Rebels

On a good night I dream I am flying, dancing, making love, or (the best) all three at once. On a bad night I have nightmares. When I was little the worst ones involved being chased by bulls—bulls that in real life we kids would encounter while biking the dirt roads of Halfway, OR. But the next worst ones involved school: that assignment I somehow completely neglected, or suddenly realizing I'd been going to the wrong classroom—for months. This kind of dream, perhaps because I still operate in a world of tasks, I still have.

It is Sunday night and my self-imposed deadline for posting the week's blog is breathing down my neck. I have been fortunate to have had a fabulous weekend of catching up with friends and loved ones. LL and I have just finished a meal of the season's first home-made pumpkin soup and are discussing our schedules, and why they are that way. There are a good fifty things I would love to do in the next five minutes, including:
—write a letter of outrage to the AAFP for its appalling new alliance with Coca-Cola
—email and call friends I need to catch up with, and write some more thank-you cards
—read a dozen articles in various journals as well as the next chapter in "The Hypomanic Edge," John Gartner's fascinating look at, well, why it's Sunday night and I'm writing a blog instead of relaxing in preparation for bed
—draw/paint a bit on my own books (LL just helped me reach a breakthrough in understanding the first book)

The list goes on. Some of these things I will get to in due time, others will inevitably be postponed past the time I think they "should have" gotten done. Why on earth do we Americans, more than any other people, assign ourselves so many tasks that we have nightmares about failing to complete them?

And what are the implications of this endless on-the-go doing, for ourselves, our health, our world?

I am coming to believe that this pace of living keeps us from living well. And by living well, I mean simply living in a way that first does no harm. Living in a way that is sustainable, happy, and sustainably happy.

The double-edged sword of despair and hope, for me, is that this way of life is the path of least resistance: In America, it is easier than not to work a job that requires long hours, to commute to work by car, to have little of one's income support healthcare, education, the environment. But in other countries, as travel writer Rick Steves reminded me recently, there is a different path of least resistance. Your job pays you to take time off, including for maternity leave, for moms and dads. Public transit is cheap, efficient, universal. Taxes go towards true social security, rather than to fund wars and favor corporations. And just because America may be, as John Gartner argues in "The Hypomanic Edge," self-selected for nonstop doing, there is no reason we can't point that in the direction of doing good.

What this will take, however, is a rebellion. It will require us to not accept things as they are, until they are the way the way we want them to be. It will require us to think more—and do, at least within the current system as it operates now, less.

Which brings me at last to the quote that I wanted to share, from the book "Nonviolent Communication" by Marshall Rosenberg. The author "shares the sentiments of French novelist and journalist Georges Bernanos..." Here is what Bernanos, who fought in WWI and saw his three sons fight in WWII, has to say:

"I have thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destruction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still less, of course, the indignation that cruelty awakens and the reprisals and vengeance that it brings upon itself...but the docility, the lack of responsibility of the modern man, his base subservient acceptance of every common decree. The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate, untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile men."

It is 24 hours later. I worked today, I work tomorrow. I want to sleep more than rebel. But perhaps tonight I will dream of flying.

Words and pictures

What is the value of words and pictures? Of ideas?

I have now self-published but am only just starting the journey of (hopefully) being accepted by a large publishing house. If I hadn't embarked on that journey, this blog would have been started much later or not at all. I am trying to post—mostly words—here, weekly, for free, and simultaneously to get my books—mostly pictures—printed, in bookstores, not for free. In both efforts I am learning a lot about the Information Age, and the value of ideas.

My father receives The New Yorker magazine. Along with walking our black lab Hugo and either shoveling snow or jumping in the pond, season-dependent, one of my favorite activities when I visit home is to catch up on old issues. In the July 6, 2009 issue was a book review by Malcolm Gladwell, of Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price." Gladwell takes issue with Anderson's thesis that "information wants to be free," arguing that just as the infrastructure and maintenance of power lines and plants is necessary to deliver even electricity that could be generated freely, so too there is a non-negligible infrastructure for delivering ideas. The cost of transmission electronically might approach zero. But a number close to zero multiplied by several billion, as in the case of the number of YouTube videos streamed, is still a large number. According to Gladwell, YouTube, offering free content, is set to lose "close to half a billion dollars" in 2009.

