the future we follow: Recent Episodes
Charlie Orphanides
Here we are again. I’m listening for the future to send out a beacon. I’ve been polishing the mirrors on the telescope of my consciousness for any transmissions from beyond the chatter of mundane humanity. I just read an article about how glass has changed the world and may contribute to greater change still- largely due to its unique molecular amorphous constitution. It is somehow both liquid and solid, or somewhere between the two, and can therefore take on novel ingredients that can change its qualities and expand its uses. There is glass that bounces and may help repair cartilage in people with arthritis. Bioglass. The nearly ubiquitous element, silicon - of which glass is made- is one of the most abundant elements on earth-along with oxygen. Cell phones. Fiber optic cables. Reading glasses. Windows. Solar panels. Through this element, the whisper of light asks us questions about our intent, allows us the ability to relate, to communicate, to see, to generate - it insists we purify our will, our capacity for love, for the love that does, that helps. It takes the purest of glass to make the lenses that allow us to peer into the deepest regions of space, that may allow us to see planets circling distant stars. There is the lore of the human body as a crystal - as we purify ourselves, the light of the divine is able to shine through us. In the movie Kundun, the Dalai Lama says he is like a mirror. When asked if he is the Lord Buddha, he replies, “I believe I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good man, you see yourself.” There is something to this mystery of light - in all its forms. The light that is slow enough to become matter and the light beyond the visible spectrum. All creation fluctuations of light and warmth. Meet the moon through the looking glass. We are a window, a lens. A vision waiting to be seen.
The moon is full today. A snow storm is coming. The storms seem to be coming on just less than a seven day cycle. The moon remains in roughly that of twenty-eight days. These rhythms are not arbitrary. Neither those of the snow nor of the moon. I spoke to a baby today and tried to smile with my eyes, for I had on a mask. She was searching for the words a face speaks - hearing only sounds from my larynx was clearly insufficient. She managed a smile nonetheless, perhaps appreciative of my efforts. It is a shame to lose faces and smiles and dimples and cheekbones lifting and lips quivering and chins. We take off our masks to look in solitude at the moon and walk the snow-muffled streets. We hope we haven't lost too much or forgotten the way back. There is illumination in the full moon, snow covered night.
The leaves are changing. It seems autumn has finally arrived here on the western plains. The trees quiver in deep yellow and lose their leaves reluctantly. While running this week, I crossed over the South Platte River and was struck by its beauty. Even in the shadows of factories and paper mills, half-abandoned strip malls and frontage roads, the river runs on, white foam in its eddies, navy waves and shimmering sunlight dancing in its ripples. For a flash of a moment I was transported to a time when the river was nestled in the high grasses and trees along its banks in a time before today’s people came and burdened the landscape with our machinations and creations. It was simple and pleasant. And while these writings are intended to paint pictures of the future making itself available in the present, the past seemed to call to me and ask that I share in its legacy. I have heard it said that sadness is dwelling in the past and fear is dwelling in the future. I have to actively resist succumbing to sadness when I think about the past, especially in terms of the natural world. Sure, humans have always been humans, silly and violent, beautiful and shortsighted, but I can’t help but imagine a time when the natural world was more abundant and vibrant, quiet yet threatening. In all this idealized dreaming and lamenting upon a past gone, a forest destroyed, an ocean plasticked, there rolls the South Platte River. It still meanders through the high plains on its descent from the Rocky Mountains, freckled with golden leaves from aspen trees and cottonwoods. It still shimmers in the sun until it meets with the North Platte and together, now one, they persist until they meet the Missouri, carrying Colorado snow melt and cow manure and fertilizer into the Mississippi and on into the Gulf of Mexico. The persistence is profound and heartening. The air is crisp and finally breathable. The trees truly stunning. The river immaculate, still running, the future beckoning, downstream.
There is a new type of cloud. At least here on the near plains east of the Rocky Mountains in August and September. At least new to me. It rises like a vague wall from the western horizon. The mountains are hidden behind this veil of cloud, even the faces of the front range only fifteen or twenty miles away. The cloud ascends as one mass up to where I would have to begin to lift my head to follow it up into the sky with my gaze. There it forms a bulbous, undulating edge, similar to that of a cumulus cloud but less defined and substantial. But the cloud also seems to leak out over everything within view. Haze might be the word for it, but that doesn’t quite provide an adequate description. It is more like a fine mist completely lacking in moisture. The sun even seems to be shy in the presence of such atmospheric conditions, though in light only. It has no reservations in providing the necessary heat to complete the sensation of living inside a wood-fired brick oven. This macabre seen is of course created by the wild fires in California and Oregon, perhaps augmented by some burning on the western slope of the Rockies and the creation of ozone from industry and automobiles. It has become relentless and predictable. Lately we hear less of how to prevent such fires, such clouds, such air. Rather we are searching for ways to mitigate the effects- air filters, less outdoor exercise, drive less. The orange of the sun as it descends through this cloud toward the horizon is intimidating, even while stunning in its beauty. There is a nearly imperceptible smell as well, that surely is recognized by the olfactory nerves and stimulates some subtle cascade of hormones signaling danger. Perhaps in the future such signals will be dulled down, perhaps will not reach the fight, flight or freeze responses. And perhaps, this will allow us more freedom to see one another as human, to attend to one another with compassion and the undeniable understanding of our interconnectedness. This summer, I was in New York City, playing frisbee in Prospect Park, and my eyes were burning from the smoke from California, thick as a Manhattan fog. As we awaken, the earth listens, hears, as do the angels, cherubim, seraphim, the clouds their bodies. Awaiting the attention of the humans, calling from the future.
It’s time to return to considering the future in our today. I’m trying to ingest all that is happening right now in the world and parse the ransom note of news and current events and upheaval and discord and find something worth saying, something with at least the slightest poetic bent, something speaking with clarity through it all. Sitting with my family today, I finished my bowl of beans and rice with fresh tomatoes from our garden and cheddar cheese from Costco and salsa from the health food store, and I noticed one small rose waving in the wind. I saw it through our front window. The rose bush is most likely quite old; it was here when we moved in several years ago. I tend to it, prune it, water it. It mostly blossomed much earlier in the season, more toward the end of spring, and I am not sure what this rose is doing. What gall to attempt to bloom now, in the middle of August when all around it are the withering remnants of roses long past-the bush is now mostly thorns and leaves. The persistence of nature is certainly something real. Tonight I also spent nearly an hour pulling weeds from the woodchipped walkways of my backyard, walkways that bring me a sense of ease when they are free from weeds, walkways both my eyes and my feet can follow to flowerbeds and vegetable garden, garage and water descending over rocks. The weeds, though not nearly so beautiful as a small mid-August august rose, are equally if not more impressive in their resilience and craftiness and persistence. I can hardly believe the reproductive and bountiful prowess of these damned bindweeds. One really must give them their due respect. It is said an anti-cancer drug is derived from bindweed. I have not heard such accolades for the rose. Alas, this is truly a diversion from all that is going on outside the confines of my small home and yard to which I tend and occupy my overwhelmed consciousness, but it is also a picture of that which will thrive in the future. Yes, roses will continue to bloom, though maybe smaller and on a different schedule, and plants like the bindweed and the Siberian Elm, otherwise known as the weed tree, will flourish in a world that is hotter and drier, that is burning and concrete, that is drilled and mined. And we, humans, what shall we do? Follow the bindweed and weed tree into the urban deserts and proliferate through sheer craftiness and unwillingness to quit? For the flower of the bindweed has a beauty too, it is called a wild morning glory. Yet the bindweed doesn’t like competition, a healthy soil and strong plants will push it out, if we can keep those alive. We have choices. They all seem challenging, and they all seem to have a less than wonderful side to them. The rose was smaller, a vibrant pink leaning toward fuchsia, waving in the wind, compact and high upon the fading bush.
Sometime around March of 2020…
Three weeks ago…
The temperature was in the high sixties today. Sunny with an occasional firm breeze and a few passing clouds sheltering the sun from our illness for a few moments. The days continue in this surreal whir of existence. It feels as though there is a muffler on time, and space is mired in a gelatinous film. The weather, nature itself, is deceiving. That hardly seems possible. The city I now call home has ordered us to Stay at Home or Shutter in Place. We’re allowed to run and hike and walk and ride our bikes, so long as we stay six feet away from other human beings and don’t spit or sneeze or cough or high velocity single nostril project snot on them. We’re also allowed to do essential business such as buy food or alcohol or weed or hardware or lumber or a toilet or go to the hospital.
Today…
That feels like an eternity ago. Not much has changed other than our minds and emotional content. More people have died. Many have been sick. Many more are and have been healthy. People seem to be doing what they understand to be their civic duty. We pray or hope or wear masks and gloves or stay home or work in the garden or all of the above. We try not to be afraid.
Some time between…
I walked out my front door tonight, a being confounded by the news and health and illness, absorbed in my thoughts, in a clutching embrace with my own feelings, and as I stepped down from the threshold onto my porch, I looked up. The early evening sky was shimmering with astral glory. Venus in the western sky glowed like an illuminated crystal, slightly to the south stood Orion, proud and gallant, the waxing crescent moon comfortably between the two. I was overcome with a merging of awe and shame, as if I was receiving the gentlest scolding from a benevolent and stunningly powerful force saying, “We’re still here.” I felt small. The world and our troubles felt small, though not insignificant. This compassionate force was not belittling the suffering and the challenges of our human race or of our planet earth. It was simply reminding me there was more out there. More working in grandest harmonies than my feeble consciousness could decipher or encompass with my paltry feelings or intellect.
On the first day of spring, snow fell wet and heavy, a blanket to cover us from all that lives between us. It was quiet, not as cold as it looked. One could almost forget all that is living in the world right now, the invisible palpable fear of the collective. I tried to smile at people in the grocery store, faces hesitant but desperately longing for contact. Stay six feet away but for the sake of all that is holy look me in the eye and affirm that I am human. That was what I heard them saying. Some of them. Others seemed thankful they now had an excuse to remain separate, isolated, obscure. This type of snow weighs down the trees so the branches hang low, reach down to brush your shoulder, drop a clump of snow between the back of your head and the collar of your jacket; a branch that is usually over your head as you walk down the sidewalk now stands before you in bold defiance of the new laws of the land. The snow melts quickly, and puddles from street car snow melt reach up and grab your pant leg. Overgrown pumpkin size clumps of slushy icy snow linger in the street. All once dusty dirt, once revealed beneath the snow, is mud. It is difficult to walk, in grocery stores and alleyways, in spaces once deemed public now condemned, on sidewalks past dog-walkers and through the slurry of our concern and uncertainty. The grass is greener now, days after the spring snow covered it. It did not relent in pursuing its aspirations. Children play in puddles and mud and tromp through warm snow with wet sneakers. It is spring after all.
Well, now it’s been nearly two years since I have written, and we find our world in the midst of a “pandemic.” I am out of practice. My writing is choppy and unsure of itself. Yesterday, as I rode my bicycle home from the school where I teach and where my own children will someday be attending- the school that will now be closed for the next four weeks, perhaps more, I noticed a dark mist resting on and below the mountains in the west. It drew my attention each time the streets allowed an unobstructed view - most of the larger east-west blocks, where no tall buildings stood in the way. When I turned right, toward the mountains, onto the street perpendicular to my own, a sharp stream of light illuminated a portion of that dark mist and the mountains just behind it, pouring down from the heavens. The color was orange or rose or peach with golden hints- more red than a honey bee- like the sun but softer, touchable. There was a sharp line between the dark mist and the wash of light. I did not stop and stare, or take the time to observe in stillness. I haven’t done that in some time. Times like these the stream of the future coming toward us is blinding, deafening, immediate, a wave through a flooding mine hundreds of feet within the earth, and perfectly harmonious, a Caribbean clear picture of all we are manifesting as a human race.
