Little glimpses of light.....

After a 16 year break, I recently returned to college.  I am now two quarters into an introduction to environmental studies class and one of the main things I have taken away from the class is a confirmation that my greatest fears are coming true.  The world is changing and it's most likely not going to be an easy transition.  Currents that have impacted the climate are beginning to slow and lose power.  Extinction is a very common event.  We are killing ourselves and we don't know how to stop.  These are some of the hard realities of being alive today and denial isn't going to be an option too much longer.  There are voices in my head that think that maybe I am paranoid or a little bit crazy or maybe I romanticize the role of the doomsayer.  In my head, as in the world, there is no more time left to question these assumptions.  The world is changing and it is our doing.

One fault of our culture is our unwillingness to look at despair and sit with it.  Another fault of our culture is that we do not know how to support someone who is sitting with their despair.  All of this must be a product of the fear of death that is part of the narrative of the West.

This is why small victories are important.  Small victories allow us to temporarily lay down the burden of fear and despair.  We must remember to take note when something beautiful is accomplished and allow that beauty to carry us through, a little bit further.

In many cultures we have developed a strange practice in relation to the arts, the award show.  A group of people, with neither eye nor ear to the pulse of deep culture, select which works of art, in various fields represent the best that "we" had to offer that year.  Usually, what this boils down to is which actors movie sold the most tickets and which song did corporate radio tell us was the best?  This is by no means a valid way to judge art and usually, anything posing any sort of challenge to normative culture receives no acknowledgement.

From time to time, something from out in the deep, pure blood of culture somehow makes its way to the surface.  There is an uproar in the media over the non-inclusiveness of the Academy Awards.  This is a valid critique of a worthless system but for the first time in 30 years and only the second time in history, a transgender person has been nominated for an Oscar.  This is made particularly exciting because the nominated musician, Anohni, isn't completely black and white about the idea of gender.  The medias primarily representation of transgender people has been very limited in it's scope.  There are men and women and it is okay to pick which one.  This is a great stride but for some people gender is more fluid. Anohni's expression of gender is something that is far more challenging to conventional notions of gender and doesn't dwell in the land of either or.

The song, which is nominated for best original song and is a collaboration between Anohni and J. Ralph, is from a documentary, Racing Extinction.  The film explores humanities role in the 6th great extinction, which is something that is happening now. The acknowledgement of climate change and mass extinction are themes that have lately been running through Anohni's music and unlike most protest music, her songs manage to be both poetic and beautiful.

Let's not forget the fact that she identifies as a witch!  In summation, a gender fluid, environmentalist, witch has been nominated for an Academy Award and there is something incredibly beautiful about that.  It gives me a little spark of hope that maybe, just maybe our culture can adapt and becoming something more beautiful.  It's unlikely but lots of small sparks are the building blocks for a fire.

It is always important to remember history and those brave first pioneers who first came and challenged the conventional thought of our culture.  In this spirit, please read about Angela Morley, who was the first transgender person nominated for an Oscar, all the way back in 1974.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Morley

Turnt uP

Out with the old, in with the new?

Today is the first day of 2016.  I am writing this from Orcas Island, an island in the shape of a horseshoe, one island in the archipelago of the San Juan Islands.  The air outside is crisp and cold despite the best efforts of the Sun.  The birds of the island fly by the window, to them it is just another day and the symbolic importance of the new year means nothing.

So, it is time to say goodbye to 2015 and send our hopes and dreams off into the not too distant future, where hopefully they will become manifest.  This last year was a rocky one for sure.  The new was littered with stories of violence, if it wasn't the police doing the killing, we knew to blame it on the religious fanatics or the mentally disturbed.  2015 was also the warmest year in the history books. Temperatures on Christmas Eve in New York City were in the 70's, just shy of where they were on the 4th of July.  As the year ended, many people in the southern parts of the United States, faced unsure futures as they watched their homes and possessions swallowed up by funnel clouds.  Unusually warm temperatures met with storms to create these tornadoes.  Scientific reports came out about the melting of Greenland and the impacts that the dumping of this fresh water into the seas may have.  Still, there are those out there who deny that we are living in a changing world, even though the evidence is clearly there, before our eyes.  We have come to a point in our human evolution where economic gain outweighs the importance of clean air, clean water and a viable future for our children and grandchildren.

We are now living in a geological epoch that many scientists and thinkers have chosen to refer to as the "Anthropocene", so called because of the impact of humans on the Earth's ecosystems.  We are also seated snuggly in the Holocene extinction or the sixth great extinction.  Extinction is a natural process of any ecosystem but, and I personally find this hard to bear, we carry the majority of the responsibility for this extinction.

So, this is where we find ourselves.  Where is there to look for hope as we fumble forward in the darkness?  How can we slow the impending ecological collapse?  What hope do we have to save ourselves from religious and systematic violence and terror?

I recently returned to college after a fifteen year gap in my education.  I just completed the first quarter of an Environmental Studies program.  During a conversation with other classmates, a student who is of Native-American descent spoke of the idea that earlier peoples had more respect for the environment.  He said that he didn't believe this to be true and that they simply didn't have the tools needed to exploit the planet in the ways that we do in this day and age.  Thinking on this, I came to a realization.  We are at a completely unique point in human history and have the greatest opportunity for positive change.  We have seen the dangers that the loss of enchantment with the world can cause.  We have seen what happens when we prioritize economic gain over the health of the ecosystems that provide us with what we truly need to live.

