, a name given to an idea.  A way of identifying a process and a connection to so much more.  I am always moving, changing, forming, blending, mixing, being born and dying.

A raindrop that lands on the top of the mountain and drips from the rock to become a part of the brook, that leads to the river to then join the sea only to be drawn up into the cloud to then once again fall as a raindrop onto a different rock to then join another brook.  Which part of this never ending cycle is me?  Which raindrop is me and which is some other?

Changing Season

Yesterday the skies were grey and the air calm.  A sense of cold was in the little puffs of breeze, when they occurred.  I took my 8 foot fiberglass dinghy out to the river and put her in the marsh, at the canoe launch.  The only thing disturbing the surface of the water was me and my oars.  All the Cattails stuck up 12 feet high from the hassocks, making the marsh into a maze.  They were reflected perfectly in the water so that they seemed to grow down, as well as up and the mirrored halves floated, both in the sky and the water.

After rowing for a few hours the cold, moist air started to get inside me.  As I rowed back to my start, a bald eagle flew low above me and headed toward one of the little islands back in the marsh that has tall trees where they like to make nests for the winter.  It's good to see them back for the winter.

Back at the house the wood stove drove most of the damp cold feeling out of me.  The house smelled of the soup I'd left on the stove to slow cook. A bowl of soup drove out the last of the cold.

In the evening the rain began just as I was stacking the wood I'd split earlier in the morning.  A few hours later the rain turned to the first snow of the season.  In the morning the ground was wet and a bit frozen in little patches, but mostly wet.  The thermometer read 29'f.

The stove will stay burning for the foreseeable future now that the temps are only supposed to top out in the low 40's and at night bottom out below freezing.  The stove will always have a kettle on for tea and more often than not a pot cooking up a soup.  We looked for our winter wear this morning, pulling it down from the attic.  It's hats and gloves from now on.

So, we have once again crossed over to a new season, with a much more tangible and real event than just some words and numbers printed on a calendar.  The light of day doesn't last as long and I feel a need to use the light of each day as best I can.  I know in this age of jet planes and electric everything it might seem odd to limit oneself to the constraints of what is called natures rhythms, but I have found I am much happier for doing so to some degree.  As we approach the Winter Solstice, now just about 5 weeks away, and the sun treats us like a friend or lover who has grown bored with us and is avoiding us, I will become ever more desperate feeling about the length of the nights and the shortness of the day and the seeming permanence of the cold.  But I know that if I took my sextant and measured the height of the sun in the sky I could see that come late December the old sun would remember us here and start to spend a bit more time with us every day.  This is what gets me thru the fading of the light and the coming of the cold.  It is a solid unchangeable thing, all this change, not as contrived as "daylight savings time".  It is a gradual adjustment that doesn't catch me off guard if I forget to change your clocks.  It is almost as if it takes place within me as much as around me.  Like the difference between walking somewhere, or, taking in a plane.  I've never heard of any body suffering jet lag from walking somewhere.

Maybe it has a little to do with being born in the Fall, doesn't really matter though, but I have always preferred this time of year.  Even though one of my greatest joys, sailing, is best done in the summer, I have always felt more in tune with Autumn.  Because it is a transition season it has a changeable quality to it.  Change becomes it's character, just as warmth and sun is summer's character, and cold and frost are winter's.  To me this is the most familiar thing, change, I have only ever known it really, and I have learned to appreciate it's ability to make everything new just as it is also taking everything old away.  Isn't this really our state of being in this life.  If we aren't changing then how can we say we are living.

By the height of the sun in the sky we would say this is still Fall, but we have crossed over to the quality of winter and that quality will grow and increase each day.  It will eventually feel like it might not ever end and I will long for the air to have some warmth to it.  My brain will tell me that it won't last forever, that Spring will eventually arrive but a part of me won't much believe it.  But that time is not yet here and now there are still a few more leaves on the trees that are too stubborn to let go, but the cold and the wind and the ice and snow will wear them down, right down out of their trees.