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Some time last year, in the midst of teaching a middle school math class, I began a story that had no content but began like this: "Once upon a time, there were three gnomes." For some reasons, this story which had no content, acquired a rather existential import for one of the students. Now that student is moving on from my school and preparing to move toward high school, graduating in a sense. So, I finished the story and will give it to him tomorrow. I thought I would share it with you because he is the future, a canary in the coal mine, a picture of childhood attempting to merge into maturity, a modern American cultural prodigy laden with this country's often questionable attributes. I wonder if such things like this help.
Once upon a time there were three gnomes. They were brothers and lived deep in the earth in a beautiful home their father had built for them from the finest stones and gems in all the earth. Of the three brothers, the oldest was very smart, quick-witted with a sharp sense of humor, but he rarely paid enough attention to what was happening around him to put his superlative intellect to use. The middle brother, on the other hand, was always paying attention, but he was very moody. One minute he could be on top of the world with joy and excitement and the next minute he might barely be able to move so sad and gloomy was he. Finally, the youngest brother may have been the most able all three brothers but he was the laziest gnome anyone in all the land had ever met. He could scarcely be bothered to lift a finger to clean his room, never mind to do chores around the house. But one day, a visitor came to call on the three gnomes. She was a beautiful princess who lived in a castle up above upon the earth, and she needed the help of the three brothers. She told them her own brother, the prince, had been captured by an evil sorcerer who took the shape of a dragon, and the dragon sorcerer was keeping the prince high high in his guarded tower. The princess said that the sorcerer told her only these three gnomes could save the prince, but they would all need to show a side of themselves they had never shown before. So, entranced by the beauty and elegant language of the princess, the three brothers followed her up to the earth to challenge the sorcerer. When they arrived at the tower, there indeed was the ugliest, loudest, smelliest dragon they could have imagined, and he smiled and hissed with glee to see the three gnomes approaching. “Ah, my three gnomes, I was hoping you would be wiling to give me a bit of sport. Each of you will have to complete a task for me, and if you complete all three, I will release the prince and go off to my own lair within the mountains far far from here, but if you do not, I will eat all three of you and have the prince and princess for dessert!”
First the eldest had to solve a riddle. As the dragon began to talk, the oldest gnome couldn't be bothered to even pay attention, so his younger brother, very anxious and nervous about the whole ordeal, moody as he was, pinched his elder brother to keep him paying attention. “What is the word that once you say it, it is gone?” “Easy! Silence!” said the eldest gnome much to the dragon’s dismay. Then, to the middle brother the dragon sorcerer said, “For you, I have a special challenge. Before your eyes will flash scenes from the lives of human beings- death and dismay, tragedies and horrific pains, joyous miracles and ecstatic triumphs- and you must not laugh out loud nor shed a tear. I will allow for a smile perhaps and a glistening redding of the eye, a lump in the throat, but no more!” The middle brother was quite afraid, but his younger brother, lazily hoping he might not have to do any trials if his older brothers both passed their tests, gave his older brother great confidence and assured him all would be well, and before he knew it, the middle brother was lost, as if in a dream, immersed in the lives of human beings, full of all the trials, hilarities and amazements a life can hold. He stayed calm, composed, inwardly moved perhaps, but able to hold back tears and stifle outrageous laughter. Suddenly, the scenes were gone, and he was back before the dragon sorcerer who was growing angrier with each gnome’s success. Finally, the youngest gnome, the laziest gnome in all the land, was called to his task. “You, young gnome,” called the sorcerer, “must run full speed around the tower three times before the setting of the sun.” The youngest gnome heaved a weighted sigh, but with seeing the eager faces of his brothers and the pleading looks from the princess, he agreed. Without further warning, “Begin!” called the dragon sorcerer. Off went the gnome running his fastest pace as he saw the sun was dipping oh so close to the horizon. Around the tower once the young gnome made it, but as he began his second lap, he grew tired and the tower seemed to be growing in size! The bottom edge of the sun edged slightly below the horizon as the gnome, slowing nearly to a walking pace, losing all strength of mind and body to carry on and with a cramp growing in his ribs, rounded the tower finally completing his second lap. Now, in his third lap, with a glimpse of his brothers, the frightful dragon and the entrancing princess, he felt a surge of strength pulse through him. But now the tower had grown to an unwieldy size! The gnome could hear the laughing of the dragon sorcerer and the calls of his brothers and the fair princess. The young gnome clenched his jaw and lifted his stride as he circled the ever widening tower. As the sun was about to disappear beneath the wooded horizon, the young gnome crossed before the dragon, collapsed upon the ground and heard the anguished roar of the dragon and the cheers of his brothers, the princess and the prince, now freed from his tower. The dragon sorcerer angrily flew off, back to his lair deep in the hidden mountains, the prince and princess returned to their castle and soon grew to rule their land with justice and grace, and the three gnomes decided to build their own fine home upon the earth, where they could always see the castle in the distance and always remember the day they were asked to be more than they had ever been before.
It's been several months since I last wrote. The last post was in the middle of February, and I attempted an entry in mid-March that simply would not allow itself to be published at the time. I think I had to stop writing because I was beginning to devour myself by ingesting too much content from the world around me. A portion of my intangible selfness entered a process of decay as my voiced perspective became increasingly tinged with negativity and hopelessness. Beauty became a caricature of the vital presence I hold it to be. It could no longer enter into the writing as the underlying yet rarely acknowledged hero of the epic fairy tale of life on earth. It's not that I no longer noticed, or ceased to strive to maintain consciousness of the warbly song of the red-winged blackbird, or the changeable moods of the mountains and the way they taunt the plains over which they dominate, or the shimmery intensity of people with intensely shimmering blue eyes - but certain forces were grappling to hold it at bay, struggling to stunt its voice. But I'm getting back on the horse- for if there is anything for which the future is asking, which the inevitable tomorrows demand, it is the preservation of beauty and the development of the capacity to differentiate between that which is ugly and that which is beautiful- including the states and sentiments of our own psyches. Much of what I was writing for the last entry landed more on the ugly side- but it ended mid-thought with my attempt to redeem the anger, the insensibility, with a glimpse of nature from running with the future: In the marsh, perched on cattails, Redwing Blackbirds called to me and my son, called enough we had to stop...
There has been another shooting and tragic massacre. This one at a school. I read today it is the 18th shooting at a school in the United States this year. Eight that resulted in injury or death. Two were suicides. Some were "accidental" firings of weapons. 2018. We are not very far into the year at this point. Sometimes I avoid writing about these types of events because I feel I have so very little to add to the dialogue, to the outrage, to the sadness, the wrenching sensation of hopelessness and frustration- so little to contribute to the attempts at consolation to those grieving. But I am a teacher. At a school. Vague flashes of imaginations of a rifle-wielding younger man coming on to our campus and wreaking havoc arise in and dissipate from my conscoiusness with the potency of a heated glowing splinter of metal laid on flesh, searing and cooling, blistering. And then I think of my own young child, who, in the not too distant future, I will be taking to school. So I decided to write with hope for the process of writing to provide some amelioration, or some revelation, or some healing balm in the form of an image summoned through the merging of language, imagination and the senses' apprehension of the gifts of the natural world. But I am having the hardest time lifting above this one. It’s like the experiences are building one upon another. The only heraldings I hear from the future are so bleak I want to ignore them. All I see are subtle wars of fear; politicians reduced to stick-figure pawns of forces of vice and greed so much more complex and grand than the mirage of governmental systems; desperate journalists starving and mad for truth; artists weeping in pools of beauty melting before their eyes or grasping for it as it fades in the din of argument and industrialization; mothers and fathers clinging to their children paralyzed in fear or enraged into violent reactionism; revolutionaries confounded and paralyzed by the myriad foes they face -- and yet, somewhere out of this socio-scape I hear the echo of laughter, innocent and true. It emanates as though from the depths of an abandoned subway tunnel. There is a faint glow accompanying it, like a very small candle flickering around a corner, the flame not visible. I can’t tell if it is the fading remnants of what we once knew as joy or the undying force of humor and optimism fueled by, as Dostoevsky says, in rough translation, “an heroic deed of brotherly and loving communion.” If you have a chance to find a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, I recommend reading Book 6, Chapter 2, entitled, From the Life of the Hieromonk and Elder Zosima, Departed in God, Composed from his Own Words by Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. There is a quote I memorized many years ago and save for times like these. Save for times when I need to remember the immense potential of individual action and freedom to choose out of a transcendent morality. When I need to remember we are in a time of radically challenging individualism, but it is not a time void of hope. The translations may differ, but I remember it like this:
“There comes a time when a man must rise himself out of the solitariness in an heroic deed of brotherly and loving communion. Even if he does so in the capacity of a holy fool. This in order that the great idea shall not die.”
The future seems to be calling for more holy fools.
Tonight, just after the sun set, I stood in the parking lot of Whole Foods and observed the clouds. I can only describe the color as a pinkish magenta-though this does not nearly do the activity represented by the dance of light, eye and the visual cortex justice. The stratus clouds in the southern sky were a blanket, drawn back from the horizon, ruffled in subtle waves. When I first parked and walked toward the automatic sliding doors, I turned to see the clouds in their rosy luminescence, but I felt awkward, self-aware, as if there were people noticing this bearded disheveled man in dirty, paint-stained and torn khaki work pants and khaki vest and bland olive green skull-cap staring into the southern and western skies over the parking lot of mid-sized SUV's and hybrids and the hum of I-25 just beyond. So, I turned back toward the doors, my presence demanding their nearly silent sliding compliance. After shopping and buying my four items and returning to the parking lot, however, the sky was even more majestic and my mood even darker. I stood unabashedly and tried to observe the sky without a thought cluttering the perception. I tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to allow the color and the forms, the dynamics of the moment, to seep into me- tried to allow the divine wisdom in that collection of moisture diligently refracting the sun's light, forcefully refusing passage to the spectrum of color presented in the dome above, bouncing it around and sending it back toward earth. I stood for an immeasurable amount of time, minutes or seconds, and then my attention was drawn to the mountains in the west. There, a tincture of the color present in the blanket of clouds above glowed with a vitality generally reserved for living things. There, I imagined, the sun had just glided behind the mountains and was allowing one last revelry, a call to the clouds above, an invitation to continue in the glorious display. To bring this moment, this moment soaked in an attempt to be completely in the present, to bring this moment into relationship to the future- in searching for the call from that mysterious tomorrow- all I have is the concept of hope. The hope that the relationship between human beings and beauty and attention will prevail over all that is dark, morbid and immoral working in the world today. The hope that people will continue to stop in parking lots and stare into the sky in wonder and perhaps see the reflection of their own divinity, the colors of their own soul, in a blanket of clouds and the echoing call of the sun beyond the horizon.
I'm starting this one with no idea where to go. I've been thinking lately about dreams. Not dreams that come during sleep, but those dreams we dream when we are wide awake or in a contemplative mood and staring off into nowhere, the kind of dream that comes with thought and introspection and is wiling to wander into the ideal and impossible and ludicrous. Dreams of walking in flip-flops and peaceful revolutions based on reallocation of wealth and equally distributed empowerment with access to quality education and resources for mental, emotional and physical health. Dreams in which cooperative businesses are started and lobbyists are influencing lawmakers in the interests of the underserved and unseen majority. Dreams and ideals fueled by art, by words and music informing and inspiring - colors and forms entering into the human being as healing archetypes- silently bringing transformation to those least expecting it and perhaps most resistant. Today is one of those days when these dreams are all I have, all that keep me thinking through the day, keep me from reacting in purely violent and aggressive acts against the perceived stupidity and selfishness of the mass of humanity - me included. And yet, there's more to this than these dreams of social righteousness. There is something magical, transcendental, spiritual in its etymological sense as of the wind or breath or the breath of god, something moving through unseen, ever-changing, sourceless yet part of a reciprocity, a process, a dynamic interaction of forces. This is the dream really keeping me afloat and simultaneously driving me mad, that there is truly something not perceivable by our limited and commonly recognized senses allowing this madness to all make sense, to have a trajectory, an arc, a climax, a denouement. Out of a fissure in the highway of the future sprouts a cotyledon of devastating and luminous potential, in a delicate exchange with the atmosphere, in the sublime transformation of light into matter, its roots unhindered in their search for meaning and nutrition, its leaves enveloping and shading, its flower, ultimately, radiant with fragrant emanations, its seed a promise of dreams of social and moral justice and magical events and mysterious interventions.
