INTERNAL COMBUSTION

The internal combustion engine and modern forms of energy production and consumption are largely centrifugal, dissipating huge amounts of energy in the creation of friction, heat and noise as energy is pushed outward - hence the need for metal bands around early wagon wheels to keep them from flying apart, and for radiators and fan belts and such. In contrast, Nature’s preferred means of locomotion is centripetal, moving from the outside toward the inside, in spirals, at increasing velocity, producing a consolidating, friction-reducing and therefore cooling effect. In Nature, extreme heat and violent force are used sparingly and for specific functions – to relieve pressure, to cleanse or decompose so that regeneration and rebalancing can occur. Everything to do with combustive engines is invasive, wasteful, complicated, noisy and expensive. Conversely, “Everything that is natural is silent, simple and cheap.”1 Planetary survival depends on our ability to rethink and restructure human activity in concert with natural systems.

Science is only now catching up to what indigenous peoples have always known: that the powerful elements locked beneath the Earth’s crust – oil, gold, uranium, and the rest – are crucial to maintaining the balance of the whole and therefore ought not be disturbed. Viktor Shauberger’s observations and experiments indicate that oil, in particular, is the source for healthy mineral content of spring water. The fact that the particulars of this underground balancing are still a mystery does not negate its inherent truth. Instead, it invites respect, even awe, and careful study to understand how the overall system and individual elements work. It reinforces our obligation to make radical course corrections.

We need to cast ourselves far beyond the fragmented battles, however urgent, to save this or that endangered species, habitat or corner of the world. The future depends on our willingness to step into the broadest imaginable vision of relationship, possibility and wholeness so that we have a sense of our earthsource at all times, one that informs our understanding of where we are going and how we will get there: What would a world look like that is fully restored and thriving?

Joseph Eagle Elk, a Lakota medicine man who lived 50 years ago, speaks of power and its use, and of the sacredness of fire. He explains how critical it was that people handled fire with gratitude, using it only when they really needed it, knowing that fire was both life giving and life destroying, and therefore requiring of us that we enter into sacred relationship with it. He said that there had come a time when people forgot that fire was a gift and stopped being thankful, and so ‘the heart got hard.’ Most indigenous cultures say the same thing. In Eagle Elk’s words, “Whenever we forget we are part of life and that at the heart of life is relationship, whenever we lose touch with our place in the scheme of things, then we start to take it all for granted. We put ourselves in the front… and then we forget what we have been given. We become hard. We begin to destroy ourselves.” 2

Kenyan peacebuilder and theater artist Babu Ayindo, speaks of the traditional understanding of conflict as being “a form of imbalance with fellow human beings, imbalance with nature, imbalance with the supernatural.” He says, “You know, right now I see the symbol of justice as being balancing scales. Even in most of Africa, we adopted the western justice system, with the emphasis on blame and punishment. But for my grandparents or any council of elders acting on the behalf of the community to resolve a conflict, the emphasis would be on the restoration of relationships, not just of relationships between human beings, but with nature and the supernatural.”

Babu says, “ For many Africans, once you apologize, you know, they’ll forgive you. In fact, it is viewed very negatively if people were to apologize and you refuse to forgive them because once they apologize, they are giving you the opportunity to redress

the imbalance (in all the worlds). Refusing that is viewed as a terrible thing to do, a greedy thing to do actually because you are now working against the communitarian purpose of our being here.” 3

Modern Western culture divides our world into either/or, us and them, all or nothing, boom or bust. Progress is primarily measured in terms of material gain. Modern narrative uses conflicts and crises to ‘drive’ the story. This way of seeing things, repeated over and over in the stories we tell ourselves, becomes the story we enact. We need stories of wholeness and possibility that will keep the world intact. It is time for humans to reclaim our place in global ecology. Like the tannins on the acacia, the earth is telling us, No More. Let us sit down together and listen.