Then there is the question of content. The obvious item to discuss would be not ideas, but chocolate.

People place some value on quality, and are willing to pay for it. Gladwell points to an experiment in which a majority of people selected fancy truffles over Hershey's Kisses when they were priced at 15 cents and 1 cent, respectively, but selected the Kisses over the truffles when the prices were 14 cents and free. Amazing that only 1 cent in both cases made the difference! But read in reverse the experiment is equally astounding: When two chocolates both cost anything, most people were willing to pay 15 times more for quality.

There are two further issues which Gladwell hints at but does not delve into. One is format: How do we like to receive our ideas? There were several predictions that books would essentially fold with the advent of the Internet. This has not happened even despite Kindle, because some of us, me included, enjoy actual books. There is a fabulous cartoon by Berkely Breathed that comes to mind: Opus dreams of curling up with his favorite copy of "Winnie the Pooh" and in the last panel ends up tucked into an armchair staring dejectedly at the CD that his friend Milo has given him.

Second is the broader issue of "support of the arts," seemingly a doomed enterprise in our current politico-economic climate. People are willing to support, beyond the cost of the goods received, those we think are producing quality material and/or effecting positive change in the world. Whenever I buy a Real Change newspaper, I give an extra dollar to the homeless street vendor who is selling it. Real Change is to my mind doing both the above-mentioned things.

Before concluding I must state the following:
1) I am not trying to place my books or blog on the same shelf as Real Change, nor compare my experience to that of a homeless street vendor. Check the paper out—it is truly high quality reporting.
2) I will continue to occasionally watch YouTube as long as they are free, especially the brilliant explanatory-lyrics take on "Total Eclipse of the Heart."
3) You are welcome to send me (or any member of my family) quality organic fair-trade dark chocolate, but please do not feed any to Hugo.

And now I want to share with you some pictures—for free!—sampled from the first third of my second book, "Late One Night." Enjoy!

On the earth

Which is another way of saying, grounded.

When asked in 2007 what the single most pressing environmental issue was, activist Julia Butterfly Hill replied, "The most pressing environmental issue is actually our disconnected consciousness." This from a woman who spent 738 consecutive days living in a redwood tree to keep it from being cut down. Similarly, towards the end of the recent movie "No Impact Man", author Colin Beavan seems to come to a similar conclusion. The biggest impact of our lives--that is, the least negative impact on the planet--will not come from how vigorously we recycle (Beavan makes the point that all recycling is "down-cycling", and to start with the "reduce" in "reduce, re-use, recycle"). It will come from now active we become in our communities, how connected we are with both the earth and with our fellow human beings.

As I write this I am siting outside, on the earth. I write with a pen on paper. All around me is desert, sun, dry heat, but I sit in the improbable shade of a cottonwood tree. A cool breeze dries the sweat from my face. A trail has led me here, up through sagebrush and prickly pear, showy mountain aster and sock-clinging cheatgrass, jackrabbit and grasshopper, here to a hidden canyon enclave of giant boulders and pools of dry sand and willow and cottonwood. I rest against one of the giant boulders and reflect on the life of one of the most grounded and community-entwined people I have ever known, my granddad.

From where I sit I can look down on Albuquerque, New Mexico. My mom says that when she was a little girl, Granddad's house was the last one on the edge of the desert. Their backyard was arroyos and horned toads leading straight to the Sandia Mountains into whose lap I've climbed. Now the development has reached the foothills, and in every other direction spreads unchecked by geography. The limiting factor is water.