Untethered, the moon hovers of its own will, growing in size, halfway between half full and full. The frost has moved east and plummeted into single digits and below zero, winds that hurt. These are dark nights, as we move toward the epiphany, as we descend from a birth in the physical to a birth in the spirit. Starting on earth and moving down toward the center where light is waiting. There should be an opening then, if the work is done adequately. The work of tearing away. The work of listening with the intention of profoundly attentive silence.
My path has led me to a community of refugees, some from other countries, some from the streets of our own fair nation. I have been tutoring a young man from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is a high school student at an independent school, studying Goethe's Faust and the optics of Edwin H. Land. Tonight I had the privilege of hearing him tell of a small part of his childhood in Africa. His assignment was to write something relating to the work of Emerson and Thoreau. We chose Thoreau's essay, "Walking," and I prompted this young man to tell me of his memories of walking in his own country. The first memory to arise was of running away from home to avoid a stern lashing from his mother for a misdeed apparently serious enough to provoke such a punishment. The story unfolded cautiously, as if the memories were timid, peering out from behind the tropical trees of the Congo, unsure if it was safe to come out and live again, live in words and feelings. As they stutteringly approached and allowed themselves to be revealed, I walked with him on streets, roads, paths, muddy from the rains, past a river than ran brown from far away up in the mountains, past the field where soccer was played, with birds flying overhead, no, no, we can't see the birds, we hear them in the forest, calling and then we met a man who told us to get cigarettes then stole our shoes and we had to return to our mother crying over our stolen shoes, and she was stern, but loving. and we were not beaten for our earlier transgression, the running away and the stolen shoes retribution enough. I was transported but I could not decipher the movement of feeling within this young man as his tale unraveled. It was a time and a place so far from both of us, and we so far from one another even while we sat close enough on a small bench in the kitchen of a home created for people displaced from their own home that our shoulders touched. In this experience lived the future I both fear and for which I have hope. An uncomfortable future in which the number of individuals unable to remain in their homes and forced to flee to other countries, foreign and strange lands, continues to increase at a pace nearly unmanageable- and yet, a future in which human beings from vastly different environments and situations and circumstances can sit at a kitchen table sharing stories, offering help in small yet unmeasurably significant doses, enlivening and warming hearts in ripples and echoes. These challenges the future is offering will be opportunities for us to grow into true humans, humans swelling toward our full capacities as compassionate and empathetic beings capable of awakening and finding ourselves within the consciousness of other people, attending to their suffering and knowing it, and by seeing it and knowing it, somehow healing wounds and recognizing the illusion of our separateness and feeling our bare feet, our toes filling with mud as we walk the road home, where our mother is waiting, angry but full of love for her children.
Today I spent several hours untangling knots and unwinding and winding kite strings. Though I was also occupied in other listening based activities while I de-snarled, my hands and eyes and thinking were predominantly occupied by this Penelopean undertaking. Throughout the day I tried to understand why this task, on this day, this day before the Winter Solstice, why this task was in my hands. There must be some underlying meaning. These particular kite strings have been untouched and tangled for at least six months, but today I just had to get them clear. I did think of cutting them a few times to make the job easier, but I rather persevered. All the knots came out. I rewound each string neatly, tightly, with a spiral hand motion moving away from me, down, up closer to me and away again. It is true there was some satisfaction in this clearing, in the untangling, in the "fixing," but the real challenge is in the why of it. These are the times for which I have been trained to get quiet, ask the question and wait for the answers to come from another person or an interaction or a newspaper article or anything really but it requires attending. Sitting here, writing about it helps too. There are so many snarls to untangle in the world right now. The new tax bill that just happens to include a provision to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. More fire in California and sixty degree days with hardly any snow in the Colorado mountains. I was so violently ill three days ago that thinking too complex thoughts, thoughts that required attention to several steps, a process, such thinking invoked nausea and dizziness. I have never encountered a virus so poignant and potent. The very ground seems made of gravy and the highways are museums of wrecked cars and displays of flashing light sophistication. I used to get high and be paranoid and now I'm clear like a monk and I'm paranoid everyone's high- high on weed, but more high on drugs served with scripts and handed over a counter at CVS- high like they don't even give a shit. This has gone nowhere, the kite strings lie in the kite bag, clean and wound with precision, the country's high on opiates and anti-depressants and power and cash, tomorrow is the darkest day of the year, this perhaps the longest night of the year, I repel into the caverns of my soul in search of a light I hear dwells there, inextinguishable and profound in its luminosity. I untangle knots in kite strings because the children love to fly kites. They throw their arms in the air, mouths agape, voicing sounds of awe when they take flight. They chase them and throw them in the air and revel in their crashes to the earth. They are winded and red-cheeked and arguing and laughing and sharing and all things good about childhood and humanity. There they are, the colors are those of the rainbow, they truly dance in the sunlight, on the wind, the children and kites tethered by strings taught, nearly imperceptible against the blue sky, unencumbered by knots, free to unwind with a gust or the daring running of a child.
I am lying on a couch in a casita in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A small flame fueled by a manufactured easy-lighting "log" burns in a brick and stucco fireplace. The boards of the aged wood floors have allowed gaps to form between them from the high desert retreat of moisture, and they dip and roll from years of foundational settling. My wife and child lie sleeping in an adjoining room and the sound of a movie rumbles from the other room in which my sister-in-law and niece-in-law are probably also asleep. An occasional car or truck moans by on the narrow, short street outside. I haven't much to say as of late in the vein of social commentary. It seems as though the future is hiding out afraid it might reveal a picture stark and morbid. The present is one painted to the frame in vibrant color and irritated forms, discomforting in its harmony. The news is full of sexual and moral impropriety and depravity, fiscal abuse, legal flaccidity- it is difficulty listening. And yet, children still laugh and swing from monkey bars. They chase one another and scream and giggle in absolute delight untethered by an adult version of the world. There are farmers who have devoted their lives to a way of growing food and raising animals that rejuvenates the land and nurtures human beings. There are water-purifying devices being engineered, manufactured and delivered to places in the world where clean water could save millions of lives. There are billionaires funding windfarms to provide electricity without depleting non-renewable resources. There are mothers all over this planet hugging their children and fathers holding toddlers' hands and grandparents reading stories, and here, in Santa Fe, a fire burns in a brick and stucco fireplace, the moon shyly glows behind a thin veil of high icy moisture and a child and his mother sleep, warm and waiting. These are the rituals of today allowing us to wake tomorrow and know god in a rustling leaf drawn tumbling along the street by an unseeable breeze and to be utterly thankful for the wind and for leaves.
Thanksgiving dinner was turkey and stuffing and cranberries and a vegan loaf. There were pies and wine and cousins, aunts, uncles, three generations. One of our family members has been diagnosed with cancer- a cancer known for its rapid urging toward death- so Thanksgiving was not as joyous as it can be, nor as boisterous, nor was the majority of the family together, with illness and weariness and grief now more interactive guests at our festive tables. Thanksgiving seemed a blip, a beat, a phrase in the slowly dictated paragraph of a family member's finite and proclaimed journey toward the threshold between earthly existence and that which lies beyond. There are different ideas about this "beyond." The research with which I occupy much of my otherwise unoccupied time tells of a continual journey from life to life with a persistent kernel of selfhood determined to grow and learn at any cost in future lives. My imaginations and ponderings often dwell in the space between death and a new birth where beings interact, where people choose the lessons they will learn and suffer the pains of those they have wronged. For so long have I worked with these ideas and experienced palpable confirmations of them that, in a time like this, the line between this world of the flesh and that of the spirit fold into one another filled with beauty, sound, color, weaving dynamic forces. I know how hard it is to lose someone you love- how difficult it is to find them across the threshold, the abandonment, anger perhaps. And I also know they are present, confronting their fears and longing for you to still know them and longing to help if only we ask. There is a comfort in that knowing. It doesn't cure the sadness- nor should it- but it provides an anchor and an imagination of possibility. Tomorrow will come and the sun will rise as the train blows its whistle, beckoning from a place far from lonely holding all you ever imagined.
The danger of starting a project like this is the unknowing of where it will lead, the utility of it, the senselessness of it, the shouting into the void of it. I've undertaken several artistic projects in my life thus far, and they have all fallen with the mediocre bounce of a rubber ball hardened by extended exposure to the sun or like a tennis ball hit too many times and chewed by a royal standard poodle - perhaps fun for those interested in play for play sake but somehow unfulfilling in that the bouncing slows quickly and stillness comes and there it lies, without a child or a dog to send it rollicking back into movement. But here we are, still writing, perhaps you are reading this and perhaps the you to whom I refer is someone other than me. And it is in this meandering vein that I ask about the future of art, particularly of music, specifically the music known by some as rock'n'roll. We can not go any further with this discussion without a qualification of terms. A dear friend once explained to me the true beauty of rock'n'roll is that it rocks and it rolls. It doesn't just rock and it doesn't just roll, and for a long time-even to this day a faint flame still burns-for a long time I was sure that rock'n'roll would save the world from its steady decay into materialistic thought, consumption based will control, civilly debilitating avarice, sub-human interactions and immorality in the guise of righteousness. From anomalies like Phish and the Grateful Dead, to the icons of Bob Dylan and Neil Young, to the modern torch-bearers of The Flaming Lips, Beck, Sigur Ros and the National, there seems to be a dwindling understanding of what rock'n'roll is and why it is and why it matters. Then there is also the thought, "Did it ever really matter?" For some, understandably, rock'n'roll music gets confused with the lifestyle choices associated with it such as drug use, careless sexual proclivity and questionable hairstyles. But the music itself, the music I characterize as true rock'n'roll has the ability to be both heartful and angry, to be simultaneously counter-culture and popular culture, to both reject the world from which it comes and embrace the human beings inhabiting that world; it is equally a love poem and raging political/cultural vitriol exuding idealist hope and apocalyptic dread. To paraphrase a quote from Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, "You don't sing a song like 'God Save the Queen' because you hate the English people, you sing a song like 'God Save the Queen' because you love the English people and you're sick and tired of seeing them oppressed." I've carried that quote in memory for years. Even though the words may have been slightly different, and perhaps the Sex Pistols could have used a little more roll with their rock, that truly expressed the intention, the will, the ideals behind the music known as rock'n'roll. With this in mind, I've been listening for a call from the future to see if there is any hope on the horizon for a new wave of compassionate and peacefully revolutionary music makers to take to the scene and allow the public a version of freedom nearly absent from today's world. I know there are new albums from the Flaming Lips and the National; I know Neil is still doing it and Bob Dylan continues on his never-ending tour. But I haven't heard or heard of anything new that could even compare to the unprecedented impact of such bands as the Grateful Dead or the Beatles or as musically ground-breaking as Pink Floyd or the Beach Boys or Bob Marley and Bob Dylan. I can't even imagine what life as a young man growing up in the United States of America would have been like without these icons as mostly living, breathing, even touring realities in the environs of my time's popular culture. My pubescent feeling life was defined by giants such as U2 and Bruce Springsteen. Oh, alas, perhaps I'm just getting old, but I do try to pay attention and as a teacher I am around young people every day - the music world, the rock'n'roll world has certainly changed. I feel lucky to have had these figures, this music, this mythology of revolution and love-driven new jerusalem consciousness. As for the future of rock'n'roll, to quote Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, "My hands are in the air, And that's where they always are, You're fucked if you do, and you're fucked if you don't. Five stop mother superior rain." It will rock or it will roll or it will all just fade to black and live as a memory of something that once was on planet earth for historians to study. Or maybe it already saved the world, and our planet would truly be inhabitable without it having ensouled and inspired millions of people who make the world tolerable today. We'll have to ask the historians of the future, when time has made the arc of culture clear, and perhaps some stiff Social Studies teacher in a public middle school will be forced to read from a text book so his students can pass their standardized tests and become productive members of the future cultural landscape, "So you see students, in the late 20th and early 21st century, it was actually rock'n'roll that saved the world."