1Alick Bartholomew, Hidden Nature: The Startling Insights of Viktor Shauberger, Floris Books, 2003, p. 90

2 Gerald Mohatt & Joseph Eagle Elk, The Price of a Gift, a Lakota Healer’s Story, University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 133-134

3 Joseph Babu Ayindo interview conducted at Eastern Mennonite University Summer Peacebuilding Institute, 1999, www.everydaygandhis.org

RESTORATION

“Until the lions have their own historians,

the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

- Chinua Achebe

Corporations are the hunters glorifying themselves today. Modernity requires that we sever our connection to the natural world and pledge allegiance to the things that money can buy. We are told that the impoverishment of the soul that overcomes us can be healed by consuming the things that corporations make for us, including ‘buying’ the stories they tell us about Nature’s latest diminishment or the inevitability of the wars that profit them. 

In recent years there has been a lot of talk about ecological ‘hot spots’ – pristine, endangered areas that conservationists seek to protect. The strategy is to identify places that are close to 90% degraded, then seek to protect the beleaguered remaining 10%. The assumption seems to be that this is all we can hope to achieve, that we’ll be lucky to attain even this meager success.

But when we’re talking about saving (as if it were up to us) the natural world, is it even correct to ‘strategize’? The definition of the word strategy derives from military activity: Strategy (Greek "στρατηγία"—stratēgia: from stratēg (ós) military commander, general (strat ( ós ) army + -ēgos noun derivative of ágein to lead); meaning, A high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty (Source: wikipedia). Secondary definitions refer to strategy in the context of business or games. 

Do we really want to depend on a military approach to healing our relationship with the natural world? Saving small percentages of the whole does not necessarily save or even protect what remains. Even the most passionate and well-educated researchers do not know the environmental ‘tipping point’ that will cause Gaia’s demise, nor do we understand the deeper function of such things as oil, uranium, gold, diamonds, copper, and other buried substances that surely are not random or inconsequential and so must have a larger purpose, though we have not bothered to wonder what it is. Decisions and actions arising from short-term thinking do not consider long-range consequences nor do they perceive long-range possibilities. And none of us knows what resplendent restoration is possible if we set our hearts on it.

Now more than ever is the time for a wildly expansive, un-practical vision of a natural world fully restored, within an epochal, perhaps millennial time frame. Infinitely better to spend our creative energy initiating the first 500 years of an unabashedly passionate vision of full, unimpeded and uncompromised global ecological and cultural restoration and to offer ourselves to an inclusive global dialogue that will create a global vision of restoration to inform and sustain us through multiple generations of effort. 

If we ‘surrender’ our vision of comprehensive global ecological restoration and settle instead for the struggle to protect tiny percentages of marine and terrestrial habitat, we allow corporations (and the culture which gives them primacy) to set the terms by which nature and nature lovers must abide. Remember that 100 years ago, commercial air travel, computers, and the Internet seemed impossible. Extinctions on the scale we’re seeing now seemed impossible, too. We’re talking here about the ‘surround’ upon which life depends. Do we really want to tell our children that the best we can manage is to save 10% or less of what remains of the intact natural world? 

Within each of us is a passionate love for some place or some being in Nature that will open our throats once again to the daily cooing of gratitude for Life. Once found, that gratitude is our most reliable guide to right action. All is not lost. Let us sing the natural world within and around us back to its fullness.  

SEPARATION

We humans long to know we've made our mark and therefore are living/will have lived a noble or at least worthwhile life, especially if, by so doing, we can leave a curative mark on the very system that has been destroying us and the Earth, and which gives rise to/has infected us with the illness of this same longing. Ironically, of course, is that the purist antidote is to step out of this paradigm altogether and re-inhabit a cyclic, non-linear and intentionally unremarkable life of surrender to and re-absorption by that same generous non-linearity.

The preoccupation with the Mayan moment of 2012, likewise exalted linear time and its mono-directionality. The more we emphasize these marker events, the more we strengthen linear time. Is writing, by its nature, so linear that it is of limited usefulness as a tool that can conjure (and thus inhabit) an alternative ecology?

