God's country

It is Wednesday morning. This is my day off from work.

I drive in to work and work until noon. When I leave I am headed for a funeral, but instead turn my car around on Highway 97 and take a left up Cameron Lake Road. As I climb the hill the snow deepens and the sagebrush is joined by the occasional ponderosa pine. The small fragments of light offered by mid-December are gathered up carefully by the new snow and amplified, reflected, a thousand million tiny suns making the short day bright. At the top of the hill I pull over and climb out to take in the view.

The air is colder here and I haven't brought my hat or jacket; I can only stand outside for a few moments before returning to the valley, to the funeral, to people and community and the warmth offered by the shared experience of living and dying. But for this instant I am alone with the indifferent and utterly beautiful landscape.

Directly below me a small lake is identifiable as a flat expanse of uninterrupted snow, which in this rocky terrain can only be explained by water. Below that a bluff blocks my view of the Okanogan River, and in the places where I can see further, the river itself is mostly hidden by trees. Wherever there are trees there are houses, at least in the valley floor, and from here the towns of Okanogan and Omak appear to be only slightly dense accumulations of the the farm buildings that dot the river's path to the north and south. But for the most part what I am looking at is wide-open space. It is rugged country writ large, basalt cliffs rising to timbered slopes and painfully white peaks, and all human endeavors look small and transient by comparison.

I think of the writer Ed Abbey, describing the desert southwest he so loved, God's country, Abbey's country. The same wide-open beauty.

In a few minutes I will drive down and cross the river and go into a church. I will hear about how wonderful God is to have given us this time here on earth, and I will find it hard to argue. The pastor will tell me that we are here to glorify God and be thankful, and who am I to argue? I will hear this message, spoken perhaps in different words than I would use, but expressing the same idea. We are here to love one another. We are here to be a part of this beautiful world, and if given the opportunity, to leave it a better place than when we entered it.

In a few minutes I will hear all of this, and be grateful for the human companionship, the hugs, the offers of pie and coffee, the warmth. In a few minutes.

Right now I am happy to just be here on the ridgeline with my thoughts.

Snow is a force that gives us meaning

As a kid growing up in eastern Oregon I loved snow. No matter how much it snowed, it was never enough for all the skiing, sledding, snowforts, snowball fignts and snowjumping (jumping off of the roof into a big snowpile) which could be dreampt up by my siblings and I. In fifth grade the snow reached over my head, the closest it ever came to my imagined quota. Now, 25 years later, I again find myself in snow country. And once again I want more.

This morning it snowed a couple inches while I stayed inside and fiddled with the new projector that LL and I have decided to treat ourselves to. Now that that is done--as with all projects remotely electronic and/or mechanical, it always take way longer than expected--I am temporarily at a loss for what to do. Not that I don't have any number of things I could/should be doing. But none are as fun as...

Of course! Snow. Outside I go, shovel in hand, to tackle the driveway.

As I push snow my mind relaxes. The task is simple and at hand. The reward is tangible, measurable, satisfying. Even as I clear a path, I wish for more: as long as it snows, I will have something which must be done, just as after finishing the driveway, I have to take LL's rig in for studded tires.

I wonder--not yet having read Chris Hedges's War is a Force...--if our urges toward violence might not be taken out more benignly on snow. We (and by we I mean of course I) have within us (me) the occasional urge, borne of the daily stresses accumulated by living an imperfect life, to destroy something. Snow is beautifully unique in its range of accommodation. Like water it can be hit and pushed without harm to do-er or do-ee, but in a way that water can't it can also be used for creation. In skiing and sledding, the desire for speed, even reckless speed, can be satisfied with yet a soft landing for crashes. In moving snow, there is unfettered access to the physical labor that is so often lacking in our lives. Maybe we all could use a little more snow.

Maybe, too, part of my love affair stems from the sense of something fragile and vanishing. We are in a La Niña year so it's supposed to be colder and wetter. But the numbers implied by global warming do not bode well for snow in the years to come. Snow, at ever-higher latitudes and elevations, may be an endangered species.

In which case, maybe snow could become the icon that finally galvanizes the floundering (or dead, as per the title of Hedges's latest, Death of the Liberal Class) progressive movement into action.

Ok, so that's a stretch. But such recent events as the failure to pass I-1098, which the 98$ of people who DON'T make more than $200k/yr would have benefited from, against a backdrop of huge cuts to essential services in healthcare and education, have me grasping at straws. At fragile and ephemeral things. At snow.

I'll write again when it's over my head. Until then let it snow!

Pumpkin soup

1 large pumpkin
A few ripe tomatoes
Hot peppers--3 or more, depending on BTU level
1 freshly picked coconut, or, if you don't live where coconuts are freshly picked, 1 package of processed coconut product
3-7 cloves of garlic
fresh ginger root, grated
2-4 orange and/or red bell peppers, depending on size
some ground nuts (e.g., hazelnuts, cashews, almonds--probably 1 cup)
1 beer of your choosing. Moose Drool is nice. If the beer is too tasty, more of it will end up in your belly than in the soup...
salt and pepper to taste
cilantro to garnish

What would you do, if you knew you could not fail?

Facing the end of another week in which the in-box is not empty I think of this quote. I don't know the author. The words are printed on a wooden placard in LL's parents' house in PT.

It is Friday morning and I am making some pumpkin soup before heading in to work. In point of fact it will be a turban squash soup. And also, I will be finishing it when I get home after work. This will probably be the time at which I'll take the baked squash and blend it with the roasted red peppers and roasted tomatoes, and throw them into the pot where the garlic, ginger and hot peppers will be sauteing. Also I still have to buy the hot peppers. I'm hoping for habañeros.