I hope this new year is one of clear vision and bold voices.  I hope for a shift in the way that we humans view the world, towards a more holistic way of seeing, where we recognize that we are one small part of a global ecosystem and that all life carries its own inherent value, equal to our own.  I hope that we all see our way to a more peaceful, just and carrying way of being in the world.  I hope for a recognition of the beauty that is the wild world and a letting go of the conceit that we have are worth of dominion over the world.

Happy New Year!

Writings from Walleye #6 12/13/15

 

For anyone that stumbles across this, walleye is a weekly writing and movement workshop in Seattle that I went to for a couple of years.  Now that I have moved away to go to college, it has been awhile since I have been.  I was lucky enough to make it back today and it still inspires me.

Here is my writing from today.  It's not supposed to make sense, it's just what comes out, unedited.

How to be your own decorator:

        PART 1

        intelligent-keen, subtle, sharp, knowing, downy, wide-awake, gnostic
        intelligence is the ability to start a fire and then to get out of the way of its burning.
        intelligence is growing sharp teeth when the time has come to eat.
        intelligence is conversing with the clouds and listening to their advice.
        intelligence is knowing the value of (k)not knowing.

        death bell-passing bell, knell
        debris-eluvium
        decay-decline, ruin
        possess

        In the distance, a bell is ringing; knell.  Someone is passing by, someone is passing through, someone is passing on.  What do I possess?  The whole of the world.  Intangible.  I sit upon a saddle and am myself saddled.  .listen.listen.listen.  In the distance I hear thunder and a bell.  .listen.listen.listen.

        PART 2

       "There are innumerable smart and fascinating varieties of trimmings and finishes."

        More than  one.  Far more than one branch blown from the tree, blown by the wind.  More than two,  branches laying.  The wind sings its old song and we all howl in unison.  Three and more than three branches.  I have lost count; bright holes poked into the black sky and the world is tearing and being torn.  Four branches and then five still seem to be creaking there where they lie.  Six and more than six lies, told with a twisted and tattered tongue; a tangled mess of stories.  Stories of the day you were born before you knew the space between the ground and the sky, no sense of differentiation.  Nonsense and what difference does it make?  Six beetles scramble across the floor.  Six nails holding the wings to the wall.  Six bent and broken forks, tuned to the frequency of nothing, lie buried in the dirt at your feet and your toes are there and they are squirming.

     

     

     

So amazing......

in so many ways.  Doug Peacock is awesome and seeing him with Arnold Scwarzenegger is surreal.

<>-----------------IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII-----------------<>

A howl in the night issues forth.
You call for silence, "Silence!" you say.
The night does not exist to cool you.
The night is on fire with one thousand screams;
screams of lust and screams of death.
Outside of your home, there is nothing for you to claim
but the memory of a howl in the night.

2014, The year of Abbey.

For the last few years, I have been trying to keep a record of all the books that I have read each year.  Three years ago, I posted my reading list to this blog.  My then roommate said that she thought it was a bit pretentious of me to assume that anyone would care what I had read.  If you know me, then you know that one of my favorite things to do, is share books that I love with people that I love.  Truth be told, I am even happy to share books I love with people  that I don't much care for.  Who knows, maybe if they read some of the books that I have suggested, they will be better people  (I'm kidding.)  I know that certain books have made me a better person and blown my brain wide open with brilliant and poetic ideas that hadn't yet occurred to me.

Last year, I didn't do so good at keeping a list, so didn't post one.  Maybe I was still feeling self conscious of coming across as pretentious.  Due to the small number of people who have ever looked at this blog, it's hard to imagine coming across any sort of way.  This year, I had planned to post my reading list again but then I went ahead and lost the whole thing.  This leaves me little to post.

However, one thing that stood out about my reading this year is my new found love of Edward Abbey.  I read six books by him in 2014 and, other than the year I was busy loving Richard Brautigan, I don't believe that I have ever read so many books by one author.  The books that I read, in the order I read them, were The Fool's Progress, The Brave Cowboy, The Monkeywrench Gang, Haduke Lives!, Fire on the Mountain and Desert Solitaire. 

I had known of Edward Abbey's books for years but for some reason, foolishly had never read him.  Although I don't agree with every single opinion that he expresses, I find that he is a person of great character, who was not afraid to speak from his heart and to me those are noble things to find in a writer.  As our country become more and more homogenous and people lose themselves in social networking and the sticky web, of the world wide variety, we need more larger than life, bold, wild characters to remind us what it is we are voluntarily giving up.  Who are these iconoclasts today?  Is there still room in this world for untamed souls to shout at us from the wilderness?  Is anyone even willing to listen?

I for one am glad to lend my ear and hope to someday be among the voices doing the shouting.  I thank Edward Abbey for sharing a voice of dissent and sharing it loudly.  I thank Edward Abbey for speaking for the last of the wilderness that we have left in this country.  I hope that in his lifetime, he knew that some people were listening.  I hope that wherever old Ed is resting in the American desert, that his soul is sleeping well and that his wish, "I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree.", has come true.  I hope that someday, I can also break the law in death and that my body can pay it's due.

Thank you, Ed.