Sacred Naturalism with Steve Serr

Having Strayed from the Garden of Eden

2010-11-25T22:09:00.000-08:00

It is so hard for humanity to perceive itself as a part of Gaia. We see ourselves, by and large, as separate: walking across the Earth or flying through its air as if we were somehow just visiting. Indeed we generally think of ourselves as ‘showing up’ on the Earth when we are conceived (or in a more superficial way when we are born), and ‘departing’ when we die, all of which of course forces a metaphysically necessary religious proposal of souls, perhaps separating from the body at ‘death’, and inhabiting somewhere else, forever, or for awhile.

We are like fish trying to observe water when we attempt to understand our inseparable integration with Gaia. The plurality of ‘individuals’ attempting to understand its unity: the part, trying to understand the whole. When, however, Gaia is understood as a ‘constant creating’, a forever churning, in combining and recombining, then the part’s immediate connection with the whole becomes blazingly apparent. We cannot understand the human-Gaia relationship from a human perspective, for this is like a fish attempting to understand the fisherman, the water, and itself. It is simply beyond its means.

However, we, just like Gaia, are creators. We stride across the Earth, creating. Every displacement of the soil by the tread of a human foot creates a landscape that was not there before. Gaia is full of creation, incessant creative acts of innumerable moments of incomprehensible numbers of creations. We, and Gaia, are the same. A motion, a process, a river.

We are already a part of Gaia and this cannot be otherwise. Yet, perhaps we don’t feel this often, if at all, or at least we are not conscious of doing so if and when we do. Moreover, we as a species are doing innumerable gross things that hurt not only other human beings, but our Earth itself. Spoiling this Gaia in which we belong. Why? Because we are not acting in accordance with our true nature.

It has become popular in intellectual circles to grin sarcastically at such a concept as ‘true nature’. It is so easy to dismiss such a nature as hurtful, spiteful and mean spirited when humanity’s glaring spoilage of itself and its environment is truly observed. Moreover, it is increasingly easy to shake one’s head at humanity when so many try so hard to convince themselves that life is good. We smile at one another without feeling love. We eat our meat without thinking of the pain of the animal that was killed. We shop in the nice parts of town and avoid seeing the hunger and poverty. It is a comforting illusion of oneself and the world that holds much of the human world together. Intellectuals have such fun with this.

However, if we do listen to our true nature, we are consistent, one human being to the next. We are compassionate and do not want to hurt others, nor do we want to hurt ourselves. It is not the nature we were born with. The child is naturally sympathetic. This is also observed in the adult when he or she listens to their conscience. However, the persona we adopt can inflict ill. Social pressures can motivate us to adopt a persona. Then, we can act in an uncaring way.

Humanity has strayed from its own true nature. Perhaps we are the first of Earth’s organisms to have been able to achieve this disturbing feat. Maybe we are the first planetary being to be able to adopt a persona, or adopt such a degree of persona, rather than move through the world as our true self.

Religious literature attempts to make sense of humanity and the world. The Christian Bible, for instance, tells an innocent tale from an earlier time when an angry god rails cowering people out of an Earthly garden of delights so that these humans would suffer, a fitting end for having ignored the god’s demands. It is an early, more childish form of morality, one constructed from injunctions. But then, these were early times.

The Garden of Eden, as was the name of Gaia in this tale, consisted of a complete interdependence of humanity with the Whole. The breaking of a rule happened, and this tale tries to make sense of why humanity suffers. Rule breaking demands punishment.

God, however, is a human, albeit not very mature, conception of how Gaia is put together with humanity in it. Rule breaking and a powerful god who enforces rules, were early attempts to understand how it is that humanity walks through the Earth without feeling a part of it. Separated from the Whole. Cast from the Garden.

The being that strayed from its true nature is the creature in the story who was cast from the Garden.

If, however, human moral development became arrested with the help of religion at an early stage of ‘morality as rules’, and the more simplistic and not-very-developed idea of spirituality is arrested with the same religion at the childlike notion of a punishing god, then we remain lost. We are unable to truly see ourselves, and instead assume a fallen nature.

If then, humanity was not cast from the Garden of Eden and if we were not goaded out of such a complete interdependence with Gaia, did we throw ourselves out? Did humanity itself hasten itself from that primal place? I think not, for even as the religion points out, it was glorious.

I think we strayed.

Like a ship veering off course, only here the confusion cannot be placed on heavy winds, fog or powerful seas, but rather, on the curious human biological development called the forebrain. Here evolved an item enabling any human being to adjust their behavior as well as their sense of self, from their true nature.

This is not something a fish can do, nor, I think, a skunk. Nor a dog, well at least not very much, or very well. I can tell, for instance, when my bulldog places her ponderous head on my knee at around dinnertime that it is for food, not out of adoration for myself, though that may be the look in her eyes. Skillful, yes, but not so much as a baboon, and certainly not so well as a human. When an organism begins the development of self-reflection, then lying can begin: a way of behaving that is at odds with self recognition. This can become so automatic, that the deviation is forgotten. In human beings, the persona can come to guide the human.

True nature, however, is living in complete accordance with what one truly feels, and with an honest appraisal of the world. It is very simple, really; harming another human, or the Earth is a very misguided act, for it only results in negative consequences. In the case of harming a human being, pain can come back to us from the human who was harmed, or from his kin, or as in the early moral stages discussed earlier, by a punishing law. In later moral stages, one can feel pain from a punishing conscience. When we harm the Earth, we harm our home. We are tossing filth into our well.

I believe that humanity was not cast, nor cast itself, but rather, strayed from Gaia. It was probably not from conscious intention that we moved from a state of concord with the world around us. That would be unnatural. It would be like consciously choosing to put our hand within a flaming chamber. Though we might adopt a persona that felt a need to inflict pain on ourselves, I don’t think this is what originally happened. No: at the first sense of unhappy consequences, we would have withdrawn our hand from the flame. With respect to the world around us, we would return to behavior with which the state of concord could be maintained.

Any child stepping into a rowboat attempts first, to keep it steady. It is only later that, perhaps with mischief, such rocking is attempted that the boat became swamped. Then, the child returns to maintaining a steady craft.

There is, however, a happy element in this admittedly rather tragic seeming tale, which is that throughout all of this, human beings have the power of choice. We can choose whether to stray from our true nature, or not. In this manner, we can choose to live in concord with our Earth or not.

Choice is power. Considerable power. It offers the ability to create, or destroy.

Green Politics and Religion

2010-10-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

The color ‘green’ has entered our economic, political and social color spectrum. Pressures for change in how we treat our world have begun to cast a decidedly green hue towards areas like industry and politics, and even into our day-to-day world. In the economic sphere, environmental constraints are being levied on industries; in the political sphere, politicians occasionally promote environmental protection (when it serves their constituency). In the social sphere? Well, I now keep a reusable bag to take with me into the grocery store in the pickup, and I am not alone in this.

However, it occurred to me that although I have heard about green economics and green politics, I haven’t heard much about green religion, at least explicitly. Arnie Naess, from the position of deep ecology had some insightful things to suggest about influencing a greenish change in politics and economics, but this got me thinking about religion. The world is spinning into devolution as a consequence of misguided but fundamental human norms. If deep change is necessary in the ‘cornerstones’ that bolster the maintenance of world, then religion cannot be ignored.

After all, is not at least one of religion’s primary functions the education and encouragement of norms in humanity? Moreover, are not these the norms that tenaciously work their way into every aspect of human life, from economic to politics to the social order?

‘Green’ is supposed to represent ecological awareness and the practice of an ecologically sound lifestyle. Naess suggests that are ‘green’ political efforts can influence change by developing a ‘fifth columns’ of ecological awareness and valuation in a kind of uprising within political parties that so not start out ostensibly green in color. What about establishing a green political party? The establishment of a numerically small ‘green party’ may paradoxically have a negative influence on the environmental changes it would espouse because of an erroneous, publically perceived sense of unimportance of the color ‘green’, simply by looking at the numbers and making an equally erroneous extrapolation of ‘green-leaning’ throughout society.

‘Green’ is not against ‘industry’ per se; only against big and environmentally toxic industry. Nor is 'green' against ‘technology’ per se; just that which fails to advance the basic goals of an environmentally healthy world. Soaring human population will continue to fly out of control for a long time before we can see human numbers diminishing. And with this out-of-control human non-stop procreating, our Earth’s health is deteriorating. We have to get this human population to exert minimal harm on the planet. In our frustration to make change happen (and in fear of the future) it is easy to criticize politicians as well as anyone else working within ‘the system’. This is cutting off our nose to spite our face: it is the major power-players in industry, politics and the living world who hold much of the possibility of ever ‘re-greening’ the planet.

But what's this about religion? Why bring that up if indeed, the power players are the suits and ties and bank accounts of the contemporary world? Religion has had an age-old reputation as a norm-building industry. Religion creates and advertises the norms of human society that in turn have carry-over effects throughout vast areas of human life.

Hmmm. A 'green' religion.

I suppose a green religion would be unequivocally 'Earth friendly', meaning ecologically aware, respectful of all of life, working feverishly at a minimum of negative planetary impact given our out-of-the box population explosion. What it would look like? Well, certainly it would have a negative influence on planetary ecology, even if that influence was through of a lack of involvement. Thomas Berry spoke eloquently and rather chidingly about the Christian redemptive mystique which “is little concerned with the natural world. The essential thing is redemption out of the world through a personal savior relationship that transcends all such concerns.” (The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club Books, 1988) In other words, it is the neglectful disinvolvement with the Earth that is the tragedy. Berry pursued his rather uncomfortable point further:

“While none of our Christian beliefs individually is adequate as an explanation of the alienation we experience in our natural setting, they do in their totality provide a basis for understanding how so much planetary destruction has been possible in our Western tradition. We are radically oriented away from the natural world. It has no rights; it exists for human utility, even if for spiritual utility.”

If 'non-Earthly' and 'Earth-as-human-utility' help point out the ‘non-green’ religions, any number of present religions might easily display various shades of ‘greenlessness’, or green.

In the past, I have spoken critically of religions that de-sanctify the Earth. Perhaps in partial reaction to these religions, I have also chosen to align with other spiritual paths, rather than try to find a healthy way within such religions themselves. However, the development of an ecological, eco-friendly populace does not necessitate coming on like some kind of anti-establishment revolutionary. There is a sneakier, far more effective route when existing political parties form such ideas and efforts from within. In this way, the color green influence the party ‘norms’ such that political decisions start to have an ecologically positive impact on the Earth. The color green, when it appears from within, is no longer considered alien, but are in psychological terms, ‘ego-syntonic’ to the organization in which it appears.

My spirituality is, at least in my own country, by far a numerical minority. Deeply ‘green’ in color - not even a Kelly green... perhaps even a forest green shade - our relatively few numbers may actually trigger the negative consequence of an erroneous public misconception that an Earth-centered approach must not be very important.

Thomas Berry took religions to task, Christianity in particular, for inciting norms that harmfully affected the Earth. Though he chastised his own Christianity, it is not any specific religion per se that is the issue. What is the issue are the religious norms that reduce our Earth to human utility, and elevate holiness to an other-worldly place. What I mean to say is that it is not ‘religion’ which is the issue at all, but the aspects of religion that can have toxic influences. And, since the religions that hold the most adherents today are likely to be the religions holding a majority tomorrow, if we are going to have any influence on the human population’s behavior, it is crucial to accept their reality and work with it.

Green and not-so-green spiritual beliefs become codified and promulgated. Spiritual beliefs and the religions that espouse them have a deep impact on the behavior of human beings. Through the norm-generating operations of religion, either a green, a not-so-green, or a completely different environmental ‘color’ will proceed to bleed into the world. It behooves us to look more closely at religion, and in particular, its color.

Religion has been grossly overlooked by the ecological movement. It is not that politics and economics are unimportant: quite to the contrary. Anyone who thinks that religion and politics are separate in the United States, need only look at the Republican party to blow that illusion out of the water. The Republicans are taking their money and fighting back, buying seats in the House, struggling to insure the plutocracy can live on.

Oh. Did I say plutocracy?

That's another subject. For now, just take a look at the monastery, church, temple, mosque, wherever you happen to derive your norms, and see what color your particular religious institution is. Well, at least try to notice how much green there is.

A Question of Values

2010-10-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

Economics, the ‘dismal science’ as I heard it called, has been something with which I have tried to have as little contact as possible. I vaguely classified it in my hierarchy of interests along with foreign languages, or algebra, two of my other areas of keen disinterest.

Perhaps this is a little unfair. For instance, E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful struck a wonderfully resonant chord when I first read it many years ago. He was talking about economics, yes, but his discussion contained a value: people mattered.

Now that conditions that are consequences of human use are forcing the issues of Earth sustainability, now that differences in religion are mixing with rising human populations and power, and since the effects of civilization on the quality of life of human beings is increasingly suspect, it is time to bring values back to the equation. Not those like ‘prestige’, ‘purity’, or ‘country’ that business, religion and politics has surreptitiously (and blatantly) fed to an innocent and gullible public, but deeper, more lasting, human values.

It is forwarded by champions of ecological care of our Earth such as Arnie Naess that to ignore the methodology and reasoning beneath economics as a science is to face one’s own – and the planet’s – future with a dismal handicap. It is not that economics is ‘bad’ (even if I grew up shunning it as if it was), but that it has been associating with ‘bad influences’. Well, ‘bad’ in the sense that the consequences are eroding the quality of life for human beings, as well as the entire planet.

And perhaps I should exercise some reservation, and qualify that those influences with which economics has been associating are not really ‘bad’, but misguided.

Without a deep and conscious value system of one’s own, it is impossible to direct the consequences towards ends that reflect such values. Economics, and politics are clear examples. Economics values equations, for instance, and thus tries quantify and provide rationale for human projects, however not based on such matters as peacefulness or wellbeing. Indeed, economists generally (though there are standouts such as Schumacher) avoid discussions of value, as if they would muddy the clarity of their work.

Politics embraces values, yes, values such as ‘winning’ or ‘America’ or ‘democracy’ when using America as an example. However, these values are merely means to ends, which are the unexpressed deeper values, such as ‘winning in order to save the parklands’, ‘America as a bastion of human freedom in a tenuously unfree world’, and ‘democracy as a vehicle for people to choose what they value most’. Both economics and politics have thus glossed the matter of human values.

This is also true in religion. How many times have we heard the value ‘devotion’? It is pretty much a standard expressed value throughout the world, serving as a sort of measuring stick for individual holiness. Yet, the same second-look at this supposed value leads to a curious reflection: devotion to what? If the response is ‘devotion to God’, or Allah or whatever, then this is merely empty jargon, for what in the heck do these, then represent? If the value of ‘devotion to God’ is the ‘measure of one’s holiness’, then we clearly have a circular ‘explanation’ so this can’t be the ultimate value of devotion. But if not this, then what?

What are the values in religion? Not religion as a generic, vague group of practices and such that humans do, but religion as a Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism? If indeed, a value of Christianity is preservation of human life, then the Crusades would never have been fought, and instead, moved forward respectfully to the Muslims with conscious discussion, rapport building, and collaboration. If Islam likewise is a religion that recognizes an essential value of human life, then how could they ever have fought against Crusaders?

As it is likely self-defeating for ecologists to ignore where economists are placing their values, it is self defeating for Americans to ignore the emptiness of ‘America’ or ‘democracy’ as values in and of themselves, and look more closely at what such supposed values are reaching for. For the ecologist to adequately champion the viability of the Earth, he or she must recognize the vacancy of values in the economists' equations in the first place. For Americans to champion democracy, the issue is not voting at all, but voting for what! To say that the mere ability to have an ‘equal right’ to express and reach for one’s choices, says nothing about the nature of the values upon which such choices are made. A mob can be resplendent with members who are equally choosing to stone a person with whom they disagree.

Religion is not a value in itself. Neither is Christianity or Islam, though already I am quite likely, already being infuriating by saying so. Neither is ‘devotion’, or ‘prayer’, or even ‘love’… as the questions – those muddying, confounding, disturbing questions – of value remain. To what value is one devoted, around what values does one pray, and what does one value so much that they love?

Ecosophy and Spirituality: Lessons from Technology

2010-10-16T12:21:00.000-07:00

Arnie Naess, in Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (With David Rothenberg, trans., Cambridge University Press, 1991) argues that “There is no such thing as purely technical progress,” and that consequential changes in culture are inevitable. Naess forays into two directions, one of which being the material, organizational, and structural ‘secondary effects’ of technological introductions. However the 'other direction' is the one that struck me quite forcefully: that of the impact of technology on human values. (All quotes that follow are from the above work by Naess. sjs.)

Although occasional resistance to technology is raised, especially from religious groups (eg. abortion, genetic research), technology is largely granted a huge immunity to challenge, and for some interesting reasons that may not be so apparent at first sight. The first of these is the apathy which is a natural consequence of the inattentiveness that comes from the detachment through specialization and education. Technicians are not simply removed by the walls of corporate buildings and the padded uprights of office cubicles from the context in which their products will have an effect, but by the very nature of the thought-forms themselves: with attention given in one area, inattention is automatically granted to another. The areas of attention are in this case, naturally, technical. Areas of inattention could include anything else, such as nature, normative values and cultural color.

The other reason for the failure of tremendous resistance to changes in culture leveraged by technology, is the helpless passivity that can come from a diminished access to immediate power to make changes. Disempowerment – and felt disempowerment, which can add up to the same consequences – can occur for many reasons, yet with respect to the technological impact on human culture and indeed, all of life, it seems to have occurred from the state of dependence that has grown on technology, and secondarily, on the narrow elite who produce and maintain it. Now of course, it is dubious whether even this elite is actually in charge of technology, as “the general trend of modern technological development has perhaps not been masterminded by anybody, by any group or any constellation of humans. It may have developed largely ‘by itself’.”

It is these qualities that have seemed to separate the ‘everyman/woman’ from a position of actively monitoring and determining the direction and extent of technological impact on human and planetary life, which reminds me of something equally of value to human life: that of human spirituality. For instance, with respect to the felt disempowerment that occurs when a narrow elite have access to the information and physical apparatus of technological development, a similar case has grown with respect to the access to the education and power centers of contemporary religion. Those who have the most impact on the largest populations are a narrow population granted extraordinary educations and provided with the buildings and grounds that support a particular spiritual view.

Moreover, the later several thousand of years of religious power has created a dependency model for spiritual life for the average man or woman, inculcating that spiritual life necessitates the mediation of a trained clergy, and that indeed, all of humanity is in any event, ‘dependent’ on a higher power. Such teachings lead to passivity and helplessness, as access to personal authority and power is diminished.

Here, Naess’ response is intriguing, for with respect to technology, he says “Our helplessness in questions of technical ‘development’ is a myth – a very useful myth for those introducing expensive new technology. Technology is chosen, but not by consideration of society as a whole.”

This could equally be said of religious and spiritual life: the passivity, dependence and felt disempowerment is not so ‘concrete’ as may be generally assumed. Just as technology can be challenged by anyone, so can religion. The ‘learned helplessness’ of humankind in the face of technology and its negative effects on human and Earth life is a powerful parallel to the impact of contemporary religions and their negative effects. The distance created through beliefs that place heaven as separate from Earth, and the dependence that is created through beliefs in an omnipotent deity to which one must pray, have conspired with many other matters to place the future of the Earth in jeopardy.

However, as with technology, religion can be challenged, and changed. The work, however, must come from the ground up, just as it may come from elsewhere. Just as technology cannot be “isolated from a discussion of values", neither can religion. As decentralization and differentiation with respect to technology can be a means of bring richness to the human potential, so it is as well with respect to religion. Does one or another form of religion actually advance the goals of a culture? This needs to be studied in depth, and answers formed.

Fear is a block to change. For technology, it is the fear of profit in the industrial-economic sector, or fear of a reduced ‘standard of living’, or of unemployment. When it comes to matters of religion, the fear that can thwart constructive reappraisal and change would be of alienation from one’s religious community, fear of reprisal (history is resplendent with examples of murderous intolerance), or of fear of divine punishment.
The efforts of Naess to counter the momentum of a world spinning out of balance through a challenge to technology’s distance from normative values challenges as well its apparent immunity to our resistance.

It is the same with religion.

Imagine

2010-10-08T18:45:00.000-07:00

Adults are often chided by other adults for behaving like children when they are given to imagination. Reality, it is said, is real, not imaginary. This is really quite humorous, because as it turns out, it is impossible to be an adult viewing reality from anything except an imagination! If we have different conceptions of reality it is because our ideas filter and sort the reality that we claim to see.

An atheist might contend that we continue to feel this driving need to posit an idea of God or Gods, despite the world that we see around us. But that is dependent on how we determine what it is that we see. A ‘believer’ is often heard exclaiming how they see ‘God in everything around them’. You might say that in one case, God is defined into the equation, and in the other, defined out. One sees no God, the other sees God, and you can’t really say they are seeing the same thing, because as observers, they are creating the very reality that they claim to apprehend.

Take the words to John Lennon’s song, Imagine…

“Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky…”

It has long occurred to me that it wouldn’t really take much to see a miraculous event take place. Hardly a finger would have to be raised to see a world at peace, in awe of life, compassionately celebrating the miracle of existence itself. Lennon’s iconic song expands on this idea;

“Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace”

What John Lennon was saying - and I guess I am singing along with it - is that it doesn’t really take much more than a different way of seeing, to make a different reality. Moreover, he was encouraging others to take heart, and see, for by doing so, that the world would change as a consequence.

In the pursuit of a better world, we are encouraged to consider how we can perceive the human self as not a discrete item, and not separate from the other humans and the rest of the world. We are reminded by contemporary biology to rethink how we think about a cell, and how it is becoming increasingly untenable to perceive a cell separate from the ‘field’ within which it really cannot be separated. Its very constitution requires it.

This is the nature of the human self, when considered in an ecosophical manner; indivisible from the world in which it walks, talks, thinks and perceives. Is it true, as Lennon states that all it takes is a joining?

“I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one”

My sense is that what is meant by ‘joining’ is not enlisting in some organization, but rather seeing with a similar perspective, a similar world. As Lennon says,

“You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one…”

Perhaps it is not imagination per se that adults criticize when they refer to one of us as living as a child ‘in an imaginary world’, but rather, not living in the same imaginary world as themselves.

I can imagine a rewrite of this song, done with less of John Lennon’s emphasis on human community (small ‘c’), but with an expanded sense of community into the ecosophic Community (capital ‘C’). Here is brotherhood, not of humanity, not just of all the people, but of all the world itself.

In this case, the world truly would, ‘be as one’.

Imagine
By John Lennon

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

The Story of the Biggest Coyote in the World

2010-09-30T15:36:00.000-07:00

Mother Coyote was at a loss.
She was exhausted. The pups were all but out of control,
Yipping and scampering all around the den.
“Husband” she finally yelped, “I need your help!”

Dutifully Coyote trotted over to where she sat.

Her ears drooped slightly, and she said “I’m tired.”
Then she thought for a moment, and added,
“Would you tell the pups a story?
That will keep them occupied for at least a while,
So I can catch my breath.”

Ever dutiful, Coyote thought about all the wild forest outside the den.
He thought about the mysterious caves beneath the mountains.
He thought about the wind that whistled through the towering trees.
He thought about the long leaps he made over the dry creek beds,
And about the moon that howled silently above in the night.

He thought about all these things,
and yet didn’t speak of them.
Instead, he sat down, curled his tail around himself,
And yipped to the pups to come over.

With their last barks of glee and mirth,
The pups went round and round, tracing little circles on the den floor,
And curling into tiny balls of fur, looked up at their father with big,
Proud eyes, for the Coyote they saw was Huge.

Coyote couldn’t know that, and anyway,
he was busy thinking about the story.
At last, he thought he had the first lines, and not wanting to wait for the rest,
Just began, hoping that the story would tell itself as it went along.
He paused, looked at the pups, and spoke:

“This is the story of a Coyote” he said,
“Stuck in the shape of a man, yet he had a tail,
and would bark and yip in frustration:
‘I need to breathe!’ hollered the man-coyote,
who impatiently sniffed at the air
and looked about in all directions with wild eyes.

As it was, the coyote in him belonged to a pack…
Of one Female, and two pups who would scamper after him whenever he returned to the clearing just beyond the den door,
playing and sometimes feasting on what he would bring back
from his adventures in the forest.

The man-coyote's wife saw his distress.
‘But you don’t spend enough time in the den!’ she exclaimed,
her soft eyes dimming with sadness
‘The pups need your leadership!’ she added.

The Coyote in him was at a loss…
how could he open his coyote lungs
and taste the wild forest air that spread out in all directions, and yet,
also run in such little circles,
around and around the den with his wife and pups…
at the same time!

He sat down and with a rear leg (he had not one, but two of them),
scratched behind one of his ears,
and Wondered.

All of a sudden, it struck him: This was new!
Wondering!

‘My gosh’, he suddenly reflected,
‘I never wondered about things before. I always just… knew them!’
‘Why, I know how to creep under the wire fence to grab the chickens,
I know how to hide from the hunters,
I know how to…’ and there, his voice trailed off.
His brow furrowed as he realized there was something that he didn’t know.
He was at a loss.

He was so busy Wondering, that he nearly leapt out of his skin in fright,
for all of a sudden, out of the forest came the biggest, noblest,
fiercest Coyote he had ever seen!
When it stepped forward, with each step the forest duff quivered.
And when man-coyote looked at Coyote,
the magnificent beast’s eyes held the farthest reaches of the forest
within them.

Man-coyote was stunned. He could not move,
his paws seemed frozen in place.

Then the biggest Coyote in the whole world spoke:
‘Come here, Son.’ it growled, with a voice that rolled like distant thunder.
Man-coyote’s feet began to move and his flanks trembled as he padded slowly towards the magnificent creature.

‘You are caught, my son, in your own trap.
You have created the ultimate Coyote trap
And have trapped yourself.’

‘I see a Coyote who doesn’t know his full nature.
You see yourself still as a young pup… you,
who are a giant among Coyotes!’

With that, the huge Coyote lifted itself up to its full height and its eyes flashed…
‘Look’ he barked, ‘Look in the mirror! See who you really are!’

But man-coyote was confused. Mirror? What mirror?
He wagged his tail nervously,
And yet peered to the left, and then to the right,
just in case there was a mirror there.

The giant Coyote seemed to tremble with power,
lightening flashed from where his claws struck the rock,
and the forest trees shook.
‘Look!’ he roared again. ‘Look in the mirror!’

Man-coyote looked with all of his might,
He looked, and looked, and looked until his eyes started to ache,
And then he Saw.

His eyes grew huge with amazement and his jaw dropped so far
that it nearly touched the ground,
For man-coyote saw… Himself.”

With that, Coyote paused in the story.
He glanced at his wife: her eyes were round with amazement.
He glanced at the pups: they lay there, not even panting
for fear they would miss his next words.