Also, in looking for an enye (ñ) to copy and paste, I learned that habanero is actually spelled just like that, and that ñ is incorrect--and on the screen just below that, I learned that "octopi is ignorant in three languages simultaneously", as it is derived from Greek instead of Latin and thus would be octopodes (while in modern English octopuses is considered "correct"). Thanks Wikipedia!

But I digress. What would I do if I knew I could not fail?

Hopefully, I would still be doing exactly what I am doing now, which is to say, I'm about to turn off the oven and go into the hospital where one of my patients was just admitted and then go to clinic and finish some charts and make some phone calls and look up some information on how better to treat chronic pain and how better to diagnose chronic suffering and how better to encourage a healthy diet and regular exercise and nurturing relationships, which are the things that keep all of us out of the hospital, and all the while I hope to be learning, learning, learning, which of necessity requires some letting go of previously learned information and letting go of some long-held habits and prejudices and beliefs, not all once of course because that would be too easy, but perhaps bit by bit.

And maybe if I can keep working at this I can not fail. Maybe if I can slowly change, bit by bit, my self-expectations, I will not let myself down. Perhaps if I keep reaching out to others, asking for help where appropriate, which is really almost always, we will succeed.

Perhaps the question should be re-framed, to What would we do, knowing that we can not fail?

We have to go for it. As Andrea Gibson says, we have to create. Whether a jack-o-lantern or pumpkin soup, a patient care plan or meaningful relationships, this is what we are here for.

And then of course I look back at what I've written and realize it's too pithy. Too canned, too hokey, too much of this, not enough of that. I have failed. I think that now that my blog frequency has dropped off to near-zero, I am trying to squeeze too much metaphor into too little space, and the result is--well, to forge on anyway, it's a soup.

And at the same time, why not go for it? Most of us, as LL likes to say, are going to die. Most of us will start out looking like the pumpkin at the top, and slowly wither to become the pumpkin below. Why not make a soup of it? Why not do it anyway?

Perhaps the question is, If we know we are might fail anyway, what will we strive for?

The answer, I hope, is Yes.

Processing speed

It has been 4 months since my last post. When last I wrote, spring was in the air, blah blah blah ("they" say 3-element lists have a nice ring to them), and I was sitting at LL's computer in our little duplex in Seattle. Now it is October in Omak. It is cold outside. Blah blah blah.

I honestly don't want to be writing right now. Even inside it is cold, blah blah blah (normally I can fill in these blanks--today my own internal processing speed seems to match that of my decrepit computer), and I'm frustrated by spending two hours online with India only to have my internet security unresolved.

But clearly a part of me wants to be writing right now, or I wouldn't be doing it, right? Perhaps I write from the desire to process the flash that was the last 4 months, and in so doing, dampen the speed with which those memories must inevitably fade. Perhaps someone has snuck into the dark spaces, the interatomic recesses, the quark-quark interface, of the cesium NIST-F1 clock in Boulder, Colorado, and monkeyed with its current accuracy of +/- 1 second in 60 million years--perhaps sped it up by a second or two.

Perhaps I am getting old.

But what is age but the accumulation of experiences? In the last 4 months, we:

...moved out of our little duplex and put all of our belongings into a storage facility located somewhere on the Columbia River

...moved into the basement of LL's parents, for the rare times we weren't traveling

...deposited a check on the one place available for rent in Omak, sight mostly unseen

...ran the lower Salmon River from Hammer Creek to Heller Bar for 5 glorious days and 3 glorious nights and 1 Hells Canyon thunderstorm night, including
--an unforgettable trip though the left-hand side of Snowhole Rapids by my brother Hans and my friend Tyler's brother James,
--a gourmet menu of mole enchiladas by my mom, quinoa salad by LL, and home-made cinnamon rolls (overnight sleeping bag rise action) by Tyler and Loren,
--37.5 gallons of water pumped from side streams using our REI filters

...flew into the world'd 3rd-largest city before traveling further to the 400-person village of Cabo Pulmo and snorkeling the only coral reef on the west coast of North America

...flew back into the world'd 3rd-largest city before traveling, in a truck whose engine exploded (required not only a mechanical fix but also a bribe to the local police to look the other way), on to the loud, dirty, blah blah blah city of Cuernavaca for 2 weeks of outstanding language classes and horrendous host family stay (think hot dogs, chicken nuggets and cold showers)

...finally traveled a 3rd time back to Mexico City where we visited the Frida Kahlo Museum (incredible) and managed to not be mugged

...flew back to the US, had a couple days in Seattle, drove out to Omak where our belongings magically materialized, unpacked with the help of LL's parents, drove back to Seattle

...woke up at 4AM to catch a flight to Minnesota, where we rented a car, bought the audio-CD version of "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortensen, and listened to his incredible story as we drove up to the Gunflint Trail near Canada

...joined my dad for the first couple days of a canoe trip, during which we had our food broken into by bearaccoomooses, ran out of cooking fuel, and generally had a great time

...drove down to the Twin Cities to stay with LL's aunt and uncle, who spoiled us silly with food, wine, and entertainment, before going to one of LL's friend's wedding, and then, to celebrate our own 1-year anniversary, stayed at a downtown hotel and saw the musical "Wicked"

...returned to the Emerald City for one last week with LL's parents and a wonderful send-off party before packing up our almost-final belongings and driving out to Omak to start work.

And now here we are. Somehow I feel better, and I haven't even gone into these first 3 weeks of work, which have included our first hospital calls, my first deliveries in this new hospital, a trip with our beautiful little 14-foot sailing boat out to Omak Lake, the discovery of a local Slow Food group and a co-op and new friends.