Is it possible (reasonable? desirable?) – and, if so, how - to (re)forge a dialogic relationship with Life while simultaneously retaining a foothold in the dichotomous, linear, commodified, fear-based, history-bound culture of self-nonself? Can one, ought one, step across that paradigmatic border and arrive intact in the undifferentiated, mythic reality and be sufficiently healed by it to withstand re-infection with modernity? Can one truly inhabit both realms? What kind of mixed message is this of the locus of potency? What is the purpose of our stubborn pursuit of this kind of travel in and out of connection? Do we imagine that we can heal the malignancy of separation and still choose to live within it?

RATS & FENCES

[Note: In late 2012 I bought a beautiful piece of land along the 10 Mile River, walking distance to the ocean. My friends who are permaculture trainers created a blueprint for restoring degraded areas, for growing food and protecting the streams, meadow, forests and river. I am restless, on edge, in over my head.]

Not sleeping. What is it that is keeping my mind so busy? The land, the fencing, the lizard killed by the brush clearing, the orchard, the garden, my work, my mother, my body, my dog, the rats, the next earthquake (The Big One?), and haven’t seen any whales since New Year’s Day.

Caught a rat in the live trap at the new house. Fed him marshmallows and poured water onto a split reed pushed through the wires of his cage. His translucent pink ears, round and alert like Mickey Mouse in miniature. His dark, brindled, minky soft fur rippling with wild health. We make eye contact. His gaze valiantly holds mine the whole time I speak, which grows longer as I do so. Funny to find I have so much to say to a rat. He stops what he was doing (looking for food, water, a way out of the cage) and listens, motionless. I tell him, Thank You for allowing yourself to be caught. You are beautiful. We will not kill you or hurt you. We do not wish to frighten you. You are welcome to live at a respectful distance, to eat well and be warm, but you cannot be here. Please let the others know. We will take you somewhere far that we hope is safe. You cannot stay here. No rats can be here, in this house.
I am wondering: How can we build a fence like a skin? The boundary between me and not me, the world and each of us. In this case, between human-centered activity and deer activity, which is also tick activity, mountain lion, fox, bobcat and bear activity, and eating-vegetable-gardens activity. What rightfully belongs to one or the other? Are there places on the land we are willing not to go? What is the correct and proper dance of reciprocity based on intimacy and respect? Or is it a dance of intimacy and respect based on reciprocity? How to fence so that it’s the skin of my body? How to fence so that it’s safe and sustaining on both sides of it?

EACH RELATIONSHIP A LIVING ALTAR

I used to want to visit the altars of modern killing to witness them and thus know they were real: Auschwitz, Rwanda, Cambodia, Argentina and the rest, but no more. Looking back, I suppose I thought it my duty to bear witness to the extremes of our time, and also that by exploring the descent of others I could immunize myself against my own capacity to destroy life, as if witnessing massive acts of brutality at arm’s length created a vaccinating dose of it. I can admit these things now because, at 62, I know that no such exemption exists, and that what one chooses to focus on has more bearing on one’s fate, and therefore, one’s legacy, than what one is able to avoid.

Some years ago during a time when I was overwhelmed with worries and to-do lists, I found myself spending yet another night ‘hamstering’ instead of sleeping. (If you’ve ever had a pet hamster, mouse or rat, you will know that – shamefully, we often put these nocturnal creatures in tiny cages with little wheels for them to ‘play’ in. All night, they spin - as I was spinning within my mind’s whirring little wheel…) In desperation, I got out of bed and lay down on the floor on my belly. The question that came was this: What relationships do you tend?

At the time, the primary relationship I was tending was with my computer and all the necessary administrative tasks that kept me from finding a sense of completion to rest in. I felt far from my deeper writing projects, far from finding joy in life. Most of all, I felt far from Nature.