“And so”, he said, “that was that.”

“What do you mean!!” the pups yelped. and yipped,
and bared their teeth in frustration…
“That’s not a story, dad! It doesn’t have an ending!”

Coyote looked back at his wife, and filled with all the love in the world,
He held her gaze as he answered to all of them:
“You are right. It doesn’t.”

And with that, his long jaws broke into a soft smile.

“Just one minute, Dear.” He spoke to his wife.
She sat there, her head cocked slightly to one side,
and a look of perplexity slowly turning into one of understanding.

Trotting out the den door to where the small clearing
melted into the forest, he stopped,
and lifting his head to the sky, closed his eyes,
filled his lungs with all of his might, and broke the still air,

“Coyote!” He howled at the forest,
“Thank you!”

And with that, he turned back,
his massive frame,
his mighty eyes glimmering,
his gigantic feet causing the ground to tremble,
and returned to his den.

Part 4: Sacred Earth, A Personal and Bioregional Journey in the Desert

2010-07-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

Considering these things during the evening, he awoke the next day prepared with questions. He did ritual with gratitude and love, again calling in the directions and asking their help, with both the quest which he was on, and the quest that was his lifetime. Again, the North spoke to him most strongly, reminding him that it was time to shed his old ways. Offering sage and incense to the spirits of the directions, and to the ancient ones of the land, he again retreated to a circle a bit at a distance, and rattled, hoping the ancestors would come again.

The old chief did come, and the man asked for direction. How could he do these things? What did he need to know about the course of his life that lay ahead? The old man bid him to gaze to his right, and waited patiently while the man began to see the obstacles that would appear on his path.

Straining his eyes, finally three obstacles appeared in front of a wide path that led up a mountain. Impatient to explore, the man started forward, but the chief was not finished. First, the old one added, the man must stop, acknowledge and give gratitude to each obstacle he would meet. Also, he must proceed with awareness, for although he could go around or step over each one, a snag would appear that would grab him.

With a deep breath, the man then started forward. The first obstacle was a dead bush. This, the old one told him, was the chaff of the man’s life, which was spent and ready to be shed. The man took another deep breath and prepared to move forward again, but came to a sudden halt. At his feet appeared a large stink bug. Unhesitatingly, it began to amble in the direction the man was headed, as if leading the way. Sure enough, the stink bug led him to the next obstacle, yet so entranced was the man with his new guide that his leg was grabbed by a dead snagging branch. Then he remembered: he needed to thank the obstacles. Turning back, he thanked his old chaff that was to be released, and turned to the snag, to thank it for reminding him to remain attentive.

The stink bug continued forward, leading him to the next obstacle. It was a beautiful, small Mojave sage. This, the old man said, was the obstacle of his attraction to beauty. This was the trap of the surface of things, and specifically women’s bodies. The man closed his eyes in reflection, for he was all too aware of using sex as a diversion, and detouring around real intimacy. The old man was right. So he thanked his obstacle for showing itself, and proceeded to follow the stink bug.

It took him to a huge thorny bush with many branches that were deeply interwoven. This, he was told, is an organization, and something he could not step over, but must go around. The stink bug worked its way into the depths of the harsh plant until it disappeared, and the man knew he must proceed alone. Thanking the beetle and the thorny shrub, he took a few steps and encountered a wide, well-traveled trail, yet chose to not take it though it appeared to loop towards the mountain top that was his destination. Walking directly forward into the creosote, he realized there were actually many beings around him. He began to see ahead one he thought would be waiting at his destination. When he reached it, he realized he was actually only part-ways towards his goal. Moreover, what he thought was a destination was actually connected to an extremely prickly shrub by a huge, tough spider web. The man realized this was a potential trap. He needed to be wary when he neared his goal.

When he reached the top of the mountain, he found a beautiful, sacred place. Yet, he marveled, it was clearly not unlike any other place. The sacred, it seemed, could be found anywhere. Reflecting on this, he returned to his circle, realizing on his way back that his journey up the had been farther than he realized, and the way back, confusing.

∞

This is the story of a man on a quest who disappeared, leaving his self and his world behind as he sought a vision.

It is the story of a man who stepped outside the dream of people, and enfolded into the dream of the Earth.

It is the story of a sacred Earth, and the part that is the Mojave Desert.

Part 3: Sacred Earth, A Personal and Bioregional Journey in the Desert

2010-07-13T17:15:00.000-07:00

The following day, the man descended into a broad basin with desert marigolds and globemallow scattered here and there. There were signs of desert larkspur, lupin, and the evening primrose. Peering more closely at the desert floor, there appeared innumerable tiny flowers, hardly large enough to be noticed at all, and easy it would be to entirely miss their humble beauty. They were a metaphor for the entire desert: an understatement of the Divine.

∞

The Mojave, one of the largest bioregions in California, rests contiguous with the borders of Nevada and Arizona, reaching towards the Sierra, South Coast, and Colorado Desert bioregions. It is a land that that holds wisdom, sometimes in stories, and sometimes in the bones of ancient storytellers, discovered and tossed about by coyotes. Such stories, passed on through generations of people, reach back into the time before time. Sometimes, in the afternoon breezes that swept from the Northwest, this man sensed he could faintly hear these stories, telling of how the Mojave people had come to know themselves.

At first, they say, there was only chaos. Yet in a glorious moment from the Earth and Sky, came Matavilya, the Great Spirit, and it was from great mountain Avi kwa’ ame that the two-leggeds came. But before these first humans could begin to learn how to live, the one who was to be their teacher, the Great Spirit, fell by the hand of his own sister, Frog Woman. Upon learning this, his little brother Mastamho took his place and drew a line in the sand with a branch of willow. From this came a river, bringing with it ducks and fish. It was said that this little brother then scraped the mud from the banks of this river and made mountains.

Yet still, the people knew nothing, so Mastamho taught them how to plant, how to build shelter, and how to make fire. He taught them how to know night from day, how to fish, and how to hunt. He even showed them how to count, and gave them the four directions. This, the Mojave people would tell each other, is how the land fell into their hands, the land of the Mojave.

Then others came from far away, with guns that tore holes in the Mojave people from a distance. They kept coming, doing to the desert whatever they chose, ripping away the self-governance the bioregion had known for millions of years.

∞

The sun was beginning to find a foothold at the top of the sky, and the man knew he should soon find shelter, and began searching for an overhanging creosote. Then, he came to a standstill before a wide scar of churned Earth that cut across the wash and stretched in both directions. Tracks from gnarled tires ripped the desert floor, footprints of wild machines that had roared past dragging plumes of dust behind. There was plastic bottle. Just beginning to take a thousand years to decompose. To his right lay an awkward spread of spent cartridge shells from high power rifle, glistening brass beneath the sun, left for an eternity. From a nearby bush came a reflection from an aluminum can, nearly ripped apart with holes from lead slugs now buried in the sand.

He pondered for awhile that in no more than about a scant hundred years, with human thoughtlessness treating the Mojave as a giant trash bin, the desert’s delicate balance and exquisite beauty were deeply wounded. This, the desert would never have allowed had its authority not been wrested by the humans.

∞

The story of human beings in the desert is so ancient, that the exact story is now unclear. They appeared long before all-terrain vehicles and empty plastic bottles. It may be that the human story began when the continental ice sheets were still visible. Or perhaps, humans appeared when Pleistocene rivers drained into lakes that no longer exist, their water eventually descending into Death Valley and into the pluvial Lake Manly. It is seen that the edges of these now dried lakebeds show signs of ancient human habitation seven to twelve thousand years before. It is possible that these early people were following game as the seasons cycled past, or perhaps they had already created a lake or marsh-centered culture.

Though it is a mystery when humans first arrived, petroglyphs left on rocks suggest the earliest may have come 15,500 years ago, a time when marshes and streams still flowed. Then, plants and game were plentiful; mastodons and mammoths lumbered through the greenery along with bison, and fish could be caught with darts. But the climate became hotter, the lakes dried up, and the humans followed the wildlife as it migrated away. Though some continued to follow the game and hunt, others took to farming, and still others to trade between various groups. Many found increasing subsistence in seeds and plants. These were the Mojave.

Then came the Europeans. A Spanish padre, Francisco Garcés, picked his way through and across the desert to establish mission churches elsewhere, and was killed by those for whom he was bringing his Roman Catholicism. Later, Mojave Indians are thought to have joined in such attacks as well. In response, Moraga led a ‘punitive’ expedition against the Mojave.

For human to prey on human does not speak well of humanity, and yet it is much of the history of the people of the desert. Ewing Young and a large party of trappers terrorized Mojave village, and Jedediah Smith, who had passed by peaceably once, returned to Mojave village only to be attacked in return, leaving 10 of his party dead and two women captured. However, compassion and trust were not entirely absent: Kit Carson and a more than a dozen others, starving and thirsty, were brought lifesaving assistance by the Mojave, and later in 1831, a party of 20, starving and thirsty just like Kit Carson, were also saved.

Criminals often sought refuge on the desert. Then came a gold rush, and prospectors came and went. Authority over the Southwest was assumed by the United States after a treaty with Mexico. Completely ignored, the longest desert residents, the Mojave, were understandably implacable over the supposed United States authority, just as they had been with Mexico’s original declaration that the land was theirs. The idea of Mexico then, somehow giving it to the United States, was incredulous.

Mutual animosity and deaths among natives and non-natives alike, continued to wax and wane through the Civil war. It was known that those who fell to Mojave warriors were first downed by a club that struck from above, and when the body began to tumble to Mother Earth, a second strike came from below, smashing the jaw. Prisoners of the Mojave were tattooed with a warrior’s ownership, kept as a slaves, and eventually sacrificed to serve warriors who had moved from this life. Gangs of horse thieves, secessionists and criminals conspired to make the desert an especially dangerous place.

Things continued to change: mining, railroads, and then cars and a paved highway appeared. Military bases were created. General Patton rolled his tanks and spent munitions over the Mojave to train troops during WWII. A policy to eliminate coyotes was enacted, along with a rash of innumerable other insults to the desert ecology. Large areas of Mojave wildlife and plants were being affected. That night, the man on his vision quest went to sleep beneath the thunderclaps of fighter planes on maneuver. The desert was no longer silent.

∞

In the morning, the man awoke and went to an open area he had noticed the day before, to consult with the elders there, if they would show themselves. Calling in the directions he lifted sage to the sky in gratitude, and offered sweet incense to the ancestors of the land. The spirit of the North was particularly helpful, explaining to the man was a seed, growing quietly, preparing to give up what was tired and should be returned to the Mother.

Taking his rattle, he retreated a short distance away, and tracing a circle on the ground, sat within to rattle until they would show. After awhile he began to see shapes appearing before him. One was seated, as if he had been there a long while and simply waiting to be seen. He was an old man, with white hair, a Native American, and clearly a chief. Behind him stood a woman, and to his right, a younger man. Clearly these were people for whom this was their home.

Respectfully, the man got to his feet and slowly approached the three. Bowing his head briefly in respect, he seated himself in front of them and asked for their help: “Please,” he implored, “Help me see! Help me open up this walnut shell around my heart. Help me become the seed that awaits the spring!” The native elder replied evenly, that the work would be difficult but that the man must keep going. Even the man’s wife, he added, might leave him. There was silence, then he continued: there would be nothing to fear. Then the old man then said nothing.

The man waited, and wondered if this meant it was time for him to leave. As he stood up, the old man began to disappear such that the desert hillside could be seen directly behind him. With surprise, the man could see figures appearing in the creosote, sage and rock. Watching these, he understood: in his life ahead, he would meet with obstacles, yet these could be walked around or stepped over. If he chose, he could take an easy, well worn trail that wound towards his future, but the most direct route would be straight. There were many paths and no shame in sometimes following the paths of others who had already faced and moved through the obstacles that lay ahead.

Now with much to think about, the man stepped back, and thanking them, returned to his circle, and rattled as they disappeared from his sight.

∞

To be continued...

Sacred Earth: Part 2

2010-07-11T08:41:00.000-07:00

In a sentence, when a story-teller decides – perhaps from respect or maybe from a sense of importance – to set one thought apart from the rest, yet still do so within the context of a surrounding paragraph, she or he may create a parenthesis. With the simple tracing of a gentle, curved line, one can hold in abeyance from all the rest, a single thought, perhaps a sacred thought, even when it is amidst countless others. By cordoning off a specific area with a light, delicate bracket, it is possible to carefully shield something of intense value, and provide it a discrete position apart from all else. In this way, this man and the rest of a small band of seekers took their first steps into a realm outside of not only space and time, but beyond the strictures of subject and object, or of matter and mind.

∞

Once they stepped outside the circle, they disappeared. The vision quest elders made as if not to see them, for indeed they were now on the other side, beyond the world as it was known. So it was, that on an already hot desert morning, before the sun could reach its zenith and the hills become the flaming walls of a brick oven, they set off to the place where they might learn more than they knew. They had found a portal between the busy voices of cultural norms and the chatter of anxious minds; a curious portal, adorned in a particularly gritty way with the raw physicality of thorny shrubs, furtive coyotes, flies, and the parched Mojave floor. Here, the draconian grip of concepts were fewer and farther between: invisible, yet towering fences that would normally guide and decide the nature of self and world, held in place by language, maintained by use, and reinforced by structures of human construction. Perhaps in part, because it was a world that many others would overlook, they came to find their freedom beneath the searing Mojave sun and spread their fingers of perception.

∞

This, then, is the story of a man and a region, told by a man enfolded as an integral part of the later. He was a piece of the Earth, a chunk that arose that morning and pulled itself upright, a part of the Earth that would later that day, step from a circle of others and walk a quest. One might even say it was the Earth, seeking itself.

He moved forward in truth, awareness and love, his eyes intermittently looking up from carefully scanning the desert floor to glance at the ridge for which he was headed to reassure his course. The desert demands that those who dare walk, fly, scurry or crawl there, travel with care, for those who do not, become another experimental data-point as to what works, and what doesn’t, in the Mojave’s self-education.

For the man, it was rattlesnakes, unstable footing, jagged rocks, poisonous spiders, scorpions, and legions of sharp thorns that demanded his continued awareness. For both the snake crossing the lonely desert road and the lizard scurrying from creosote to creosote, it was the hawk that circled far above. For the mouse hiding in its hole beneath the woody shrub, it was the snake: for the insect it was the mouse. The lizard searched unblinkingly around and above, for he was sought by both snake and hawk. The quail shivered at the footfall of coyote; the jackrabbit’s tall ears straining for the imperceptible pad of bobcat. A large black beetle took its last steps within of reach of tarantula, and a line of ants beckoned the horned lizard. In this way, the Mojave had learned how to nourish itself, carefully balancing life and death.

∞

Beneath each of the man’s footfall’s, there had once been a warm, shallow sea extending in all directions, though it fled, disappearing into the west when eruptions of rock pushed to the surface with the implacable power of great tectonic plates, warping, folding, and then finally shattering the brittle skin. Then, Gaia’s breathing slowed, and the surface of the land rose and fell more gently for another 200 million years.

But this was not to last. In a fit that lasted 60 million years, the thunder of volcanoes pierced the silence, first from the North, coming closer and closer, heaving blankets of ash and cinder in wave upon wave upon the land until one day, they burst from beneath the land itself. Mountainous jaws reached up from below the surface, spitting fire and molten stone.

Large blocks of continents lurched past each other, leaving a trail of deep valleys and high ranges, while what became the desert floor continued to descend as the land was stretched and pulled apart by some giant hands. Then, the rain and wind, incessant, slow but unyielding, reduced mountains to gravel, and sand to dust, washing all before it to wherever the valleys were most low, bringing nine thousand feet of sediment.

But Gaia’s growing pains were not done, and she began a new weather pattern, a bitter ice age, which in turn created vast lakes, eventually to disappear before a returning sun into yet another, smaller ice age. This in turn left smaller lakes that again, disappeared as the climate warmed, leaving their stay written in salt on the desert floor.

After the shuddering of tectonic plates, eruptions of volcanoes and the grinding of ages of ice, wind and rain, Gaia appeared to fall into a restful calm, but it was only a seeming calm. Silent and sinuous streams of molten rock were moving far beneath the landscape, nudging and exploring tiny fissures, melting their way forward to flow where they may. And, every so often, they would encounter groundwater, the sudden meeting erupting in a shattering explosion of violence and steam, tearing open the landscape, leaving huge craters gaping at the sky.

Yet none of these things were in the mind of this man, save perhaps when his eyes followed the edges of a jagged boulder, or when he paused briefly before an uplifted sandwiching of tightly pressed rock layers. Only then did he hear the desert’s whisper of ages before men and women, for he was on a quest, and was single-mindedly climbing the first slope. In search of vision, his thoughts restrained themselves, and when they had to speak, did so with softness and respect.

He picked his way through the strewn pieces of geologic tumble, his shoes crunching against the grainy scatter of once-looming mountains, now mixed with the salt of ancient lakes. A lizard, followed by a tail twice as long as its body raced ahead, darting beneath the peppered shade of a creosote, not unlike the hundreds surrounding it, or the tens of thousands that reached for the next hill. It did not occur to him or the lizard, that such a meager bush might be the oldest living organism on the planet. Nor was he privy to the silent biological politics of the creosote community, where the older ones intentionally inhibited the growth of the younger. All he saw was how in all directions, they were spaced with a curious evenness, as if by a divine hand.

That evening, as he rested against a giant rock, a jackrabbit languidly hopped down next to him, suddenly breaking the desert quiet. Under the glow of a waxing moon, the man picked up his head with a start as they eyed one another for a moment. Alarm turned to a smile, the man rested his head once again against the rock and the jackrabbit proceeded on, foraging through the shrubs and short, yellowed growth, slowly making his way down the slope.

to be continued...

Part 1: Sacred Earth, A Personal and Bioregional Journey in the Desert

2010-07-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

Some may say that when a man or woman embarks on the ancient human rite of passage called a vision quest, that they leave reality behind as each steps into the ‘dreamtime’. This is not so.

What is actually the case is that one who embarks on this ancient walk is temporarily stepping out of the sweeping, jostling dream that is humanity, and into the vast dream of the Earth.

This is the story of many stories, all interwoven, encircling and embedded in one another. It is, for instance, the story of a desert in the southern part of California. It is also, the story of a man who with deep nervousness felt remarkably calm as he took his place in a circle of men and women who each waited to head out alone into this desert on their quest for a vision. There are many stories that can be told, probably as many as there are beings with the power to apprehend, understand, and then tell them to others. But let’s begin with the man, for it is through his eyes that the other story, that of the Mojave desert, is seen.

However, it was not his eyes, but his skin that drank in the kind of surreal stillness which hung in the air of this particular desert morning. The crunch of gathering shoes on coarse desert sand slowed to an anticipatory silence as nine humans faced each other and seven of their number inwardly prepared to leave their understanding of world and self behind, and embark on a journey of discovery for three days and three nights.

Lost in thought, sharing a few parting words, the circle’s gaze settled down towards the sandy, rock-strewn ground between them from where a small pile of sage burned above the rocky, dun-colored ground. Around it ran a circle of stones: a splash of desert white, melted reds, black and the everpresent brown from millennia of transits of the sun. The stone circle marked an entrance through which these people would, one after the other, take their first step of a difficult journey they each knew they might – and might not – be able to complete.

But as I promised, there is yet another story to be told. This is the story of the part of the world into which this man would walk, a bioregion now called the Mojave Desert. As if held in Gaia’s cupped hands, it is highly differentiated from other regions, yet coherent within itself. It produces its own offspring, teaches, nourishes, governs and heals itself. It is thus fulfilling to those who know this as their home.

There is a recognition, however latent, that our existence as humanity holds both great promise and great risk, just as does a single man’s vision quest. Both humanity on the one hand, and this man on the other, are somehow aware that they may – or may not – be able to survive.

Yet just as men and women throughout the globe do not all come to a standstill in their cities and towns, and suddenly immerse themselves in reflection that survival of their species just might not be possible, neither did this man. In those moments before stepping forward on his vision quest, he was not contemplating all the pitfalls and perils that waited ahead, perhaps just beyond even the first, short craggy slope. The future was shrouded by the present.

For the man about to embark on a rite of passage, a vision quest, his thoughts of danger were quieted to the point of whispers, as his senses heightened to the potential perils and trials that were but moments away.

Vision is the art of seeing, but how does one really see, beyond the glitter of the immediate? Moreover, how does one see and still remain fully present, fully embodied, and not lost in the thought-forms of words?

To seek a vision, whether it is humanity’s struggle to comprehend itself and its human role, or whether it is the struggle of a single man to see through the personal maya of his own and shared cultural illusions, to truly grasp the reality of self and world, it as if human beings in search of these things must step outside the circles of both self and world.

Those about to enter their quest stood before just such a circle, upon a land that had cycled for eons through wet, marshy and then dry climates. Like living in and out-breaths, vast populations of plants and animals would multiply and expand in range when the Mojave was lush and green, only to adapt or die off when the climate changed again to blistering heat, expanding again in range and numbers with the return a wet era.

Though they were exceedingly attentive, they could not feel through their feet the ebb and flow of alluvial fans gathered, stabilized, and then eroded in cycles across planetary eras. It was the same with the sand dunes, rising and falling as would waves across inconceivable stretches of time. All was a cycle, a pulse, of the heartbeat of the Earth. The soles of their feet met ground which had cycled over and over as well though through eons of chemical weathering and soil formation which would transition amidst a grand cycle to a following era of mechanical weathering and erosion, only to return eventually, to breaking down chemically again. The man knew he must break down as well, and the desert was the perfect place to let this happen.

The timeless history of this place could not be seen, only felt. And though they could not see into the past, the felt these things as one by one they stepped into the circle, drawn by an incessant, clamoring to know beyond what they had yet known, receiving first a blessing of sage smoke that pulled at their nostrils with ancient memories. Taking a tiny pause before stepping out across the circle of stones, they began to journey out of the jostling, surging dream of humanity, into the vast, enfolding dream of the Earth.

-to be continued-

A Human is Not Just a Human

2010-05-30T21:30:00.001-07:00

On April 10th, I blogged the following: "If humanity has difficulty comprehending itself as a part of Gaia, it is as though we were nomads on a desert, though a curious tribe who lost track of where we came from. Perennially wandering back and forth across sand dunes, searching for an identity in a form that may no longer exist. When you look for something and you can’t see it, it might not be because it doesn’t exist. Even more, it might not be because you don’t know what you are looking for.

It might be because we don’t yet know how to look."

This thought has haunted me ever since. I was recently reminded that humans have cultivated a humancentric perception over a hundred-thousand years. Yes, indeed we have, and over the past several thousand years cultivated this humancentric perception even more deeply as we have been able to exclude ourselves – at least in our perception – from nature. This, despite that it is in perception only, for without nature we would die immediately. Yet, this perception is that from which our identity in this moment is deeply informed.

Lost like nomads on a desert, we have forgotten the tribe from which we came. In distancing ourselves from nature, we have walked away from our ancestral heritage. It was even a conscious abandonment, done with pride. We preened our identity as above nature, above the plants and animals, and even a special species in the light of the divine, which we created as well. The more we distanced, the more pure we felt we were. Interesting, yet unsurprising how this reach for purity has laid waste and fouled an Earth that hitherto our efforts, been healthy and clean.

How we identify ourselves, such as Lakota, or German, or banker or soccer player, are all meager attributes, or curiosities of a particular existence, and hardly an identity. Who one is, the fullness of identity has been lost in noting the particulars of the moment, something for which humanity is almost too-well-suited.

So who are we? What is this identity that I challenge as more than the particulars of occupation, culture, nationality or even race? Who is this being that wanders within the body of Gaia, stuffed with self-importance, estranging itself from its homeland, leaving devastation in its wake? The difficulty in answering this is because we don’t yet know how to look. We have practiced the self-other posture for too long not for it to have become part of unquestioned reality, a reality that provides the basis upon which an identity is constructed. An identity of human nature.

It is time humanity began to challenge this self-other dichotomy. Humans are simply Gaia, reflecting back upon herself. Nothing special, for so are tadpoles and meadowlarks. Yet we humans, we like to think, have the ability to ponder more deeply (we believe), a creative brilliance that has been used to inflict as much ill as it has ever been used to bestow good. This brilliance, this edge in cognitive ability beyond the same abilities in other species, has been our weakness as much as our strength. It is the human virtue taken to excess, utilized for unwise ends, that has been snaring us into what may become our ultimate tragedy.

If we can take this recognition that we are more than simply human, and begin to own - as part of our self - this entire earth amidst which we are but a part, we may begin to finally see… a tree is not just a tree, a frog is not just a frog, and a human is not just a human. Our body does not end at our skin, but possibly seven miles into the sky where the uppermost reaches of our atmosphere cease to be. Our identity does not end at our nationality, our name, our culture, or even at our species.

We are nature herself, a part of Gaia functioning awkwardly under the illusion that we are a separate entity, split into a tragic distance from the rest of our full self. If we have trouble comprehending who we are, it is because we are not seeing who we are, and thus have nothing substantial to comprehend. It is not that our identity doesn’t exist, but that we don’t yet know how to see it.

We have no idea.

Responsibility

2010-05-30T21:24:00.001-07:00

We sit here, reflecting on ourselves, on the sun that came up this morning, on the lilies in the meadow, on the words on the computer screen about an oil rig that exploded and fell apart, trying to wonder through the manner in which things like this come into being. Unlike mayflies, who live for a day, we humans have on the average around 29 thousand days in which to take in the world around us. Unlike mayflies, we have a brain with innumerable neurons connecting in innumerable ways to innumerable others, capable of absorbing, contemplating, and reflecting on this world. Yet unlike any other creature, great or small on this planet, we have laid waste without equal.

It takes a glaring event to capture the vision of the news media, to funnel it through all the routes of economics, logistics and technology to our door. It takes a gush of oil, pocked deep beneath the ocean floor, pierced by human capability, to wash up across our southern shores as it drapes a mantle of death and plants seeds of ongoing death in the decades ahead. It takes an enormous disaster of human creation to capture the interest of our media, which then is sent through the circuitous routes of information technology to land before us, giving us pause to reflect.

It is a false image that we are given, and as we try to solve the problem we see, we are not seeing the problem we need to solve. Though we attempt to plug the gushing of this oil from the ocean floor, the problem is not just in the oil, nor in the oil rig, or even in the men and women who worked the rig that day. Nor is the problem restricted to the huge company which owned it, nor a government that allowed the rig, or the cars that demand the oil for which the rig was pumping. The problem can not even be cited as just in the car manufactures, or the people who buy the cars, or the servicepersons who pour it into our waiting cars. The problem is not only my needing to drive to the store to purchase the food we eat, or to pick up or return the video we watched last night.