In fact, as I reflect on this time, process this speed, I realize how incredibly grateful I am to be here, alive, healthy,
able to be doing the work I want to be doing,
sharing this experience with the love of my life,
here, alive, healthy,
here, alive, healthy,
here, alive, healthy, repeat.

Patch Adams

Started on June 6, 2010

Until this morning I had shyed away from news of the Gulf Oil Spill. It seemed a tragedy too enormous to comprehend, much less do anything about. And my fears were not unreasonable. If anything, after reading an article my sister-in-law wrote and following that up with some Democracy Now! coverage, it is worse than I imagined—worse, probably, than most of us could imagine, in no small part because we really have no idea how bad it is. Even BP officicials quietly acknowledge that the amount of oil could be 10 times what we think it is. Already it is turning the entire Gulf of Mexico into one giant dead zone. By next summer, the Gulf Stream could carry that up the Atlantic coastline.

In the face of such overwhelming news, it might seem an odd or even inappropriate time to dedicate one of only two posting in two months to Patch Adams.

And yet I think to Patch Adams I owe in some small way the fact that I am writing at all. In the midst of everything happening in the outside world, LL and I have begun to prepare for our move this fall to remote Omak. As part of that preparation I've been sorting through old paperwork with the not-always-successful goal of throwing most of it away. In such manner I came across a paper I'd long given up for gone: my introductory words welcoming Patch to speak at Johns Hopkins.

Below are two excerpts from the beginning and the end of that introduction; the beginning was mostly logistics and a discussion of how it was that I'd met some resistance to bringing Patch to campus. Apparently he'd come a few years earlier and there was a small but vocal minority who didn't want him to return. So Patch called me up and offered to come for free, and the funds that we raised to thank him were matched by a sympathetic undergraduate dean to give to a local women's shelter.
...

When Patch came to speak at Wesleyan in my junior year there, it was as if someone put into words all the things that I already knew were important in life. I've had a similar reaction when reading the work of Daniel Quinn, and one of the things that struck me was that neither Adams nor Quinn encourages anyone to emulate them blindly. They share a strong belief—based on observation of trends in population, the environment, culture, and politics—that the world society we've created is unsustainable. They also feel that change would, rather than the conventional wisdom of "having to give things up," make us immeasurably richer. But we must find this for ourselves. Patch also said, "If you need a friend, write to me, and I will write back." So I wrote, and he not only responded to that first letter, he remembered who I was and always built on our friendship in correspondence over the years to come.

...

In pondering [my own experience], I couldn't honestly fathom [that some people had responded unfavorably to Patch] until I asked myself: what might I myself find dangerous about this doctor, this clown, this person who had written to me as a friend?

I believe Patch Adams is dangerous to those parts of myself that say, "That's just the way it is."

I believe Patch Adams is dangerous to those parts of myself that say, "Just get through today, and tomorrow you can be revolutionary." Those parts that say, "I'm too busy with school and stressed out to have fun, much less help anyone." Those parts that say, "These four years of college and four years of medical school and 3 or 4 or 14 years of residency and 50 years of paying off debts will be really tough, but then, (if I'm still alive) I'll take a break." And you might laugh, but there are times when it feels like this is the mentality I need just to survive medical school!

Patch Adams is dangerous because he's saying, "Make revolutionary work itself the break." I think Patch is dangerous not because hes's crying out against injustice and the direction our planet is taking—there are numerous folks out there telling us how bad things are—but because he's actually trying to make an alternative work, and he's having the time of his life doing it. If Patch Adams were advocating an alternative program, I don't think he would get such a strong reaction. If he were saying, I want you to recycle more of your Coke cans, and take public transit instead of your car, and water your houseplants on Wednesdays, we could write him off. Because all of these things—while they're good programs—aren't really going to transform our society. Patch is dangerous because he has a different vision. Patch is saying that we can make helping our planet and its people the most fun thing ever imaginable. And that we have within ourselves the power to make that change—that I do, and that you do.

Thus I challenge you tonight to ask yourself not just what you can do to help, but how you can do it so that nothing else could be more fun. In conjunction with Physicians for Social Responsibility and several student groups, we will be arranging a follow-up forum of the ideas of Dr. Adams in the context of medicine and social justice, and I invite any of you who are interested to join us. Regardless, I ask you tonight to listen to the words of Patch Adams, and to think about what they mean for you and your community.

I was going to close my introduction with a quote oft attributed to Nelson Mandela but actually from Marianne Williamson which talks about how our greatest fear is not being inadequate but rather being powerful beyond measure, because I think this quote applies to Dr. Adams. He is letting his own light shine, and giving all of us permission to do the same. But rather than recite that quote, I think it would be an injustice for me to not share with you what is for me Patch's most important message. Once this spring when Patch left a message for me, I called him back and said, "My room-mate told me there was a message on our answering machine, but I thought it was just my friend!" Patch said, "I want you to erase that word 'just' from your vocabulary. If anything, I'm a 'just.' To have a friend is gold; that is the gold of life!" And so forgive me for taking this opportunity to say,

"Thank you, my friends, for all your incredible work in making tonight possible. I would like you to meet Patch Adams."

Thousand-dollar diarrhea

56 hours ago I awoke with terrible stomach pains and over the remaining hours of the night vomited three times. In-between vomiting I was kept from sleep by cramps which progressed to diarrhea with accompanying exhaustion, and with each passing minute I saw my hopes of going to work fade. When day broke I finally slept. For the next 24 hours I would be intermittently awoken by the dire urge to go to the bathroom, after which I would sip on gatorade before drifting back to an uneasy slumber.