I now start my "keeping of the watch".  This is what happens when the stove needs to be fed every 4 to 6 hours, around the clock.  I start to wake up in the middle of the night hours, just before the embers wink out and I put more wood in the stove.  Some might say that not getting more R.E.M. sleep might have negative affects on me but as I have gotten older sleep doesn't seem to be something I require in much more than 4 hour chunks of time anyway.  Sailors used to keep these kind of schedules for much longer than the 5 or 6 months that I do.  Besides, I look forward to the first snow storm that blows thru over night, if for no other reason than to sit up as I have, slippers on, robe wrapped tight sitting right next to the wood stove watching, first the flames, then, the snow falling outside.  The quite during a night time snow seems like it has settled over the entire world, like a big down comforter has been pulled over our heads as we snug down into our beds.  I'd rather be awake to witness that, so tending the fire is not so much a chore as a chance to be up and have the world to myself for a moment.

I know that some will think how awful it is to have to be slave to keeping myself and my home warm thru the cold season.  It isn't so awful at all, as anybody who lives  thru it will tell you.  I remember growing up in a place that didn't really have much change between seasons.  The lack of change just seems so distasteful to me now.  I imagine that it might make the changes in me as I age, surprising, making me think, "where did the time go, how did I get to be old".  Where as here I feel constantly aware of the marching of time, and my life, and this has nothing to do with a calendar or clock, it is all around me, it is me.

We each have our places and ways that make us most comfortable.  Where you are it may not seem any different today than yesterday, even though it truly is.  Here today is different from yesterday, it is now the cold season here.  Happy Autumn, Holiday season, or what ever you celebrate.

Doing what one can do, a choice

Sometimes people ask me about my reasons for not eating meat.  They start to talk about all the reason why humans are "supposed" to be meat eaters, or were built to be meat eaters, or they mention the real need for meat in order to be healthy.  My reason is simple really.
I don't eat meat because I can live with out it.  There are two reasons really.

The first is that I believe the only real way that we could ever all reach a truly joyful life, all of us together, would be if we were more compassionate.  I think an primary step towards compassion is easily summed up in the adage, "Do unto others as you would have done to you", or "Don't do to others what you would not want done to you".
In a world where this is the way we begin our actions, most of us are not denied by any body else, the possibility of attaining our own happiness.  Since the prime concern for most of us is being in the first place, not killing another is easily reasoned out.  Since we can easily see in other beings the same efforts as ours to live then it is also to reason out including all life forms in this consideration.
This starts to bring up larger questions when applying it to our eating habits.  If one includes all living beings, including plants in the scope of compassion then one could easily get to the idea that killing and eating a plant, being a vegetarian, might not be going far enough.  One could then go on to the next level and decide to only eat the fruit and nuts and the different "leavings" of other living things that do not cause their death.  This could come to include milk, and unfertilized eggs, seeds, leaves....

In truth, I don't have a real problem with one being eating another.  It is the way our world works to a large part.  But there are many beings who survive with out killing and eating others.  Being human we seem to be able to adapt to many different ways of living.  The practice of not killing in order to survive is a choice.  In a world that is saturated with human violence, at a personal level, and at a national level, and if one considers how easily we cut down trees, and pollute habitats then on a species level as well, then the practice of not killing and causing the suffering of others seems a step in another direction.

The second reason is more selfish.  I feel better, healthier for my choice.  I have come to believe that my diet must change as I age, just as all other things must adjust to my older and decaying system.  I look at the people around me and I see a host of ills that I do not suffer from.  I cannot say definitively that it is due to my dietary choices but I believe that much of it is.

For as long as I have been eating the way I do and removed from my diet the meat of other animals I should by now be suffering some ill effects if they were to occur.  I don't seem to be suffering at all.  I work physically hard to cut the wood I need to heat my house thru the winter and doing all of the other work I do around here.  I seem to be plenty strong enough.  I don't feel that I have lost any intellectual capacity, but an outside observation would be more objective.  I continue to learn new things and think critically and creatively, so I don't feel as though I have suffered any mental weakness as a result of my diet.

So, I try eat in a way that causes the least amount of suffering to other beings as possible, be they plant or animal and I do it because it is what I can do to try to be more compassionate to the other beings in our world, the way I would like to be treated.

Re-Wild, really?

I recently came across an article/advertisement for a show being done by the National Geographic Channel.  The show is about "Re-widling", or leaving society and going out into the countryside, and what you will have to do to make it in the wild.

They list four essentials for survival:
1. food
2. water
3. shelter
4.protection

I think the show was called "Live free or Die" and is won of those challenge type of shows with competitors who are recorded and evaluated on how they do.

Ya, nothing changes much, it is the same old shite on the telly and that is why I don't watch it.