The night before last we heard a noise in the adjacent room as my family finished dinner. The room is in a state of unfinished renovation from a sun-room that may have housed a hot tub at some time in the one hundred seven year life of our small brick home. It has pieces of drywall and screws and tools and spray cans of insulation and a ladder and dust upon the floor. When we first heard the noise, we didn't know from where it was coming, but we quickly ascertained the general location and out I went with headlamp in hand to investigate. I was a bit nervous and excited, not sure what type of intruder I would encounter. I have had to battle bats in the past in a house in Vermont- a bat would visit our basement every February until it made its way upstairs one last time. I took the advice of my cousin who was a police officer in the Bronx and worked the night shift from 11pm to 7 or 8am and often had to answer calls from frantic citizenry about the bat in their apartment. My cousin said, "Dude, people would call all the time about these fucking things. Some cops won't deal with it, tell 'em it's not their job, but I always go. This is what you do dude. Bats just fly around in circles, the same path every time, so I would say, 'Hey, lady, you got a broom I can use? And I need a towel or a blanket or something.' And you watch where it is flying, like, in the room, and it goes around a few times and then you know where it's gonna go so you just whack it. That just stuns 'em, so they fall to the ground, then you throw the towel or blanket on it and stomp on it. Then they say, 'What am I gonna do with this now?' and I say, 'Listen lady, I took care of the bat, ok? Now you get rid of it.'" I took his advice, and it worked just like he said. Except I was wearing a motorcycle helmet, leather jacket, long wrist-covering ski gloves and a scarf, and I didn't have the nerve for or interest in stomping on it, so I carried it in the blanket outside and let it go. It flew into the night, and I haven't seen it since. So I was thinking of bats, when I went outside. When I shined the flashlight into the room, I saw a shadowy figure flying in the abandoned, half renovated mystery sun room. I thought, "Bat." However, my light suddenly came to rest on a feathered critter hiding between the glass door and some small size strangely angled drywall. It was not a bat. It turned toward me and revealed round yellowish eyes with large dilated pupils. It was a small owl. After looking it up in the bird book, I think it was a screech owl, either western or eastern. We are on the boarder of the two ranges here on the plains before the rockies. I quickly came back inside to tell my family, and when I went back outside, it spooked and flew out a high window through the lattice work and into the night. Owls are known to be powerful omens, either of bad or good, depending who you ask. Later in the night, I smelled an enchanting smell like incense and the presence of a being I've known before. Only time will tell what portent the owl brought from the future. There was a certain magic moving through life this week. The veil between the spirit and we so thin this time of year. I do my best to listen when an owl comes to visit.
Well, here we are again. Stunned by events in our country with sadness the only emotion that is able to mature in the face of confusion and questioning. More shooting. Unexplained motivation. How does this not point to a deteriorating society? How does tomorrow not plead in a shrieking voice from a desolate future-scape of loneliness, fear, isolation, paranoia for drastic changes deep in the soil, in the soul, in the withered divinity of our culture? In all my yearnings for and striving to awaken in those fellow humans with whom I do not agree, those I perhaps dislike, I can not find the place in my inner being, in my intellect, in my silent listening caverns to see through the eyes of the perpetrator of such an act as this most recent shooting.
I started this entry one month ago and was not able to finish it. Where does one take such a sentiment? To congressmen? To neighbors? To a depressing and apocalyptic end? We often feel so removed and distant from any sphere of activity that could have real influence on affecting change. Today, on the radio, I heard a story about the modification that allows a store bought weapon to fire similar to a battlefield machine gun. Directly after the shooting, it felt as though there was some momentum to make such a device illegal. Now, only one month later, it has largely been forgotten in the public conversation. The influences are just too powerful, the money just too influential.
In the month since I started this entry things have not been pretty. Most of Puerto Rico still does not have power. Acres upon acres have burned due to wildfires in California and elsewhere. The future is ranting to us to make drastic changes in every facet of our lives. We act locally, supporting social groups, teaching children, conserving resources, caring for our neighbors and our loved ones.
We once dreamed of a new world order based on radical love and truth and progressive use of technology and sustainability and artistry. Now we hope to simply survive the pressing war on geo-political and inter and intra-human emotional stability.
It's not a whisper from a far distant voice. It's a megaphone to the ear.
Yesterday I escaped from the school in which I teach and ran on gravel paths through prairie dog fields, uphill into the rolling plains undulating at the feet of the Front Range like gently rolling waves pulsing out at sea preparing to transform into menacing curling whitewater and glassy hard faces pounding beaches and rocky shorelines. I was winding my way east- if I continued to run, as sometimes I wish I could, slowly run across the countryside, across parched earth, across bridges spanning mud and clay-brown rivers, across shrinking forests, across maddening and enraged city sidewalks, until I reached the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean, where I stop, toes kissed by the flow and dared by the ebb of the sea that brought so many of our ancestors here- aiming for a water tower a little more than two miles from the school. I turned around before I reached the water tower because I needed to return to school, to teach, to supervise recess. When I turned, I was once again confronted by this Front Range of the southern Rocky Mountains, much of which rises to more than 10,000 feet. Moments before I was dreaming of the vast expanses of the Great Plains stretching their way to the Appalachian and Taconic mountains. The fullness of time and devotional will in the forces moving the earth and the sun and moon and planets and galaxies and universes nearly strikes me down each time I perceive these mountains- truly perceive them, devote a moment to breathe the earthy grays and splotchy whites, the angles and ridgelines distorting depth perception, the scale, the blue sky or huddling billowing clouds. Part of me would like to stop here, here where we can leave with an image of the stoic plains contrasted with the majestic mountains, an image of humanity moving slowly across the earth, minuscule yet infinitely expansive in that he is conscious. But it is not that easy. The mission of these writings is to attempt to perceive the heralding of the future in the activities of the present, and the future here is monotonous housing developments and gas and oil exploration and cultivation. The plains are filling with skeletons of plywood and rapid growth lumber, plastics and solar panels. The earth beneath riddled with venous circuits of pipes and wells, benzene laced water. The oil pumps and beige coffee can containers are in the back yards of future children and family pets. This is not to say fracking or housing developments or oil production are bad or good- this is to say this is the future, and it is happening at a pace that is noticeable day to day. The horizon, the endless plains, the brazen relief of mountains rising out of oceanic flatness is disappearing into angular, hard lined constructs. Aesthetically, it is not a change to my liking. To catch the last glimpses of a planet in a state minimally or negligibly impacted by the workings of humanity is an honor. To live in a home with heat and hot water from gas burning appliances is a privilege. As I run down the hill, the sun warms my bare chest and makes me squint my eyes, the air nearly void of moisture is palpable in my straining lungs. I could keep this up indefinitely and in days and years watch the landscapes transform in rapid frames and remember what the mountains looked like and the horizon so far away and keep running until there was no more space for my footsteps and they were only landing on pavement anyway and I was forced to stop and stare at a wall of vinyl siding whose kiss and dare are not so inviting as the ocean.
Oh fuck. i can not think of a better way than that to start a commentary on the world of today. Hurricane Harvey recently ransacked Texas and surrounding areas. It's whirling water wheel reached the area of Houston and decided to set up camp in a gesture that certainly seemed malevolent. Then, Hurricane Irma, cited as one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, rolled across the southern North Atlantic, with egregious visits to various Caribbean islands, Cuba and Florida. Another hurricane is behind it, lurking in the shadows of its recent predecessors. This excess of wind and water has been accompanied by more than seventy wildfires burning in the western United States producing tangible and noxious smoke at least as far as the eastern front range region of the Rocky Mountains. And these are only the natural disasters. And this is only those events with direct and undeniably tangible effects of the United States. Part of me knows these things have been happening all over the world for as long as the earth has been spinning in its harmonious sway with the sun and the other planets of our solar system. Part of me feels the end of times upon us. The social situation in these environs- initiated by the events of early 2017 that finally motivated me to begin this blog- has not improved either. In fact, it feels like something genuinely evil is moving through and hovering, Harvey-like, over North America. So, what is the future telling us now? The most obvious answers are diametrically opposed but both would direct their attention to all the evil in the world. Some would consider the evil to be left-wing, liberal, green peaceniks. Some would consider the evil to be the gross mistreatment of the earth, her resources and her multi-cultural inhabitants. Either way, it seems most would agree that some group of humans are not good and are to blame for the current state of the world. It comes back to one of the themes recurring here in this blogsphere: the seemingly widening polarities in the social dynamics of the inhabitants of planet earth. This gap needs to be reconciled if we are to continue to progress as a species and as a culture and perhaps if the planet itself is to remain a viable abode for we humans. We hear the calls from the future to attend to our brothers and sisters, to our friends and enemies, to the winds and fires and water.
"Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them. 7The LORD said to Satan, “From where do you come?” Then Satan answered the LORD and said, “From roaming about on the earth and walking around on it.” 8The LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, fearing God and turning away from evil.” 9Then Satan answered the LORD, “Does Job fear God for nothing? 10“Have You not made a hedge about him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. 11“But put forth Your hand now and touch all that he has; he will surely curse You to Your face.” 12Then the LORD said to Satan, “Behold, all that he has is in your power, only do not put forth your hand on him.” So Satan departed from the presence of the LORD." Job 1:6-10 http://biblehub.com/nasb/job/1.htm
Sometimes, in the evening, as I am getting my two-year old son ready for bed, into his pajamas, after his bath, he looks up and points to a brassy colored metal silhouette of an angel which adorns a wind chime hanging from the window, "Like Meets," he says. Meets is the name he calls himself, an abbreviated version of his name, and one his Grammy often calls him. The first time I heard him point to the angel and say, "Like Meets," I was not quite sure what to think- what level of intentionality lay behind the statement? Does he really think that image of an angel is what he looks like? But, since that first time, he has done it a few more times, and I believe there is meaning and a true perception he is articulating. So, what is an angel- or more relevantly- what does the typical representation of an angel, depict? The wings, perhaps a halo, the flowing robe, the androgyny, the benevolent gravity- where does it all come from? One thought is that the angels are one step ahead of us in their evolution. In the far distant (from our limited human perspective of time) future, the angels will have progressed and we will be where the angels are now, looking over some species and compassionately trying to guide them without impinging upon their freedom. Some task. I imagine an angel as a guiding force, as a more perfected version of my self untainted by my persona, as a being who patiently waits for me to ask for guidance, who carries the weight of my transgressions and ignorance without blame. My two-year old son is much closer to that being than I am. His wings are nearly visible in his eloquent posture and clumsily maturing relationship with the earth and the mysteries of gravity. It is not a matter of belief or religious dogma- whatever these beings, these angels, may be, it is clear little children are closer to it than we who have trod upon the hard earth long enough to be identified as adult. There is an innocent wisdom in them, the children and the angels, a knowing lacking in judgement, an eagerness to learn and an attention and receptivity to the entire sense world, especially human beings. If you are wondering why you made a decision that shaped your life, or faced a challenge you believed was beyond your capacities to overcome, or dodged a bullet, imagine a version of your self, an infant, cherubic and chubby like Raphael's angels, full of gentle understanding, hovering above and behind your head, urging you to attend, and know it is you and it is yours and there is nothing you can do for which you will have to ask forgiveness, and ask and listen quietly for hours, for days until the wind blows through a chime and you finally notice, point and say, "Like me."