During this time I missed my most productive workday of the week, wherein, because I start at 7:30AM and often work until midnight plus or minus a few hours more for a delivery, I might earn up to $1000.

Which leads me, 56 hours later and with stomach cramps slowly subsiding, to reflect on where I stand in the global scale of wealth.

Let's say that I worked 100 of these 24-hour clinic+call shifts for $100,000 a year. According to Global Rich List, such an income puts me in the top 0.66% of earners worldwide. If I earned a tenth of that—$10,000 a year—I would still be in the top 13%, with 87% of the world's population earning less. Even at $1000 a year—the amount I missed in a day's work because of a GI bug—I would be in the top 44%, meaning that greater than half of the world survives on less, which is less than $3 a day.

One limitation of this website is that it doesn't delineate the breakdown of salaries greater than $200,000. This might not seem to matter, except that in this tiny fraction of people most of the wealth is concentrated, and the further to the right of the wealth-vs.-number-of-people graph one goes, the steeper the curve.

A site which gives a better idea of this graph, which looks like a reverse letter "L", is called just that: The L-Curve. The L-curve site focuses on America alone. Since America has a median income of $40,000, it's like taking the final three person icons on the Global Richlist site (the top 3% of all earners) and expanding them in detail. The results are shocking.

If income is stacks of $100 bills, America's median of $40,000 is a stack 1.6 inches high. For an income of $100,000, the stack is 4 inches high; for $1 million it is 40 inches high. $1M is reached at "one foot from the goal line"; population is plotted along a football field with the median income at the 50-yard line. One has to zoom out to appreciate the full scale. At $1 billion worth of income, the stack is 1km high. Using what it says was an estimate of Bill Gates's greatest increase in net worth in 1 year of $50 billion, the final stack of bills is 50 kilometers high.

I went to Forbes.com to confirm this. While wealth is not equal to income, the spread is the same. As of 2010:

-There are 1,011 billionaires

-The richest 51 billionaires control over $1 trillion dollars

-The world's 3 richest men control assets greater than the combined GDP of the world's 71 poorest countries (using CIA - The World Factbook, 2009)

-If one of these men lost money because of diarrhea in commensurate fashion to my 2-day loss, that bathroom break would cost him...one billion dollars.

Unsettling, to say the least.

So. Clearly we non-billionaires don't at this time have the power that money commands. On the other hand, there are 1000 of them, and more than 6 billion of us. I cannot help but think of the Jimi Hendrix quote, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

Such are the reflections of an unquiet stomach, which as I write is quieter already.

Optimism II

It is Sunday night. There is a long list of things that I could have, should have, would have (if only the [blank] hadn't gotten in the way) completed, things that are probably more important to be working on right now than this.

In my fourth year of medical school I participated in an amazing--truly, amazing--elective called HEART. Loosely, this spells "Humanistic Elective in Alternative Medicine, Activism, and Reflective Transformation." (A week ago was my five-year reunion, and the first reunion I've missed in these five years.) This elective marked my first formal exposure to the idea of nonviolent communication, or NVC.

Among other things, NVC encourages taking responsibility for one's own feelings and actions. To restate my first paragraph, I chose to do other things instead of the items on the "long list." I don't regret any of the things I chose, just as I don't regret doing the things I chose to do the previous weekend instead of going to the HEART reunion. At the same time, I did really want to go to that reunion. And I did really want to get to the things on my ever-evolving list.

The truth is that right now I am struggling.

I am struggling to try to keep up with things I want to do, things I said I would do, things I have hoped to do, things I've chosen not to do yet because I've chosen to do other things.

Years before the HEART elective, I had another amazing opportunity, namely to serve in the Peace Corps in South Africa. After several months working with township grade schools my job description was pretty clear in my mind. It was to get the teachers to stop hitting the students. This seemed fundamental. Yet the application of it was so complex, nuanced, daunting. How does one maintain order in a 30-minute class crammed with 60 students and armed only with a textbook in Afrikaans from 1952? How does one contend with parents' expectations that a classroom should be run as they experienced it, with a sjambok? How does one reverse the mental effects of Apartheid? How quickly can they be reversed?

One afternoon, after a particularly disheartening schoolday, I returned home only to find my normally pacific host mother stormy and my 8-year-old host brother crying. I can't recall the offense. Only the punishment. After briefly comforting 8-year-old Zama I recognized in myself the need for air, breath, wide open space, something, anything to escape the choking anger and hurt that threatened to cut off my airway.

I walked. Out of the township and back up the hill towards the railroad and the open veldt. Crying. Overwhelmed.

Halfway up I heard a familiar voice. I turned to find my best friend, 17-year-old Jeffrey Nkosi, running after me. His bright voice was tinged with concern. "Hey, my man! Why are you crying, my man?" In sobs and starts my responses, my story, my frustration and sense of helplessness at taking on this enormous task, found their way out. As they did, ever so slowly, the edge to the day softened. By the time we crested the hill and turned to walk along the coal-strewn railroad tracks, my tears were gone, and Jeffrey was inviting me home to share a loaf of bread with tea. "A half a loaf is better than none, you know?"

The answer is that one doesn't reverse 50 years of Apartheid, hundreds of years of poverty and oppresion. That task, as do most things worth pursuing, takes at least two. Just as there are few things more overwhelming than taking on a struggle alone, there are few things more empowering than finding comrades with which to share the struggle.

Remembering that I am not alone, I feel better. The list will still be there in the morning. Jeffrey, wherever you are, thank you.