The thing I find worth discussing here is the way we humans continue to think of ourselves "outside of nature".  Do we call a bee hive, or an ant hill, or a birds nest, unnatural and artificial structures, or do we call them part of the wild?  How about when a spider uses his web to catch the wind to float from one place to another, or when a seed uses the wind to carry it a distance off from the tree or when a small fish hitches a ride on a larger fish, are these unnatural occurrence or part of the wild world?

We are just another life form on this planet of countless life forms.  We all share the same requirements of environment to the degree that we all only exist on this planet.  What we do is what is natural to us.  NYC, London, or some remote village on the African continent, what happens in each of these places are examples of humans in the wild.  This is our wild.

It is true that humans are different in to the degree that we create and seem dissatisfied with the state of things around us and manipulate the rest of the planet for our own benefit, and almost always at the cost of suffering of other people and other beings.

It might be more genuine to have a show that shows how most of the human animals do getting their four requirements.  How many humans get food in a way that allows them to survive, healthfully and happily?  Current medical statistics would indicate that an ever increasing number would be booted off the show because we are eating poisonous foods.

We are creating an ever increasing water scarcity and toxicity problem.
Homes are beyond the financial reach many and do little to actually protect us from things like flooding, tornados and hurricanes.

The last thing on the list, protection, is the most distressing.  We are mostly in need of protection from other human beings, or, ourselves.  The only time we hear of humans being "attacked" by other animals is when human beings put themselves into situations that allow for this.  We play in waters were sharks thrive, or we domesticate animals and train them to be violent, and we wonder into the domain of large predators.  We also open ourselves up to smaller threats like disease by our own voluntary actions, smoking and the resulting lung cancer for instance.

How many people do you know or suspect of having weapons to defend themselves against something other than other humans?  Do you know of anybody who is worried about a bear coming down there street and breaking into their home.  I can imagine it if you live in certain places, but most people don't worry over threats from anyone other than other humans.  Our police and military are trained and focus on protecting us from each other, not from threats from other living things.

A much more prescient and informing and entertaining show might be to show how a few humans can take what all the information that is available to us now and then survive in a "wildlike" manner,  or, in a manner more like most other living beings seem to.  Most other living beings spend the better part of their time getting their food, locally and seasonally.  Most stay within a certain range of a water source, and don't corrupt it.  Most make their home or shelter in a manner that works with their surroundings and from local materials.  Most other living creatures act in a way that protects them to a limited degree from predation, but almost none wage war against another.

Seeing humans living more like the rest of the living community, but using all that we know and have access to would be interesting, and a more reasonable thing for National Geographic to be investing their and our time in.

On Activism: "Don't Just do something, Stand there!"

What did the large corporations of energy companies see on their ledgers after Sunday, the day of the largest "Climate Change Protest" ever?  Did they see slight increase in petrol and electricity profits from transportation to get the estimated over 300 thousand demonstrators to NYC?  Did they see a spike in electricity use from social and regular media all tapped into the event?  Did the restaurants of the city use more energy to feed all those people and sell them drinks?  Did the buses and subways have an uptick in use for the day?  Maybe every demonstrator in that march was actually from the island of manhattan, and they all walked or bicycled to the march.  Maybe.

How can we expect the corporations who provide us with energy to change the way they provide that energy if we are not willing to stop buying it from them as they provide it to us now?  How can these energy corporations take any demonstrations seriously when those very demonstrations use more of that energy, and the people in attendance are more and more reliant on any energy source they can find as they "plug in" more and more often and live more mobile lives?

I understand that many see the energy used to make an event like that happen as a necessary evil in order to "get the word out", or to make their voices heard.  But I question the seriousness of those involved if all they want is for somebody else to change the way they live and work, while they go on ever increasing their own "quality of life" by advancing in the technological lifestyle everyday.

I am not saying that it is easy to accomplish a paradigm shift of an entire race and it's march towards what ever it is we are marching towards.  But there is really not an easy way to accomplish the complete halt of industry and technology and population growth of the human race, is there?  Isn't that what it is going to take to actually affect a change that will do anything?  If all the information I have read about the state of things on our planet is even half right that is what we need to do.  We need a paradigm shift away from the way we think about ourselves as a race.

No other species is creating waste that is beyond the capacity of the natural systems to assimilate.  Most other species don't seem to need to create water treatment plants, sewer systems, land fills, nuclear waste sites, or create other means of conveyance like planes trains and automobiles.  And yet, it is only our species that seems to be creating real and measurable troubles thru our inventions and use of these things.

