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.

HNY!

¡Próspero Año Nuevo!
Godt Nytår
×åñòèòà Íîâà Ãîäèíà
MELKAM ADDIS AMET YIHUNELIWO!
رأس السنة
Heri Za Mwaka Mpyaº
L'Shannah Tovah
農曆新年
Happy New Year!