Stillness

April 9th, 2009, Halfway, OR:
Stillness is usually the first thing I notice about coming home to my dad's house in Halfway. This time that was not the case, because yesterday was my dad's 70th birthday, and we threw him a surprise party. All the plans were in place: the false premise of a party a couple days later, the Higginses with a birthday cake comprising the initial sortie, the congregation at the bottom of the hill and the subsequent walk up. It was perfect. And in inimitable Hammar fashion, Dad took off in the car with our dog Hugo to go for a walk just half an hour before the Higginses were supposed to show up. I arrived after the eight-hour drive from Seattle to find my older brother circling on his bicycle at the end of our lane, hoping to divert all cars until Dad returned. A few minutes and several cars later we made the impromptu decision for everyone to go up the hill. I ran up and down the hill several times in the next hour as we awaited Dad's return—eventually he arrived home, was completely surprised, and the party was enjoyed by all—and did not really feel like I caught my breath until I went do bed that night. So my usual awareness of the stillness was postponed until today.

I wake up, for the first time in weeks, not to an alarm clock but to the rising of the sun. I get up and feed Hugo. We humans feed variously on granola (not Dad) and ham and eggs (Dad). Hugo and I go for a walk.

The sun is bright. The air is crisp and still quite cold and several large patches of snow blanket the ground. We climb to the upper bench, walk through a stand of pine trees that when I was growing up were Christmas-tree size and now reach 30 feet or more. Where the ground is bare it is still flattened, whether grass, leaves, or pine needles, only recently having shed an enormous weight. We walk through the North Gate. A ditch runs along the top of the ridge, eroded in places by cattle, and I have to find a place that is both shallow enough to jump and free enough of hawthorn bushes to permit passage.

An old dirt road leads from the ridge down into a marsh and up and over another hill. Here selective logging has thinned the pines enough to allow the sun to shine through in several places, the ground is dry and almost sandy; it would make an ideal home for the rabbits of Watership Down. Over the other side of the hill is another marshy flat with slowly flowing water that occasionally coalesces into a little brook.

In the center of the marshy flat nature is quickly reclaiming a cabin and a shed long abandoned by their builders. Three ancient relics of cars are more slowly decomposing. What looks to be an International Harvester pickup truck is but a rusting shell, while the tailfins of a '59 Cadillac still burst with their original, albeit-faded, lemon yellow color. A few stubborn pieces of glass remain in one rear side window. The third car, a convertible by design or destruction, is now undergoing its final metamorphosis into a truly open-air design.

As I cross over a barbed-wire fence and head back up into the woods that will eventually lead me home, it strikes me how indelibly we've altered the landscape even here in the tiny, remote Eastern Oregon town of Halfway. True, some of its former habitations are now dissolving into the ground whence they sprang up. In places fences sag or are gone completely. Trees once cleared for pasture are re-growing where permitted. But some changes may take longer to reverse. The beggars lice weed synonymous with livestock is now ubiquitous. Natural predators—grizzlies, mountain lions, wolves—are scarce or absent.

And yet in places like Halfway there is still stillness. There is still ample space and time for reflection, about the pace and nature of change, about presence of weeds and lack of wolves, about anything. This is less true in the city. At least for myself, I feel an unavoidable pull into motion when I am in Seattle, a raft pulled along by a current into what at times seems an unending rapid. Part of this has to do with density of humans, and perhaps part of it might have to do with most of those other humans seeming as though they are also struggling to keep their heads above the waters of a fast-paced river. Unless one makes a conscious effort to the contrary, this pace can lead to human interactions being shorter and more superficial. Needing to have more packed into any given time frame. Containing less stillness.

In the 70 years since my dad was born, the physical landscape of the earth has been altered more by human activity than in the 10,000 preceding years combined. We are now living in a landscape that is more different from that of 70, or certainly 170 years ago, than the landscape of those times differed from that of 10,000 years ago. And now since the time I was born an entirely new landscape is being created. This virtual landscape, that of the world online, is farther removed even than our cities from the natural world of fields and forests—the world from which all that we eat derives, the world in which once we ourselves were occasionally eaten, the world that, through an incredibly complex and varied symbiosis of millions of living organisms and natural cycles, gives us the air, water, and food essential to life. This new landscape is more prone to more and more packed and superficial interactions. By its very nature, of always being in creation, always being revised, improved upon, changed, it is anything but still.

I would be the last to say that we should not embrace this landscape, for it also contains an incredible potential to inform, to share ideas, to instantly access information that can help us make better decisions and to make them faster. At the same time I think it will be vital for us as a species to spend time in the stillness that can only be found outside, offline and unplugged. We are and always will be dependent of that landscape. And probably too on that stillness.

Choosing optimism

It has been over a month since I’ve written. One way to describe this would be to say “I haven’t had the time,” or “I’ve been too busy.” Another way, one which acknowledges that I have the same 24 hours in a day* as everyone else, is to say, “I’ve chosen not to write for the last month.” Instead I’ve chosen sleep, work, travel, life outside the computer. It is true that my time spent on work and volunteer activities has increased in the last month. But these too are choices I’ve made, and in approaching this blog again after several weeks away, it seems important to remember that these are choices. Options.

For these options I am grateful. Not everyone has the options to choose when, where, at what, how and how much to work. When I am able to remember that, I am better able to see the bright side of what I myself have chosen. Optimism.