It is said that a spring meadow can be compared to a symphony, an eruption of material music that blends and thrives in wholehearted abundance, singing through stems and petals to the sun in utter abandon. However, beneath all of this runs a deep connection, a pulse that is rapid here, slow there, moving everything within it in balance and mutuality. Problems also have this deep connection, however the song that is produced is discordant, awkward, in this case polluting the shores with death-bringing sludge that is washed up onto our computer screens and televisions, and spills onto the pages of our newspapers.

We see a darkened shoreline, and we want to fix it, but it is not the shore that is broken. Not to be blamed is the oil rig, or the cars, the president, or the corporations: one might just as well blame a blind man for failing to see, or a deaf woman for failing to hear. Nor can we blame you or me alone for this, for the source of what we see gushing from beneath the ocean floor was from long before you or I was born. Do we blame the dinosaurs for dying, and the ancient plant life for decaying, and so creating a deep pustule of crude beneath the planet surface? Do we locate the problem just in the company for piercing that crust, and so letting it gush to the surface, or do we say it is the consequence of the cars that demand oil to lubricate their moving parts, or do we call the problem the husband and wife who drive separate cars to separate jobs miles away from home in order to bring in the income to keep the house and feed the family?

It is like an outbreak of disease. We might find a pustule forming on the skin, or a reddening, or a darkening. It captures our attention immediately, especially if there is pain or it hampers our movement. Yet the discoloration we see, and the pain we feel is not the problem. It is a symptom, one that may cause further problems, but not the source of the problem which brought it into being.

The discord we now see and feel that is breaking out across the earth in weather patterns, deaths of species, erosion of soil, melting of glaciers, toxifying the air, is a consequence of discord spread across the globe. Yet the problem cannot be focused, for it is like a symphony struggling with discordant sound, the source of which is not located in one instrument, or the mistake of a single player. The symphony itself is off key.

Even if it is a symphony without a single conductor. There are many attempting to lead, and the players were born into their roles, and culturally schooled, driven by their perceived role, their education in playing, and the logistics of trying to play with the others around them. They might have been given a vision, and among them could be many of these, that are like elusive songs they should try to play. Yet, they seem unable to be grasped. If we call the problem the ‘petroleum industry’ what we then will try to fix, will only patch a symptom, and further symptoms will only surface elsewhere. The petroleum industry is just one of the players, on one of the instruments created to bring this elusive song into being, this vision into what was hoped to be a pleasing sound.

If we blame, we miss the target. You cannot blame gun-makers for war. You cannot blame cocaine dealers for drug addiction. You cannot blame the petroleum industry, or cars, or even those who drive them, for the enormous dislocation of the earth’s natural balance and health. Stopping war or drug addiction is not possible by eliminating gun-making industries, or capturing all the drug lords, even if such things were possible. Nor can the earth’s ecological failures be corrected by shutting down the petroleum industry. Certainly, given an unreasonable amount of seemingly ludicrous degrees of human cooperation, such a feat is logically possible, but even in so doing, the ecology of the earth would be likely to be tilted askew by humans another way. Eliminate the Winchester and Remington companies, or the innumerable others who create firearms, and this will not stop war. The propensity of human beings to inflict such waste upon one another long preceded the firearm, just as addiction occurs without cocaine.

The waste to the planet we see thrown up across our computer and television screens gives us a false sense of ironically, security. To see an exploded oil rig, or a plume of oil fouling what otherwise would be a healthy sea lends us a peculiar sense of knowing where the problem is. This could not be further from the truth.

The problem seems to be deeper, and far more complex than any of us have imagined. It is naive to blame an oil industry for the mere outbreak of problem on a recognizable scale. In fact, we might thank them, for maybe they might be helping us to wake up. In our struggle to comprehend what we think we see, and as we begin to piece back through the many contributions throughout the world that resulted in this particular eruption, we may discover that the source of the problem is far more widespread, and immediate, than we could also have imagined.

The problem is likely to be found more deeply, in our goals, sense of reality, sense of meaning or ultimate human purpose that drive our civilizations into war, addiction, or in this case, ecological disaster. The problem is in how we see the world, or if we truly see it at all. If we begin to blame –which we cannot – anything at all for what is occurring, we might choose instead to lay responsibility on ourselves for having accepted a disastrous vision. Perhaps this disaster may open our eyes to looking at a symptom, but it is just that and no more.

Then again, perhaps we are like the mayfly. Though we have a life span much longer than a single day, we seem unable to truly learn from the past. The War to End All Wars did not end war, nor did the deep incision into particular drug cartels stop drug addiction. As we attempt to plug this gushing from the ocean depths, or further penalize the already plummeting finances of British Petroleum, we are not going to solve the ecological problems facing the world. In fact, we might be even further reduced by doing so, because we will think that the problem has been dealt with.

As we sit here, reflecting on the gushing oil, the sun outside, the lilies in a field and come back to reflecting on ourselves, we might start to fidget a little uncomfortably. The problem is certainly human, and it is certainly not restricted to this particular place or moment in history. In fact, we humans have brought such harm to the Earth and to ourselves for as long as we have been able to determine. It is somewhat discomforting to consider that maybe the source of these problems is in humanity itself.

In human lifespan development, it is said that the ability to own, reflect on, and feel regret for the negative consequences of one’s own actions is necessary to growth and maturation. If we blame British Petroleum for the environmental disaster, we are losing our opportunity to mature. Unless through reflection we are able own this disaster as our own, we will miss our chance to grow as a human being. As long as we envision the problem as outside of ourselves, so long as we disown our deep connection to every other human being across the planet, indeed to every other living and non-living thing throughout the globe, we will fail to step forward into our potential as human beings.

I am in many ways, responsible for the disaster in the gulf. Here, in my little office nestled within our little cabin upon this little ridge deep in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains, I am responsible for the ecological disaster off the southern coast of the United States. I cannot step into the cab of my pickup to take back the video we rented the night before without a deep pang of conscience, nor can I return home to step from the cab without a sense of regret. As I begin to open my eyes to the countless ways I am integrated into the dysfunction of which the consequences are disasters of our earth’s ecology such as these, I am finally opening myself to the opportunity to change. And, as I change, so the world changes.

A small way, you might say. Yes, yet not insignificant, but profoundly so. The problem is not 'out there', but 'in here'. It is within each one of us. We must each accept the responsibility. Each leaf breathes for the tree, and all of them do so, and it is for this reason that the tree lives. What is true here, is true there as well. No one challenges that the leaf is not a part of the tree of leaves, or that all of them are connected. The problem is in our vision: one that sees these as separate and unrelated.

'Earthstory'

2010-05-17T10:03:00.001-07:00

Never has Thomas Berry been more brilliant in his writing than in The Hudson River Valley: A Bioregional Story (The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club Books, 1988). Here is his concept of a healing, biocentric ‘story’ taken to a full, though incomplete – for what story can ever be complete? – expression. Woven elements of birds and river, rock face, beavers and humans combine in an inner image of the natural world he depicts. As I sit gazing through the words of the text I am transported into Berry’s vision.

How powerful then, is his warning about human naiveté with respect to our civilization’s impact on the Earth when the story is told through the local lens of the Hudson River Valley. In 1609, the entrance of the tall-masted ship sailing across Sandy Hook, through the Narrows and into the channel, heralded an impact that was then unknown, yet with huge consequences that can now be seen in retrospect. Berry wondered if the Earth ‘shuddered’ at the sight, though I think it is more likely that she squirmed uncomfortably. This is far too alienating a term to be thrown at one’s kin, for humans are Earth’s children just as much as everything else.

And so we are given a story, a microcosm of an Earth story, localized in Berry’s Hudson River Valley. Perhaps we should coin a new term for this type of story, such as ‘earthstory’, for our former term ‘history’ was built on an anthropocentric world view. As Wikipedia reminds us, the term came from “historia, meaning ‘inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation... the study of the human past.’” And, as we are beginning to wake up to the fact, it is far more than humans that are the story.

The ancient Greeks well understood that a human virtue, when taken to excess, becomes a vulnerability: a flaw from which tragedy will necessarily unfold. One human virtue is the ability to form and communicate ideas, in the development of concepts upon which more and greater ideas can be built. This virtue, when seen in light of the story of the Earth, becomes also our undoing if it is to continue to express itself beyond the Earth’s balance. Thus our words, and the concepts within them, become the foundations upon which our ‘given’ story was built, yet around which the unfolding, truer story vainly circles.

Though a new story of the Earth brings healing and hope, it also brings deep-seated change, and this is difficult. Moving past a ‘history’ into an ‘earthstory’ means a deep incision into our very conceptual foundations, glimpsed through the words used to express them. Stepping beyond a naïve human-centric orientation to an earth-centric one necessitates an uncomfortable recalibration of our language itself, which simultaneously provides a fresh foundation upon which healing recovery can be built.

We have stepped into a human role as both subject and object, as the part of the whole Earth that can reflect back on itself. As we set out to articulate the story of the Earth, we must not fail to look carefully at the language that we use, for in this language rest the fallacies of previous generations. The story of the Earth is ‘earthstory’: it can be no other.

The Failure to Learn from Success?

2010-05-17T09:45:00.000-07:00

Human nature was forged in the harsh flames of tribal survival. Here, an overarching frame insured the possibility of a natural collaborative learning process.

The methodology of collaborative learning relies first on information, common knowledge that was available to everyone in a relatively small band of humans, for which I am using the term ‘tribe’. What became key issues and concerns easily arose when daily encounters with the group’s ‘world’ provided daily feedback. No problem, then, having small group discussions: one can easily surmise how the informal topics of conversation would bring up variables, individual positions, and suggestions for decision-making. It is hard not to also see room for debate as a band is by its very nature insuring the encountering – and verbalizing the differences – between its members.

It’s interesting how something called 'collaborative learning', this contemporary, post-civilization approach forwarded to ease the transition to consensus in such areas as environmental decision-making, is nothing larger than the forgotten, natural human way of interaction. Interesting, and also instructive in how ‘unnatural’ our overgrown human world has become. Where is group identity today? Certainly, not in an overarching small band of humans, working necessarily together to insure their group, and individual, survival. National, organizational and cultural identities are grasped in lieu of the tribe to which one ‘belonged’.

We humans are lost. We have become so estranged from our homeland that we have nearly forgotten from where we came. We became swept up in the novelties of the foreign cities to which we have traveled, distracted by the sparkle of the new. We became entranced with our growing powers, and in our naiveté set off into directions that left us in peril.

As we set about searching for a way out of the dangers that lurk all around us - and within us - let us not forget from where we came. Let us recall our human abilities won through innumerable generations before civilization took its bitter toll. Over time, our genetically produced capacity for civilization's technological glimmer deeded us a power that so entranced us, that it blinded us to our ancestral, hard-won success, earned by the trial and error of human survival, the experiments of the natural world. Nature was a harsh teacher, and it has injured us to the core to have lost her instructions regarding healthy human community.

Gaia's Call

2010-04-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

How we see ourselves is, at least in part, a function of what we see in the world around us. This short insight is a huge doorway. The short path between our self and our world can lead towards human wellness, or just as easily, away from it. The connection between people and their world is strong such that they transform each other. Gaia is calling us back, and her voice is reaching deep within the inner-city.

Vacant lot programs such as in Detroit, Michigan, with goals of transforming overgrown, junk ridden lots, weed-ridden with crime, neglect and unattractiveness into places of beauty, community and life, describes a process by which our distance from the natural world decreases. Transformations back to the natural world then lead to transformations in the people who live there. Moreover, changes like this lead to even further positive transformations in the environment. The cycle goes on.

For a much of my life I have maintained the simple equation: if you want to straighten up your thoughts and emotions, begin by putting your room in order. The place in which one lives and the ‘self’ who lives there are intimately connected, for one is a reflection of the other. My equation simply takes this proposition one step further. They are mutually transformative.

It is easy to recognize, once we become attentive to it, that how we feel is affected by the world – the immediate world – in which we live. On the other hand, we also know from experience how changes in this world transform how we feel. Oh, we might phrase it as ‘How it looks changes how I feel about it”… with the emphasis on the ‘it’. However, the phrase completely demonstrates, anywhere you choose to put the emphasis, the unmistakable transformation in “…changes how I feel…”

It is disturbing to me that so many people in our world are separated from nature. A little like a couple of 'Thoreaus', I guess, my wife and I have retreated to, not a pond, but our little Walden ridge, which we call ‘Pook’s Hill’. Here, we awake daily to a natural world of oaks and redwoods, birds and wildflowers. It is a beautiful place, and we feel good being here. We are fortunate, and well aware that not everyone has this opportunity. It is, however, an opportunity we created, and maintain. More than mere chance, it has come about by choice.

To see inner-city projects struggle with success and failure to transform vacant lots into small oases of beauty and peace, suggests a small opportunity to transform life towards a naturally healing environment. We feel good when we are there, and this transforms us in how we understand ourselves because in feeling this way, we are different. How we feel is as much who we are, as how our hair is colored, or the clothes we choose to wear.

We are being called back by Gaia, silently with an incessant tug. She offers us peace, pleasure and joy when we are near her, just as we feel anxiety, frustration and emptiness when we are not. A little doorway to such change through an inner-city project is a small expression of a huge opening into self-creation. Do we choose to move towards a more fulfilling life, or towards one that is more empty? To create a small oasis such as in Detroit is not a mere matter of planting shrubs and trees, or of removing trash and decaying buildings. It is hearing - and heeding - the call of Gaia herself.

The Mirage

2010-04-23T15:56:00.001-07:00

The millennial hope of so much of the contemporary world’s faith is beginning to take clearer form as an illusion. The mirage is more clearly a mirage. The spiritual alarm has been sounded: forces have been gathering just beyond the walls, just beyond the gates.

We see that our well-ordered texts, beautiful sermons and peaceful illusions that oiled the mechanism of our social order will ultimately be ineffective to thwart the powers that we see, now silhouetted against the horizon. Insulated so long, having become comfortable in what we thought was a lasting construction, we were blind to destructive power within the creativity and discoveries emerging even within our community. What we built as firm footing seems to be dissolving beneath our feet. We stand on these melting bastions, facing an overwhelming loss of the pleasant innocence of our beliefs, nervously wondering what to do.

The origin stories of the world created by a divine being and a special covenant deeding the rule of man over the beasts, women, and the Earth itself are withering before us like last season’s wildflowers, disintegrating back into the soil and taking our unshaken beliefs along with them. History shows that all monuments, all structures eventually succumb to a process of change. The greatest of cities, the heavy stones of pyramids, and the magnificent arches of Rome are now crumbling piles. Soon to follow will be the cathedrals, temples and mosques, the physical representations of the crumbling spiritualities that built them.

Though the alarm has been heard, what do we do… and with what? Perhaps, one suggests that we reinforce the gates with more of what is at hand. More wood, more stone, more of the materials with which the spirituality was constructed? A more glorious god, more important covenant, easier salvation, an even happier heaven? Yet more is not enough, as the very materials themselves seem to be dissolving. Like a mirage of water to a thirsty soul, it is a problem that cannot be solved with the illusions that created it. Even by shoring up the illusion that they could.

Another voice chimes in: “Force it!” Others applaud and with much scurrying around within the woodwork, explosives are gathered, sights are aimed, and the profession of terror rises as a branch of government or a rebellious underground. Dominicans burned disbelievers alive over roaring fires, Islamic jihadists exploded Shiites like popcorn on hot city streets, Pope Gregory XIII took great pleasure when 2000 French Protestants were dragged to their death by Christian mobs, and Catholics and Jews were lynched by the Ku Klux Klan.

Perhaps it is mere human decency, a shred of guilt, or a glimmer of moral sense that exists apart from religion, which purses its lips and says “No”. Or perhaps it is because time has shown that forcing our ways over others will always produce a stubborn resistance that ultimately finds its way to survive. So we stand there, thinking through these ultimate insufficiencies, incapable of choosing between them.

Another voice speaks. “Adapt” is heard. With a heavy sigh, the difficult decision is made. It has been a choice taken many times. The history of faith divulges a history of adaptation. Christian theologians, for instance, provide an example of faith’s ability to incorporate and amend their religious stories to kept abreast of the knowledge and experience of a growing humanity. From the Christianity that first emerged came one that was even newer, and then another that was newer upon that, and yet even more came. Yet always there was a god, a heaven, a promise of salvation, and a special covenant deeding authority of the Earth to man, beliefs upon which so many of the world’s spiritualities rest.

Yet from where we stand, we can see these beliefs fading before us like fog. The illusion of awareness, order and process that smoothed the relationships, even between ourselves, is dissipating into an emptiness where our faith once rested. The bastion of so many of the world’s spiritualities: god, heaven, salvation and covenant, is disappearing beneath us.

There is a point where adaptation is no longer sufficient. Not that change is inadequate, but such adaptation eventuates in something that is not only dissimilar, but is no longer the same. When the cornerstones of god, heaven, salvation and covenant melt, can it be said that the faiths that are constructed with such illusions remain? A Christianity without god? An Islam without heaven? A Judaism without a covenant? Any of these without salvation?

The mirage is more clearly a mirage. If the vision was of a pool of clear water, the certitude of a thirsty soul is perplexedly slipping into the sand.

Why Are We Not Communing with Nature?

2010-04-12T10:55:00.001-07:00

There seems to be an undercurrent flowing through many of our reappraisals of our human contributions vs. destruction of our world, pulled forth from the realization that our ability to commune with the natural world is something that is exceedingly important and valuable, and that this is being lost. This gradual loss of our human relationship with nature has, after a couple of thousand years of human growth across the planet, been appearing time and time again as something that is 'missing' in this world that we now find ourselves in. It is a loss that is becoming more evident as we grow to increasingly recognize the social and environmental problems growing around us.

I think that the groundswell of thought from environmental, social, political and psychological thinkers says we are well on our way in digging into appropriate territory with regards to locating the roots of our human alienation from the Earth. Religion has certainly contributed to this withdrawal from nature (the Earth and people are essentially sinful and sullied, where as ‘spirit’ is clean), and science with its powerful objectivity not only as science but as a socialized posture of looking at the world as object, have both encouraged us to ‘looking at’ rather than a ‘feeling with’ our world. Certainly, there is also our species-wide childlike narcissism and self-centered, human-over-world outlook as we developed our powers of control over nature, which has surely factored into this distancing. Then, there are the social, economic and political forces that have contributed to urbanization, roads, walls, roofs, automobiles and all the other physical factors that structurally prevent us from being with the natural world.

However, I would add that it is our very power as a conceptualizing creature that is part of the story as to why humans are not communing with nature. Surely, one can read a book in nature, just as one can conduct scientific observational experiments there, cut down trees there, build roads and houses there, and build churches over ancient grove sites. However, thinking and contemplating are different activities than ‘communing with’. It is a different mind/body/being.

A reapproachment with the natural world will necessitate a radical step: we are going to be calling into question our traditionally unquestioned primary power as human beings, our ability to 'think about things'. This power has been such an assumed 'virtue' that it feels somewhat immoral even to suggest that we reexamine the strength of the conceptual ability that allowed us to step out of nature’s immediate grip. I say this simply because it also has been showing as a disability that has distanced us from nature’s continuous source of information and healing. The ability to think about things opened up a whole new world of understanding and the creative acts that came from this. However, thinking about things is the same power that has set us a little to the side from our world that we are thinking about.

Thinking itself needs to reacquaint itself with the full nature of that which it is thinking about. Humans have evolved as the current poster child ‘thinking animal’. Gaia, our world, has produced us. We are her progeny, yet we are not distant, but rather completely connected to her. Like children, yes, born from her, yet completely connected nonetheless, even as we wander across her. There is no inbreath we can take, no food we can eat, nothing we can build on or subsist on without her immediate presence.

If we are not disconnected, I wonder if not only are we a part of Gaia, but that we are part of her self-reflective part, struggling to understand herself in a manner she is now genetically prepared to do. She produced us. Now we are here.

The image of our species as a butterfly comes to mind, just having emerged from a chrysalis. Groping to understand the nature of who we are and where we fit in… Thoughts are like wings: what are these things? On our backs, there are these attachments that move. What are they? My… they flutter. Why?

Living in Containers

2010-04-11T17:55:00.000-07:00

It does seem that our current human perplexity about our very nature derives from our misperceptions and confusion regarding our relationship with our planet. After all, in our alienation from our planet, we are distanced from the meaning that it can provide. In our alienation, it is not so much that we really are distant, but that we fail to recognize our proximity. It can be said that a man lost in the woods is just as lost whether he be 100 yards or 100 miles away from the world he knows. In our case, it is not even 100 yards, but familiarity that is out of range. It is as though we have become lost in our own backyard.

This happens frequently in human aging. I recall a poignant moment recently in a well-to-do apartment complex. A nicely dressed elderly woman was wandering the halls – her halls – trying to find her front door. With her, it appeared to be a problem of memory associated with aging. In the human condition, however, we find ourselves searching for meaning at all ages.

We have for many generations wandered from the natural world, into a world of human making. Earth is covered with concrete. Speed and windshields separate our journey from the world beyond the asphalt roadway. Instead of reading the weather patterns and the flights of birds, the movements of animals or the curl of a leaf, we recline beneath our lamps and read books. Instead of talking with neighbors, we read the newspaper or internet. Instead of raising vegetables, we pick them up in plastic bags at the market. Instead of interacting with the Earth, we interact with human constructs.

The degree of difficulty in extricating ourselves from this alienation is directly related to the degree that the industrial/conceptual human construction has been amassed. Our freedom to create our concepts and our ability to turn these concepts into constructions has penned our very freedom into containers. We wander within these containers; driven by a deep instinct that home must be close by, but unable to quite reach it.

A Vertical Perspective

2010-04-10T13:05:00.001-07:00

Nathaniel Altman in his 1993 book Sacred Trees: Spirituality, Wisdom, and Well-Being made the interesting comment comparing human beings with trees: “We both share a vertical perspective” (Altman, N., p. 7, Sacred Trees, Sierra Club Books, 1993). My first response was complete and simultaneously a combination of “of course” and “how insightful”. It’s curious how the stuff right in front of our faces can surprise us. And inform us.

All this goes back to a gnawing something that has been digging into my brainstem for years, which is not alien – thankfully – but, gradually has been expanding into a very different way of looking at our world than my human-centered habits have been accustomed to. You see, I grew up as so many of us humans do, in a culture imbued to the core with a couple of thousand (at least) years of a broadly held ‘gestalt’ that is simply, human. Well, putting it more in perspective, more recently human.

This was a gestalt that I took for granted as a youth who awkwardly groped through the schools, family and town of my upbringing and human enculturation. I was human, and trees were different. Part of the landscape, even less on the scale of the accepted order of things than animals. There was me, then our household pets, then the animals outside in the wild, then the trees, then little plants, ending up with bugs. Oh, and there were rocks and things, but these didn’t really count. With the accepted order of things automatic to my sensibility, it didn’t even cross my mind that trees and I both stood upright. Even though it was quite obvious.

That the landscape that I walked over, that the bugs that I swatted, that the little plants, trees, animals and even the household pets were a part of a single living organism was a framework for understanding that was as foreign to me as desert nomads (I lived in American suburbia). It was only in college that I began to grok nature as more than a mere life support system for humans. It was only when my curiosity began to challenge the ‘status quo’s’ understanding of nature, who I learned had the name ‘Gaia’, and was a being who I was deeply involved with simply by the act of existing.

I had already come to the conclusion that people were somewhat overly narcissistic in their sense of self importance. It has only later dawned on me that this human-centricism also applied to my sketchy relationships with pets, wild animals, trees, plants and yes, even bugs. In organizing all of this, my hitherto arrangement of everything in a sort of living pyramid shape began to dissolve into that of a tree with branches. Change in perception, however, came only in fits and starts, not all at once, and not evenly. Humans were sort of ‘on top’ still, with a hard-to-ignore domination over ranched and hunted animals, but they were still only one of many branches of life. Bugs didn’t count, trees and plants were still just part of the landscape, along with mountains and such.

It is only in the more recent decades that my sense of being a human self, has melted into what morphed from a pyramid to a tree, into something… else. No longer on top of a stone-hard pyramid (such as in Egypt), no longer the tippy-tip of one of the branches of the ‘tree of life’, a sense of my ‘self’ has been gradually shifting again, though it is exceedingly difficult to give this a shape. Not the pointy top of a pyramid, not fluttering leaf on a biological tree. But something.

So it is from this admittedly blotchy, personal intellectual history that I somewhat surprisingly, see myself surprised, astonished, and at the same time, going ‘duh!’ in response to Altman’s simple comparison between the upright nature of trees and people. It is like looking at oneself in the mirror: we see ourselves, perhaps, every day. But what to we see? It is literally ‘in our face’, but quite honestly, it is also disturbingly absent. We change, in my case with wrinkles appearing and hair disappearing, and yet we don’t seem to. That is, until someone points it out. Then I am in the mirror, all over it, observing seemingly for the first time what has been in front of me every day.

Well, of course we share this upright nature with trees. And how intriguing. It is hard to see that which is so close to me as my face in a mirror, which leaves me thinking: perhaps there is a very simple reason why I have difficulties creating a new image of how I perceive myself as human, and why this still seems so hard to grasp. The utmost point of a pyramids, tree branches ending in leaves: these were somewhat simpler. I see photos about me in our home of myself in younger years, and I guess I have to admit that deep inside, I still maintain an idea of myself as somehow resembling those photos. Even though I do not. And, the more broadly human gestalt of seeing my species at the top of such a pyramid, or the spread of small branches ending in a profusion of leaves on the distal segment of a very large tree, still seems to be carried around somewhere inside me as I course my human way through the world, even as I notice that these vague images seem to be dissolving.

So, maybe it is, that the trouble with identifying what it is that this dissolution might be morphing into, is related to my apparent oversight in noticing new wrinkles, or a receding hairline. If it is true that observing oneself has a rather slithery way of slipping out of one’s attention, perhaps this difficulty grasping an image of my human self with respect to what I now know as Gaia, has to do with the simple fact that she, and I, are a part of my larger self. No, not like a Napoleon way of thinking, such that I might be the Earth and that it spins merely from my whim. More like that I might be a tiny cell, perhaps like a walking nerve cell, wandering across the skin of this immense being who I am a part of. Perhaps the difficulty in ‘seeing’ such an image is because I am not only trying to look at myself in a mirror, but that I am not even sure where the mirror is.

I can conceive of such an arrangement as being a little like one of the nerve cells in my brain, deciding to wander around within my cranium, looking for a mirror. And that’s silly. Wander as it will, if it continues to ‘look’ for a reflection, I have deep trust that there is no mirror in my brain itself upon which it might gaze. The very act of gazing demands an act of the body – my body. As a person living as a separate being upon an Earth-planet in orbit around the sun, I can observe my body as I head into the bathroom to find the mirror over the sink. As a human being who is but a part of and living within Gaia, I wonder where the ‘mirror’ is, or, how I would find it if it even exists.