If we were to remove human activity from the planet, as an intellectual exercise, do we think we would see the resource scarcity, the toxic pollution or the species extinction that we have with us here?  I can't imagine it.

In light of these thoughts it seems naive to think that we can invent or create technologies that will get us out of the situations that threaten the quality of life, not just for our species, but for many others as well.

With the old phrase in mind that goes "Don't just do something, Stand there!"  (apparently a director speaking to an extra upstage of the leading actors)  Maybe we are doing more harm than good by our need to act.

What would a "Day of unplugging"  do for the cause?  The idea is that for a day, or any length of time that is chosen, people from all over the world, simultaneously did nothing.  What if for that day nobody turned on a light, drove a car, or computer or cell phone, what would the energy corporations see on their ledgers for that day?   I am sure we couldn't achieve a big fat zero, but we could, for a day, or however long, not feed the monster that threatens us.  The willingness to actually sacrifice modern convenience by doing nothing that requires other than human energy, clean energy would show an intent in a way that a big party/parade in New York City on a Sunday afternoon doesn't quite achieve.  It shows the ability to withhold from those large corporations the power that is our money.  It shows unity.  It shows a mature willingness to sacrifice.  It sets a direction for what action is needed (or inaction) by those political groups and business groups and reinforces that message by withholding cash.

I honestly don't believe the conviction of all those people who attended that march was genuine.  It makes me sad to think this, but it is honestly what I believe and I believe it because of what I see.  In the same year we have a record breaking march to fight climate change we have a record high of CO2 emissions.  As we march forward with our new Iphones in hand and we require more speed from them and more "apps", and as we drive to the march in our cars that are not getting any better gas mileage than a Honda civic from 1972, but have onboard computers and video cameras and........we all seem to be wanting our cake and to eat it too.  It seems a bit childish and disingenuous.

Look up John Francis and find out about his life.  He wrote a book called "Planet Walker" about giving up the use of any motorized transport after witnessing the oil spill from a tanker in San Francisco Bay.  By not using a car he was able to actually travel the breadth of the continent, get a degree, and work to improve the standards by which oil tankers are used.  Most people with modern computers, airplanes and cars couldn't achieve as much.  He is an inspiration for what can be done in the microcosm of the self and the macro of the planet both at the same time.

Regardless of wether, or not, you believe that man made climate change is happening, it seems apparent and intelligent to realize the affect human activity has had on the biology/ecology of our planet.  The exponential growth of our population over the past 100 (that's one longish lifetime) years is staggering.  What is even more staggering is the exponential increase of the amount of energy we are using that comes from toxically polluting sources.  And even more staggering and stupid, quite frankly, is the increase that we each support daily, of the use of petroleum products, i.e. plastics, in every conceivable application possible.

Back in the 16th and 17th centuries, somebody in England might have looked at the huge forests of oak and elm as they began cutting them down to build boats and burn as fuel and thought, "This will never end, there are so many trees."  That sounds a lot like what many people say about fossil fuel, doesn't it?

We know our lifestyles corrupt our living space here on the planet.  Think about England and coal.  Think about 3 mile island or Chernobyl, or Fukushima.  If you want  you can think about NYC circa 1895, or anytime before the automobile, when the streets were layered with horse shit.  All of these things pollute, oil, coal, animal/human waste, but there is a importance difference between them.  Oil and coal and radioactive elements in even small concentrations are toxic to most life.  The length of time in which they can be re-assimilated into the planet is so long that it makes them for all practical discussion poisonous.  Animal waste on the other hand only becomes a hazard in high concentrations.  If you doubt this then think about how much shit comes out of the back of an elephant, whale or bear and then think about how much that is NOT a problem for any of those species, or others, to deal with.  The only reason our own human waste is a problem is because we don't know how to live with it, which is to say we live in very high concentrations and in one location.  The only reason horse shit was a problem in the cities like New York or Paris or london was because we were putting so many horses in those places.

In Paris they came up with a great solution for the incredible amounts of horse shit.  In the winter they collected and piled up the droppings and above the piles they made raised bed gardens to grow the vegetables.  The heat that came off the decomposing shite allowed them to grow food all thru the winter and the compost fertilized the plants.  Simple, smart, and even obvious really.