During this month I was able to start (and almost finish) a book I’ve wanted to read for a long time, Arundati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In the spirit of acknowledging her beautiful writing—and how often she made me look up new words—I decided today to take out my 1966 Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopedic Dictionary and look up the following:

opt v.i. To choose, decide, elect. [ < F. opter < L optare to choose, wish]
optic adj. Pertaining to the eye or vision. [ < MF optique < Med.L opticus < Gk. optikos < optos seen < stem op- as in opsomai I shall see]
optimism n. 1. A disposition to look on the bright side of things: opposed to pessimism. 2. The doctrine that everything is ordered for the best. 3. The doctrine that the universe is constantly tending toward a better state. [ < F optimisme < L optimus best ]

Hmm, a little rosy. Am I a true optimist? Certainly not by all meanings. These definitions make me recall—

—At this point in writing this, the electricity shuts off. I should have heeded the first clap of thunder, which set off several car alarms. But how often do we get electric storms in Seattle strong enough to knock out the power? In a second it and the computer both come back to life. My document, however, does not. I look up:

pessimism n. 1. A disposition to take a gloomy or cynical view of affairs: opposed to optimism. 2. The doctrine that the world and life are essentially evil. 3. The theory that the existing universe is the worst possible world. [ < L pessimus worst + -ISM]

Yikes! Relieved that at least I’m not a true pessimist, either, I retype my thoughts and carry on—Seattle poet Matt Gano has a poem about optimism and opticians and seeing and choosing, and after looking the words up I like the poem even better. I like to think of my own personal brand of optimism as seeing clearly the world for what it is, and choosing to take actions and interpret events in a way that gives me hope and meaning. In a way that acknowledges the imperfections and even evils in the world but still chooses to do what can be done to nudge the universe towards a better state. This is the optimism that I think Patch Adams, tireless true-life worker for social justice, advocates in describing himself as a “relentless optimist.” This is not the optimism that Barbara Ehrinreich derides in her new book Bright Side on America’s delusional optimism, an un-seeing faith in a brighter future even as we toil hand-over-fist to dismantle that future.

This is the optimism that brings me back to write after a busy month away, in the hope that this choice of how to use my time might illuminate even a small corner of the world.

*don't get me started on Daylight Savings...

The blues

This morning I wake up with Elton John in my head.

“Don't wish it away
Don't look at it like it's forever
Between you and me
I could honestly say
That things can only get better

And while I'm away
Dust out the demons inside
And it won't be long
Before you and me run
To the place in our hearts
Where we hide

And I guess that's why
They call it the blues...”

Beside me the love of my life is curled up in the blankets. As I stir she murmurs and snuggles in tighter. Elton John is still singing, and I recall the dream I just had. In my dream Madonna is dancing with Queen Latifah. They spin each other round and round. They are so in love. I look at LL sleeping beside me and a wave of incomprehensible gratitude washes over me. We are spinning each other round and round, so in love.

Over coffee LL finishes up her charting from the previous day’s clinic and I read Science News. A new analysis of 13.7-billion-year-old light, the cosmic microwave background, has provided further evidence for the theory that the universe began as an infinitesimally small dot and expanded “from subatomic scale to the size of a soccer ball” in 1/10exp33 seconds (and on to at least 10 light-years in size by 1 second). Researchers at Stanford have bypassed stem cells and transformed skin fibroblast cells into working neurons using virus-inserted genes. A compound similar to the active ingredient in marijuana might interfere with the proton channel which affords sperm cells their motility. Paleobiologists have identified the feather colors of a tiny flightless dinosaur that lived 151 million years ago.

My subscription to the magazine had lapsed and only recently been renewed, and I devour the information excitedly. As I marvel aloud over the idea that all observable matter—dinosaur fossils, marijuana leaves, stem cells, Queen Latifah, our solar system—was once compressed into a space smaller than the period at the end of a sentence, LL finishes her granola and yogurt and heads upstairs to take a shower.

In another moment she is out the door, and I am alone. The house is quiet.

“Time on my hands
Could be time spent with you...”

Suddenly the painting, the emails, the reading I had so looked forward to, seem so empty. I sit down and get out my watercolors and then stop. I do a quick search on the internet and pull up what I am looking for.

“But more than ever I simply love you
More than I love life itself...”

In a moment I will resume my day. Soon enough the sun will again shine. For now, though, I quietly savor the gray Seattle morning.

Marine life

Two days ago I received a many-times-forwarded email with the heading, “Please sign and send to everyone you can think of...HORRENDOUS!” Normally I am leery of such chain emails, which tend to be poorly-formatted and reactionary; this one was no exception. But the subject matter compelled me to probe further.

The email graphically depicted, in words and photos, the annual slaughter of Calderon dolphins (which comprise two species of pilot “whales” but like orcas are actually in the dolphin family) in the Danish Faeroe Islands.

I was instantly reminded of the documentary film The Cove. In The Cove, former Flipper host Ric O’Barry assembles a team of Hollywood tech experts, extreme divers and environmental activists to travel to Japan for what has been aptly described as a Mission Impossible-style exposé. Going truly behind enemy lines, they lay bare to the world the killing of some 20,000 dolphins a year.

While the Danish slaughter is horrific as well, it sadly is not surprising.

Around age six I joined Greenpeace, and then the Cousteau Society, and soon my involvement in “saving the oceans,” as I saw it, included the American Cetacean Society and the World Wildlife Fund. I adopted my own orca and wrote letters to protest the clubbing of harbor seals. In a seventh-grade animal report I veered away from my usual favorite—the giant squid—to write a dissertation, The Whale Called Killer. I concluded with, “…to call the orca a killer diverts our attention from the true killer: man.” I was and remain stalwart in my conviction that marine mammals should not die at our hands.