If humanity has difficulty comprehending itself as a part of Gaia, it is as though we were nomads on a desert, though a curious tribe who lost track of where we came from. Perennially wandering back and forth across sand dunes, searching for an identity in a form that may no longer exist. When you look for something and you can’t see it, it might not be because it doesn’t exist. Even more, it might not be because you don’t know what you are looking for.

It might be because we don’t yet know how to look.

Gaia as Educator

2010-04-09T15:12:00.001-07:00

Gaia has been educating her children all along, with an imperative to heed what she has taught. An imperative might seem to be the nature of information passed genetically and chemically, and the term ‘education’ might seem to construe the mere passage of information. It is true that in ‘education’ by humans refers to enabling students to grasp information. Thus, mere education does not impress the student with a single, or even a range, of imperatives. It is also true that human education is a kind of general frame within which a particular human being can proceed to experience and act in the world. It is not a code, in that it is neither specific nor directive. To different degrees in different places today the human freedom from coded directives has been the forte of human life. There is a degree of freedom of choice in human education that is illusive to the codes of genetics and chemistry.

However, this is not the same education as that which has been perennially provided by Gaia. We have been given a breadth of choices in our actions. However, this does not mean that she has been freeing us from imperatives. She has been teaching us to listen to her, and we erred in our imperious naiveté that we had a choice to listen, or not. She will always, unfailingly, respond kindly to our willingness to listen to her, and with increasing sharpness if we fail.

Now she is demanding our attention. There is no difference between the education that she has been giving her humans and that which, for instance, she has been passing down through biochemistry. For millennia, she has taken the adult position: patient, warning but forgiving, trying to correct us in subtle and consistent ways. It is not that her voice has not been immediate, but we have been slow to understand the nature of her authority.

Gaia is the perfect teacher. We humans will always face, by degree, the natural consequences of our actions.

Our Relationship with Gaia is an Emotional Thing...

2010-03-28T21:14:00.000-07:00

What is going to be consequence of increasing unavailability of positive experiences of Gaia? Without the experiences that create the emotional bond with her, where will come the corollary emotions of desire to protect, care for, and encourage her along?

This whole business of ‘self-concept’ is grossly handicapped at its very conception. If we are going to go about considering what an ecological identity even looks like as we try to remember how to identify with nature, we are going to have to explore other approaches than ‘conceptualization’ in search for answers… otherwise we are going to miss the non-conceptual aspects. These things that have absolutely nothing to do with 'thinking about' things, might actually be the salient determinants of the human relationship with nature. If we are going to take seriously the idea that positive emotions play a powerful role in the process of building a nature-based identity and nature-appreciating behavior, then we are going to have to step back and re-approach our hopes of finding a way to re-identify with Gaia, differently.

It is unsettling to hear that people think it strange to ‘identify’ with nature. This is especially intriguing given the biophilia hypothesis, which recognizes that the massive time Gaia spent generating a human genotype must have produced some sort of essential correspondence between herself and her troublesome progeny. But I think we have forgotten how to identify with nature. The children have forgotten their mother.

I am increasingly dubious about approaches to correct our human errant ways vis-à-vis Gaia by simply extending our knowledge about her. I am increasingly given to recognizing that it is our emotions that fuel the thought and ensuing behaviors that end up leaving life better, or worse, in or wake. I will go even further out on a limb and suggest that morality is itself emotionally based, that moral ‘reasoning’ (so called) is nothing but an exegesis on what came before any such thoughts.

It seems to me that our very method of considering, reflecting, and thinking about ‘self’ and ‘nature’ is way too deeply confounded by our very conceptual skill set. Our analysis, itself, narrows our field of view and hence capacity for wisdom… notice I did not say ‘understanding’, but I am reaching for a term that could be inclusive of emotions. To be simply conceptual misses the very outcome that is sought. This whole business of being scholarly with distance and tidy concepts ignores the massive elephant in the human-species ‘living room’ that lumbers around with hundreds of thousands of years of genotype formation without producing a single concept.

This reminds me a little of the silly archetype of Christian scholastics, shut up in their little rooms, surrounded by their texts, strenuously compiling concept after concept from their own detritus regarding theology. Stuff that led to nowhere. If humans are going to seriously study how we can help reestablish a relationship with Gaia, they are going to have to step outside of their scholarly conceptual ‘rooms’ and start having positive experiences with Gaia.

It might be a little difficult to quantify, but so is falling in love. And thank goodness we haven’t forgotten how to do that.

Close Encounters of the ‘Bird’ Kind

2010-03-28T16:30:00.000-07:00

The Earth was once admired, even worshiped, though human sensitivity has become distanced from our Earth and its natural forces. As a consequence, we have become distanced from the emotional and psychological wisdom and healing our Earth offers. Human-Earth relations have, with the myth of ‘progress’ and civilization, been lost. The loss of this intimate relationship is the core of what has become the single most toxic source of human and Earth problems.

In pre-history, shamanism ‘sprouted’ among people living in an intimate relationship with the Earth. Today, we most commonly know of shamanism as a source of healing techniques: technical procedures that find their power from the natural relationship humans once had with nature. Shamanism thrives because of the relationship, where nature and psyche co-exist in an integrated whole. However, shamanism is so much more than healing techniques: it is an ancient and powerful posture towards self and world that enables healing by proceeding from this integrated understanding of humans and the Earth. Shamanism is a holistic, natural spirituality.

We need a functional cosmology. How many times have I heard shamanic practitioners talk of profound experiences they have had of understanding or insight, received through one or another, simple shamanic practice. Such practitioners incessantly recount significant revelations that took them by surprise. Take for example, this discovery from a woman who happened to notice a red-tail hawk flying in circles above her. She was engaged in a shamanic practice that opened her up to the healing and potential wisdom of the Earth, and then she saw the hawk. This apparently plain encounter caused her to leap across any separation between nature and herself. She realized that there was a message being given to her by this large bird flying overhead: “Let your spirit soar… Free (your) spirit, fly freely… changing the way you look at things.” One could counter that anyone could have plopped down a hundred dollars for a psychotherapist’s chair and realized something similar. How intriguing it is, however, to note that the natural world has an immediate therapeutic healing potential. Simply by engaging in a shamanic practice built on the recognition that our Earth itself is healing, we can be opened up to this.

Birds fly around us all of the time. Sometimes they try to fly across four-lane highways and are left in crumpled tufts of feathers at the side of the road. Those who plant lawns chase them away when they peck at new lawn seed, or feast at their apple tree. On the other hand, we love them when they sing outside our window, that is, except when we are trying to sleep. For many, birds are simply a delight or a bother, depending on what their personal interests are at the time. If we are planting a lawn, preparing to harvest apples, or trying to sleep, we chase them away. If we are sipping our coffee at the kitchen table window, we succumb to their song. For much of our lives, if we notice them at all, we see them as we, in our human-centered way, find them helpful or a hindrance to our immediate desires: an object of beauty, bother, or disinterest.

The ‘functional cosmology’ that we seek may already be present – at least a glimpse of it – glimmering amidst our most ancient cosmology. This primal, shamanic Earth-centered spirituality begins from the early realization that birds, as well as the rest of nature, are profound teachers and healers. However, if we do not recognize the wisdom and healing they have the potential to bring us, we are apt to consider them simply a detail, a nuance, or unimportant matter. When we are distanced from the natural world, we lose the opportunity to realize the blessings of this world, even in our immediate lives.

It so happened that another practitioner, a man, also had an encounter with a bird when through a shamanic practice, he opened himself up to experience the wisdom of his natural world. He emotionally recounted; “Suddenly a small bird flew in over the river in front of me, from the left side, and began to fly circles in front of and around me. I know he knew I was sitting there against the stone wall. At times, in his circles, he would fly straight at me, before breaking off, left of right. I was totally captured by its dance, exclaiming, ‘Oh my, oh my’ as the tears welled up and ran down my face. It flew just… darting, swaying, down over and close to the churning water… (it) finally exited left as it had come in, but the tears did not and would not stop.” When later, in a shamanic journey, he contemplated the meaning of this encounter that was so plainly profound and important to him, he realized that the bird was “…quite simply, you at your best. That’s what you look like when you are grounded, alert, and alive. When you can’t remember who you are or how to proceed, just think of that bird flying over the river and over you as being yourself. That will bring you back.”

The Earth and humanity are both begging that we humans develop a cosmology and spirituality that begins to heal the Earth, and ourselves. For the Earth, it is our technological assault on the biological community that has led to her pain. For humanity, it is our estrangement from the healing of the natural world that has led to our social and psychological ills. Living in cities, behind walls, locked away from the soil by thick slabs of concrete, we become neurotic with our narrowed view, uncomfortable in our core, tenuously searching for meaning and peace in a kind of sheltering prison of our own making.

I believe this is why there is a growing surge of interest in shamanism. Gaia is calling us back to her. Shamanic healing practices that grew from an intimate relationship with the natural world are being sought precisely at the same time as our growing human recognition of the tragedy our separation from the Earth. Shamanism is a spiritual life, a relationship with a healing Earth that once reestablished, enables us to lessen the destruction and begin the healing of both ourselves and our Earth. Be prepared in shamanism, to find wisdom and understanding, and peace.

I believe that some clues towards a functional cosmology for today may be found amidst the sensibilities and world view of the most ancient shamanic healing techniques. To move forward, we may first need to step back. Shamanism grew from the Earth, a product of an intimate relationship with Gaia. The spirituality that flows through shamanism may be different from what we need in today’s world in order to repair our relationship with the Earth, but I believe there are essential elements in shamanism that fulfill this need.

What we need is a spirituality that leaves us in gratitude for Gaia, reverence, and a commitment powerful enough to motivate change in our behavior. The ancient forms of shamanism may not fit perfectly, but there has to be potential in a spirituality where watching even the smallest aspect of Gaia, a simple small bird flying back in forth, brings wisdom and leads to tears of gratitude and joy.

How We Know Ourselves

2010-01-09T19:24:00.000-08:00

Humanity has had to make some uncomfortable adjustments along the way. It seems that just when you think you have what it ‘is’ to be human down pat, that some danged scientist or explorer comes along and dislocates something seemingly pretty crucial to our self-image. Kind of like a species adolescence, in a way, standing in front of the mirror and trying to comb or preen our way back into a sense of knowing ourselves. Yet the changes are huge and inevitable, and the discomforting anxiety around it almost palpable.

The illusions shattered by Copernicus (no, we are not the center of the universe), Darwin (no we are not set apart from the beasts and are in fact closely related to them) and Freud (alas, we are not as entirely masters of our ‘selves’ as we thought) signify just three more obvious of the probably uncountable numbers of greater or lesser adjustments we have had to make with respect to how we conceive of ourselves in our world. We haven’t even fully dealt with any of these three.

So I can totally understand when someone complains that the workings of life are “obvious, explainable, and thermodynamically inevitable. And relentlessly mechanical…” (Goodenough, p. 46) However, I pause and begin to bite my lip when the angst starts building into “And relentlessly mechanical. And bluntly deterministic.” (Ibid) Then, when the cry heightens into “That can’t be all it is!” (Ibid, p. 33) I have to say ‘stop.’ This is not good enough. As a matter of fact, astrophysics does not reduce the magnificence of the night sky, nor is life demeaned by knowing its component molecules.

And I think I am beginning to fathom the problem. We are again, as a human species, facing a self-reappraisal, stemming again, from a shattering of our self-concept, and it isn’t fun.

Like a teen glaring at the pimple in the mirror, it so easily shows when they come to the breakfast table full of defensiveness, or a sullen existential emptiness, disappointment or resentfulness. It doesn’t have to slip, however, into self-pity. Nor does one have to pine on with a “Why lord, why this”… followed by the familiar "Why Me!" refrain. We certainly don’t have to hand it all over to some deity with an “OK, Thy will be done!”

When you look at the history of life on the Earth, the growth of humanity as a species is actually just a blip on the screen. I might even be pushing things to call this a period of human species-adolescence: it might actually be childhood. Nonetheless, the point is that if ever there were going to be reappraisals, now would certainly be the time for them to show. We are used to raising kids, and though we are never fully prepared for the work they put us through in helping them slip into maturation with more rather than less comfort, it is a whole different matter raising ourselves, as a species. We are not prepared. Nor, can we be. We’re doing this one entirely on our own.

The matter may have a great deal to do with the way we conceive reality to actually be. For instance: what is the ‘real’ unit of life? Is it the organism”? Indeed, as biologists rapture on about how biochemistry and biophysics unfolds into a creature who grows and divides, I am reminded of the history of human self-perception that gloats arrogantly at its magnificence, as the pinnacle towards which all of creation was hitherto striving. Only, this time, falling prey to an understandable error of focusing on a conceptual tier. If the point of view about life’ starts at the level of the organism, it is a biologists natural weakness.

To a biologist, not only is the skin (fur, membrane, shell, exoskeleton, bark, etc.) the natural point of reference, but anything related to a machine draws immediate stern looks. “Life is different than a machine” they said, because machines were created by people, and machines don’t think or do things without human programming (they said), and they go on and on about the glory of life. Heck, if they wanted to work on machines, they would have become a mechanic. Well, that is what they used to say. Now they find themselves saying that life appears like wiring diagrams for a vastly elaborate machine. An amoeba to a biologist, can appear as such an organic machine. It isn’t too difficult to then begin wondering at what it is to be a human organism, full of little cells…

It isn’t ‘all or nothing.’ There isn’t some kind of instant demarcation point in time or space between biology and machine, between life and non-life. These are conceptual points of reference established against a flux, impossible to hold in position, and impossible to define precisely. That is the other issue and what confounds the problem. We have been used to looking at ourselves as not quite the same pinnacles of universal hope and prospect that our earlier, yet more recent civilizations conceived, but we have not quite relinquished the unwieldy definitions. Our language still retains the materials with which our thoughts are constructed and our world is seen, and in this case and most pointedly, as we as humans understand ourselves.

Fetal life is in grand pursuit of its teleology far before its organs are produced. It is, however, a point of view from an organism that a particular ‘self’ begins when all of its parts come together and ‘go.’ The fact is, that the mechanics of life has been producing itself long before any particular organism took form, a process that has been going on somewhere we think between 4 and 4.5 billion years. Even before the primal soup, it was going on as the material from the stars began to form the Earth.

I like to think of the world as a range, rather than a within distinct parameters, and as a flux of many processes, rather than a given state. Of course, this is harder to grasp, and somewhat amorphous if one tries to take hold of it, but that is the nature of flux. If I became attached to the notion of life being separate from mechanics, it would be a serious affront when faced with the mechanics of life. The wonder, of course, is in the phantasmal quality of the flux. Yet, we are afraid of an apparition, haunted by a fear that we are ‘only, just a…’ It is our human self-image that is at stake. On the one hand, humanity is the same, regardless of the self image. On the other, our self image defines us, defines our actions. And we humans have been very active on our Earth.

It seems important for some to consider that as an organism, there is but one of them, though that has never been the case. Each human being is actually composed of untold millions of beings, including mitochondria and bacteria, that make from a skin-defined biologist’s point of view, a ‘single’ being. The most forthcoming complaint to being defined as a multitude, would conceivably be one’s sense of self, in a “but I know me!” as if ‘one’ was ever, only one. Any half-hearted retrospective would, even begrudgingly, admit to having seen, heard, experienced and organized the world and sense of self differently over time. “OK, so where do my thoughts come from!” is an expected retort. You think… yourself, maybe? Hardly. Name one thought, one experience, which does not come laden with epochs of linguistic, cultural, and social ‘pre-organism’ education. Odds are you can’t recall it. The experience, however hard it would be to recall, was likely at birth, or even earlier, in the womb before you began to associate feelings with the sound of your mother’s voice, or the chemistry in her bloodstream…

And do we end at our skin? Not a chance! Take one breath, and try to hold it. Now ‘you’, you say, end at the skin of your pursed lips? Even discounting what you just inhaled, odds are you can’t persist very long at maintaining that you can persist as the organism you think you are, more than a couple of minutes at the longest. And even that’s a stretch for all but the most hearty of us.

The problem is ‘tier-centricism’ at the level of the organism. If we persist in conceiving of ourselves as skin enclosed sacks of ‘self’, we are going to bump up against the fluidity of life. If we loosen whatever unconscious, albeit feverish hold we have on human self-concept and allow our experience of self and world to blend into the manner in which it presents itself to us as we come to know it more fully, we have the opportunity to slip maybe, a little more gracefully into the future. And, importantly, reach a more easily a relationship with an Earth that is not separate from us, but a part of us as we are a part of it.

It is how we know ourselves, however, that is upon which the matter rests.

_______________________________________________
(Quotes from Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998.)

'Religion'? What's That?

2010-01-09T17:03:00.000-08:00

Popular etymology misguides our understanding of religion, as it erringly derives it from 'religare', referring to 'binding fast' or 'obligating' one. Naturally, this would find a benefit in 'binding' oneself to some deity, or in the more abstract, be a preference of organizational religion, which would desire a constituency to be 'obligated' and 'bound' to a distinctive understanding and behaviors. However, the word is more likely a derivation of 'relegre', which means 'to go through' or 'read again.' , or 'religens': 'revering the gods.' (Barnhart)

It is curious how our words construct our very thinking. My developing understanding of what it is that is religious, continues to evolve as more information and perspectives about the world (that I have been constructing with my words, with my hitherto understandings) further broaden and sharpen my awareness.

In this vein, I discover a kind of fondness for the more popular (though probably, etymologically speaking, errant) derivation of 'religion' from 'binding fast.' Yes, even though it is likely wrong, I prefer it a little, because in my developing conceptualization of what I think I 'see' when I look around me, I am starting to 'see' myself, our Earth (Gaia), and everything else becoming more and more an integrated whole. This, in contradiction with the many dichotomies that have been haunting human understanding for many thousands of years, if not into deep prehistory.

Thus the 'spiritual’ vs. 'mundane' dichotomy, the 'self' vs. 'other', the 'good' vs. 'evil', the 'me' vs. 'it'... all of these dichotomies feel as if they are actually intermediate steps to a deeper understanding, perhaps necessary in a developmental sense, but ultimately insufficient. On the other hand, the more inclusive understandings that once again (from our human perspective) 'bind together' all that we had been holding separate, is extremely appealing.

However, it is not that it is bound. It actually would, if this reasoning is valid, be in a completely unforced relationship. There would be a 'Tao' to it, a naturalism, an 'of course.'

The Problem of God

2010-01-09T16:59:00.001-08:00

We live amidst a difficult period of human history, when a scientifically supported view of the universe is increasingly unable to dodge the broad grip of the theistic, particularly monotheistic religious movement of the past couple of thousand years. You would think that any contention over following theism or pursuing the development of something more ‘fact-friendly’ such as a religious naturalism, might simply be put to rest by reviewing the facts. Then it hit me.

The problem of god is not about facts, but beliefs.

Surprisingly, after science succeeds in eroding most of the foundations upon which the world’s faith-based monotheistic religions rest, which it is very likely to do unless these facts are able to be kept hidden, the issue will actually, not be whether there is a god or not! After all this chatter from Nietzsche to physics about the demise of god, the major religious conflict of the future is not going to rest on whether god(s) actually exist. After all, if there was one (or several), proof could be submitted and we would simply move onto the next matter.

However, an issue of god’s existence is not likely going to surface as the issue of contention, at least from the major stakeholders. This is because such groups and organizations (Islam, Christianity, Judaism) will shun submitting themselves to scientific inquiry, as such inquiry is a two-edged sword that would just as easily be turned back upon themselves. Much like kids in a schoolyard throwing taunts back and forth, such challenges to the existence of another's god might easily be slung back as a challenge to come up with some credible proof of one’s own. Plainly, such an approach could turn out to be hugely self-injurious. Although I may think that the leadership of these theistic groups may be deeply misguided, they are certainly not stupid, and will probably avoid walking towards such potential, mutual destruction. Much more likely will be a covert, unspoken agreement that the issue of god’s existence, simply will not be raised.

For religious zealots, challenging the existence of someone else’s gods was a commonplace in epochs past. However, this is a matter that in more recent times has been spoken of much less, and is an avoidance that will with all likelihood increase between theistic groups as our science-based ability to actually see into the universe continues to unfold. Why? For the obvious reason that it would undermine the very beliefs upon which such theistic faiths rest.

Which is actually a very interesting phenomenon: here, we have billions of human beings, all over the planet, who believe quite vehemently in different gods, yet because of the sensitive nature of any god’s actual existence, refuse to challenge each other to provide proof.

In such silence, we definitely have a problem. However, the problem is not the fact (or not) of god, but beliefs about he/she/it. The problem is this: if submitting proof is not going to be an acceptable way to determine validity, theistic religions are going to have to resort to alternative measures. Religious institutions, to survive in the face of increasing scientific secularity will have to choose a tactic other than challenging each other to whether the other god actually exists. Rather than choosing to do battle on what would be a minefield, they will turn to matters not of god’s existence, but of human behavior. For instance, competition to show superiority of one faith system or another will be around such challenges as whether one has enough faith or not, or whether one is living in a particular way or not, or bows in a certain direction, or mumbles some prayer or not, or does or does not do any of a number of human behaviors. In short, the matter will be about behavior, not god.

I find this troubling because history has demonstrated what has been successful in enforcing faith rather than fact systems in the past, has been the same tripartite strategy used by successful totalitarian governments: power/control, decree/law, and propaganda/education. By power and control, I mean the ability of an organization to dictate what actually happens in their jurisdiction. Such control can be accomplished through different methods that arrive at the same ends, such as a bristling police force or military, covert operatives and smaller, less formal bands, or through a skillfully or culturally guided self-righteous force of a community. The second part of this is decree and law: formulas by which particular instances of deviation from some norm are recognized and responded to, and that formally and ritually codify the broad injunctions and demands that socialize such norms. Finally, the use of propaganda and education to train the general populace to think and behave in general patterns, reassures the broader development of ideas, emotions and behavior to remain within general prescribed boundaries.

Get Together

2010-01-09T16:51:00.000-08:00

(from Get Together,
song by the Youngbloods)

“If you hear the song I sing
you will understand...listen
You hold the key to love and fear
all in your trembling hand
Just one key unlocks them both
Its there at your command

Come on people now
smile on your brother
Everybody get together
try to love one another right now”)

(from For What it’s Worth,
Song by the Buffalo Springfield)

“…What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side
It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down”

“…why has our own species become engaged in behaviors that not only undermine the survival of other species, but the integrity of the system at large—when no other species has done this.”?

Recently, I ran across this question. Since then, these two songs as well as snatches of others out of the ’60’s have been running through my mind, as if I had a virtual radio in there, listening directly to the music as a youth. In fact, to be perfectly honest, tears flowed uncontrollably as I listened again, as this music rings such a deep chord of my upbringing.

As a part of that generation, I grew up amidst a sincere and radical questioning of the principles which grasped a broad American culture, themselves formed by the decades of war, industrialization and religious organization that preceded it. Also, as part of that generation I rebelled, knowing in my heart that there was more than the general models of culture and understanding in which I found myself, and I was right… as so many of us during the latter part of the century, and this early part of this new one have come to realize.

This question is a good one: why do we undermine the system at large, and each other, when no other species does so? I do not think I have a ready answer to this. It is a question that is one of those ‘big questions’ about which entire lives and even generations are involved in finding an answer.

One of the ways, however, to approach an answer would be to look first at how and where we differ from the other species, for from here it seems reasonable to suspect that differences arise. And, the ways that we do differ, at their root, appear based on something psychological. I say this only because what it is that is psychological, is a crucial underpinning of whatever comes out of being human.

Another way of approaching an answer would be to look at how and where the other species do not undermine the system at large, and each other, and for this, I have to start from the position of ‘devil’s advocate’ and determine if this ‘non-undermining’ is indeed true. Sadly, the history of biology forwards a picture that is not so simple. The initial overconsumption of the microbial nitrogen-eaters led to massive starvation and demanded genetic change in order for survival. In essence, this is certainly not caring for the system at large, and it created a mad scramble to develop alternative approaches to survival.

It is been a good many years since this mad scramble began, and a lot of reapproachment between members of the same species and those from different species. The outcome of this has been a balance, never stable, always in motion, and always changing. But, a general balance nonetheless.

Now enter humans: banding together, harvesting, building, and developing a reflective brain. Whatever it is that we as humans have done to become the ignominious ‘poster child’ of Earth’s undermining is probably a consequence of our differences, and possibly also our greatness, vis-à-vis Earth’s other inhabitants.

It is with these reflections that I listen again to the lyrics that I grew up with, the words that formed so much of the ‘me’ who has grown through and from this ever since. The words hearken to an awareness that grew wildly with an equally wild generation, that we needed to cease saying ‘hooray for our side’ and ‘come together’ to correct an imbalance that we recognized yet were only starting to understand.

In these lyrics, we are reminded of the crucial importance as a species to work together. What a huge task thus awaits: helping an entire species shift its self-understanding and relationship with its Earth into one that encourages balance: even helping one person find such a way of being can be an investment in time and energy. Now, a whole species! In the years since, we have come more and more to recognize that this reapproachment and growing relationship extends far beyond that between the members of one species alone. But there is so much more, for such balance needs to be found between all species and their Earth.

And between the species.

Come on people now, smile on your brother. Everybody get together, try to love one another.

Right Now.

Random Thoughts on Community

2009-12-20T16:46:00.000-08:00

I am captured by the image of shape and fit. Like pieces of a complex jigsaw puzzle, the pieces fit nicely with each other in one niche, and not at all, in another. In the Native American community (and I use this word ‘community’ very specifically) there is a deep understanding that verges on the domain of moral and cultural imperative, that each person finds their proper place in the smooth working of the whole.

This is a understanding and social instruction that is far from belonging just to Native Americans. Indeed, it is both a wisdom and an injunction of any well-functioning group, sliding round and around the communities of life, from insects to plants, and humans to birds. Naturally, the particulars will change as both the niche and the beings inhabiting it communicate with and adapt to the changes of the whole through time and space.

Evolution is indeed built on the environment that produces the niches within which an organism’s genes maintain or alter their arrangement, and the organisms thus fit better or worse, dialoguing constantly towards mutuality. Which, is not to say that the effect of the organism’s genes, and hence the organisms as a group, do not affect the environment as well. Algae may flower into an abundance that changes the entire nature of a pool of water, or a lake, or even an inlet of the sea, crippling the lives of innumerable other creatures that required light, or oxygen, in its depths. Similarly, the data points to humans changing the environment of the Earth.

********

The gene similarity throughout the animals and plants, indeed all organisms upon the Earth, is a constant nudge towards a growing scientific understanding of our common living community. We are related: the plant and I, the insect and I… These are, as more indigenous communities are more commonly declaring, our brothers and sisters, our grandfathers, and our grandmothers. When I meet in community, in true community, I gather with shared understandings and with an open heart. There is no need to hide, indeed, I don’t feel separate. I belong, and I am glad of this and naturally find my place. If someone needs help, I am eager to help. I try to fit in. I make an aware effort to merge in concordance.