What prevents us from hearing Nature’s howls of possibility? Where in our bodies do we sense our longing for restoration? For silence? For wildness? How can we grieve together and make amends for what we and our forebears have done to the earth, and, therefore, ourselves? When, if not now, is the moment before it’s too late? There is a course correction that comes naturally with knowing what relationships we tend, and deep satisfaction from tending our relationship with the natural world. Each relationship becomes a living altar.

I like being awoken in the middle of the night by the brightness of the stars. I want to hear wind with birdcalls in it, and maybe the night sounds of animals, preferably lions, hyenas and hippos, the occasional night heron or cricket, and those odd, unidentifiable grunts and coughs that make one feel small and in a bigger world one cannot know and therefore will never, thank goodness, control, or care to.

In the African bush, silence is measured by the movement of shadows, every tree and shrub a living sundial. Ring-necked doves whir in the heat, as long as the sun is out, and fall silent at twilight. Pit-prrh-it, pit-prrh-it, their cooing pulses in the dry air, a thousand living clocks that keep the hours marching in a great circle, ratcheting the light through woodlands and across the undulating plains and pans. It is these sounds that remind me to stop and lift my eyes to the farthest horizon, to sit in wonderment at how the day knows what to do, a vast harmony that is the everything and is what matters above all else and that will hold us indifferently so we are as free and as wary as anything else in the intervals between hunger and contentment, danger and rest.

This hunger for the sounds and silence of Africa began long ago, before I was born, a path shaped by human hands and laid out in a pattern that drew me toward it, though I had no conscious desire to explore it. In Africa they say that before you begin a journey, you own it, but once you take the first step, it owns you. The journey into Africa was not of my making, but it has illuminated my life. And Africa awoke in me the longing for silence after certain silences – and certain sounds - had entered my bones along the sand rivers of Tanzania in the summer of 2008, when I camped there for the first time. The silence of the bush is actually very noisy. In it are the interwoven sounds of fruit bats dipping and feeding like nocturnal hummingbirds in the trees above our tents; the lioness draped across the road – all the way across it – and roaring so loud and so close that our bodies felt like tuning forks reverberating with the notes of her voice. We sat in the back of our little open-sided cart, like bells still ringing, clutching each other’s hands.

When I got home from Africa that time, my house sitter had rearranged my furniture and ‘forgotten’ to put it back. The neighbors had begun adding a second story to their 1920’s cottage, and I arrived home to workmen jack-hammering the driveway beside my kitchen window as the McMansioning process began. (Several years later, the remodel remained incomplete and the couple was getting a divorce.) Why do we jackhammer things when what we crave is silence? Sometimes it takes a jackhammer to pulverize the life that can’t be repaired, the driveway that no longer takes you home. The closed door of silence opened my search for land on which to live where I could be in and with the wild. This mythic place that did not yet exist for me in any tangible way was also where I hoped to learn an intimacy with the wild that had eluded me, its absence creating a backdrop of sadness that infused everything.

It has been fear - only fear - that has kept me looking for shards of connection with the wild that could be pieced together into a vessel that would contain the longing for silence and for the aliveness that creates it. Perhaps it was my father’s death that finally set me free by placing me next in death’s receiving line, finally willing to seek a sense of comfort in the wild that I have not been able, or perhaps willing, to embrace until now. When the time comes, I wish to die outdoors, my body on the earth’s body, in a place I love and have come to know, releasing my last breath into her care.

BITS AND PIECES #1

It is significant, startling, that animals, plants, stones, water, birds and even micro-organisms remain friendly, neutral, even overtly benign and inviting of (re)relationship in spite of our unrelenting brutality. This inexplicable open-ness is less a charming quirk than a simple fact of character: it is in the nature of most beings (humans included) to seek relationship, to express love and receive it. Remarkably, this has not evolved out of the non-humans. One wonders whether Nature is curious to see whether humans will remember or even recognize this connectedness and choose it.