I do, however, question the impact of emails such as the one above. Apart from grammatical and spelling errors (Faeroe Islands was “Feroe Iland”), there were several larger issues. The first was the question of where all these forwarded signatures were going. A simple internet search takes one to a more organized petition site (below), which I did sign.

A second issue is delineated in an easily-found Wikipedia article on Faeroe Islands Whaling: just how different is this slaughter of wild, free (and intelligent) animals from the awful treatment, and often inhumane methods of killing, of feedlot cattle or boxed chickens? While I personally would refute this argument on its own grounds (i.e., it is precisely the freedom and especially the intelligence of the dolphins that makes their killing so horrific), there are others who would see it differently. Even as a meat minimalist, I cannot deny the point made by the Faeroe Islanders that the majority of us are hopelessly disconnected from our food sources.

On a much bigger scale is the question of what we as a species are doing to our oceans, and our world.

What may finally bring an end to the killing of marine mammals—and perhaps soon the majority of marine life—are some scenarios less gruesome than their current slaughter but equally chilling.

The first of these, which is shared by the waters of Japan and Denmark, is mercury and other poisoning. The world over, dolphins and whales concentrate human-made toxins because of their position at the top of the food chain. Already the mercury levels in these creatures are at levels known to cause neurologic damage. In the last 50 years the list of new chemicals we make that end up in the sea, including compounds that turn male species members into females, has exploded.

The second is ocean acidification. A New Yorker article a couple years back called “The Darkening Sea” painted a grim picture: Even if all fossil fuel emissions stopped today, the amount of CO2 we’ve put into the atmosphere will take 50-100 years to reach equilibrium with the oceans. As the waters take it up, their pH is lowered, i.e., they become more acidic. What occurs next, and is already happening, is that calcium carbonate cannot precipitate out of solution and thus coral reefs, oysters, shellfish, and over 1/3 of the ocean’s phytoplankton cannot form the shells the depend on for life.

That is to say, it may already be too late.

Which brings me to my final point, and the reason that I’m actually thankful to my friend for forwarding me the email. How willing are we to change our own behavior to lessen our negative impact on the planet? It’s easy to sign and forward an email; a modicum of effort more reveals other ways to get involved. But until we are personally willing to do such things as drive our cars less often and demand public transit systems (emitting less CO2), change our diet to eat less meat (a recent Science News article found that 85% of the carbon footprint of foods is not from the distance they travel to us, but from whether they are animal-based instead of plant-based), and in general form sustainable, fun, inter-dependent and non-growing communities that recognize that we—all of us, all species—are in it together on this finite planet, change will be small and limited.

On the other hand, the stakes of what we may yet save with a concerted effort make any involvement worth it: dolphins, whales, sea turtles, fish, water, the air, the planet, ourselves. It may not be too late.

http://thecovemovie.com/
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/stop-the-calderon-dolphin-slaughter-in-denmark
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/20/061120fa_fact_kolbert
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40934/title/AAAS_Climate-friendly_dining_%E2%80%A6_meats

Purpose, kung fu and love

(Link: YouTube - The Matrix Reloaded Agent Smith Fight Scene)
The voice is quiet and calm yet direct and laden with unmistakable menace.

“There is no escaping reason...because as we both know, without purpose we would not exist.
“It is purpose that created us.
“Purpose that connects us.
“Purpose that pulls us.
“That guides us.
“That drives us.
“It is purpose that defines us.
“Purpose that binds us.
“We are here because of you, Mr. Anderson. We’re here to take from you what you tried to take from us...purpose.”

These are the words spoken by Agent Smith in The Matrix Reloaded—several Agent Smiths, to be exact—just prior to engaging Mr. Anderson (“My name is ‘Neo’”) in mortal combat. Despite a display of martial arts skills in utter contempt of several laws of physics, Neo finds himself facing certain defeat against a horde of cloned agents. “It...is...inevitable.”

After three weeks of internet silence, I feel a bit like Neo, weighed down by an unrelenting and ever-increasing battery of tasks. LL and I just spent all of last week up in remote Omak interviewing for jobs to start this fall. The draft resolution to protest the AAFP-Coke alliance needs revising. Several Real Change efforts need attention. Having finally submitted a manuscript of Early One Morning and Late One Night to a New York publishing house, I would like to follow that up with a submission to the publishing arm of The Sierra Club.

Why on earth should I spend any time on a blog that may be ever read by few, if any?

Surprisingly, given that I started with a Matrix reference, I found the answer this morning in a book titled Love, Medicine, and Miracles by Dr. Bernie Siegel. The answer is simple. The answer is love.

In a world of gross inequality, injustice and environmental destruction, it is all too easy to look for meaning in any number of worthy causes. There are principles to fight for, dolphins to save from slaughter, children to provide with an existence of hope and education so different from that into which they are born. The common denominator is that we take these things on out of love.

Yet is also easy to forget this; it is easy to become burned out; to lose sight of a larger vision. It is easy to feel like we have lost our purpose, or more passively, like we have had it taken away by the demands of just keeping up.

This, then, is why I write. To reconnect with purpose. To reconnect with love.

“Love,” writes Bernie Siegel, “heals. The fundamental problem most patients face is an inability to love themselves.” I am not quoting him to suggest that he has miraculous answers, nor that I am somehow remarkable in trying to apply them. I am the patient here. It is I who needs the reminder that this time spent, if done with love, is worthwhile. Just because I did not meet my self-imposed goal of weekly blog posting does not mean I should abandon the entire project, but rather that I might choose to breathe, pause, and carry on.