A religion, if the root comes from ‘to bind’, is thus not an enforcement. It is a handshake. Perhaps the root of the term’s idea of ‘binding’ is itself a longstanding human misconception. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does not have God grasping the hand of Adam with omnipotent strength. The two hands extend towards each other, looking for that deeply satisfying contact. If and when they do, the consequence would not be and iron grip, but rather, a loving touch.

********

Indeed, there is no need to create a God at all. God is in fact, entirely unnecessary. The Divine is all around us, and within us.

********

It is sometimes thought that since stories often have common threads, that there must be a common source to tales and myths, passed on, dispersed, changed to fit circumstances… I ask you: if a man or a woman inhabited the same world and yet lived on opposite sides, might they not share stories about dawn and dusk?

********

Since there are more bacteria constituting my body than cells, not counting the bacteria that constitute the mitochondria within each of my cells, would it not be more appropriate, well, perhaps more realistic, to consider the human organism as a collection of bacteria first, and cells second? That would at least be more democratic, giving equal voice to the entire constituency.

And by the way: would that then make me a single organism, or a community? And, on this note: since bacteria are basically biochemical machines, what does that make me? Put in another way, if I am a machine, who or what is the operator? And really, what is the point of all these questions. I am what I am. What difference does it make?

********

Religion is a giant affirmation. From the cathedral to a forest sacred gathering around a fire, religion reaffirms our community with all of existence. We belong. We do fit, and in gathering, we re-identify where and how we fit. We feel the impulse to deference, without need to bow at the head, the waist, or throw ourselves to the ground. We give way naturally, because it feels better.

It is a dance.

Finger Worship

2009-12-20T16:19:00.000-08:00

It is probable that there are many dimensions of human awareness, due to the specific development of the human brain, that reach farther than other species. That has always been a hallmark of human self-concept, as ‘above’ the ‘lesser’ beasts, the ‘dumb’ animals… When we notice one or another of them to be particularly smart, we refer to it as ‘cagey’ and ‘cunning,’ but certainly not intelligent like a human.

Many forms of life have developed an intelligence resting on molecule shape-detectors (sense of smell), photon stimulations (eyes), vibration sensors (ears), and molecular motion detectors (skin sensing heat). On top of this, humans developed an additional survival edge (hence selected by natural environments) with neural complexity, and take their 100 trillion synapses and linked each neuron with 1000 others to create a huge capacity to process primarily physiological information, leaving a small part to attend to something else, all of it far from trivial. Humans: another aspect of a planet that is aware: what a conceptual leap, so long as our human awareness can release the small, ego centered selfhood that it had known and realize our place amidst a planet that is a shimmering globe of awareness…

We have this ability called self-conception with which we can attend to something called a self, vis a vis the ‘other.’ I don’t think this is limited to humans. There are my cats, for instance. I have three of them. Some believe that cats do not reflect on themselves. Others, such as myself, think otherwise and can imagine to one degree or another, that they have a self-concept. I watch them interact with one another, preening, hissing, posturing for first-dibs on the cat dish, batting at each other to be first in line, I can’t help but think I see this. They obviously have an 'other' concept. Why then, would they not have a self concept?

Of course, I could be projecting, another one of the many anthropomorphic projections of a human quality. This would certainly be traditional thinking, the idea of projecting my ‘higher’ human qualities on the ‘dumb animals.’

But, what if I’m not.

If human self-concept is in part defined as different from the other species because of the self-concept ability, what would it mean to our species self-concept if it was granted that we are surrounded by innumerable other life forms that we used to call ‘creatures,’ that also had self-concept? That would certainly help explain, for instance, the gaze of sad incomprehension in the eyes of a deer dying from the hunter’s rifle shot. I know that if it was a human that was shot, that this gaze, mixed possibly with many other emotions and thoughts, might just as easily be looking back at us. In which case, I doubt that many of us would be able to stand up before such a gaze without serious self-doubt, misgivings, compassion, apology and anguish. That would be murder. It would be hard to let it go.

But I guess that’s not what it’s called when it is a deer.

Sometimes I wonder about how the Divine might be projected by one of our deer or even snail friends. I suppose it would be zoomorphic. I can imagine that it is possible that deer, if conceiving the divine, might easily conceive of such as a kind of huge super-deer, appearing at times of need from the depths of the forest.

Humans walk on the interface of being human within the larger whole of life which is humanly conceived, a mind within a world in which one is being human. We can then take such things as the ‘spirit of loving kindness’, the ‘spirit of compassion’, or an idea of wholeness or sacredness or any of the other humanly aware qualities of existence and do something specific with it. We take this spirit and place it in a concrete form and recognize it’s qualities in other elements such as talking stones, spirit-filled trees and sacred birds, wise old gods in the form of omniscient spirit-men or powerful and sacred spirit-women goddesses. This is helpful for comprehension, perhaps, as a tool for approaching the divine, as it gives us something with which the human mind can begin to fathom such things with more depth.

However, this matter of projecting such spirits onto one or another god or goddess figure, is something that - in the face of continuing scientific discovery - is rapidly and uncomfortably looming closer. Soon, this matter will demand our attention. Not to worry, there is still time. As this very awkward encounter remains in front of us, we can still get by ignoring that there is a problem.

But let’s think ahead a little bit: suppose it were true that all of our notions of gods or goddesses were simply concepts and projections? If that were the case, then, what do we do with God, or gods? And what about all those goddesses!

Well, if one was searching for the moon, where do we look? These projections of god or goddess figures, to borrow from an old Zen formula are simply fingers pointing at where the moon may be. If we are looking for gods or goddesses, they are not to be found in our finger.

*****

God is, in a sense, not a god. The gods or goddesses we usually think of, if we think of such things, are most likely concepts. If we were searching for the moon, we wouldn’t stop to gaze rapturously at the finger pointing towards where it might be. Nor, with gods and goddesses, or for that matter, with any conceptualization of the Divine. In short, it doesn't do us much good to worship the finger.

Meaning-Making

2009-12-20T11:47:00.000-08:00

I just read about a man who, deeply well meaning, has been extremely proactive in feeding the local deer. He brings apples, bags of pet food, and places bowls out so that during the winter months, the deer have food available to them. Now the deer have almost become ‘pets’ to him. They have been given names, and sadly, one recently was struck and killed by a local car, possibly coming to or from his bountiful home full of deer-loving goodies. They are now battling amongst themselves for his food: broken antlers testifying to the competition for the apples.

Then someone wondered aloud about his actions, about how his well-meaning acts probably led to the deer’s comfort around humans and hence the proximity to the car with which it met its death. They raised the question: is this the role, being fed by men with apples and being hit by cars, a role that deer were meant to have?

This got me thinking about ‘meaning’... as in: what role deer were truly meant to be cast in. I wonder where this meaning comes from. I suppose, if there were some hidden resource to this, perhaps known by some ancient civilization that knew the meaning of things, this could be an important thing to discover. Or maybe what we need to discover is that the universe was built on some grand meaningful scheme about which humans just find it very hard to see. But I am increasingly dubious about either of these as I get the sense that humans are actually the ones doing this 'meaning-making' and have very likely been doing it for a very long time

Perhaps the ‘meaning’ to things derives from a kind of self-reflective ability, a sort of secondary effect of an increasingly complex neural latticework such as humans have. I don't think the ability to assign 'meaning' was the original aim of complex brain development, but rather the ability to devise more cunning ways to secure sustenance and habitation.

But regardless, here we now are, with this increasingly complex mental apparatus, running around assigning meaning to things which seems to be an epiphenomena of our self-reflective ability. We think about things, we think about ourselves, and we think about how we think about things. We can envision that deer existing without human involvement in their affairs would be finding their own population numbers and behaviors constrained and dictated by the usual predators, food availability and such.

Now, we might begin by extracting humans from the equation, and imagining a life for deer without humans being around. There is a kind of rosy hue about this; noble and soft-spoken creatures of the forest cohabiting with each other in peace, raising their fawns, nibbling at wild leaves. Then, enter the humans: reducing habitable areas through roads and development, hunting, providing apples, driving cars… the ecology now includes the appearance of the human animal (and its products), which from the deer’s point of view might be seen as an invasive species. The deer eating the apples might be happy with this matter. The crumpled deer on the road might have another idea, though it might have been the same deer, I don’t know.

OK. Let’s take humans out of the picture. What if another force, such as cougars, began migrating or growing in numbers in a deer-rich area, which would seem a nice thing to do if one were a cougar, they also would be making a dent in the deer population. If deer were self-reflective to the degree that they could assign meaning to the appearance of the cougar, they might consider each loss an ‘act of God’. Or, perhaps some might consider it an act of karmic justice following their carnal (and reproductive) base and heathen urges. I don’t know what manner deer might produce deer ethics, metaphysics or theology. Perhaps some of the deer might choose to become celibate, realizing that there were just too many deer, or perhaps driven by a deep spiritual urge to focus on the Divine.

Given enough time and mental development, eventually deer might conspire among themselves to resist what could alternatively be considered an unjust cougar invasion, and wage war against the cougars with death assured and thus also thin a swelled population, which would be a relief to most everyone. More apples, less cougars. Truly a laudable goal.

Yet, I wonder, where does this meaning that we assign, such as the proper role of a deer, come from? Moreover, from what perspective? Since we find it so hard to understand what deer might fathom as their own goals, priorities and meaning, we assign these from a human perspective. However, if we are going to assign meaning to human involvement with an environment that affects the deer, we need to also take into account what conceivably could be the deer’s meaning. I mean, what do the deer want? But, like kids, I guess we have determined it is our position to decide for them what is right and just.

But, is that truly just? By what authority do we abrogate decision-making for the deer, and that matter, for rest of our Earth? Are we assuming an authority that is not ours? If not ours, whose? If we have the authority, what is its basis? In an unavoidable confrontation with our ecological crisis, we are brought face to face with the matter of meaning-making itself.

In the midst of this, we will be facing questions about which we had hitherto simply made assumptions. I don’t have answers to these questions, just more questions.

A Human Ecological Response to Limited Resources

2009-12-20T11:45:00.001-08:00

For me, looking at the ecological responses to resource limitation or exploitation is easier when observing the human animal, rather than other species, probably because I am one of these animals and have read and observed a lot about them. Resource limitation, for instance, has been squeezing the human population forever, punctuated by intermittent bouts of expansion into new territory: like water behind a dike, eventually building so that the walls cannot sustain it.

On the other hand, we have found new methods of developing sustaining resources. There’s the famous one, agriculture, which demanded so much concerted effort at such tame efforts that a large portion of the population needed to be domesticated in order to maintain a dutiful, if not obligatory work force. However, this aspect of resource limitation on the ecology also becomes a matter of exploitation. Slaves were maintained through sheer intimidation and physical power, such as in Egypt, Greece and the United States, or through the bitter forces of economic power, such as in medieval serfdoms or the American ‘free’ economy and private ownership, where instead of a whip and chain, the prod was starvation and the chain was a minimally compensating work assignment, all enforced by law.

Despite the repeated warnings of experience, humanity has repeatedly grown into high numbers of individuals within a specific area. It seems to have been a species characteristic, the consequences of which have never been pretty. Squalor, poverty, hunger, disease, violence, totalitarian governments premised on power and control, and war: these are just a few of the common outcomes. When too many individuals exist for the same resources to adequately serve everyone, and the release of pressure by movement to new areas or development or new resources becomes impossible, then population density is eased and the population of humans is thinned by war, starvation or sickness, bitter routes to easing the social and ecological pressures, yet extraordinarily effective.

There is another tactic for survival in times of limited resources for which humans have demonstrated very clever predatory skills, which is generalized or specific violence against each other: generalized towards broad segments of the population in the case of war, and made very specific in the case of individuals or small groups raiding other humans. Piracy off the coast of southern Africa is a richly developing access to resources otherwise limited to a poor population. However, this pattern is not at all limited to developing countries. In contemporary America, for instance, we have discovered the ‘home invasion,’ where one or a small group of individuals, often male but not necessarily so, will simply force their way into another human’s living area, and then take what they want. This happens also on the sidewalks and streets. However, it also happens on the broad scale, such as the recent invasion of Iraq and sustained military interest in Afghanistan by the United States, which has produced huge carnage which reduces the population, and puts a struggling labor force to work in the invading country through all the materials needed to support the invasion, and giving soldiers a job.

Both individual and small group predatory tactics to develop resources from other human beings, as well as larger invasions of populations are clearly effective at both thinning the population and boosting resource availability.

When European humans first invaded such disparate places as the west coast of Central America and the contemporary American eastern seaboard, they brought with them even smaller pathogens than the individual soldier, bringing with them in their bodies such armaments as measles, for which the local populations were unequipped to fight off. One can see the invasive European species of humans as strikingly effective at finding sustenance in the new local ecologies while killing off the indigenous populations. Immediately following physical power, Europeans instituted cultural colonization whereby the populations could be domesticated, their behaviors enforced by entraining them with theological, moral and political concepts that helped guarantee a kind of meekness and pliability that could maintain their effective exploitation.

Expanding harvestable resources to include others of one’s own species in a predator–prey relationship throughout a broad range of exploitative means seems to be a tactic that humans have shown true excellence in creativity. Indeed, no other species has exploited the rest of the Earth in as many fantastically diverse ways as have humans. Far from excluding themselves from the pressures of exploitation, they have simply added to exploiting the Earth, an additional resource in exploiting others of their own kind. Naturally, the sustainability of this will take a keen degree of maintenance by the exploiters in order to insure this success over time and keep a large population convinced that being exploited is actually very fair. However, with enough addictive and mentally limiting diversions such as television and movies, alcohol and high carbohydrate food sources, the ancient Roman discovery of the ‘bread and circus’ approach to population control will serve quite well, especially when reinforced by a theology that induces guilt, meekness, and turning over oneself to a priestly authority or a divine higher power.

How things Are, and What things Matter

2009-11-26T16:18:00.000-08:00

(With this post, I need to begin by giving my deepest appreciation to Ursula Goodenough, the brilliant cell biologist who wrote The Sacred Depths of Nature, (Oxford University Press, 1998) and I am responding to some of her message.)

How things are, and what things matter: these are two questions essential to human being-ness. It is as though culture is as much built on these ‘heady’ matters as has been forged around the more corporal concerns such as the availability of food or sexual partners or shelter from the heat and cold. This thoughtful side of being human in itself says a lot about what it is to be human. It is a thoughtful enterprise and yet at the same time, rooted in flesh and blood, soil and water.

Now, to the next step, which would be to integrate a 'what is' with a 'what matters' so that these two can co-create a human community in both a self-nourishing and ecologically sound manner. Actually, they are a natural outgrowth, one upon the other, the second upon the first, like flowering branches stemming from the same trunk, drinking from the same sap… However, the 'what matters' grows out of the 'what is' as they both wind around each other towards the light.

Religion, importantly (given the human propensity for head-driven action), attempts to gather and disseminate broadly accepted mores that can align these two into a co-creative, co-productive concordance that serves to encourage life, and not destroy it. Religion begins with the determination of a ‘what is,’ and then installs a careful (let us hope) construction of a ‘what matters’ on top of this.

Well, it seems obvious that a planetary ethos is by all apparent data a requisite to a less tragic future. The list of reasons is well-known, and the self-interest governing the positions of so many key players is sadly familiar. Although I am uncomfortably troubled about the difficulties of humanity to respond together as a team, a little matter of human psychology might prove to provide a little hope: perhaps there is in humanity at large, a developmental aspect to the recognition of the ‘what is’ and ‘what matters’, as there certainly is one that shows over an individual human lifespan. Looking at the development of the individual gives at least some hope to similar potential growth among humans as a species, and this potentially gives some comfort to the prospect of humanity’s developing such insight and understanding.

However the acceptance of a global ethic, even a global metaphysics and epistemology, appears daunting, however well founded the need for it may be. What ‘is,’ in and of ‘itself’ is subject to perspective. It is not simple: physics alone raises deal-breaking questions about agreement regarding the universe’s construction: the argument in light’s being either a particle or a wave as a case in point. Concordance on the constitution of reality is not as immediately forthcoming, even among the scientists, as some might hope. These questions may dissipate with time and deeper understanding, but agreement regarding the basics of ‘what is,’ even from scientific perspective, is far from complete.

This said, if there were an opportunity for a generally global agreement on what was true, then it would makes sense that the ‘what mattered’ could be found to be more generally agreeable as well. This could logically mend the rifts forestalling improving our human behavior amongst ourselves as well as tending to our shared Earth, both matters of deep concern to people. Moreover, if there were to be a more global agreement regarding the nature of reality, it seems a better prospect that it came through observation and reproducibility that is scientifically founded, rather than by Confucian, Moses or Mohammed-like fiat.

Ursula Goodenough suggests that three things must exist if a global ethos – and possible religious formulation that supports it – can take shape: gratitude for life, reverence for life and its complexity, and an unflagging desire for life to continue. (Ursula, I am paraphrasing, and I hope I have this right enough.)

With respect to the first and third of these, it may be that we have our genetic heritage serving in our favor. Whomever has struggled for air, desperate for oxygen to fill her or his lungs, has already tasted the sweet thankfulness for being able to breathe. Moreover, the struggle itself testifies to an insatiable human appetite for living at least one more day.

The second of these necessary foundations to the prospect of a global ethos, however, demands a ‘foot up’ so everyone can take a good look at the ‘what is.’ It is hard to see the intricate dance and develop such a reverence for life in its complexity, to stand back in awe at the exquisite tapestry and the universal breadth and atomic depth of life, without access to its observation.

It was a moment of human evolvement when the first pictures of Earth transmitted to where you, I, and any street passerby of televisions illuminating store windows could first see Earth as a whole. It was a simple step in thought to then consider our own minuteness as a speck upon the screen, and face integrating this physicality of our own life with its wants, needs, hopes and fears, with this new-found broader perspective of the whole. We were forced to ignore, compartmentalize, or come to terms with some kind of integration of the distinct part that is our own life on the one hand, and the whole of life, which is the other.

One planet, one globe of water and air, a shared residence without – yet - a shared community.

The Heady Matter of Sex (and other ramblings)

2009-11-04T15:08:00.000-08:00

Not all light is good light. In other words depending on the scale and perspective, light can be considered better or worser. I don’t think the light has any issue with this business of being critiqued, it just moves in its photon-ey way, dashing through the universe at what to humans appears to be unbelieveable speed, and does what it does, unconcerned. A good friend of mine, however, is a professional photographer. He recounted how at one of his model shoots, he had such wonderful daylight shining in some San Francisco windows. He hadn’t anticipated a grumpy neighbor’s discomfort at the nudity of his model, and a local constable was called to throw a wet blanket on the whole affair. Unless, of course, he shut the blinds. Which in turn, shut out that wonderful light, which is what my friend found distressing.

There seems to be a narrow, or wider, band of ‘goodness’ within which things can be judged as such. I am not at all certain there is any abstract nature of this, whereas something is ‘good’ (or not) as judged from all possible observation perspectives, times, and places. The narrow band with which humans survive with any manner of gracefulness would likely to be not at all good, to something that found it more suitable at the infrared or ultraviolet range. But, biological life seems to work best in that 45 percent of solar energy that drives Earth-born biological systems.

Its not good light, its not bad light, its just light. Goodness or badness is an assignment from a particular point of view, which prespupposes a particular teleological idea, and in the case of human dependency on ‘good’ light, a somewhat practical one as well.

Then there is this matter of being omnivorous, which is a polite way of saying that we could also chew on another living, feeling being, probably with a family. The omnivore is also a carnivore at heart, though this is a matter of some discomfort among human beings lately. But, we have a choice. We can subsist on spinach and such, though this would take some considerable adapting of at least my own preferences.

But, we have a choice. But, what if we didn’t? What if no matter how we thought about it, we would have to eat flesh? What an ethical conundrum! Ethics, it seems, is unforgivably biased towards necessity. I am struggling to think of an ethic that survived very long in the face of a contrary necessity. Like the hunger striker: ethics can propel one grandly, but not interminably, unless the nature of the world changes.

And for a lot of things, that’s a tall order.

Ethics and morality: hard to distinguish between the two, both actually deriving from something a lot less stern sounding, which was ‘customs’ (ethics a derivative of Greek from which we get ‘ethos,’ and morality from a Latin root that leaves us with ‘mores,’ i.e. the customs of a people. Maybe ‘ethics’ is more abstract, and ‘morals’ more particular, but I think that is a matter of when ethics is more near at hand and in our immediate face, that we start thinking of it morally.

Recall the discomfort polite society had around the matter of sex? Well, maybe it still has. My photographer friend, for instance, encountered admonishment at not sex, but simply nudity. I hate to think of what might have been his ensuing story if there had been sex involved. Probably more than a slap on the hand, possibly hauled into the local police station. And that would have been tame in comparison with what would happen in an fundamentalist Christian or Islamic city!

Admittedly, human sex running wild will only serve to destroy the very lusting beings we are, unless we figure out and practice a socially effective way of not letting such heady matters lead to full-term pregnancy. Personally, I hope that we don’t put an entire end to that practice. But then again, your are listening to someone who still eats meat.

Which probably now explains the title of this piece: The Heady Matter of Sex. It kept you reading, didn't it?

Detritivores, Herbivores and Carnivores

2009-11-04T12:51:00.000-08:00

I am living amidst a ton of living herbivores, yet they do not stand out so hugely in my awareness, probably because they neither seek to feed on me (no need to fear them), or because I am not doing a lot of active feeding on the herbivores out there, foraging through Marshall Creek's plant life. If I didn’t have the corner market – or any market – available, I would probably be in a very different frame of mnd. I notice the deer, they are herbivores, but I notice them not because I feel drawn to eat them (though I am an omnivore, which includes carnivorous behavior), but because I am either drawn to their beauty (my judgment) or to their distressing herbivorous behavior (they eat my carefully tended plants.)

In this latter instance, I guess I am in competition with them: they for food, me for… what? Beauty? I guess I love the way my ivy lends a soft cushion to the hill along the path, and the flowers that burst from the potted geranium (when the deer don't get to them). I do sometimes get grumpy over the dears’ feeding on the ivy along the path, as I am aware this tenacious plant is holding back the loose soil and rock, which would come tumbling down and impede my journeys up and down the hill were it to be eaten. Then, the rains would come and complete the whole mess. This is my opinion, a very human-centered one. But, to me, I hold this opinion very close to my heart. I am not going to put my own needs down just because they are human. I like my plants and I like my house.

Oh, and don’t let me forget the banana slugs, aaaaaand the grasshoppers. I have been at odds with the banana slugs since moving here as my gardens and early attempts to build a lush and beautiful landscape outside the cabin door was constantly endangered by the voracious appetites of these bright yellow and not-so-little plant-eaters. Then, with our having taken out the nearly-toppling old trees along the west side of the house, the incoming light, not seen on this hillside for maybe millennia, invited scores of happy little grasshoppers, all grinding their little mouth-like things on chewy low-growing plants that also ‘saw the light’ and decided to take up residence.

Then, there is are whole tribes of little beings called 'detritivores', which means something that lives of dead and decaying plant and animal stuff. Sounds spooky, but they are actually cute little things like mushrooms. However cute some of them, the detritivores in my little world are not the least of my concerns. I say this even though the little white mushrooms I found yesterday looked so tiny and charming, and the taller, thin flat-topped ones had such a wonderful radiance of darker hues racing towards their delicate edges amidst the lighter browns and whites. There were also some big bulbous ones that crouched like gnomes against the hillside, utterly awesome in their ‘bulbedness.’

But Ive got issues. Marshall Creek is not just moist because of a creek, it stands next to the ocean with all the incoming sea moisture laden in the air, only to be captured by tree needles to fall steadily on the soil. Our house is wood. Moisture plus wood equals rot. That is not good. I am in competition with rot for my home.

I guess I forgot the termites, natural herbivores, they also want my home. I am very wary of predacious termites and rot, and must remain forever alert.

The carnivores are those with whom I naturally tend to gather and play. We meat-eaters must understand each other in a deep way. My wife, our dog, our cats, our friends: all also carnivores, except for Frank and Joyce. They’re herbivores. Well, they act like herbivores, but deep down inside I know (even though I don’t say it because I know it would make them uncomfortable) that they are just as capable of being carnivorous as one of those huge dinosaurs with flashing teeth you see in mocked up in movies. It’s in their genes.

Other carnivores? The little brown birds that scamper up the fir trunk out the window, and up the oak trees and across the limbs, busily combing the nooks and crevices for insect lunch, insects who themselves likely divide up into different parties of herbivores and carnivores. The little tree frog that was hovering amidst the short bay leaves was a carnivore, but I didn’t feel too connected to him, except to try to keep him safe from the cats.

The Boar of Winter

2009-10-30T22:34:00.000-07:00

I feel restless, pacing the edge of the creek. Looking, watching, squinting my eyes, often unsure of what I see. There is an unsettledness in the air, hanging beneath the redwoods, hovering above the ferns amidst the ivy.

Less than 3 days before the full moon, the turn of the seasons beginning to groan like an ancient wood pivot supporting the weight of the Earth. It is twilight, and yet it is not dusk, and an eerie thread of cloud gauzes over the sky. It is cold, but dry, though the ground is wet still from an earlier rain and last night’s late autumn air.

And everything is so quiet, and still, though there is a breeze coming down the ravine from the direction of the sea. In all ways it is both this and that, and it leaves me unsettled as well.

Will I meet a madman or madwoman running towards me, eyes ablaze with ecstatic frenzy? Will this person cry out the approach of season’s change, the weight of the unforgiving, the dominion of Winter’s fierce onslaught already stirring among the fallen autumn leaves. Am I ready?

It makes no difference: the inevitable shifting of the earth upon its axis will continue to lend a deep groan from the soil, between the rocks. And the ivy hears, sits quiet, and waits. Silent, with many ears, laying close to the Earth and clutching tightly the rough bark of trees.

I sense it in my chest, high in my abdomen. A tight pang, a feeling like a relentless edge of a thin blade slid beneath my ribcage. It thrusts me to high alertness, watchful, combing the wooded banks with my eyes for a clue, perhaps messaged by the sword ferns browned from the relentless pounding of the last storm. Not there, I look for an answer from the creek, and I am hypnotized by an unusually round and black rock glistening beneath the dancing water in the last of this hazy daylight.

And still I find nothing, that is nothing more than my awareness. I am aware that the boar of Winter is bearing down on us, eyes bulging and frothing with the momentum of an entire planet. There is no way to stop it. All we can do is all that any era of humankind can do… so I grasp my shield in one hand, and my spear in another, and raise my voice to the sky and shout.