I don't think that there is anything wrong with trying to get a bit of help with the work we have to do to sustain us, but I think that there are more and less appropriate ways of getting that help.  An example can be seen in the log splitter I have.  It is a hydraulic ram that is powered by a person pumping a lever, like a car jack.  This is absolutely technology in action, but it doesn't require constant energy from a toxic source.  If you put a gas engine on that log splitter then you create a toxic pollution.  You also deprive yourself of the physical experience of work and exercise and the intellectual knowledge of how much work it takes to keep your fireplace going.

It is a crazy culture that we have.  We complain about the lack of jobs, but then work to create machines to do more jobs for us.?  We get in a car to drive to a distant place to ride a bike or run for exercise.?  We go on special diets and have operations when eating whole foods, mostly vegetables (thanks Michael Pollan) could fix most of our issues.

I am not trying to disparage the Climate March, I am just saying that it only makes sense if it is a small part of the steps people are truly willing to take, or the thoughts people are really willing to think, or the conversations people are really willing to be a part of or the sacrifices we are each willing to make in efforts to change our world for the better.

So, don't just do something, maybe just stand there.  Consider the idea of a world wide "Just Stand there" day and the impact it could have, or even better, come up with a better idea.

Of Art, Love, and picking berries

while gathering wineberries and

anticipating

the sun warm sweet juice
as I mash the the soft red fruit between my teeth and
feel the tiny seeds wedge down in the canyons of my molars,
or
the snowy winter day when the sky is grey with cloud and the air white with snowflake
the loud and rewarding ping as the toaster oven tells me
my sour dough bread is toasted,
I will spread the jam over the melting butter that seeps through the big air pockets formed when the dough was rising, and down onto the butcher block
 putting the warm bread to my mouth, I will crunch into that taste of summer sweet and tart
 an archive of the summer sun and sky and all the colors of the garden that are now faded and buried under the snow that won't melt for 2 weeks and then be covered again, two days later by the next snowy day.

Moving the thorny vines aside to get to the darker richer redder almost purple berries,
the ones the bright red cardinal and his grayer colored lover missed, or left, when they were startled by sound of the screen door,

the vines only protection pierces the skin of my finger, 

the finger I use to strike the Y,U,J,H,N&M

but I only wince
and continue on in my desperate desire for the sweet and deeply red, almost purple, fruit
knowing that the thorn will fester there, in me,
and that later I will be desperate to get it out, bothered by it when ever I try to write, or pick up something, or have to be polite and listen to the same old story over again ,or
am trying to sleep

The moment of biting into that wet sweet warm yielding berry,

it's juice spreading over my tongue, my brain lost to the song my taste buds are singing

comes at a price
the thorn in my finger, the constant awareness of discomfort, festering,

swelling, an inflamed redness surrounding that tiny bit of alien thing under my skin

To remove it means digging deep, probing
further pain and discomfort

I must look close, I must put on my eye glasses
because my eyes are no longer young

and my vision not so clear,

I must look
thru those old eyes,

thru those glasses

thru the magnifying glass

in order to see that tiny sliver, that thorn, that invader of my person

that has sounded the alarms of resistance and defense

thru this glass
thru this glass and
thru eyes straining

I can see

the thorn, the moment it pierced my skin

I was happy then,
until then,
smiling,

excited, anticipating the sweet sensations, not only of the biting down
and breaking open of the

sweet dark berry

but

of the discovery of that
just ripe enough,
just red enough,
not yet picked off by a hungry bird who might not

be as particular, might not be as delighted at having found that just right fruit,

happy in
the search,
thru the brambles, pushing back the underbrush, bending to look under leaves

hastily wiping away at spider webs that stickily cover my face
and then trying to calm myself
so as not to hurt the spiders,
who were trying to catch something other than me
 and now have to rebuild their webs as if I,
hurricane Sandy,
had blown and washed over their beach side cottages

The thorn must come out,
nothing will be possible until the thorn is removed and
the discomfort removed and
the distraction removed and
the swelling removed and
the memories of the summer sun removed and
the joy of the sight of the deep red fruit removed and
the wonder over the spider with the long green legs removed and 

the complaint of the cardinal being kept from her breakfast removed

from within me

With the thorn gone, the fevered skin calmed,
the constant ache subsides

and what remains is the memory of the sun warmed & sweet wineberry in summer

I am only slightly aware of the sharp thorny consequence of my lust,

and I am free to go back into the thicket again.