The birds finally came to our yard. For the last two months we have had two feeders in the yard, one hangs from a hook extending about eighteen inches from the house and is attached to the kitchen window frame, and the other, hung later, when no birds came to the first feeder, hangs from an apple tree in the yard, about forty-five feet from the house. Through all of June and most of July, the only birds that came were two brave black-capped chickadees who bounced to and from the feeder hanging from the apple tree, but they hardly put a dent in the level of the seed in the feeder. Then we went away for nineteen or twenty days and returned to find both feeders empty, but still no birds for two days. Then, finally, as if an invitation had been spread to the entire state, our yard was atwitter with those old courageous black-capped chickadees as well as house finches, what I think are song and/or house sparrows, red-breasted nuthatches, and four bluejays who decided to join the party following an afternoon thunderstorm. Chirping and singing and calling and munching, dashing off and flying their horizontally wavering flights parallel to the earth through the yard, into the neighbor's, even flitteringly resting on the rocking chairs on the front porch. It is said that the frequency of bird song lies in the middle of the range of human hearing. Some hypothesize that human hearing developed in this specific range so that it would be attuned to the song of birds, for where there are birds, there is most likely water and food. This is what has been concerning me for the last two months. Is the yard of my home, the yard in which my young child plays, is it void of life? Is this why the birds shy away? So my joy at seeing the birds today, at hearing their song, at drawing the attention of my son to their feathered fluttering, at getting the bird book back out and the casual binoculars, was seemingly disproportionately gleeful. There was an inner warmth stirred in me that somehow made me feel that things in the world were ok- contrary to the threats of nuclear war, to the aggression and death in Virginia, to the general insecurities in the social, political and global arena. There is a nobility and a surety in even the most fleeting and flitting head tilting song bird, small as they may be. Over the next few days, the doves decided it was finally safe to come over and peck at the fallen seeds on the ground below the feeder after weeks of watching from the electricity wires strung just beyond our property line. Then, two days ago I woke, my son and I made our groggy way to the kitchen to greet the birds outside the window and begin our morning rituals of oatmeal and coffee, trucks and dishes, and there, on the decades old, leaning, nearly falling over aged grey farm fencing that may have served as a corral of some sort in the early twentieth century when the house was built, there on the horizontal rail of a fence defying gravity, was a hawk, casually resting, studying our yard in no hurry, most likely a young red-tail, though my birding skills are still in the developing amateur stage. Our yard had gone from a barren landscape to a wildlife refuge. We've now settled in to the activity in our yard, the birds seem quite happy and unthreatened, as do the squirrels and bunnies. We devoted attention to our yard, to make it beautiful and safe and full of food for small animals, but we also devoted attention to the future, to the world in which we were hoping to live. Attention to a world where the song of birds assured us that life indeed did thrive here. Their songs fill our mornings and our days, our hearing more acute, as we eat our oatmeal and drink our coffee and wait for the hawk to return, to perch on our fence, to show us it is still standing, and something mysterious is still working in the world and it is good.
Today was the last day of a lengthy visit to my childhood home, my family, the surroundings in the midst of which I was raised and grew toward adulthood. Around here, everything smells of the ocean, a potato chip left exposed to the open air for twenty minutes becomes soft and chewy, birds are in constant activity, feeding and flitting and there is an accent more in the way the people walk and interact than in their actual speech. As if engaged in a dance with the dramatically changing seasons, with the wind and rains and snow, the storms and sunshine, their gestures roll and bounce, their steps sway both light and intentional, jokes and wisecracks mingle with talk of life and death. In my teaching as well as the rearing of my own child, I pay attention to the sensory intake of the developing human being. These past few weeks I have been reflecting with gratitude and wonder at this gentle yet dynamic sensory environment in which I grew and changed and learned and played. Many children in today's world receive a large percentage of their sense impressions from a screen, either television, computer or phone, with studies showing children watch an average of about thirty hours each week of television- this does not include the many other activities on various devices. There is also the homogenization of housing developments, big box stores, chain stores, highways, music, clothing. Of course there are exceptional situations in which children are exposed to a diverse and, if uniquely, beautiful array of sense impressions- whether natural environments like that into which I was born or eccentric multi-cultural city-scapes like Brooklyn or Oakland. There are ideas and evidence which suggest that sense impressions not only help to form our minds, our psyches, our beliefs, feelings, prejudices- but they actually help to form our physical bodies, our organs, our hairlines, our pathologies. The future sends forth the question, "What will human beings look and feel like five, ten generations into this technological revolution?" It gives the term cyborg a new nuance. Perhaps we will become robotic not only from the devices with which we engage but also from the inside out. Perhaps our liver will begin to function more in a simple code like html and less in the vast and mysterious code of human chemistry and spiraling forces of growth. The future may reveal in the very structure of the human body the sensory input with which individuals and hereditary lines have engaged- cheekbones and chins carved by salty breezes and prairie winds or thin and agile fingers and flitting eyes of the technologically superior. I like to see children with fingers in mud and rain on their faces or squinting into the sun, corners of eyes wrinkled, but to truly be citizens of tomorrow's world, their fingertips must type and eyes adjust to the hue of liquid crystal and LEDs.
My son will be two years old in about three weeks, and his language is developing at an exponential pace. He is linking groups of words together to form rudimentary sentences, repeating nearly everything he hears and using new words and phrases in unexpected, timely and appropriate situations. It is truthfully a miracle unfolding before us. In juxtaposition to this joy, wonder and mystery of the human use of language, I joined Twitter yesterday- the medium of word sharing limited to 140 characters- poetic, brash, empty, insulting to the genius of language or an homage to it. I have yet to post anything on it; I am usually just getting warmed up by 140. I will experiment with the platform, however, to see if it can be something beautiful, creative, artistic in the sense of attempting to represent a small piece of the divine. Many famous and powerful people use Twitter, and it seems many things tweeted are not well thought out or carefully constructed in the sense of wordsmithing. Will we be able to save language from becoming a dry, corpse-like means to voice or vent an opinion rather than an artful and heartful vehicle to truly communicate? Perhaps we are being given the opportunity to bring language to an even more elevated state by the mediums of texting and tweeting and snapchatting. The future may be asking us to limit our characters, carve them carefully and share them with the world. Rather than full of emotionless arrangements of letters, the future will be full of poetic sharings both between individuals and on a global scale. If we are to take advantage of these tools, we must not sit idly by while public figures draw down the standards and potential of words and manipulate the power therein with harsh, often shallow and damaging sentiments. My son cannot yet write- his language emanates from a voice high and scratchy as he works to exhaustion to form words and phrases. The effort, the determination, the sheer will he exhibits throughout the day to join the human community of language based communication is thrilling, inspiring and beautiful well beyond any adult-created arts.
Polonius ....What do you
read, my lord?
Hamlet. Words, words, words.
Polonius. What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet. Between who?
Polonius. I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
William Shakespeare
Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2
I haven't much interest today in socio-political commentary. I spent the day outside with my family, beneath the sun and clouds, submerged in salty water or with sand and pebbles nuzzling through toes. My child laughed and lay on rocky shores and threw stones. I napped in the semi-shade early in the day and never really woke- even now my eyes are closing as they do when the day has wound down and I sit to write. I vacillate between a desire to become intimately devoted to and active in the political realm- fighting for social justice with congressmen and senators, lobbying for education reform or sane and contemporary healthcare- and working in the comfortable bubble of my own family life to make small changes such as using less natural resources, buying local and organic and raising a courageous child with manners, morals and a general interest in the well-being of his fellow human beings. I even attempt to quell my partisan opinions by searching for a place in myself that agrees with the social and global policies and opinions of the current administration- after all, it seems like so much has been left undone in the past, the rich getting richer, the poor getting nowhere. The other pole to which I vacillate is that of art. Perhaps art is the only thing truly worth our time and energy. Creative efforts to make both the present and the future more beautiful, more thought provoking, more moral (yes, I think art has a moral component. I will have to save that for another entry into the old blogosphere). Music, poetry, painting, sculpture, these are worthwhile uses of glycogen and amino acids. Art, activism, localism- perhaps the future demands all three, perhaps vacillation is an unnecessary use of energy. This derives from a lack of interest in socio-political commentary, and we've moved from salty bays to fresh water ponds, poems and co-ops.
The sun shimmers in the ripples and waves of the bay. The moored sailboats and small wooded island provide anchors for vision on its journey toward the horizon. The wind might blow the light as its descends from the sun, causing it to dance across the water and play against the lens of the eye as it passes on to the retina and further to the optic chiasma until some remnant finally reaches the optic centers of the brain and allows us the gift of an image- though it would be difficult to tell. These are easy sensations to ingest and digest, the light on the water, the sound of waves crashing, gulls screeching. However, the words produced by news outlets these days are fried jalapenos dipped in mayonnaise and chased by a pint of vinegar. Staggering and numbing in quick procession, they intrude upon the senses and linger in the mind, heart, feelings and memory off gassing as they painfully and slowly break down and assimilate themselves in the depths of our consciousness and manifest as anxiety and fear and anger and sadness. If the consequences were not so tangible, it would be comical, fun and worthy of mockery and jokes. As it is now, however, the news we read and hear constitutes a weighty proportion of our daily nourishment. We ingest the world and all it provides, whether images or words, prismatic light or melodic song, hot dogs or kale- the world provides the sustenance and the very substance of our being. In turn, we have to digest all of this as well, food and drink as well as the constant bombardment of sense impressions of today's world. I wonder what the future will bring as we carelessly create and ingest stuff we do not recognize or understand. Our digestion will have to mature and evolve- the occipital lobe as well as the intestine. Occilating us from grateful and full of wonder to staggered and numb, the world is currently providing tremendous opportunity for development, equanimity and aggressive nourishment. Can we provide the future with the tools, the strength, the courage, the dynamics to digest, to assimilate it all? The beauty, the grossness, the enormity, the humanity. The oars of my boat leave symmetrical ripples for moments after I pass- an army green helicopter roars above leaving unseen ripples in the light and wind.
I've been digging holes in the yard of my new house, nearly three feet deep, and filling them with fence posts and concrete. The permanence is daunting and the physical labor remarkable. The ground is hard and dry, a handful of dirt comes out of the holes with each stab and draw of the post-hole digger. How many handfuls to make a hole big enough for a fence post? More than is productive to count- the tedium would bring tears to our eyes and make the physical pain unendurable. This is clearly a project the vast majority of the materials and labor of which is intended for use in the future. In the present, a shallow hole into which to place the post and some dirt packed solidly around it would suffice to withstand the gentle breezes and children's inquisitive nudges. But these posts are intended to resist the forceful invitations of the near-tornado strength winds and small ball stones of hail accompanying the electrifying storms raging through these first brave miles of plains stretching eastward from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Work undertaken for the future carries a meaning, a mystery and a value clearly well beyond that of simply earning wages or increasing the number of digits on a bank statement, this is well known. Perhaps beyond and above this is working from the future. To reach into the future to draw the impulse for meaningful work in the present requires a bravery and a willingness to continually search for the highest ideals and capacities in humanity, in children, in world leaders. For there, in the unrealized divinity, in the glimpses of unknowing genius, lie the seeds of the future and the starting point for the truly meaningful work of today. By working in this way we can create individuals, organizations and social structures that will have time to mature into the future and reach ripeness before or as the needs arise. It is a duty and responsibility of an innovator or self-described progressive to continually strive to not only worktowardthe future but to courageously propose ideas that seem unreasonable and fantastic to the rational mind of today but are relevant for distant tomorrows. A massive chunk of ice dislodged from Antarctica recently. It was the size of Delaware. My fence posts are less than three feet deep, laid in concrete. Permanence is a fantasy. Ice and fences.