The Miracle is not the Exception, It is the Rule

2009-10-20T20:27:00.000-07:00

The contemporary world is trying to come to terms with an understanding that is in one way, shape or form affecting and influencing a lot of people. This ‘new’ understanding is called ‘naturalism’, which generally holds that everything is a part of nature, ‘nature’ being that which can be fathomed by physics. This is actually, ‘strict’ naturalism. There is also, a ‘broad’ naturalism that seeks to “preserve consciousness and values” (Stuart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism, Eerdmans Publishing, Grand Rapids, 2008, p.71) amidst this scientifically understood, natural world.

This is a huge movement in human understanding, before which even the gods are steadily disappearing. For instance, when we explore the subject of ‘consciousness,’ is consciousness a matter of brain? Or is it more: if it was more, then perhaps men and women might have a soul. And might this soul not go to heaven? If the soul is gone, however, if all that remains is brain…

I concur with John Searle (Mind: A Brief Introduction, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004; The Mystery of Consciousness, New York, New York Review of Books, 1997), that consciousness is emergent. I understand this, however, possibly differently than Searle, as consciousness resting on biological and physical properties. We are not talking about strict biology and physics. Searle writes that “consciousness is caused by microlevel processes in the brain and realized in the brain as a higher level or system feature.” (Searle, quoted in Goetz and Taliaferro, p. 72) It is this ‘higher level’ or ‘system’ aspect that appeals to me, the brain being a ‘platform’ upon which consciousness takes shape.

To see a higher level or system, as I understand these, does not necessitate seeing in complete detail each and every one of its integrated micro-processes. Photosynthesis and digestion, for instance, are processes of life. Life is an emergent quality, something that depends on a pretty substantial ‘platform’ of contingencies.

Photosynthesis alone requires at least light and carbon, not to speak of a zillion other matters, all integrated successfully. To see photosynthesis or digestion, on the other hand, is not seeing the higher order of observation of ‘life’ itself. We might witness a cessation of life, such as when a plant, pulled from the soil, slowly dies on the ground. We may stop to touch the leaves, and note that even then, some photosynthesis may still be taking place. However, most plants with their roots exposed to the air and sun cannot sustain life for very long. Though it may be still trying, the contingent ‘platform’ is not in place to sustain it.

On one level, when I get into my car to head to the corner market, it ‘seems’ that there is one thing going on: me, sitting in the seat, intentionally pressing the pedals and rotating the steering wheel. However, this is missing those thousands upon thousands of little processes beneath the dashboard and engine hood that must be happening simultaneously in order for this ‘thing’ (me driving) to occur. We are looking at different levels of beingness. Consciousness is the same.

Jeffrey Gray’s argument is that “nothing we know so far about behavior, physiology, the evolution of either behavior or physiology, or the possibilities of constructing automata to carry out complex forms of behavior is such that the hypothesis of consciousness would arise…” (Jeffrey Gray, The Contents of Consciousness: A Neuropsychological Conjecture, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, v. 18, no. 4, p. 660) I disagree: reach a certain level of complexity, and it may.

Of course, I am holding this possibility because of the innumerable human beings I have met who appear to maintain a consciousness, and I believe this is possible because their complexity allowed for a secondary phenomenon of consciousness to emerge.

I may be entirely wrong with this, but my sense is that Goetz and Taliaferro are trying to save God. To do so, they seem to feel a need to take issue with this steadily growing understanding people are having about nature. It is reasonable, from their position, to be so nervous about an increasing secularization shifting towards a ‘nature is all there is’ worldview. After all, if nature is all there is, and God was supposedly super-natural (above the workings of nature, i.e. not answerable to the laws of physics) then where’s God?

Therefore, issues such as consciousness become from their perspective, crucial. If consciousness, for instance, was simply a function of brain, then the whole 'humanity has a soul which wants to return to God' thing becomes awkwardly specious. Here, the nature of what we are looking for is crucially important. Can consciousness exist without a supporting platform? Is there a necessary correspondence between consciousness and the minute processes that pulsate beneath it?

I have to shrug: well, yes and no. ‘No’ in the sense that the phenomenon of consciousness is not necessarily dependent on the biological underpinnings of the brain, for a moment of consciousness may be secondary to the consciousness moment that preceded it, not dependent on (and secondary to) the brain-platform upon which it stands. However, I would have to see for myself at least one example of a consciousness without such a platform – any kind, be it automaton or physiological – that supports it, if I was to consider this as a viable possibility.

Thomas Nagel (Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem, Philosophy, 73:337-52, 1998) stated brilliantly: “An obviously systematic connection that remains unintelligible to us calls out for a theory.” (Ibid., p. 345) It is the very absence of our understanding that should focus our criticism towards the paradigms and their concepts with which we reach for intelligibility.

Consciousness is just such a matter. But it doesn’t end there: that’s just the beginning. We also have a long ways to go before we are capable of comprehending what is ‘physical’. Scientists are often the first to point out the “eerily insubstantial ether” (Hofstadter, quoted in Goetz and Taliaferro, p. 25) quality of our universe. Hofstadter sees beneath nature's surface, the 'eerie,' perhaps even seemingly supernatural, as yet indescribably complex phenomena that dance within.

Interestingly, according to theism, “the origin and continued existence of the cosmos are explained by the basic or fundamental intentional activity of an omnipotent, omniscient, good being God.” (ibid. p. 83) Oh my gosh. Did I hear what I thought I heard? Are we proposing a theistic causal link? Is God (or gods, depending on your spirituality), then, a ‘natural’, at least causal phenomenon? If gods are natural, and science is eerie, perhaps indeed a (yet) unintelligible theory bridging and reappraising the two, calls out to be named.

With all that goes on in our day-to-day lives, it is probably not the larger number who fret about the crisis of theism that faces humankind. We have demands at work, too many things to remember to pick up at the store, and the kids still need to be fed. It is probably lower on our ‘to-do’ list to think about how we are going to go about discerning moral values and the meaning of life, than paying the mortgage. However, as a secular, naturalist world view increasingly permeates our lives, our world that had hitherto been religiously informed, drifts towards the demise of theism. This, in turn, will bring on an increasing existential realization of loss, unless, it is supplanted with a spirituality that can successfully contain both scientific discovery and moral and teleological meaningfulness.

Personally, I don’t think that the loss of the gods will be all that important. They never did anything for us anyway: just the belief in them got things done, and not all of that was good. Without their God, some might wring their hands and cry out for a miracle. Actually, I don’t think finding a miracle will be too terribly difficult. In fact, to me it’s all-too-apparent: the ‘miracle’ is not the exception, it is the rule. We don’t need exceptions. The miraculous is all around us.

The Soul Problem

2009-10-14T01:06:00.000-07:00

Despite the power of a river to carve its course through the landscape, a river is constrained by the very course through which it has hitherto flowed. Such flows the course of human thought: winding as we have explored and pondered, occasionally brilliantly and incisively. Yet, despite how human thought has churned and frothed, its course remains deeply embedded in the landscape of human history from which it derived.

We come from history. Unlike Athena, leaping fully armed from the head of Zeus, we arrive biologically, socially and intellectually after a very long preamble. The term ‘soul’, for instance, comes laden with a tottering amount of associations. I know this, because of my own. As a child raised within a predominantly Christian environment, I remember thinking of a soul as something akin to an everlasting, buoyant bubble of essential ‘me’. I dimly grasped that this bubble was held mysteriously within the frame of my body; that is, until my body could not sustain itself (and my soul) any longer. But then, this me-bubble would float upward, perhaps escorted by angels, to where it would be triumphantly greeted by gatekeepers with white robes, to be escorted - perhaps to the sound of trumpets – into an unbelievably sacred communion with ancestors, or even God. (Unless I had been bad, and had been sent Elsewhere).

Now, many decades later, I have to admit that my idea of a ‘soul’ still carries a lot of these childhood associations. Thus, it is difficult for me to contribute intelligently about souls in general. Is a soul something that remains the same over time, or like the ‘self,’ does it change, as does the body in which it is said to exist? I get confused: is ‘soul’ the same as ‘mind?’ Or, perhaps the same as ‘self’? If so, why not use one of those terms?

The problem of the ‘soul’ is the extent to which the term has been used throughout history by so many, from so many perspectives and in so many ways. As a term by itself, with so many associations, it appears hopelessly useless. It would need, at the very least, a definition that was defensible. But here, I have to sigh, for the scholastics already spent a long while working on this very thing. You hear jokes about their purported interest in such matters as ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’. Whether or not any scholastic was truly involved in pursuing pin-head dancing, many valiant soul-searching efforts were made to get a handle on this ‘soul.’ However, all that appears to be the consequence of all that work is that a lot of well-meaning people became lost in their own terms, such that to them, the terms became realities themselves.

If when we use the term 'soul', what we are talking about is a more psychological ‘me,’ my own position is that the term ‘soul’ needs to be discarded. I don’t know how to talk about everlasting bubbles that float up to heaven, but if it is a sense of self (a ‘me’) that we are referring to, then I feel competent to chime in.

My own idea of ‘self’ (not ‘soul’) is found dancing within the spatial latticework of something that that can support such a phenomenon. Though not in itself substantial, something that exists nonetheless. A co-determination: something that has a causal relationship with the body, in both directions. To exist, it requires specific physical environmental elements which can support it. Pull out that support and ‘poof,’ it’s gone.

Dancing in the northern sky, in the uppermost recesses of Gaia’s forehead, flow the flowing colors of the Aurora Borealis. This is an image that, if not exact, suggests something of how I visualize the ‘self.’ On frigid winter nights I would stand beneath the stars, gazing at these northern lights, and my jaw would drop in awe. Remove the Earth’s magnetic field, remove the solar wind, and the aurora disappears. Did it exist? Of course.

A thought keeps nagging at me: why this interest in souls that transcend the life of a body? From a psychologist’s standpoint, it seems evident. The fear of death, ultimate loss, has probably egged humanity into a yearning for everlasting life, ever since there has been a humanity. So, you ask, what of it? What is the problem?

Certainly, in co-opting term ‘soul’ to indicate a ‘me,’ there is arises an immediate problem because of the ‘soul’s’ longstanding reference to something, perhaps not too dissimilar to that ‘buoyant bubble’ which I recall from childhood. However, this can probably be ironed out by choosing our words carefully.

The problem of the soul, the real problem, is that it distracted us in the very pursuit for which it was developed: the yearning for the Divine. It is not my place to try to convince anyone that heavens (or hells for that matter) don’t exist. I’ve witnessed both realms firsthand: in my own mind, and possibly in the minds of others. I, like any other human being, can easily create my own heaven, or hell. We don’t need to be sent somewhere else to find one.

However, our fear of death led to pitting our hopes on a soul, one that would float upward to Heaven. Therein lay the distraction: we lost sight of the precious opportunity for the Divine right beneath our fingertips.

Let us suppose, hypothetically speaking, that this universe: this life, these breaths, this world, those stars (and those stars beyond those stars) were all there is. Let us further suppose that for one afternoon, everyone’s gaze slid down from Heaven to the mundane, ceasing the perennial search for immortality, to peer instead at the world around them. Some might, with widening eyes, look more and more intently into the microcosm, others might find their eyes riveted macrocosmically to the stars, and beyond. As Douglas Hofstader wrote, “Perhaps my lifelong training in physics and science in general has given me a deep awe at seeing how the most substantial and familiar objects of experience fade away, as one approaches the infinitesimal scale, into an eerily insubstantial ether, a myriad of ephemeral swirling vortices of nearly incomprehensible mathematical activity.” (quoted in Stuart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism, p. 25)

If this were ‘all’ that there was, is this not majestic enough? What if the odds for our opportunity to live were so infinitesimally small, that it was a miracle that our existence happened at all? Then, given this miraculous opportunity, how would we react if we learned that this was, most likely our only chance and the opportunity would not – could not – be repeated? I bet we would treat each other, the Earth, and ourselves quite differently, for would these not appear priceless?

The Transition Zone

2009-10-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

Here in the craggy mountains just off the Pacific Coast of California, it’s generally not hard for me to spend some time with nature. I just have to wake up in the morning. Alternatively, it is not hard for me to wake up in civilization, for we live in a transition zone.

My wife and I chose to settle with one foot in each of two worlds. One side of our cabin-home descends via a narrow path to a relatively narrow valley floor, within which is just enough room for a river, many other cabins and homes, and a two-lane road that served as one of the first thoroughfares north towards the San Francisco Bay area. With this road came the two-edged sword of civilization, with all of its benefits and troubles. On the other side of our home’s little perch, descends another path, a little wider, that reaches a couple of other old cabins and a rich narrow gulch. A couple of steps down this trail and the sounds of the road – civilization – disappear, and one becomes enveloped in the softer sounds of nature.

It is not so much that nature’s sounds do not exist on the ‘civilizational’ side of our little ridge, though I don’t spend a lot of time there, I’m sure that they do. However they are more difficult to hear. Even though the fairly good-sized river next to the road flows with a substantial amount of water, the croaks of its frogs can’t be heard, especially near the road, over the drone of vehicles. In the same way, the birdsongs from the surrounding trees along the roadway, though probably chirping and warbling, cannot penetrate the thick glass and metal walls and exceed the roar of engines, to otherwise delight the many commuters going to and from the nearby towns and cities.

It is true, that there is less structural interference between us and the birds on our dwelling’s ‘nature’ side. Even the calls of small crickets in the early evening easily reach us on the top of our ridge. And the creek, so small yet flowing year-round, plays its delightful array of tumbles and splashes so that it fills up the narrow gulch with mesmerizing music.

As my wife and I labor on this land these first several years, shoring up and coaxing our cabin into a home that can keep us warm and dry in winter, I am reminded of the struggles that fresh shrub and tree transplants go through for their first several seasons. It is sometimes said, as I have read recently, that “For the most part, humans, particularly those in Western societies, tell sociocultural histories, rarely do we consider our natural history.” (Terrestrial Tales: the story of the place: natural history, by Katie MacDowell). This observation got me thinking, as I, like a newly transplanted growth, struggle to extend my roots into the local soil.

For one, the members of my family as well as my wife’s have been for generations a series of transplants, carried as children, infants or genetic threads by mothers and fathers for thousands of miles. Or perhaps viewed in another way, we have sprouted like seeds blown by the wind of civilization as it swept from the European continent to the soil of the Eastern seaboard. From there, the winds carried us further across North America’s wide prairies and towering mountains until we found ourselves here on the far Western edge of the United States. Either way, as a seed or as a transplant, neither mine nor my wife’s ancestors sprouted from this particular corner of the Earth where we now live.

In one sense, I can see that ours has been a migratory lineage, though not such in the season-to-season manner of so many other peoples and life forms, but in the bigger picture of our families’ lines over many generations. Perhaps amidst changing economies, they picked up and moved looking towards the possibility of work, or perhaps for personal safety during times of social upheaval, or maybe they were in search of spiritual freedoms: who knows the many reasons that over 10 or 15 preceding generations convinced so many of my ancestors to move to a new place. As for my wife and myself, we chose to come to this land because of a deep fondness for the color of redwood bark, the clean sea-washed and forest-scrubbed air, the bats at night and the black and orange butterflies during the day. To come to rest here, with at least one foot planted firmly in nature, was a call that however quiet, spoke to us deeply.

Yet I wonder, where is my natural history? I can’t produce long-heard tales of our history as descendants of this place. There are no family legends that spring from here, extending back before grandparents. Far less, are there myths that might trace our people back as offspring of the towering redwoods and firs that force the spindly oaks to extend awkwardly skyward. I can’t recite stories of how my family learned to forage from the deer, or gathered its nobility from the silent advice of huge forest trees. I can’t claim a natural history as a part of this place, as well might even the soil horizons that descend below my feet... if they could speak. If I stop long enough to consider this, these thoughts leave me feeling a little sad.

I wonder if I am alone. Perhaps there is a deep sadness that accompanies much of civilization as it has migrated from place to place, sealing itself off from nature within cities, cars, and double-paned windows. I suspect it is a feeling with which we are so accustomed that we don’t even notice it until it is brought to our attention.

It seems I live in not just one transition zone, but several. One zone is our beloved cabin atop the narrow hogback ridge, looking out one side at the flow of civilization, the other side melting into the mysteries of the forest. As our human population grows, how many must find themselves further and further distant from nature! Our families’ stories describe another transition zone, as they moved from place to place over generations. How few of us are actually a part of the natural history of the place in which we live! Yet, there is a third kind of transition zone in which I find myself. Whereas the other two leave only sadness, this one inspires me with a kind of hope. This is my own consciousness, a transition zone shifting from a noisy civilization of ideas and human structures into the softer sounds of the natural world. It is as though I am remembering something crucial that was forgotten. Something that was at one time, so obvious.

We sprang from the natural world. This is our home, our lineage, and our origins. This is the place of our myths, legends and family stories. I did not move away from anywhere.

I returned.

A Community Impact Statement

2009-10-04T17:24:00.000-07:00

I live in a modest old family cabin that we have been lovingly, and painstakingly fixing up ever since about three years ago when my wife and I decided to move here permanently. It perches on the top of a craggy end of one of the steep mountainous forested ridges overlooking the San Lorenzo Valley in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. For more than a decade it sat virtually empty of human life, after those who had been visiting it most, my father and mother, began to go through the illnesses and physical decline of advancing age. In and out of hospitals, their lives were just too fragile to allow slipping away to their pastoral retreat.

Meanwhile, I had been working at a psychiatric hospital across the bay from San Francisco, unknowingly preparing to meet my wife, and rounding out what had been about twenty years in the helping profession. There was a period of a year or a little longer when I would take a few days off from work, and come down to the cabin on my own where I could 'hole up,' and uninterrupted, keep myself focused on the painstaking research and writing of what was to become my doctoral thesis. All this, of course seems secondary to what I really want to explain, but it is important, because there was a huge shift going on for which I was primarily responsible, but about which I was almost completely unaware.

I would enter another 'community': a whole bustling world of beings with lives somewhat stabilized through the years of the cabin's disuse. But I didn't really know this. From my human standpoint, arriving after a long drive in the late evening after leaving work, I would see this dark, silent, cold cabin, looming up before me as I climbed to where it stayed. Whether it was raining, misting, or just plain cold, I would hurriedly pull out the key and work my way through the blackness with my little flashlight to the breaker box. Flipping the switches, life seemed to flow back into the building. Lights turned on, I could see my breath in the cold, and I opened the door to the living room that and rested on my haunches before the pellet stove. Grab a handful of pellets, put them in the cradle, pull out the starter gel, squirt a dab across the top of the pellets, find a match, strike it and lay it on the gel... It was a familiar pattern. As I would warm myself next to the strengthening flames, I was pretty much ignorant of the many plants and animals who were and would have their lives drastically changed by my decision to spend time here. I was going to impact a community that I didn't even know existed. From my perspective, things began to brighten up, and lovely heat began to permeate the cold. The cabin, having stood silent and still, seemingly forgotten up here on this hogback ridge, now seemed to be coming back to life.

At first, I had not been aware that my parents had not been visiting the cabin. They seemed to have been doing it regularly, every couple of weeks it seemed, though I could have been wrong. I didn't really know when they started not coming to the cabin. When this came to my attention, it had already been several years. Under the jurisdiction of nature, the cabin - and the surrounding landscape - were practically free from human intervention.

When I became aware of the cabin's emptiness and first started visiting regularly, I was met with many wonders, usually not encountered. There were the large mice or small rats (I never knew exactly which) that would run up and down the trunks of the smaller trees, scampering busily going this way and that. There was the large cat - I never knew whether it was a bobcat or a mountain lion - who had been sleeping on the porch when I made my way up the stairs towards the front door. All I saw was something large and in the dark, a sliver of gray beneath the moon, as broad, softly padded paws leapt past me and over the rail to disappear heavily but gracefully, into the woods beyond.

That is also when there was a family of very old, spindly oaks along the west side, just beyond the kitchen window. Alas, knowing they were preparing to topple with age, I reluctantly agreed to let them be cut down this last year, a matter that I have mourned ever since. They were part of the community before I got here.
I don't see the large mice or small rats (I still don't know) any more. There has been no more scurrying up and down the smaller trees. My guess is probably not a very astute one, a 'no-brainer' that the three cats we brought with us have chased down a fair share, and that the rest have wisely withdrawn. I haven't seen the bobcat or mountain lion, though I hear that the latter still pad through these hills and are occasionally spotted. And the oak trees? My goodness: it took them longer than I've been alive to grow anywhere near as tall as they were when they fell. They are either gone, taken by the woodsmen who cut them, or are haphazardly laying in small piles nearby, with the fungi busy at work helping them to return to the soil.

There was a large band of some kind of winged things living behind the light on the bathroom wall over the sink. I can recall one day they started spewing out of a tiny hole up there, seemingly by the hundreds, until I plugged it up. Also, when we first moved here, my wife opened an old chest to discover to her horror, a vast nest of little six-legged crawling things, and quickly the vacuum cleaner came out and they were whisked away. Also, I remember there used to be spiders: huge spiders, and a lot of them, who would find their way in through the many gaps in the siding and walls. Quietly, they would tiptoe across the ceiling, or work their way amidst the curtains to give me a start. So I sprayed beneath the floors from the access below, filled in the cracks, and laid a new membrane across the kitchen roof. Now the spiders don't seem to find their way in as often. I wonder if the cats chase them if they do.

But what has shown up are more banana slugs. I started watering along the front of the building, putting in a few new plants, nestling a few new bulbs between the rocks in some dirt, and the combination is proving just too delectable to resist. Now I find banana slugs, often in pairs, gliding by, which I counter by lobbing them into the ivy a short distance away.

The deer seem to be not coming around any more or less frequently then if I was not here, but then, how would I know. I do know that I have been watering the ivy, that it has been growing, and that the deer come by and then eat it. They wouldn't be eating it if I was not here watering, as it would probably not be here in as lush and tempting a fashion as well. So: are there more deer or less deer? I would bet it is an even draw. Our dog - yes we have a dog who is part of the new community as well - doesn't chase the deer. He just watches them, with more or less interest, as they gently step along, foraging as they go.

When the oaks came out, and a couple of old firs who were threatening to fall as well, a lot of light came in. With it, came scores of little grasshoppers, who now leap around the hillside, something the cats just love, who leap into the air fruitlessly after them, just hoping they might catch one. Also came the Scotch Broom, that threatened to take over the hillside until I went out and kept it at bay. I must have pulled up an easy hundred of upstarts ranging from 8 inches to about 4 feet tall. There were three scraggly adolescent redwoods that never seemed to get any higher than about 6 or 8 feet beneath the darkness of the fir and oaks that once towered above them. However, with these gone, these little redwoods are just beaming with discovery, and developing so fast you can almost see them grow. There are vast numbers of little bushes and clumps of softer-tissue plants that are also taking advantage of this ability to see the sun. They are starting to fill out the hillside, even clumping with almost a grin on top of the oak stumps.

And I think to myself, what a surprise. When I moved here, how many beings did I displace in my human-centered near-sightedness? Though my focus was on restoring this cabin and this land, from my human-centered perspective, I overlooked so much. There was life already here: the bobcat (or cougar), the bugs in the wall and in the chest, the spiders on the ceiling, the rats (or mice) dancing in the trees, and the old, towering but spindly oaks who were spending their last remaining years enjoying the Santa Cruz mountain rain, mist, and sun.

My coming to re-inhabit this old cabin, and bringing with me my wife, our dog and our three cats, has destabilized an entire community filled with different species who had found its way to a reliable way of relating. I probably don't know even one percent of the effect of our presence on the many plants, animals and insects who would be living here differently, if we - my wife, myself, our dog and three cats - were not. It is not so much that I feel it is wrong that we are here, quite to the contrary. I love this land, and in my heart of hearts, I want to steward this wonderful little corner of our planet, and help it thrive. However, I am somewhat uncomfortably aware that just my presence has already affected it in a huge way, and not all of it has been happy.

I am now walking with an increased sense of responsibility. OK, you might say that my impact on our little cabin and hill is a small thing when compared with our overall impact on the Earth, but it is hardly small to the many beings who try to live here. Even trying to do things well and right, we sometimes err.

It's a big learning curve we're on, and we are all on it together.

Confronting my Addiction... to Being Self-gloriously, Human: Rethinking Human-centricism (reprinted from the Marshall Creek Project Newsletter,)

2009-08-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

For one challenging year, I ran the adult section of a recovery center. As would be suspected, there was a lot of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and NA (Narcotics Anonymous) stuff going on. I say this, because at the moment I feel like I am standing up in front of you, saying: "Hi, I'm Steve, and I'm a... human." OK, now that I've got that out of the way, I can breathe easier. I feel the empathy of you, my peers, and now I can settle back in my chair and begin to think this whole human addiction thing through.

You see, being a human these days involves a certain amount of facing up to patterns and behavior that haven't been doing us humans, or the planet, any good. Indeed, there has been a lot of addiction stuff going on: our self-glorifying illusion that we are somehow the most important species, so proud of our buildings and books and automobiles, all of which deliciously stimulates and reinforces neural pathways in a surge of human-centric biochemistry...

But, I am now aware that my, and the rest of humanity's addiction to feeling so grandly on top of Gaia's list of cherished Earth-inhabitants is not only self-defeating (i.e. humanity faces eventual extinction if this remains unchecked), but threatens the loss of everything else I know and cherish that lives on Earth alongside us.

What addiction? My addiction shows, for instance, by my reliance on fossil fuels. The addiction itself, however (and this is very uncomfortable to disclose) is an utter narcissism and self-centeredness about using the Earth around me for my own advantage. This is an all-encompassing addiction: the belief that I - as a human - am the center, owner and most important member of all of Gaia's inhabitants. And, like so many other addictions, I developed a complete way of life around this addiction that is maintained and facilitated by such things as my car, my home, and the very products that I buy.

OK. I realize that I am not the only one supposing that my existence as a human means that I am the utter pinnacle of Gaia's creation. I am perfectly aware that I am addressing you, my circle of peers, and that we are surrounded by a whole human race, which adds up to countless (and steadily increasing) others who share this problem.

That is why I am here: to learn, to grow, and to change.

Yes, change. You see, I have since learned that mine, and I assume ours, is not the only species on the planet. Sure, I always knew that, but what I am learning is the magnitude with which I had lived by the unchallenged presumption that I was a member of the only species that really mattered.

However, as most persons in recovery well know, the real work involves a piercing analysis of oneself.

It makes little difference to me that I was raised (and still live) surrounded by others who feel morally, intellectually and spiritually superior to the planet's other species, although it helps me understand the extent of the problem. It's a species issue.

Even the literature that I have read throughout my life was nearly always written by other human beings. Alright, always. And, suffering from the same problem as myself, though not recognized as such. Even a lot of our brilliant philosophy or 'deep' religious writings, carefully studied for generations and meticulously thought through by so many, never questioned the superiority of humankind.

I used to gaze at the world around me and it all appeared justified. Bacteria were not writing illuminating essays and even our closest genetic kin - the chimpanzee - had not invented the car, or even a bicycle. Zebras had not chronicled mind-opening epiphanies, nor had dogs particularly impressed me by their efforts to tease out delicate moral or ethical issues.