Granddad was aware of--

--hold on. Stop. Breathe. Stay grounded. I myself am aware, sitting here reflecting, of wanting to say too much. Of trying in one breath to connect my granddad's life and awareness of the unsustainable water-based existence of Albuquerque in the desert, with his incredible life as one of the youngest men to work at Sandia National Laboratory on the development of the atomic bomb and his awareness of the civilization-altering implications of that, with his involvement with his family, church, and community, from the long, delightfully unhurried conversations we shared in his living room when I was a "grown-up" to the birthday and Christmas cards we received without fail to the way he kept in touch with old friends near and far right up until the end. And then to somehow connect all that with the redwoods and recycling and living in harmony with other living beings on the earth.

But what I really want to say is that I'll miss him.

I will miss him, and so will my brother and sister, and so will my mom, and so will a lot of people. We will miss him because he was a wise and kind and good person, and he was our granddaddy, our dad, our friend.

It is easy to lose sight, in writing and in life, of why we are here. Of why we do what we do, why we try to learn as much about the earth and about people and about living together on the earth as we can. We do it because of love. Granddad was very loved, and he loved the earth and he loved us very much. Soon his ashes will be back where in some metaphorical sense they started out, on the earth.

I will miss him.

An inconvenient truth

At 3AM I am woken by the singularly exasperating chirp of a dying smoke detector. It is a well-known but little-publicized fact that smoke detectors are programmed to wait until 3AM on that night you’ve been hoping to catch up on sleep before starting their death rattle, a precise sequence of incrementally more frequent bleeps. My impulse is to rip the thing from the ceiling, sever the wires, and smash the lot to bits with a hammer, as I did once—to no avail—in my college dorm room after the teakettle spontaneously combusted. Fortunately the love of my life (henceforth, LL) intervenes. After some fumbling about we are able to simply replace the battery.

Sleep is slow to return. My mind wanders to another inconvenience a few days prior. At the time I’d wanted to write about it but hadn’t. The smoke detector incident takes me back there.

At this point a warning is necessary.

WARNING: The following entry is about feelings.

It is Wednesday evening. LL and I are visiting a dear friend, an artist who in this lifetime has been touched by grace as well as sorrow. I met her after she had experienced the worst loss possible, that of a child. Having myself lost a sibling, we bonded almost instantly. Shortly thereafter, by her account, nine or so other people appeared in her life who shared with me the number 28, whether a birthday, anniversary, or other significant event. One of these friends had bought for her "The Idiot’s Guide to Numerology," and I pick it up now.

Mathematics, the science of numbers, fascinates me. Whether it is the Fibonacci sequence in the spiral of a sunflower or the repeating fractal designs at different scales of a coastline or the unflappability of pi, I’ve always been intrigued when numbers objectively illuminate a pattern. Numerology, the study of numbers’ occult meanings and their supposed influence on our lives, is different. Like astrology and the automobile, numerology elicits in me a delight wrapped up in disbelief: that is to say, I do not understand it.

This is the opposite of what I let on. As our artist friend talks about the "28-ers" in her life, I smile self-importantly at LL. I pat The Idiot’s Guide as if those of us associated with a 28 are part of a secret club that she can never be a part of, a club fully explained by this book, for those who need such explanation. I intend it all in good fun.

But as I touched on in my first blog, even good intentions can do harm when carried out without thought. And anything that highlights difference or separation cannot help invite comparison and judgment. X is better than Y. I am better than you. You are better than me.

We say goodnight to our friend. As LL and I talk on the way home, this is the first time I realize I've hurt her feelings. With my affected pomp and command of numerology, she felt bad, and now I feel bad for causing this. It is not easy to explore these feelings. It is so much easier to gloss over them. What an inconvenient truth that I am human, a sentient being, able to cause another pain and feel pain myself. But what profound gratitude seeps into my core as I realize that here is a fellow human willing to process through this discomfort with me! I begin to glimpse the meaning of those bumper stickers that say, "Peace in the world begins with peace in the home which begins with peace in the heart." Unlike the insane chirping of the dying smoke detector, this particular inconvenience becomes an opportunity for self-reflection.

Incidentally, the numbers in 10/3/2009 add up to 15, 1 + 5 = 6, and 6 "represents malfunctioning home appliances, overcast skies, and mindfulness."