It's been more than two months since my last entry. The insanity of life in transition took over, and I have not been able to focus my thinking into any sort of poignant commentary on the present social life of the inhabitants of planet Earth- nor to extend the purview of my will to include the future as it presents itself today. I also lost the content of my last entry because I didn't save it, which was a blunt dagger driven into my solar plexus. Not nearly fatal, but enough to leave the alveoli unable to draw oxygen for a short time. A portion of my creativity and willed thought driven out prematurely and lost into vapors. I am newly inspired, however, in part by a documentary about Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre called "The Defiant Ones." It's made me think of passion, drive, motivation, dedication, success. In an attempt to look to the past to see what the future holds, to see the impulses streaming toward my younger self out of the dark chasm of the unknown, I am wondering what dreams I had as a young person- to see where that led me and to see if there is more I can or should be doing to honor that which illuminated the daily meanderings of my imagination and nighttime wanderings and fantasies. I sincerely thought I was going to be a professional athlete for much of my childhood- that is the predominant dream of my youth. For a period from reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" in ninth grade until I failed out of college four years later, I wanted to be a lawyer like Atticus Finch, defending the underserved, the unjustly persecuted of the world. A magician, a circus performer... I have always had the slightly debilitating gifts of being better than mediocre at many things, sincerely interested in nearly everything and secure and comfortable in home, family, surroundings and social life. These privileges have led me into and through many truly wonderful experiences and conversations and have hopefully led me to add some beauty and good to the world, but they failed to propel me blindly, bluntly, forcefully into a career, a vocation, a form of expression- a singular vision without which the world and I would not be viable or livable. It could be laziness or insecurity, but neither of those seem to fit. Creatively, when I dive back into my youth, the thing to which I was most attracted, perhaps showed some promise, was writing. As though drops of words dripped from the petal of a flower held by a future me reaching back in time to bestow wisdom. So I'm writing again. In hopes of honoring the gifts of the future, in hopes of honoring the deep past of previous lives in which I prepared for this short time on earth, in hopes of still bringing some light to this world as it contorts itself into shadow. The future is as unclear as it was two months ago, the notion of truth as vague, the social life of the country still trapped in a pre-boil ferment of antagonism and discomfort. It is a gift to be able to look back, to see a life unfolding, drawn taught by the future which is today and continues into tomorrow, pulled forth by an immense wisdom of which we are a part. The future we follow the future we are.
The concept of nationalism has been in the news lately, on the minds of people all over the world. As I stood waiting for my fish tacos on Cinco De Mayo in a "taqueria" in the less than diverse town in which I live, tacos that would never arrive because they lost my order and then ran out of fish, I had a flash of understanding of the fear many people feel toward globalization. I have an "All One" sticker on my car. It comes from the soap company, "Dr. Bronners." I have been using this soap for as long as I can remember. I used to read the label on it that listed the many uses of the soap, "18 in 1" along with the dictates of some perhaps cultish holy order that manufactures it. "All One God Faith," as I remember it. This always made sense to me, and I never really questioned it. Sounds good to me. We are all humans. The vagueness of the "God Faith" part was perfect for me. No need to go any further. But today, as I waited for my tacos on this day commemorating the Mexican defeat of the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862- an inspiring victory but a short lived defeat of the occupying French- I sensed that not everyone is interested in all humans getting along and agreeing to respect each other's cultures, languages, traditions. For some, this gesture is scary, threatening, economically destabilizing. It seems the sentiment of nationalism is on the rise around the more developed world. Where will this lead us? Though a healthy dose of pride of place and love of home and those close to you is appropriate and helpful to ensure your safety and general well-being, the animosity and competition it can create can be a detriment to the perhaps larger call for each individual and each country to carry a responsibility toward the physical earth as a whole and each and every one of its inhabitants. I love the United States of America, and I feel a kinship with each and every one of its citizens and residents. However, this does not make me feel less responsible for the suffering of Syrian refugees or displaced Haitians or Christian and Muslim rivals in the Central African Republic. It is difficult to imagine a peaceful and productive future populated with insular nations isolating themselves and ignoring the toxic clouds blowing across the Pacific Ocean or the garbage piles adrift in the sea that stretch for hundreds of miles or the inhumane treatment of any citizen of planet earth. We eat tacos on Cinco de Mayo and sushi and pizza and falafel. I would hate to see extreme nationalism leave us all hungry.
I have been having the hardest time writing for the last few weeks. Perhaps it is this idea that our thinking flies off into the cosmos during the spring and into the summer, abandons its domain within the confines of the skull where it can be used somewhat effectively to solve problems and form various observations into coherent arrangements of words and concepts. There is also the matter of the social situation of modern humanity that can be continually blamed for any series of maladies. A colleague said to me today that her doctor told her she was sick because she was carrying the collective sadness of our country. I think many people are still carrying this burden, unsure what to do with it, watching it manifest as anger, illness, depression, hopelessness or some unnamable emotion that slowly morphs from day to day as though intentionally eluding definition. This onslaught from without, this disagreeable sense of otherness and alienation, seems to be part of a world to which the future is asking us to adjust, embrace even. There does not appear to be a slowing of this divisiveness in society, but we can know that there is an other that is feeling a similar dislodged relation to his or her fellow humans on planet earth. All over the planet there are people utterly confused and astounded by the profoundly alien opinions and perspectives of their neighbors, their countrymen, colleagues, clients, family members, lovers. So, how do we sculpt this knotty and gnarled social stump into a useful tool, like a table, or a piece of art, a heron in flight? Again, the call comes to strive with all urgency to perceive from the point of view of that other person, truly attempt to enter their shoes and walk around for a bit. The future seems more and more to be asking us to grow increasingly whole, complex and loving- despite our best efforts to shrink, to simplify, to hate. It is futile and untrue to blame our inability to write on the times or the season. I am the only one who can make the choice to take action, even if it's a blog no one reads. We can't afford to be silent or to become ill; if we are to carry the collective sadness of our brothers and sisters, we have to learn to transform it. Redwood burl displays its struggles and meanderings throughout the course of time, twisted and rough, in its utility and in its beauty.
My country has recently engaged in violent and destructive military action. We dropped several bombs in separate countries against what I understand to be separate enemies. One of the bombs has the enchanting moniker, MOAB, Mother of all Bombs as the news reports tell us. According to Wikipedia, it is actually named GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast and is apparently the most powerful conventional (non-nuclear) bomb ever used in combat. In the Bible, Moab is the place where Moses was buried, and it is said the prosperity and pride of the people of Moab may have incurred the wrath of God. In Utah, Moab is an outdoor sport hotspot, especially for mountain bikers- a stunningly beautiful landscape and a strange haven of around 5,000 people in the midst of a conservative, largely Mormon state. Interesting the names we give things. Isis too, a name laden with mythology. The devoted and magical wife and sister of Osiris, she gathered his remains and brought him back to life after his body was chopped into little pieces and spread around Egypt by his brother. That was a different Isis. There are echoes of the past in these names, in the feuding, in the attempts at domination, but the stakes seem to have increased exponentially. Set, one name for the evil brother of Osiris, did not have the potential to launch a nuclear bomb and eradicate half the earth. Even the wrathful God of the Old Testament did not seem to have such a broad scope of annihilation as the destructive powers of today. So what does this say for the future? It looks bleak, certainly, if these are signs of things to come. I do everything I can to look at the activities of today and search for indications of what the future might bring. In this case, though, I do not see signs of a future full of violence and destruction, but I do see one full of humans in desperate search of meaning, one void of its own mythologies and relevant cosmologies- a world in which imagination, parable and archetype are vague words pointing longingly to a bygone time. It is true, many things seem to under attack in today's world; there seems to be a dizzying array of threats looming in shadowy corners- threats to all things deemed sacred or vital. But the essential shriek echoing from the caverns of tomorrow is from the dying voice of Imagination, freely moving thinking which is the basis of true morality. The new mythology lies in pieces scattered throughout an increasingly virtual world, awaiting its resurrection into buoyant actuality.
My son took my hand today and led me down the street. It was the first time he has done this, and the draw of his intent was utterly compelling and absolutely undeniable. I felt pulled by a force unrestricted by muscle, gravity or magnetism. Later, shortly after the sun set, the full moon rose. I thought of its forces acting on the Earth from such a distance, undeniable and compelling. These thoughts drew me toward musings on the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and to the oracle of Google where I read about the four fundamental interactions in the natural world-- strong force, weak force, gravitational and electromagnetic. The pull from my son's tiny hand and hurrying steps did not seem to be any of them. I am wondering under what classification the interaction related to intention and attention would fall. Or love. Or the feeling you get when speaking to two people after they have been speaking to one another about you. Or when you know someone is lying to you. I've spent years testing many "fundamental interactions" that occur in the social realm and in the non-human world of nature, but I did not know about these classifications. The distinctions are not entirely clear to me, but it seems there is something being left out of the research at the Large Hadron Collider, the 17-mile long tunnel buried deep in the Earth in which humans study the interactions of particles. Something closer to a unified theory may be discoverable, not through formulas or in laboratories and perhaps not verifiable by the current standards of physical science, in the pull of a young child intent on exploration. They supposedly have found that in fact weak force and electromagnetism are different manifestations of the same force-it's called electroweak force. I imagine they will find all the forces to be manifestations of the same power of interaction that begins with a pulsing of will, intent brought into action. The interaction of my son's tiny steps and tiny grip with my attention to his needs created a force immeasurable. We were particles colliding at invisible speeds creating as of yet undiscovered quantities of massless light, only detectable by the ripples left in the wake of its activity. Our walk down the street a demonstration of timeless forces still mysterious to the science of today but an open secret to children and those willing to be drawn by tiny footsteps.
My son is experiencing his first encounters with broad sandy beaches and waves and the salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It is clearly a deluge of sensory experiences for the 19 month-old boy. Just walking through the fine white sand could easily take us the greater part of an afternoon. He stops to inspect his toes, the hardly perceptible particles of shell, dune grass, seaweed; he hunches down, stands again, a few steps, the sensations impressed against his plump, pale feet again overwhelm him. This is not to mention the light and heat of the Florida sun in April, the moisture in the air and the wind that carries it and has been driving from the south, the gulf a mess of intersecting waves and white-caps frolicking amidst turquoise vainly trying to remain calm and undulating. Before even reaching the sea, he chases the black rebel-spiked crowns and white bodies of the teams of Royal Terns in mating season, disturbing their attempt to appear regal as they perch on the beach and squawk into the wind, forcing them to take wing and join the black masked Bonaparte's Gulls swooping on the gale. Or he pauses, and stands staring at them, lost in thought or in the timeless moments of pure thoughtless observation. Sometimes while running he falls, tripped up by the seemingly random landscape of countless footsteps in expanses of sand. I imagine his neurology like a fireworks show with trails remaining after the explosions and slowly filling the sky with a finely woven net of light, a proprioceptive melange exciting hormonal cascades the likes of which his little being has never known. Then comes the sea, the rhythmic, crashing, unpredictable dance of waves, the ebb drawing the sand from beneath his feet, nearly drawing his feet from beneath his body. The first day, he would not dare to stand in the water; he spent much of the afternoon in his mother's arms, crying when she braved the waves for a swim without him. On the second day, his bravery grew into a surprising and gallant dash directly into the breaking surf. He stood with the help of his parents with the water caressing his shins, sometimes splashing up to his waist and sending droplets onto his face, eliciting a triumphant squeal of glee as loud and joyous as I have heard his little voice sound. His thrill waxed and waned with the rising and withdrawing of each pulse the waves brought, his body shaking in the excitement. Since this primary encounter, he has been flirting with the shoreline, nonchalantly standing in the surf, earnestly digging his hands into the sand or lying down, his face coated with dusty white particles or running back and forth from the beach to the water, as we, his caretakers, struggle to simultaneously allow for his freedom and his safety in this phantasmagoria of sea and sand. We watch the sunset together, the gulls and terns, children, parents, grandparents; he chases the birds, a small silhouette bounding through the sand against a fiery backdrop of oranges, reds, pinks, colors more expansive than words can contain. The future still gathers to watch the sun descend into the horizon, and we secretly pray it will return to grace our days at the beach and our days in times less full of joy when we need to remember the light of a child in sand and sea and sun.