My species-superiority appeared unchallenged.

However, as I learn that all beings on Earth, from the microbe to the elephant are integral to the balance of the Earth's health, I am floundering like a captured fish on a pier, no longer at peace and comfortable with my former human-centered consciousness. This is hard to talk about generally and for the sake of exploring it at all, I must focus on something in particular.

I will choose... the banana slug.

These silent yellow monsters slither through my garden, gorging on delicate plants that I have painstakingly been caring for and coaxing forth into their full potential and, as I see it, their beauty. Daily, as I make my way through the grounds here at Marshall Creek, I find utter devastation following their nightly forays. Plants, whose leaves yesterday were brilliantly cascading beneath the sun, now wither limply with ripped and torn edges, their vitality chewed nearly in half, their lifeblood sucked from their veins. The damage is often irreversible.

I take a big sigh here in the uncomfortable awareness that this is: homocentricism. Human-centeredness. The 'humans are all that really count' perspective. Just look at the way I see them: plant-eating monsters.

A slug is not a 'plant-eating monster.' It's just a slug.

There is also the matter of beauty. It is I, a human, who so enjoys the proud spikes of a (deliciously) soft-tissue plant reaching for the sunlight, with a spread of wonderful soft green leaves gathering the sun's energy and mixing it with the nutrients of the soil. It's the kind of plant that makes a banana slug go 'yum!' I love the beauty I see in my garden, and I haven't quite got around to think of it as the slug's garden. I doubt that they find the yellow flowers quite as aesthetically pleasing as I. My sense is that they prefer the sight of a nice juicy stem, or the edge of a pleasing leaf. I am sure these pull them in like me to a pizza.

I guess I can understand why banana slugs might not have the same impulse to protect and encourage the same beauty that I see in my garden. It would be nice, though, to live in a world where I, and the banana slugs, could gather on the deck in the mornings. We would just sit, watch the garden and meditate on the delight of the swaying ferns and young buds on the azaleas. But, this is my dream, not theirs. Its an anthropocentric one.

Maybe this matter of my little garden and these slugs is not the most significant issue of conflicts arising from my human-centered perspective, but it is real to me, and one that I faced this year's spring, as I did last spring, and the spring before.

The conflict persists. I don't like to see suffering of the plants in my garden, nor do I like to suffer. I don't even like to see slugs suffer. When I spot them, I gently lob them across the creek into the clover where I figure they can carry on with life in their own way, and I in mine, without conflict.

"Hi, I'm Steve, and I'm a human..." I say. Thank you for joining me in my little 'Humans Anonymous' meeting. They say that these meetings are not for those who are fully recovered, but for everyone. It is also said that I shouldn't feel shame at my addiction, but instead be glad that I am here, with you, working on my recovery.

----------------

This article was reprinted from the Marshall Creek Project Newsletter. Consider joining this forum: a place to read and contribute your interest in reconnecting with our Earth and raising our awareness of the miracle of the opportunity to live. Go to www.marshallcreek.org and go to the 'newsletter' section to read, and sign up to receive your monthly newsletter.

Help us Dream a New Dream

2009-08-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

OK, I’ll get off my theological jag, but one last thing. When Gerald Barney of the Millennium Institute of Arlington Virginia addressed the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions, he issued the deepest challenge to religious leaders that I have yet heard: “We need you to help us acknowledge that our old dream has failed. We need you to help us dream a new dream – a dream that is not only true to ancient traditions, but also true to the revelations emerging from what we are learning about the Earth” (quoted in Ecotherapy: healing ourselves, healing the Earth, by Howard Clinebell, Augsburg Fortress, 1996, found in Haworth Press edition, p. 98). In essence, Barney is saying that insofar as religion has ever been successful at serving humanity, it is now clearly, not.

Although Barney gave a blanket critique aimed at the bulk of faith-based religious organizations, it is likely a gesture of exasperation. He evidenced this ‘failure’ by citing the multitude of faith-based interreligious hatred-fed wars, the faith groups that oppress women, anthropocentricism, many faiths’ ‘otherworldly’ focus, birth control opposition, and the rigid preservation of ancient traditions that thwarts healthy critique and vital change. “Many” he says, “Feel our faith traditions have become a very central part of the human problem.” (ibid.)

The reason for the crisis of religious failure is, at the root, alienation from the Earth and our “awareness of our organic connectedness with the planet’s marvelous network of living inspirited things.” (ibid, p. 100) Moreover, “Judaism and Christianity, by seeking to destroy ‘pagan’ animism and shamanism, weakened their ties with the earth and helped open the door to exploitation of nature by industrial society with indifference justified by humans’ species arrogance.’ (ibid.).

Even within the community of theologians, there is a ‘gnawing away’ and a growing challenge to some of our largely unchallenged religious dogma. This is possibly taking substantive bites from some of the destructive and toxic practices that appear so frequently in religions, especially where religion “maintain(s) magical rescue fantasies of being saved from the brink of the ecological abyss by God, or perhaps rescued by the power and omniscience of religious or political leaders onto whom godlike expectations are projected.” (ibid)

Here is a quick jibe at the ‘savior man/god’ cults that appeared in the centuries just preceding the birth of Christ. As history has it, there were a number of cults during those several-BC centuries that provided the readiness for Jesus’ success. A bedrock of thoughts, hopes and yearnings was already in place, such that this particular itinerant and well-educated rabbi was prepared to understand his role in the way he did. Moreover, he lived amidst a social climate that was also ready to accept and quickly spread the hope of a Christ savior-figure.

However, with a ‘true’ faith, the groundwork was thus also laid for the tragic decimation of the many natural, local nature and land-spirit indigenous spiritualities that lay in Christianity’s path.

There is a problem inherent in faith-based religious understanding. Faith is the maintenance of belief with no need for evidence, or even in spite of contradictory evidence. It is somewhat wishful to base religious belief on faith. It is kind of like saying, ‘it is true because I believe it is true.’ To base a spirituality on something other than faith means that we have to look closely at the world, and from what is right there in front of us, derive our spiritual understanding. Barney (above) is taking faith-based religions to task in light of the awareness of the incongruity of certain religious beliefs with the nature of the Earth as we are seeing it.

Faith doesn’t need observation. Just belief.

As opposed to a faith-based spirituality, we need a real-time, observer-based one. Look into the microcosm. Extend our vision as far as we can see into the universe. Look at the world around us. From these things, draw forth what is spiritual.

This is not simply a theological discussion. Our current ‘disconnect’ between some widespread religions and the health of the Earth and humanity, has generated an “urgent need to help generate a new earth-saving guiding vision or ethic for society. In retrospect, history may show that this re-visioning was the most vital single contribution of religious people of all faith groups in the global ecojustice crisis.” (ibid, p. 99)

That’s why we’re here, I think. That, at least in part, is what possibly draws many of us to our work in helping ourselves and others, reconnect with our Earth. I think its time to dream a new dream.

A Faithless Unbeliever

2009-07-19T19:55:00.000-07:00

With an agonizing writhe of my shoulders, I peck at the keyboard in an effort to expose a tremendous spiritual flaw. Well, it has always seemed to me that it is a flaw, and it has led to a great deal of silence when speaking with those who are staunchly religious.

How do I say this… Ok, here goes: I have no faith.

Sheesh. I said it. Out loud, even. If your eyes roll up in dismay and then off to one side with disbelief, or even drop with an embarrassing realization you are not talking with someone with even an ounce of spirituality, I will feel a heaviness in my heart that I have felt many times over.

You see, I don’t believe in faith. Oh, I know, it is considered the bedrock of so much religion. You hear of the ‘unfaithful’ or the ‘faithless’ and the nose starts to twist up as if encountering a bad odor. I feel that way myself. To realize that these words apply to me initiates a sort of cultural imperative to hang my head. But I’m stubborn, and I refuse to lower my gaze for very long.

I am a bit like someone who might have been from Missouri, at least I gather that from the license plates which refer to the ‘Show Me State.’ This is how I look for spirituality. I need to see it.

The trouble with faith is that it relies on holding a matter as truth without any evidence. This just rubs me wrong. I go through a lot of rumination about choosing one thing over another in this world, and when it comes to my spirituality, I can hardly imagine not being at least as careful here. Heck, I look at the ingredients on the boxes in the supermarket, you’d think it would be no less important to do the same when it came to spirituality.

Truth without evidence is belief. Now, if there is any more twisted and sordid confession, it is that I am a man without belief. Or, at least, I think I am. I have no doubt but that lots of people could eyeball my understanding and working knowledge of the world and point out all matters of belief that I have come to believe is knowledge.

The point is, however, that I don’t want to. I want my world view to rest on what is true. Given that I am weak and fallible, there are likely to be punctures in my metaphysics, and such things under analysis simply won’t hold water. Hence I am a faithless unbeliever.

I don’t care how righteous I feel about it, it still sounds bad.

A Thin Microbial Sheen

2009-07-11T09:34:00.000-07:00

There is a recurrent organizing idea that helps me sort out my understanding of my world, and that is that there is a deep underlying consistency to the ‘whole.’ Call it Buddhist, new biology or physics or whatever, I tend to work through my day with the premise that everything not only has a reason, but that it fits together nicely.

Seamless. There is no separation except by appearances.

Sure, things may look separate, though this is because of benign ignorance, or a consequence of seeing the surface structure only, or possibly the all-too-human application of a tautological conceptual template that purports to demonstrate separation, by defining it as such.

Nature has a subtle language. It is passing on information and storing memory in its own complex-yet-simple holistic fashion. I have languages also. One, that I feel confident in, and a couple others that I can communicate to others with only a little. I am doing something similar to what nature does.

The vision of this similarity is hard to express. However, imagine if you would, that the words you are reading were chemicals, exuded from busy fingers on a computer keyboard as a sort of molecular secretion. These pass through the biosphere to you, the reader, or to a listener if I was speaking aloud, where they would, (or would not, after all, the listener might just roll up their eyes and yawn) link up with other molecules, perhaps triggering their alignment. They even might turn out to be self-replicating.

This sounds quite biological: something that you might encounter in a book about cell physiology, morphogenesis and division.

However, these words that were typed, are not just living in some world separated from the rest. Certainly, if left in a book or archived (never to be seen again) on a computer disk, they are mere arrangements of atomic particles. Dare we even call them ‘words’ if no one is there to understand them as such? These arrangements of ‘stuff’ of will do nothing (I suppose) but sit there. It is when the disk is inserted into a computer or the reader picks up a piece of paper upon which this ‘stuff’ is decoded into cipherable ‘words,’ only then do the lines of ink on the page or the computer-generated lines and curves catalyze a biological process in a brain, and we read.

This vision of words-as-biochemistry keeps haunting me. Words have letters, which in English, include the childhood litany of ‘a’ to ‘z.’ String them together and they create word forms. Words strung together trigger a quadrillion-fold more mental forms. Watch them catalyze changes. Watch them ‘line up,’ in other human beings, resonate, and become the urge that creates change in the world.

At the molecular level, computer data, words scribbled on a piece of paper and organisms in nature are all, simply molecules. Humans generally maintain a rather presumptuous but common assumption their molecules are more important, or of a ‘higher order’ than those of say bacteria, or those on a computer data.

Our Earth’s biosphere extends about six miles down, and seven miles up, with a particularly dense portion spanning the thin surface ‘width’ of a just a few meters. A thin biological sheen. From space, our biosphere could look remarkably similar to something that you or I might see, as we stand at the edge of a still pond: the microbial patina of tiny cells richly populating the surface, disturbed only by the occasional scamper of a water-spider, with hungry pollywogs moving silently below.

A friend recently sent me a series of pictures of earth as seen in comparison to the solar system’s surrounding planets, and then in a number of progressive tiers outward into the universe through telescopes. We are really very, very small. Nearly negligible. A spec, not even that, each person on the planet a seeming electron in size when compared to the whole.

The Work is in the Illumination

2009-06-19T19:23:00.000-07:00

With a kind of prurient fascination, I was stunned by a quote of an unknown Japanese shaman:

"The lives of you modern people mirror the lives of the animals in your factory-raised meat farms--born inside, kept in the dark, fed artificial food, exploited for profit, and then finally, when a little light seeps into the cage, it is merely the door being opened by the great huntress that ends your life."

Ouch.

However, my next thought is that the shaman may be mistaken. Not the part about exploiting other humans, but that I don’t think this is strictly a modern phenomenon. My sense is that this assault on human ignorance actually should cut much deeper, into thousands of years of human cultural pathology, with the biting edge of truth.

OK, let’s suppose that at least some of our numbers are deviously maintaining our ignorance as the ultimate source of their feast. This would indicate that they are ignorant as well. Not in the same way, but in a little 'cage' just the same: trapped by their own ideas of justice and morality (recall the sickening mis-read of Darwin where ‘survival of the fittest’ is misunderstood as a moral justification for stepping on the other guy?) All this on their supposed grand road to happiness.

Orwell comes to mind, with the infamous phrase that "Some animals are more equal than others." It is breaking the cycle of ignorance which traps both the powerful and the disempowered together, that will end the suffering that both endure, whether they realize that they are suffering or not.

It is harder to take a misstep when the light is turned on. Illuminate the truth of things, and - at least in terms of human history - things are going to change.

The work ahead of us if we are going to turn this thing around, is truly in the illumination.

May I Be Like the Leaves of the Maple...

2009-06-14T18:34:00.000-07:00

Shortly as we are before the Summer Solstice, my thoughts wander to the sky, and to its leading figure this time of year, the sun. It seems to quick: that Summer Solstice if nearly upon us, as if the Spring had dawned and fled too fast.

I have become used to thinking of the seasons in accordance with the Solstices and Equinoxes, when actually it is at the midpoint between any two of these that ‘marks’ the change of seasons, and summer is half over. Nearly at its zenith, the sun will shortly be at the highest point from any position where we stand in our northern latitudes.

It is the day of the most sun: a full-on, sun celebration. Moreover, not merely the sun, but the Earth itself celebrates, for all life that is light-drawn will be reaping the full benefit of the most sun of any day’s cycle. The leaves, poised as they are to drink in light, are about to get their fullest measure. This means the moisture they draw from the soil, and the abundance with which they flourish, are also at their peak. As the sun is at its zenith with respect to the Earth, the Earth is drawn to keep pace. Hence, it is a dual celebration: the ‘highlight’ of both sun and Earth energy.

There is something festive about this. I imagine people drawn to gather with a sort of festival joy, sprawling their bodies across lawns and fields, next to pools, and flocking to rivers and lakes, soaking in the gladness of the fullness of the healing light with the balance of cool water close at hand.

Yet, what I notice is something sobering as well, which comes from knowing that from this day forward, each day will be less lit. My memory of mid-winter cold brings me to a reflective pause.

This, I think, is the reason why I feel the seasons have moved too quickly. All of my previous days this year, since winter was at its deepest, have been anticipating longer and longer feasts of sunlight. So used to this anticipation have I become, that lately, I stopped anticipating, relinquished to utter contentment by days that only have become longer. It was as if I had a larder to feast from; one that never seemed to empty, but rather grew more resplendent, a larger banquet at each meal.

Today, I find myself facing a chilling awareness that the stores will begin to empty.

No wonder that all of my plans for this year’s work are suddenly thrust to the front of my mind: the painting that needs to be done on the buildings, the gutters that need to be installed at the edge of the roof, and the shelter that needs to be hung beneath the decks, covering the flagstones that lead to the rear building that will shield those who pass through from the steady drip of winter rain.

In some ways, Summer Solstice is not so relaxed as the lounging participants at mid-summer’s fullness might suggest. There is a sharp edge to that full sun, like the glint off of a sword catching the light. All of the tasks left before me this year parade unbidden to the forefront of my ‘to-do’ list.

The harshness of winter is brought fully to mind, hidden within the sun’s utmost arc.

The Buddhists say that it is our attachment to our joy that hides the seed of loss and despair. I have become attached to the joy of the sun. The more I desire that sun, the harder it will be to let it go, and I will suffer.

The deep teaching in mid-summer’s seasonal marker is the awareness of all spokes on the wheel of life. It is not simply the sun that I celebrate this Solstice, nor the accompanying Earth who has so gamely kept pace, drinking in the sun’s life-giving light. It is the Autumn, the Winter, and the coming Spring as well.

Let me celebrate this Summer Solstice as any of the leaves of our many Maples, who today opened wide to gather the sun. May I release my hold on summer days with as much understanding – and gravity – as when in Autumn, these leaves spread their tenuous fingers to float softly to the forest floor.

Love of Life

2009-06-12T22:33:00.000-07:00

To engage people in more and more intimate relationship with their biosphere means literally, to fall in love. When love has kindled to passion, the boundaries disappear. The eyes of the beloved become like seas and we lose our sense of separateness as we eagerly plunge headlong into their depths.

When in love, we become much less selfish with our lover, instead, finding ways to give. Indeed, there is even a selflessness, and the one who had been an ‘I’ is thinking, chatting and behaving so much more as a ‘we.’ For now, there is an interdependence: a contemplation of the other as a part of the self.

To really know the biosphere is to love it. Wandering along Marshall Creek the one who had been ‘I’ gets left on the trail behind, until there is only an ‘us’ left. Just nature, and me. Then something happens, miraculously.

Even I and nature disappear as something envelopes the two of us, like perfume, and we sink in each others arms and become one. True, if you were not in love as he, you might still only apprehend one man walking along the creek, often with his dog, but that is not what is really happening.

That is just the surface, and the surface belies the truth, for he has paused enraptured, encircled and embedded in a miracle of bursting activity. The rising sun drawing to itself the luxurious leaves, silently tugging through their roots like babies at the breast of Mother Earth. A dragonfly droning by on a stately mission, a banana slug gliding along the forest leaf floor… Far from alone, the man you see is dancing within a mad passionate sea of life.

They say that two lovers are wonderfully mistaken when they feel they lose their ‘selves’ when in love. Moreover, they are chided with a ‘tsk, tsk’ and forwarned about losing their identity, power, and future. Facts, however, say differently.

When making love their union is so close, that half of each splits off, and joins with the other’s, and life goes on in the most intimate of DNA dances, encircling each other, dividing, dividing again until its nature as a child is fully seen as a living combination of both.

I say, lose your selves, toss them aside with delighted abandon. Feel the many bacterial and mitochondrial lives stirring within you as you glide among the trees along the creek like a blood cell drifting through a capillary. Breath in and breath out, exchanging your thread of existence with that of the surrounding leaves. Dive into the Earth like a lover into the arms of the beloved, and recognize your true self as that wonderful, rare and magnificent totality of Life.

To Be Radical

2009-06-05T23:35:00.000-07:00

In order to heal ourselves and the Earth, we find ourselves facing the daunting prospect of accepting a radical world view, only because it is we who have veered off course so far that what is healthy initially appears so radical.

I love the word: ‘radical.’ Certainly, it calls to mind televised images of rioting students hurling bricks, or furtive figures printing leaflets with symbols of fists and headlines of “Down with the…!” It seems very political, confrontational, and vaguely threatening violence. I envision scurrilous troublemakers with unkempt hair and sneers.

Actually, it is quite the opposite. It wasn’t until the 1800’s that we use in the sense of advocating fundamental reform. The word derives from the Latin radix, meaning simply ‘root.’ This ‘being in the ground’ left room to reference that which was fundamental to existence and vital to life.

We are looking at the prospect of going back to the roots, tracing what went wrong with the planting by following it down past its leaves and petals, through the stems and twigs down to the main shoot to where it disappears into the soil. Then we examine the nature of the twisting, turning root where it divides into smaller and smaller hairs until finally we peer at the soil, water, nutrition and drainage.

In other words, translating this to the human relationship with the biosphere, we are facing the task of looking at ourselves, at all that makes up human life and culture, and with a steady eye, refusing to blink as we struggle to determine what went awry.

For it seems, the worldview that makes up the contemporary problem of the human relationship with the Earth, is actually not a world view at all, but the failing to have done so. By looking to heaven for succor, the insides of a cubicle for our livelihood, and through a hardened glass windshield to where it is we travel to, we come to a distorted sense of what the Earth is, we have lost our relationship with her, and moreover, lost even ourselves.

And so, we look at turning ‘radical.’ We take a second, longer look towards the aboriginal, the indigenous, and those for whom the soil is not so distant and the Earth not so shielded from their direct gaze.

Turning radical, we set out to save the whales, perhaps by circling predatory whaling ships with tiny inflatable boats, and we set out to save the trees, sometimes even by chaining ourselves to them. Though a pod of whales may be briefly separated from the hunters, and though a tree may remain standing, such respite is not the greatest outcome of such passionate and noble acts. True change comes from changing consciousness. The tree and the man or woman chained there become symbols that live on in our memory, and transmit through the images of media into millions of homes, as do the activists in the tiny boat with the megahorn, pleading and taunting, like modern, desperate Davids before Goliath, challenging the whaling vessel bearing down.

But its not about just the whales, or the trees. The whales and the trees are just two of the leaves that are unnaturally wilting and falling from a planet whose people what forgotten how to live in a healthy way with the natural , interrelated world, amidst all of its beings and elements.

Some say that to go back to this world and truly look at it, we need to step out of our automobiles, remove our shoes and feel the soil or sand beneath our toes. Perhaps it is suggested that we can ask our employer if we might sit next to the window and if we can open it. If we get a frown and a ‘no,’ then we can bite our lips and wait until we get home and instead of the television, spend time in the yard, the park, or take a walk in the twilight when the sun is setting.

Yet, there is much we face in considering this reapproachment with the Earth, for so much of how we have constructed our world and organized our lives has left what seems like obstacle after obstacle in front of our connection with it again. For what are we to do! Abandon our cars, walk the two miles to the market, ride a bicycle to work? Certainly practical for some, exceedingly impractical if not impossible for so many others. Shall we ask our employer to move the company out of the city where, perhaps, we could just scatter ourselves around a field and happily peck away at our laptop doing company business while occasionally gazing at the grasshopper on a nearby stem of wheat grass? I think, the employer would probably resist the invitation, and we need our job.

Moreover, the cars and the employers' towering concrete, steel girded company buildings are not only the symptoms of huge problems, but have become parts of the problem as well. We need to trace down the city walls, and follow the lines through the cars and into our homes. With a steady eye, we must look clearly at what it is we have created, for we see the Earth wilting. The vitality isn’t there. We have built a civilization that is leeching toxicity into the biological, psychological and spiritual life of the planet, and perpetuates crumbling health in all of these.

Therefore, we must become radical. We find ourselves facing the task of retracing our steps back to the roots, back to where we began to deviate from living harmoniously with the Earth. We remind ourselves not to separate ourselves from the world, but to remain mindfully attentive and connected in it. For it is in our proximity that we can sense when something is wrong. And, where it hurts, we can tend to it.

A Mountaintop, of sorts...

2009-06-03T22:07:00.000-07:00

It seems ironic that in order to see some things clearly, we actually have to step back and loosen our focus on the little things that hitherto grabbed our attention. We can step back from a painting, or from a particular instrument in an orchestra, or hike all the way up onto a mountaintop, in order to take in the whole. Indeed, to see or hear more clearly, we must step back from the instrument, the painting or our lives, and hold less tightly onto the conceptions by which we had been recognizing these things and deriving an understanding of that which we were perceiving.

Perhaps play – the flexible, creative and free-flowing delight of children – provides far more than a pass-time. It is interesting to speculate that the species-wide activity of childhood sets before us a wisdom that is hard for adults, or even older kids, to fully appreciate.

Through the constant, everyday teaching that is childrearing, and herded as we are into schools, we are instilled with the procedures for understanding, as well as with our family’s or community’s agreed nature of our world. We learn the commonly accepted structures of existence, such as what reality consists of, the nature of truth, and the proscriptions of morality. We learn as well, the alphabets, arithmetic and logic that support these.

For instance, children are taught to differentiate between fantasy and actuality, and that the latter is what ‘is’ while the former is best left behind as a hindrance to moving forward in the real world. Reality in some communities includes one or another god. We also learn what to question, and what to leave unchallenged.

The wisdom in children is the natural ability to playfully create, without the assignments of what and how to think and act. However not simply 'released' from constraints, children were not bound to begin with. For adults to recapture the ability to 'think outside the box,' we are challenged in ways children are not.

Most human beings who have learned to live in community (i.e. domesticated) are implicitly, if not explicitly, prepared to live among others according to millions of little rules. These create a kind of cultural critical mass that encourages individually and collectively, certain thoughts to surface and certain behaviors to ensue, and not others.

And, like most inclinations, there are deviances. Those who ignore the social mores commit ‘crimes’ and are punished, and if these are more tolerable, merely given degrees of ostracism. Those who ignore the injunctions of truth may be ridiculed as liars and dismissed as hypocrites, although their manner of deriving truth may be simply different. For instance although there may be some overlay, the manner of deriving truth by a mathematician may be quite different from that of a judge or someone who is religious.

However, it is the strictures conveyed across a community regarding the nature of reality that captures my interest at the moment. In specific, it is in what we conceive as the nature of being human.

Our languages, schools, similarly reared human beings and our parenting figures have collectively taught us many things about being human. We learned that in many ways we are separate from one another, and that the boundary is at our skin. It is a way of conceiving of ourselves that overlooks our shared language and all the rest of the symbols with which we understand our world; our extended ‘common tongue.’ Moreover, it disregards the shared nature of our learned reality itself.

We learn that ‘I’ am separate from not just you, but from the rest of the world around us. Indeed, there has been a war raged with a some ‘success’ and much failure with the Earth. Sometimes we are able to shield ourselves from the insects, creatures and storms and each other. And sometimes we are not.

Interestingly, we are not separate from each other at all. Unlike the village idiot who sits by him or herself babbling incoherently, we share a common tongue, general understanding and social beliefs and behaviors whether we adhere to them or not.

Moreover, we are not separate from the Earth at all, but deeply interwoven in community. This extends in all directions.

For instance, though we have been taught that ‘each’ of us is one being and the census counts us this way, we are actually complex and deeply interwoven communities of vast multitudes of beings. For instance we are constituted of great numbers of bacteria, many of which are necessary for our survival (our dry body weight consists of a full 10 percent of such beings.) Not to mention the mitochondria, living with their own DNA within our body’s cells, without their more than 20-fold increase in energy, these bodies could not function.

Furthermore, we are indivisibly connected with the world around us, a observation easily noted by simply observing our breath. A friend explained to me just the other day, how the breath is a kind of umbilical cord – substantial, though hard to see with human eyes – connecting us moment by moment to the biosphere. Moving about within this ever-present womb, our breath connects us so critically to the rest of the world that the severance of this for only about a minute will lead to certain unconsciousness, and if continued, to death.

In addition, this breath has only became life-supporting to us because it has been ‘breathed’ by plants, extracting in their symbiotic way our ‘waste’ carbon dioxide, and producing the oxygen we so desperately require.