Love heals. So it should not actually surprise me that even in The Matrix this most potent of purposes can be seen. While the second episode is mostly eye candy and unnecessary explosions, it is love, at the end of the first and best movie in the trilogy, that brings Neo literally back to life. Love is its own purpose, sufficient unto itself.

Of course, kung fu and the ability to fly never hurt, either. But when Neo breaks free and the throngs of Agent Smiths look skyward and brush themselves off, I like to think that what registers on their faces is not so much incredulity as the simple need for a hug.

Emily Dickinson

For the longest while I knew not much more of Emily Dickinson than a single favorite quote: "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

To read her poetry and letters for me bears out this image of a life startlingly lived, of a mind ecstatic with the experience of existing--and of ceasing to exist.

...I'd like to look a little more [the previous lines concern dying]
At such a curious earth!

To delve further into this mind, I will simply let her words speak for themselves. Below, then, are some snippets from poems and letters, taken from LL's book "Selected Poems & Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Robert N. Linscott."

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
_________________

Will there really be a morning?
Is there such a thing as day?
Could I see it from the mountains
Were I as tall as they?

Has it feet like water-lilies?
Has it feathers like a bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?

Oh, some scholar! Oh, some sailor!
Oh, some wise man from the skies!
Please to tell a little pilgrim
Where the place called morning lies!
_________________

I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl,
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.
...
_________________

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
_________________

Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.
_________________

Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door;
Or has it feathers like a bird,
Or billows like a shore?
....
_________________

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.
_________________

And finally this, which gives some insight into perhaps the loneliness of her mostly reclusive life. Emily Dickinson wrote a "letter to the world, that never wrote to me." Does all writing, that goes unheard, share some of the following sentiment?

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.

And if that writing is heard after one is dead, as was the case for her, does she somewhere feel the accolades we express to her? I like to think so.

300

Please note: this is not about the movie “300”, which I have not seen.

Earlier (“Rebels”, 10/26/09) I have commented on our propensity—human?, American?, hypo-manic?—to try and do so much. Clearly I have not made any changes in my own behavior. Though initially posted with a single sentence on Monday night, I am now catching up with the rest of this blog on Wednesday, all because I’ve been unrealistic about how many things I can get done in 24 hours.

This is exemplified by my email inbox. It refuses to drop below 300 messages and stay there for any length of time.

More accurately, I refuse to let it drop below that number. I could delete every single one of those 300 emails and possibly be better off for it: as far as I know, the world would keep spinning on its axis. Things that are really important would get re-sent to me. I could more realistically tackle current projects without having this number hanging over me.

Most of these messages, however, represent connections that I would like to make or to re-establish with real people. It seems a bit rash to just toss them out without at least making an attempt. And many of the connections are ones that lapsed during my residency. In a way this is my attempt to reclaim, or redefine, that time.

One of my favorite bumper stickers says, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” I like to think that it’s never too late to make and re-make human connections. To whittle away at a number, and in so doing create something intangible, but infinitely valuable.

Even if that means, as by definition it must if so much of my time is spent doing, doing less.

Beginnings II

My head is spinning.

It is the beginning of a new year. It is just after 5:30 on a Monday evening and in 23 minutes I will have used the remainder of the time I have allotted myself for this blog. I had such grand ambitions of what this first post of the year would be. As the seconds tick away I watch these ambitions spin wildly, collide with reality, explode like overheated balloons.

In my head are two memories, their juxtaposition framing my dilemma. When I started this blog I wanted to at least pay homage to a sentiment of Edward Abbey at the beginning of Desert Solitaire: to try to talk about the real world. Not to anthropomorphize, as we are wont to do, but to describe nature as it is.

On New Year’s Eve LL and I find ourselves, improbably, boxing. She is Albert Einstein, I, Jackie Chan. It is not even a contest. Einstein over Chan, K-O.

This is the first memory. Is the memory of a virtual event—for we are playing on a Wii, owned by the host of our charmingly odd bed and breakfast—a virtual memory? While the experience may have been all in my head, so to speak, my arms are sure sore.

The second memory is more tangible, and, even apart from not (virtually) dying, much more pleasant. After checking out of the B&B the next morning, we drive a couple miles up the road, park the car, and step out into reality. I have yet to experience any part of the Oregon coast that is not awesome, but that morning it is particularly so. Awesome: inspiring awe.

The pavement slopes directly into a sandy beach. Huge waves pound the shore, carving away at dunes held up by bunchgrass. A salty wind whips seafoam into a beach cover several inches deep. Low clouds seamlessly become rain, but thankfully hold back to a light, albeit horizontal, drizzle. We step onto the beach, carefully selecting a moving target of clear sand between ocean, foam, dune and driftwood. At the north end of the beach a promontory of basalt and sandstone juts into the Pacific. We start up its steep incline, the wind now a gale pushing us onward.

At the crest of the huge dune forming the saddle of the promontory, we pause.

Around us the wind is sheets of sand. Where earth becomes sky is not clear; so too the line where ocean meets air is blurred. 500 feet below us fissures in the rock channel waves into enormous bursts of spray which over millennia have carved caves and channels into the shoreline. Scrub pine clings to the leeward side of the cliffs, its myriad trunks ever bending to the wind. Everything is sound and motion. We are part of it all, and we are alive.

The horizontal precipitation intensifies.

When Ed Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire his self-issued challenge was to be out in nature and describe it as it is. Now I find it enough of a challenge simply to be out there: to find wilderness. And this is not to say that everything human is outside of nature—in fact, far from it. Abbey himself returns to the city to work in soup kitchens and find community.

I do want, however, to be cautious about time spent in things which are further removed from the living, breathing earth. Which includes time spent here: it’s 6:37, and I still have to post. Until next week.