Today, at the school where I teach, there was a discussion about governance. We are a small school, with perhaps sixteen full-time teachers and staff and a limited group of part-time employees. The school is undergoing a transition, has reached a stage in its development in which it is time to create new forms, new patterns of activity, new modes of organization and accountability. The pedagogical work taking place in the classroom is solid, substantial, relevant and creative. Many of the teachers have years of experience, and all are devoted to their craft of both sharing the content of the curriculum and inspiring the children to fulfill their utmost potential in all facets of life, whether it be social, intellectual, athletic or moral. However, there are many other responsibilities and duties that come with running a successful school. Public schools and well-funded private schools often have a team of administrators to accomplish the day to day tasks, the hiring and firing, the budget considerations, payroll, supplies ordering, record keeping, phone answering, admissions, licensures, insurance... the list goes on and on. Being a school that is neither funded by the government nor endowed with an excess of donated capital, much of the weight of these duties falls on the shoulders of the teachers. Without a healthy model of and participation in governance, this work ends up being tackled by a small group of devoted and incredibly hard-working individuals who, despite their most sincere and tireless efforts, are not able to accomplish all they would like. This is not a new challenge in the realm of organizations, but the solution needs to be new and dynamic. The time calls for it, and it is more important now, perhaps, than it has ever been. In the evening after our discussion at school, a melancholy tinged with anger slowly swelled in me and lingered, gnawing, and I could not quite make sense of this discomfort. Finally, I lay down in my bed, took one of the books from my bedside table, and almost immediately came across this quote from Rudolf Steiner:
If we allow things to take their course, in the manner in which they have taken their course under the influence of the world-conception which has arisen in the nineteenth century and in the form in which we can understand it, if we allow things to take this course, we shall face the war of all against all, at the end of the twentieth century. No matter what beautiful speeches may be held, no matter how much science may progress, we would inevitably have to face this war of all against all. We would see the gradual development of a type of humanity devoid of every kind of social instinct, but which would talk all the more of social questions.
This was in 1921 and the world-conception of which he speaks is one focused on materialism and intellectualism and devoid of any spiritual understanding. This struck me like a humungous plastic inflatable sledgehammer swung by a bitter teenager with vengeance directed toward me personally. This is why the conversation at school lingered with me in this way. Such opportunities for developing a new, vital and dynamic form of governance for our school are opportunities to impart essential social change within our culture. This is not about who does what job or who stays at school too late or who is the most selfless, this is about creating truly human social forms constructed out of love and service that will be the remedy for our increasingly diseased culture. If there is any trace of truth to the sentiment of Rudolf Steiner, the challenges we are facing in our culture today with its dramatic polarization and enmity between political parties and diverse social, ethnic and religious groups, will continue to increase. Such opportunities to create forums for human beings to interact in freedom, out of a gesture of love and service will become not merely opportunities but absolute necessities. The future is demanding we create; it is demanding we seize upon such a chance to devise a new model of governance for a school not as some administrative task, not a utilitarian exercise, but a highly spiritual act, a creative act imbued with beauty and nobility, one with consequences that can reverberate throughout our culture. The future may be difficult; we may be engaged in a "war of all against all;" but the "all" for which I choose to work is motivated by love, profound empathy and devoted creativity directed toward beauty in all facets of life. These are revolutionary acts in our times--a stroke of color, a subtly shaded curve, a relative minor, a gesture, an inflection, living thinking, an unexpected word. This is an invitation.
So, nature. Somehow, somewhere along the way, the natural world and its resources fell into opposition with economic growth and prosperity. In the present day atmosphere, it seems as though to be a lover of old growth forests, pristine water sources or undisturbed wildlife habitats is to be an enemy of job creation, a stable economy and national security. I sincerely love untrammeled spaces where the forces of life and the mechanisms of geologic forces have been allowed to work with minimal disruptions from human beings. Such spaces seem to provide the conditions for a different type of thinking, a perception of a more harmonious state of being that might be able to serve as a model or at least an inspiration for a healthier society. Such spaces also help provide clean water and air--necessities for human existence. Currently, though, there are many threats to the relatively few remaining environments in which human activity has not drastically altered the conditions for life and the interaction of flora, fauna, mineral, air, water and warmth. This is not to say that humans are not natural. Indeed, we most certainly are a part of the natural world, no matter how hard we try to mechanize it, to manipulate it, to utilize it to the perceived advantage of our species. This is where I find myself questioning my devotion to these pristine spaces. As I continue my endeavors to truly understand the thinking and feelings of my fellow human beings, particularly those with whom I least agree, I strive to understand how we can continue to alter the earth and her atmosphere to such a degree in the name of what I understand to be economic well being. If we continue in our search for and seizure of coal, oil, natural gas, rare earth minerals and water, and if we continue to create radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, and if we continue to cut down forests for lumber or cattle or palm oil--all of which generate capital and create jobs--what will the world look like? I ask this question in earnest. The human race has been in a fast-forward, hard-driving. planet-dominating quest for quite some time now. We have not stopped our development as a species. We continue to invent and explore, to consume and reproduce. Our current path may lead us to a mechanized society with little of nature as we currently understand it left to observe or utilize, an earth where air and water are cleaned by machines rather than rainforests and layers of earth, where the only animals are pets, where temperature is controlled by satellites and gigantic phase changes of hydrochlorofluorocarbons. Perhaps this is the direction in which our culture needs to progress. Perhaps those, like me, who cling to the forms of the natural world that have persisted for thousands of years are the ones who are actually holding up the development of humanity towards its ultimate potential. This is the direction my thinking takes when trying to empathize with those who claim economic necessity for the alteration of the earth and expansive use of her resources. It is difficult for me to imagine these people-- many of whom are clearly intelligent, have the capacity to follow thoughts to a productive and clear conclusion and who certainly are able to grasp and conceive a broad and long term view of consequences for actions--see any other outcome. I am doing all I can to understand these world-views, these economic necessities and take strides to help bridge the gulf of belief and perspective in our current culture, though, I must admit, I am tempted to go sit next to the shimmering mirror of a high mountain lake or upon the sands of a lonely, cold and windswept ocean beach and spend time with an old friend before she's changed forever and we no longer recognize one another for what we once were.
It is the first week of spring. I intended to write during the vernal equinox itself, but life got in the way. Sometimes I fall asleep while writing, which is something I had never done before I began writing these entries. I have a toddler- not yet two years old- who doesn't always sleep well and daylight savings time began recently which disturbed our diurnal rhythms and our harmony with the more grand circadian rhythms of earth and her creatures. Therefore, I fall asleep in the not-so-late hours of the night when I usually write, when my family is asleep, and I can digest the day and my thoughts. It is difficult to look for the future in times like these, when the present is so laden with all that came before, when each day is a race to get ahead of the past, a desperate striving to breathe in the present and a near hopeless lurch to achieve a vantage to peer toward the steam-rolling future. But, it is spring, and the trees are sprouting buds and fruit heralding flowers, the early blooming daffodils and crocus dare to show their petals and children are indomitable in their pursuit of joy and mischief. This is the time when nature does tempt us with visions of the future. We can begin to feel the warmth of summer on our bare skin or imagine again the smell of steam rising off the streets after an August thunderstorm. Autumn shares a similar potential for portent in falling leaves and baring branches. These cycles are eternal. They remind us of the awesome turnings and revolutions of our planet, the immense heat and light that travels nearly 93 million miles from our sun to draw forth life from rock and water. This is a future that lives with us day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. When all else seems bleak and gloomy, this movement of time and warmth and light through space is refreshingly true and dependable. Our relationship to it may change; we, as humans, may not be here to observe its cyclic meanderings. But there is an eternal quality to it- even if earth's revolutions were to collapse and we hurtled into the sun, taking Mercury and Venus with us and disturbing the entire delicate balance of our solar system- the greater cycles would continue. Somewhere heat and light, gravity and levity, and the waltz of space and time would continue to express their creative urges in rhythmic pulses. There is a simple yet profound meditation I find helpful in times like these. As we contemplate the vicissitudes of contemporary life, the socio-political climate or our own more immediate circumstances, we can ask, "What is eternal and what is temporal?" Sometimes it is surprising to see what slips away and what remains- love of child, music that is true, heartbeats, perhaps wind across water.
I flew kites today with a group of eight seven-year old children. The wind was blowing out of the southeast, a gentle breeze just strong enough to hold our kites aloft. The children let all the line out and the kites floated at the end of their barely visible tethers hundreds of feet in the air. A certain peace came over the children while we flew. Some wanted to hold the line, some wanted to sit down and play in the dirt, some wanted to run out, following the line of the kite, to where it might crash should the wind shift or wane. We've flown kites together before, but only in winds too strong for both the children and the kites. So today's calm and successful outing was remarkable and earnestly felt healing for all of us. The Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner described a total of twelve senses with which the healthy human being perceives the world, instead of the five senses we customarily recognize. Among these is the sense of self movement. This sense can be considered similar to what is termed proprioception: "The ability to sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium." (definition from WebMD) According to Rudolf Steiner, this sense is not only stimulated by the movement of one's own body in space but is also active in the observation of the movement of another body. As we observe something else moving, our awareness enters that moving object, and we are able to sense its movement through our own sense of self movement. This idea is also gaining traction in the main stream through the discovery of mirror neurons. An article on the website of the American Psychological Association states, "Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that respond equally when we perform an action and when we witness someone else perform the same action." Currently, the only tests that have recognized individual neurons with this capacity have been on monkeys, but it is known that humans have general areas of the brain that perform this mirroring function. Without attaching electrodes directly to the brain (which I guess we don't do to humans, only monkeys) we are not able to isolate the individual neurons, but we know the activity is there. This discovery from the 1990's has tremendous ramifications for our understanding of such developmental challenges as autism, for the way people, (especially children) learn through imitation, and, ultimately, for hope in the innate, hard-wired capacity for the human being to empathize with their fellow human beings. It also tells us that when we are flying kites, there is a very good chance, according to the insights of Dr. Steiner and many others more recently through studies of proprioception and neurology, that we are actually experiencing the sensation of flight. Some part of us is up there floating at the end of the barely visible tether, tentatively dancing against the backdrop of the flat blue sky with the winds that ebb and rise. The boys who normally wrestle and tackle one another were excited and engaged but calm. The children less prone to playful aggression and impulse control challenges rode the edge of boredom but sensed a rightness to the kite flying and joined or sat quietly playing with the grasses and dirt. The flight of a kite in a prairie breeze, the soaring of an osprey searching the ocean below for a fish on which to dine, the arm gestures of a toddler rocking their doll to sleep, the roaring lap of a Nascar vehicle around a petrol fumed track, the pain of seeing someone trip and fall on a concrete sidewalk, a Syrian refugee standing outside a tent with their child in their arms--our neurology demands we sense the movement, the intent, even the feelings of that which we observe. We can see it in the children as clearly as a rainbow colored kite against that flat blue mountain sky, in the lightness of their steps, in their focused but distant gaze--they can't help but reach out and feel it, experience it, within. The future may be asking us all to fly more kites, perhaps our mirrors need some polishing.