How the many other necessary and symbiotic relationships amidst which we exist, melt away the notion of 'individuality,' as is the nature of symbiosis itself. Such happens when we step back and take in the whole.

The way in which we learn to see, recognize and know our very selves is facing a momentous trembling. There is an earthquake, quietly reaching from the substrata of scientific discovery, that is reaching for the tapestry of self-conception, a weave that we assumed was strong. Indeed it is delicate, and under closer observation, the threads that we thought held it together suddenly look thin, or non-existent. There are other weaves, and other patterns taking shape before us.

Like reaching a mountaintop and standing there finally, weary and delighted, letting the eyes take in the broader range of vision that had been shielded by where we had been wandering, we release our focus from where we came from. Even though, or maybe even because further ranges may then be seen unfolding on the horizon, something happens on mountaintops.

Forgetting Who We Are

2009-05-28T17:50:00.000-07:00

Ecological alienation, or what is better known as a habituated distance from and possible discomfort with the natural world, is an academic term broadly applied to a huge spectrum of manners of human disassociation from our planet. Everything from a lack of awareness to disregard, or even hate for the wild Earth mother from whom we found our lives and take our daily nourishment is included in this term, ‘ecological alienation.’ However, I am beginning to see this as not so much a disconnection from such natural manifestations as soil, wildlife and wind, as from our very self.

It is said that therapists utilize practices with clients that allow them to rediscover their awareness of their relationship with the natural world, and that such work allows for insight into the possibility of renewal and the naturalness of the client’s own life cycle. By observing the transit of the moon through its cycles and by a close familiarity with soil under the fingernails – by planting, nurturing, and harvesting – clients develop a more realistic understanding of human life. Therapeutically, this can lead to an easier acceptance of the difficult truths that otherwise freeze one into a ‘stuck client:’ overwhelmed in bitter resistance, anger, depression or immobilization.

This is good. However, my own sense is that when re-approaching what had been a distanced relationship from the biosphere, people are led to the threshold of rediscovering their own lives, as nature. This is a crucial difference. To be related to the Earth, or to be a part of the Earth, is a profound distinction.

I am learning to see what looks like a withdrawal from the planet, as a withdrawal from the self. Naturally, one might anticipate this simultaneous withdrawal. It makes a kind of intuitive sense. However, that they might be one and the same leads to some interesting speculation.

For instance, humans are extraordinary adaptive, known throughout the planet for their ability to strategize survival in the most varied and difficult environments. Thus, it is that an inner-city family can take a flat beneath the ground-shaking overhead railroad and eventually, hardly notice the pounding and conversation-stopping noise. Kids get used to sociopathic surroundings, learn ‘street skills,’ and posture or slip their way into adolescence and adulthood. Businesspersons get used to not seeing the sky amidst towering concrete monoliths and everyone loses the feel of soil between their toes.

This adaptability, however beneficial it may be, contains a ‘dark’ side. We can become used to that which is unhealthy. It becomes normal to be ill.

Now I realize that not everyone will immediately agree with me that a separation from our wildness, our selfhood as the Earth, constitutes an illness. Yet, that is what I am saying.

Moreover, there is a subtle but powerful ability of the brain to generate all sorts of biochemistry that floods into our perception as emotion, and importantly, pleasure. A rush of excitement, for instance, produces a thrill, like a drug. Extraordinary environmental stimulation, if repeated, may become so normalized that without it, we feel discontent. We may even crave it. When the movie, the vicarious excitement of danger, death and revenge does not seem fast enough, we look for another film. Nurses in the emergency room are notorious for thriving at the mortal pace of saving lives, and feel useless and empty when the hospital corridors are unaccountably empty.

Addiction to stimulation is the other half of what I am beginning to understand as the vulnerability hidden in human adaptability. Perhaps they are the same, I don’t know. However, what I do know, is that in a rather short period of time, though humans have been walking the planet for a long time, the world in which humans live has changed dramatically.

For eons, humans lived close to nature. Things were pretty similar for generations upon generations. We hunted, we gathered, we lived in bands and relied on our small communities to thrive in the relative silence of nature. We awoke to the sound of birds, and listened closely to the wind and leaves to tell us what we should be doing. Then, like a sudden spike in an otherwise nearly horizontal line across a graph, you find a sudden surge in human life change, the mark of civilization. With our very genes wrapped around a world of nature, our daily lives became surrounded by buildings and skyscrapers, our communities dispersed and children were gathered into schools, and the circle around the fire melted away into small, nuclear families who lived a distance from one another.

Ecological alienation is not so much a distance from nature, as it is a distance from ourselves as nature. The natural human life, so well engrained in the adaptive human that we became, has become distant from us.

We have forgotten who we are, and have created a world in which it is hard, and for some probably impossible, to find ourselves again.

A Kind of Reasonable Ambiguity

2009-05-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

The gentle push or gigantic shove towards an Earth-centered, or in some ways a shamanic consciousness seems a particular art of the storyteller or musician. The riddle, a drumbeat, or the logically unaccountable and ambiguous sequence of words in a hypnotic confusion induction all propel one towards a loosening of our ordinary world hold, and the potential to enter the non-ordinary world unconstrained by the ‘rules’ of unquestioned, ordinary thinking.

The Zen koan, for instance, has the effect of forcing the meditator into a realm where ordinary ways of thought and conceptualization are insufficient. The drumbeat induces through brain-wave entrainment and focus (thereby limiting the effects of ordinary reality distractions) a freedom to move into the non-ordinary consciousness. A confusion induction is a hypnotic tool utilizing, for example, the inappropriateness of words, perhaps out of order, that present an element of confusion that beckon the brain to ‘give up’ in ordinary mentation and enter a hypnotic state. Since the world in which one lives is seen, grasped and understood as a consequence of our consciousness of it, the effect of such techniques is that one is propelled into another ‘world.’

There is a deep and ancient relationship between shamanic consciousness and the realm of twilight, the time of dusk or dawn. This is sometimes known as the ‘betwixt and between,’ the world in transition between the ‘is’ and the ‘not is.’ This is a Celtic shamanic practice, where in nature, non-ordinary consciousness of ‘another world’ has been found for millennia in areas where elements of nature come together, places like the constant back and forth flow between the land and sea, or the intermediate zone between day and night. In terms of pure consciousness practices, this realm is also mentally found in the midst of an ‘impossible’ (in ordinary thinking) confrontation imposed by the koan, a classic Buddhist riddle that forces the meditator to dwell between an ‘is’ and a ‘not is.’

The shaman and the Zen master are both comfortable in multiple constructions of reality. These are ones who navigate different realms of reality and successfully incorporate them all.

They have arrived at a kind of reasonable ambiguity.

A Happy Little Glimpse of the Divine (And an Awkward Little Glimpse of My Resistance)

2009-05-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

I am not a 'religious man' as it is commonly understood. I tend to go a little blank when people start going on about "god this..." or "god that...", and then my discomfort turns to pure flight when and if they get a little pushy. I tend to not do too well in churches.

We have a little gathering that I host here at Marshall Creek, dedicated to Earth-centered spirituality, and although I have not been putting it out there much, seem to gather an intermittent few who really want to experience and learn. My single (!) visitor today and I had a great 'circle' and she left. That left me with a kind of preparation for what followed, as now alone, I took a short hike up the creek.

I reached a grove that is a bit wider than the rest, and following my instincts proceeded to the other side of it, and looked back, and around me. All of a sudden I felt the presence of what I can easily imagine others call 'god,' and the word 'god' came to mind. I was a little startled by this, and quickly changed the term to the 'divine.'

Hmmm. I am comfortable with the term 'divine', at least it doesn't have the knee-jerk reactivity in me that 'god' does, probably because I have not been nearly so encircled over my life by 'divine-fearing' righteousness as I have been by the 'god-fearing' kind. Certainly, there are expressions being bandied about such as 'divine justice' that carries forth the same insensibility as being 'god-fearing.'

However, what hit me is my own dissonance with the 'god' language, and how when I slip out of my ready resistance to all that goes with that, in through the 'back door' comes a recognition that what is divine is divine, despite the language and baggage that it brings with it.It is clearer to me today that I have to be more aware of my own resistances, and how they impede me from seeing more fully the nature of that which I truly do want to see.

Although I am equally confident that I am not going to be a 'god' or 'divine'-fearing man, ever. The divine, god, sacred, meaningful... can never be feared. Understood, yes, or at least an effort to do so. Appreciated, sought, encouraged... yes. But feared?

Not even hardly.

Separation?

2009-02-04T22:27:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine, one who lives in a city, told me about a conversation he had the other day with some of his friends, and their comments on what they labeled a tendency of human beings for seclusion. Seclusion is separation with intention. This got me thinking, and I ended up having to disagree. The sense of seclusion is only possible by wearing blinders: you know, like the cart horses used to wear in the olden days to keep them from spooking at whatever was going on nearby.

However, in humanity’s case, the ‘blinders’ are fastened to us in three quite different ways.

First, they appear like whales, leviathans seeming to rise with uncanny silence. These are the walls of our houses, stout members of cut and dried fir, filled with insulation and coated by a half inch or more of sheetrock. There is more: take our cities, with walls spreading beneath our feet and above our head, pavement and towering concrete. A devolvement that – with brave stubbornness – we call 'civilization.' Suburban homes may look swell, but are as lonely and separated as that of inner city apartments whose windows and doors are shuttered with iron grates. One needs to go down the driveway and around the fence to spend a moment with the person next door. Its an extra huff to the neighbor down the street. What is that: two? Suburbia is not known as a ‘community,’ but rather for its façade of pleasant safety: the lonely emptiness of appearances.

Living alone or even with others, whether in a city flat or a sprawling mansion on the outskirts of town, these are a far cry from the natural human community of a tribe, which depended for survival on everyone stepping forward and contributing to each other.

There is however, a second way, and one that may be less obviously detectible, and for this reason far more dangerous. This is a gestalt of separation passed to us in the quietly pervasive transference by one or another culture that has simply forgot. The grand refrain of individuality rings through countries like America with an almost anthem quality. Its economy was developed along with this in harmony, finding competition to actually be a virtue! “Let the strong and able survive,” they say. That’s business. Children grow up in such a world, believing that separation is natural. Thus, to such a very normal person these days, it is perplexing to them why their loneliness is still there, despite their new car, high definition TV and wealth.

However, the third reason for this unfortunate error of seeming separation, is I think, truly the heart of it. We have simply forgotten that we are inescapably connected to everything. It was so simple to the ancients. As straightforward as breathing and as immediate as the soil and trees around us. There was a time when humanity was less an observer, and more a participant. An observer watches, a participant is. Where is the difference between my in-breath of oxygen descending from the tree above me, and its movement through my bloodstream? Does the tree’s ‘out-breath’ of enriched air suddenly cease to be 'the tree' when it exudes half-way from the leaf? When its oxygen enters my bloodstream, when does it then become ‘me’? When the water I drink awaits in its glass, is it ‘me’ yet? Or, do I have to wait until it touches my lips, or perhaps reach my stomach before 'it' becomes 'I'… Yes, we do have a tendency, I fully agree with this, to think of ourselves as separated from the world around us. However, such a disconnection is actually, an impossibility.

The truth is, there is no disconnection. It is the ‘disconnection’ that is the illusion. However, don’t let me suggest that simply because it is an illusion that it is benign. It is enough to cause us to halt, become defensive, withdraw and act is if we were separate. It provides us with the rationale to squeeze the earnings of less powerful employees in our businesses. It lends credence to a felt righteousness for war. Dumping sewage in the sea or manufacturing plumes into the air are consequences of the illusion of separateness.

It is an illusion, however, that will always come back to haunt us, because what we put out, always comes back.

There is a reason why Enlightenment is often cited as an experience of oneness. Enlightenment is not something for humanity to reach forward to, as if it were some grand stage in the magnificent unfolding of human development. Far from it. It is going back. Going home. Returning to the whole.

There is no tendency to separation. There is only a tendency to its illusion.

Much love,
Steve

All My Relations

2009-01-30T14:01:00.000-08:00

As succinctly stated by Lisa Seachrist Chiu in her book ‘When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish,’ “It’s important to remember that 99.9 percent of human DNA is similar, even between unrelated people – only about one in every twelve hundred DNA bases differs between people. The variation in that last 0.1 percent of human DNA results in visible differences such as hair and eye color and susceptibility to diseases, and the bulk of that variation comes in the form of a single DNA base-pair change.” 1

If you ask me, that makes us related. Part of the same family. OK... I realize that a lot of people will squirm in their seats over this: "Oh, I couldn't be related to thaaaat person!" But, the results are in. The final tally is: less than a tenth of only one degree of difference. That makes us pretty close.

Actually, we're not that different from chimpanzees, who share about 98 percent of the same genes as us humans. OK, a more distant relative, but part of the same Earth family, nonetheless.

We are all brothers and sisters from the same 'hood'. We come from the same turf, Earth.

I don't know what got me onto this relatedness jag, but the degree to which we are part of the same family just shows itself more, the more you look at it. For instance, humans are nourished by a common 'soup' of ideas, experiences, and emotions of a surrounding community. This, from tending to live in large or small groups, and thus inhabiting a cultural milieu. Actually, the 'soup-bowl' has grown to planetary proportions with the advent and development of the world wide web.

Because we are so related in kind, one can pretty easily make a few generalizations about being human. For instance, we tend to fall in love with someone, get into fights with someone (or some group), worry about our neighbors (whether they are the oddball next door or the next tribe up the valley). We listen to each other (or not), speak out about what we are hearing or experiencing (or not), or chose to in some degree, become involved in what is occurring around us.

Actually, it’s hard not to. Now, we not only have access to the thoughts and issues near us, we have vastly broadened the range of people we share thoughts with. We write books. We read books. We hear the news and the banter of opinions and emotions, whether through sound of talking heads on CNN, the local radio, or following the soon to be disappearing thump of the newspaper as its is tossed on the doorstep. With just a click at a computer, a single human has the ability to hear and see events, ideas and emotions from the farthest corners of the world.

Instantly. The ‘cultural milieu’ is rapidly growing.

Pondering these things, since our human variation is so slight, our sharing of information is so wide, and since we come from the same 'hood' (Earth), it would be unsurprising that the cultural, psychological and religio-spiritual manifestations are at their basis, similar as well. These are, after all , the products of remarkably similar, related, humans.

I like to think of human development as being in a kind of species adolescence. We are no longer infants, yet we are pretty clearly (by our behavior) not yet adults. This is a time of rapid and awkward surges of growth. It is uncomfortable. Teens can be difficult to raise, even when they have the most wise and compassionate of parents and supportive community, in which to mature.

Sadly, humanity as our extended family of not-so-distant relations, has forgotten where it came from, and who we are related to. We have been trying to raise ourselves, blindly kicking about, thinking we were alone. In the boisterous enthusiasm of our first adolescent blush of technological and cognitive power, we thought ourselves infallible. Along the way, our mother Earth and our huge family extending everywhere on her was forgotten, passed over in the sparkle of toys like cities, airplanes, televisions and cars. The consequence of forgetting this is... well, just look around.

Sigh...

Regular trash swept in by the tide.

1 (Lisa Seachrist Chiu: When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish: ... and Other Amazing Tales about the Genes in Your Body, Oxford University Press US, 2007. (ISBN 0195327063, 9780195327069)

Thoughts on the End of One Cycle and the Beginning of the Next...

2009-01-03T12:12:00.000-08:00

Untold numbers of Earth's 6,873,117,938 people are just getting around to ending their celebration of the end of one calendar year and the beginning of this new one. However, at the root and foundation of our Earth-centered existence, it has been the Winter Solstice that has been the marker between the cycles of each year. This is an event that observes a change in Earth's seasons: one that impacts our lives in a huge way. This past week, the sun died and the Winter solstice proclaimed its resurrection. It is unfortunate, but the calendar year has drifted away - in both date and cultural practice - from the Earth and the grand astronomical dance in which it revolves.

On its surface, Winter Solstice appears differently in different parts of our common world. Its rituals, stories and customary practices vary from culture to culture. What is consistent is the recognition of a huge rebirth, interpreted throughout our many cultures as a sun reborn and a return of life-giving light.

With the birth of the sun, the Winter solstice marks a new beginning with Earth returning to longer and longer periods of light over darkness. There are many stories about this birth, the Christian being the birth of Christ the 'son' of God. One theory is that the choice of December 25 as the birth of Christ is a simple consequence of the troubles earlier cultures faced discerning the elevation of the sun in the northern hemispheres. Without sensitive instruments, it might have been impossible to see the changes that were actually taking place until several days after December 21. Consequently, celebrations for this event would occur around the December 25.
Also, there was the not-unimportant decision by Emperor Aurelian of Rome (270 to 275 CE) who chose December 25 to mark and allow for the celebration of a wide variety of Earth-centered spiritual stories, all about the birth of god-like men who were considered saviors. Dinoysus, Mithra, Helios, Perseus, Apollo, Baal, Attis, Hercules, Horus, Osiris and Theseus were all brought together and celebrated in the single festival called the 'Birthday of the Unconquered Sun.'

The celebration of Christmas, Winter Solstice, and the end of one year's cycle and the beginning of the next all spring from an Earth-centered base. To civilizations sometimes many times removed from the Earth upon which they live, this might come as a bit of a surprise.
Let us celebrate this New Year as the beginning of Earth's, and our own, new cycle. Let us take these first days of our New Year as our first steps in recreating ourselves and our world. Let us, however, do this with the insight and wisdom gathered from our years before.

May your 2009 unfold with grace, understanding, wisdom and compassion.

Steve Serr

A Christmas Story

2008-12-23T22:10:00.000-08:00

Hello.

Preparing for our Winter Solstice gathering here at Marshall Creek, I was suddenly inspired by the Muse of Christmas, who whispered the following tale into my ear. I shared the story with a friend whose eyes widened... I took it as a sign of approval, and emboldened, set it down into print.

So, I give to you this Christmas a tale! It is my gift to you.

Much love

Steve Serr,
Shortly before Christmas Eve, 2008

A Christmas Story
By Steve Serr

A woman stood with her back against the ocean, just beyond where the waves hissed towards her feet. In front of her the dark mouth of a cave pressed against a high white sea-cliff wall. Stepping forward, she walked towards it and into its cool dampness. Immediately, the sound of the sea fled and it became oddly silent. She followed the cave’s descent into the darkness. Sometimes running, seemingly flying, she pressed onwards through huge caverns, deeper and deeper into the earth. The darkness called out to her and her heart raced, as around her myriads of tiny soft violet and green crystals cushioned the walls. Pressing on until she felt she could go no deeper, she spied a tiny light. Forced to a halt at what appeared to be the tunnel’s end, she pulled aside a few stones to find an opening.

With each stone, the tiny light grew brighter. When the gap was as wide as her body, she pulled herself through, into a dense Amazon-like jungle, next to a wide, slow moving river. A long canoe with high sides and an oddly curved and carved prow ornament waited for her. She carefully stepped inside and it began to glide downstream. Past waterfalls and giant leaves she traveled, hearing the rustling of animals amidst the dense foliage along the banks. She floated past a large, long-beaked bird that flapped its wings heavily as it lifted itself into the air from the surface of the water.

In an instant and without warning, everything changed. The canoe and jungle were gone and she stood in an icy land that appeared polar. She walked briskly, as much to warm herself as to search for shelter. Huge drifts of snow and walls of ice rested imposingly around her. As she passed a huge ice cliff, the vague shadow of some large animal of a distant past hung deep within, frozen in perpetuity. She walked on.

Then just as suddenly, everything changed once again and instead of snow, she realized she was walking through sand. In all directions there were only windswept and dry dunes, the sand making progress difficult. The sun was slipping below the horizon. Wondering if she would ever see the end, or at least somewhere to go to, she knew there was no choice but to keep moving forward.

No sooner had this occurred to her, than she spotted the odd appearance of a small stone well with a wooden peaked roof. On coming closer, she could see there was an old woman in a brown hooded robe, turning a wood crank and raising a bucket. The old the woman turned towards her, setting the bucket on the well’s stone ledge as she neared. She dipped her withered, ancient hands into the bucket, and cupping them, withdrew glistening water and held this out to the new arrival who, at her direction, drank fully from the old woman’s hands.

Then, she lay down. Why was she doing this! Why did she drink from the old woman’s hands! Why was she lying down? She started to sit back up: was there something she needed to know about the water? Was it something special? The old woman clicked her tongue and motioning, directed her to simply rest and welcome the refreshing liquid into her body. Lying back, she had the bizarre sensation that she was floating and moreover, had the distinct impression that her arms – indeed her entire body – were beginning to glow!

Above, the desert night spread impossibly full of huge stars, with one in particular directly above her, shining much brighter than the rest. In the distance, she could see camels and riders, slowly ambling towards her. Her mouth hung open as she watched the small caravan, suddenly recognizing the star that shone so brightly and the 3 camels with riders…

They came closer until they were but footsteps away, the camels chewing and grunting. One of the riders stepped down, and produced a box with something glowing and moving inside. As he approached her, he pulled the lid back, revealing a bright orb of glowing light, about four inches in diameter. It hovered above his cradling hands as he carefully presented it to her.

She shook her head and asked: didn’t he have the wrong person? Wasn’t he supposed to be giving gifts to someone else, Jesus perhaps? He laughed, and shook his head… no, they did that ages ago. These were for her. With a gentle wave of his hands, he proceeded to direct the glowing light into her chest. This, he told her, was the glow of passion and energy. Smiling, he drew back toward his camel.

Then the next wise man stepped off his mount. He circled back and forth, making wide swings in the air with a tall glowing bundle of what appeared to be some kind of plant that sent billowing clouds of perfume around her. The sweet, earthy scent covered her completely, leaving a deep feeling of peace that struck her the moment she breathed it in. Yes, he said, seeming to read her thoughts, this was the gift of peace.

Bowing, he returned to his camel. The third wise man stepped down from his camel and came towards her. However, as he came closer, she recoiled in alarm, for he was ugly beyond reason: his face was covered with boils and pestilence, his hands cracked and swollen. Surely this must not be one of the Kings, she wondered, as her mind scrambled to make sense. Yet, there was something about his eyes and expression that held her trust. With a look of upmost compassion and concern, he was there, he said, to help her die…

She knew, beyond what she understood, that he was right and this was the time. Gently, he extended a virulent hand to softly touch her with his illness. With a face of perfect beatitude he spoke further:

… not just to die, but to be reborn.

Sighing a last breath, she lay back, floating slightly above the sand in the middle of a vast desert beneath a biblical sky with a huge star directly overhead. Surrounded by three wise men, their camels, and a watchful old woman, she indeed died. But no sooner did she do so, but she began to break open along her centerline like a chrysalis. Moist with the dew of an emerging butterfly, she stepped out from within herself, anew.

The unspeakably ugly king smiled. Even more than tending to her death and rebirth, his said, his gift was ‘compassion for what came before.’ She thought to herself: a perfect gift from one so repellent as he! In order to be the compassionate and wise king that he was, for at least a hundred times he must have had to forgive and let go of… himself?

The three kings remounted. Tapping with their canes, they arose above her as their camels lurched upward to their feet. Returning from where they came, the tiny caravan soon disappeared into the distance. Giddy with excitement, she pranced around in the dark, dancing around and around the well and even getting up onto its small roof to dance closer to the stars. The old woman, in her own way, creaky and slow, danced with her.

Then it all stopped: the old woman began to age so rapidly that that her skin fell away and her body disintegrated, with even her skull crumbling until it was just dust. Then the well began to fall into itself, following the path of the old woman until it too crumbled into the sand.

With a heart on fire and a smile as wide as the desert itself, she retraced her path, back from where she came, through the snow and ice, back up the jungle river, not stopping until she found the opening from where she had removed the stones. Pulling her way back through, she retraced her steps, scurrying up the long dark caverns until she stepped back into the sunlight, to where the waves were still pounding on the shore.

Copyright © Steve Serr, Ph.D., 2008 Material may be freely redistributed without profit or associated user fees so long as author’s name and copyright is included. Author permission is required for any print or electronic publishing for which a fee is attached, whether there is profit or not.

Connections

2008-12-19T01:19:00.000-08:00

It’s a deep winter morning just a couple of turns of the earth before the longest night in the year. Like a small steam engine, my breath billows puffs of vapor in front of me, left hanging in the air while I make my way down from the hill where we live to the Center, with only the sound of my shoes crunching softly on a thin carpet of ice. Descending no more than a couple of hundred feet into the protected areas next to Marshall Creek, here beneath the trees it warms and the ice vanishes. I pick up a leaf blower and send the daily fall of redwood, maple and bay off the decks and paths to where it will continue its slow reintegration into mother Earth.

The ‘edges’ between things blur when living this close to the land, our human habit of making distinctions between trees and soil eroded by the daily witnessing of fallen leaves and branches melting into the ground.

Nodding into dormancy, a maple before me gathers its roots into a proud trunk that reaches 60 feet above my head, driven aloft through successive springs and a perennial yearning for the sun. From there, it drops its leaves, yet where does the maple leaf stop and the moist soil begin? I ponder this as my blower makes narrow arcs, coaxing forth the reluctant twigs and sending the huge yellow and soft brown leaves scurrying before it.

It is easier to see the interweave of it all rather than ‘separate things,’ here beneath the canopy of trees of this still wild land. Unsurprising, I suppose, that out of this wells a remarkably physical sense of connection with the world.

I follow the leaves, swaying my blower back and forth, stepping as if my feet had pads like the cougars who also live in these hills. Since my wife and I made the decision to live full-time amidst nature’s quiet uproar, I have begun to learn the importance of walking, as a dear friend and colleague reminds me, “as if your face was on the soles of your feet.” When living close to the Earth, it seems our human awareness naturally slips free from the constraints of our head, dropping perhaps, through our torso and legs, and extending like fingers into the world around us.

As I unplug the blower and begin to coil the cord, I notice a lone hiker standing on the mountain road above me and across the creek. Hands in his coat pockets, he withdraws one to wave a greeting. Even at this distance I recognize the husky frame and warm smile as one of my neighbors who lives up the gulch. I light up with a broad grin and wave a hearty response.

Over the past couple of years, this otherwise unknown individual and I began to wave to each other; he on his way up the road or down, me usually in the midst of tending to this land and these old buildings. It was as though we shared some kind of mutual understanding.

He reinserts his hand into the protection of his pocket and turns to head on down the hill, gathering his coat against the cold, immersed in the complex weave of life and earth around him. As I watch him continue on his way, slowly and at peace, I now understand why it is that we have this connection. Though he was but a small figure against the hillside, his posture and deliberate footsteps were of a man enraptured with the lingering perfume of moist soil, the heady bank of towering trees, and the glistening winter pallet of dark green, yellow, and the softly disolving shades of tan to rich dark brown.

I know these things. I feel this too.