The heart is composed of its own kind of muscle called cardiac muscle. Cardiac muscle has similarities in its form and function to the other two kinds of muscle in the human body, smooth and striated. Smooth muscle is generally found in organs and is associated with involuntary movements. Striated muscle is also called skeletal muscle because it is the type of muscle that moves your skeleton when you really want to get the ice cream from the carton to your mouth. Striated muscle can be moved voluntarily to eat ice cream. Cardiac muscle is generally not thought of as voluntary, as the heart indeed beats whether or not you are conscious or paying attention or lazy or are running a marathon; however, the cardiac muscles are striated like voluntary muscles. This has led some to wonder if there might be a capacity within the heart that could be accessed by a conscious willing. Perhaps there is a future in which the heart becomes a part of the human body more like a limb and less like a liver or kidney. Furthermore, we know the heart plays a certain role in the feeling life of human beings, has the capacity for sensing and communicates with other parts of the body, including the brain, through nerves and hormones. It seems the heart might play an essential role in our future as an organ that will allow us to sense the humanity in the other and even help us take action in the service of our fellow human beings. Perhaps if we can begin to view the heart as an organ that we can consciously and voluntarily engage in the activity of perceiving the needs, the feelings, the motivations of other individuals, we could be on a path to the more tolerant and productive world we envision. In these times, it seems to be an essential endeavor to do all we can to foster a more compassionate society--active and engaged. Even if the heart is not on a transformative trajectory toward becoming a voluntary organ of profound and energetic empathy, the imagination of this region in your chest as capable of reaching out to your fellow human beings in that act of "brotherly and loving communion"-- this imagination alone will feed our love and caring for one another. And that is really and truly the only salve for the troubles of the world. We have seen the paintings and heard the sayings and songs of the heart as a metaphor, and perhaps it is really more than a metaphor. We have the opportunity to shape now what we will certainly inherit in the future-- our own hearts seems to me to be a good place to start.
There is an Aspen tree in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah that weighs over 6,000 tons, spans 107 acres and consists of some 47,000 trunks. It is one of the world's largest living organisms rivaled by another Aspen grove near Crested Butte, Colorado and a fungus in Oregon that stretches over 1,000 acres. It is also one of the oldest, with estimates ranging from 80,000 to over one million years old. Every one of those thousands of what appear to be trees shares the exact same genetic material--perfect clones. They bloom at the same time and shed leaves at the same time. This phenomenon of Aspen trees sharing the same root system, being of the same organism, having sprouted thousands of years ago from one seedling, explains the unique sensation of standing in an Aspen grove or observing one yellowing on the lower slopes of a mountain in late October, quaking and chattering in the breeze. There is a harmony there, in the movement, in the sounds--as if a gentle conversation is underway in some archaic language, a conversation full of subjects profound and net yet even considered by our burgeoning human intellect. This makes me think of the idea of fractals or the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm. The thought that you can take a small piece of something and it is a representation of something much larger. This is how I understand the healing effects of homeopathic remedies. We are able to ingest an untraceably small dilution of a substance from the natural world; our body, soul, spirit, life force will recognize it as a part of us that is having difficulty, and show our self how to make the appropriate changes that will bring about healing. As with the Aspens, we are perhaps all a piece of the cosmos, hold the entire cosmos within us, the same materials, the same physical forces, gravity, levity, attraction, repulsion, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen. The future calls to us through the struggles of the Aspen groves to send up new shoots, through the dwindling rain forests of the Amazon, through depleted reserves in the Ogallala Aquifer, through our hungry neighbors and the 34,000 people who are forcibly displaced every day, the 65 million people who have been forced from home, the 21 million refugees. The 42,000 trunks of the Trembling Giant, the Pando Aspen grove blossom together, drop their leaves together, share water and minerals; they speak in their archaic language of truths we can hear in the eyes of a stranger, in the laughter of a child, in the trials and sufferings of every human being. The future is able to show us, through this wonderful web of information, homeopathic pictures of our collective pathologies and the remedies available to heal them. Whether in an Aspen grove or the Genographic Project by National Geographic, through Instagram or the UN Refugee Agency, it is becoming ever more challenging to ignore the grand unity of our cosmic situation. Stories, pictures, information--homeopathic doses of remedies for an ailing world are at our fingertips, in the white bark and trembling leaves of a giant, ancient tree.
The wind has been galloping across the plains for the last week, coming down out of the mountains in the west and the north. Trampling my physical body and stealing away with some part of me more subtle, it is cruel and mischievous. Sometimes it comes accompanied by moisture, chilling through layers of wool and down; sometimes it is warmer, sun and blue skies its vessel--poor consolations for the fluids, minerals and sheer life forces with which it is able to abscond. I look for changes when wind blows like this, and there are so many changes to see right now. It is difficult to even assimilate all there is to learn about the civil and political sphere from day to day. Many people I know and listen to on various media outlets say they spend an unfortunate proportion of their time in alternating states of laughter and weeping. Laughing at the sheer absurdity of world events and tears for the lives of the displaced, disrespected and disavowed humans and the exploited planet and her devastatingly drained natural resources. Such mania cannot be healthy. The wind has long been reputed to promote insanity, depression and illness--some say it is the shift in the ratio of positive to negative ions in the air that makes people ill or crazy. It seems like we're in a windy nation right now. The vast differences in pressure in various regions of belief and perspective have caused things to move with great rapidity and little concern for consequence. If these differences are not attended to, we will be leaning into a gale or learning to bend like the tall prairie grasses for a long time. And here is where the future calls to us like the rustling of leaves in a tree a moment before a gust, or the white caps on the windward ocean ripples declaring it is time to adjust the sails. We will only find relief from the dramatic vicissitudes of today if we continually attempt to see, to hear, to understand, to know the other side, the enemy, the neighbor, the one that is different from you--to affect a balance. A breeze is nice for kite flying, but the wind these days has torn through at least three of my kites and two lines and seems to be demanding my sanity as well. I can endure it if I know there is a change coming and calm ahead, and I can mend my kites. I know that calm will come to the prairies eventually. It will take all us of working for it to come to the rest of the world though. The future is telling us to either mend our sails and hold on for an endless romp in a frothing sea or engage in a creative effort to change the very topography and jet streams of our society. This wind metaphor may have gone too far. Forgive me, I've been out in it for days now. It's truly been known to drive people crazy.
Tonight, in putting my one and a half year old son to bed, after saying our prayer and singing our song, as I prepared to blow out the candle, I was thanking the boy's guardian angel for guiding and protecting him, as I do each night. However, this night I had a moment of doubt, a questioning in which I said to myself, "I don't know if such a thing exists as an angel, I'm not clairvoyant or some medieval visionary, I've never had an experience of an angel." Just in this moment I heard the faintest fluttering sound. It could have been my heart beat, or the candle flickering, but I had the tangible sensation of the presence of a being, reminding me of all the times the imperceivable activities, the unseeable collection of organized and organizing forces, the majestic harmony of the workings of the cosmos, the dynamic unknowns that have come to be known as the spiritual world have revealed themselves to me and left me humbled and full of immense gratitude. I don't consider myself a person of faith. I don't prescribe to an organized religion. Though through research and experience I have come to allow for the possibility of a God or gods, or "spiritual" beings, or quantum physics, or the laws of The Force as articulated by the early Star Wars movies. Over time, allowing for the such ideas as reincarnation or benevolent and adversarial forces at work in our lives has not led me to a dogmatic belief system or a blind faith or a pretentious show of certainty. Rather, it has added a richness to my experiences and an openness to and tolerance of the beliefs of others and the vast marvel of human existence. Faith is a complex word and far too awesome of a concept to attempt to define or even describe here, but certain phenomena prevalent in our society today seem to derive from a proclamation of faith and are using it to questionable or blatantly malevolent ends. As the cultures of our globe continue to intermingle, the future may be demanding us to deepen our exploration of our beliefs, of our faith. This quest need not be in defiance of the traditions of our ancestors or in the negation of our culture. Experience, openness and serious inquiry will only serve to reveal the truths, the timeless and universal verities that lie within our practices, our sensations, our holy literature. I find it doubtful that intolerance and violence will be amongst the glittering gemstones and shimmering treasures we find as we dig deeper into the teachings of our forebears. The future is dependent on our understanding of faith and seems to be asking us to expand it into a faith in the capacities of our fellow human beings for tremendous deeds of loving communion. We can then listen for the sound of the flutter of wings that may come from our own hearts or the flickering candle flame or the wind through the windows and have faith that it is good.
The foothills that rise out of the dry grassy plains on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains have appeared more crisp lately, their craggy contours in sharp relief against the sheet of pale blue sky. I try to look at those mountains every day; before I do, I try to conjure in my imagination what they looked like the previous day. This exercise is known as light yoga. Instead of the traditional, ancient Indian practice of breath yoga, or pranayama, it is a practice of breathing light, or images- retrieving mental images from their abode in the mysterious realm of memory, taking in new ones, and then consciously erasing them from the mind's eye. According to some streams of thought, the image forming capacity of human beings, otherwise known as imagination, is being compromised in our current culture of screen centered attention. As we spend more time in front of devices that create images for us, such as our phones, tablets, tvs and laptops, we may be losing our ability to freely form images--image-inations of a world and a society that is better, cleaner, more peaceful and harmonious than the one we currently inhabit. Along with these hopeful, future oriented pictures, we may also be losing our ability to form image-inations of what it is like to be someone other than ourselves. The capacity to imagine the thoughts, feelings or ideas of another human being is often referred to as theory of mind. Wikipedia defines theory of mind as "the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own." Theory of mind is widely discussed among those who research autism spectrum disorders because it is an attribute most individuals on the "spectrum" lack. According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), the rate of autism among children who were eight years old in 2012 was 1 in 68, up from 1 in 150 in the year 2000. This rate has escalated dramatically in the last thirty or forty years. According to some sources, the rate in the 1980's was about 1 in 10,000. It is true, we must account for growth due to more thorough reporting and diagnoses and a broader definition of the "disorder," but, as an educator, I can attest to the change in children we are seeing in our classrooms today compared to even seven or eight years ago.
It seems a large portion of our culture is also losing this ability to recognize and accept the humanness, the individuality, the differences in those that are not of the same race, religion, ethnic background, gender orientation or sexual orientation. The rise in the rate of autism spectrum diagnosis may be a harbinger of a future in which tolerance and understanding of the other will become not only a social issue, but also a physiological, a health issue. Are we walking toward a future in which a significant portion of humanity will be empathetically challenged--not due primarily to social conditioning--but due to physiological differences? The future is still ours to shape, but it certainly seems we are being asked to look deeper into our fellow citizens, to develop our capacities for imagination, for true creativity in recognition of the other, for a profound artistry in our humanity and empathy, to reach across the aisle or the classroom or the sidewalk or the neighborhood or the border in courageous acts of understanding and acceptance. You don't need to practice light yoga to notice the mountains are less clear today, a slight rise in moisture in the air blurs the lines of ridges and mingles the rocks and snow and trees. A bit of imagination will reveal to you the dynamic contours in the sandstone, granite and shale and in each and every one of your fellow human beings.
Teaching is a profession with dramatic social implications and relatively drab compensation. One in which we feel like we fail more than we succeed and one in which we are never sure how the future will reveal the efficacy of our labors. One of my heroes, the author Dave Eggers, helped found something called THE TEACHER SALARY PROJECT which "is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to raising awareness around the impact of our national policy of underpaying and under-valuing educators." Here is some information from their website.
The average starting salary for teachers in our country is $39,000; the average ending salary—after 25 years in the profession—is $67,000.
As of 2015, teachers' weekly wages are 23% lower than those of other college graduates.
99.5% of teachers reported spending their own money on their students or classrooms during the 2012-2013 school year. Of the $3.2 billion spent overall on school materials that year, $1.6 billion came directly from teachers' pockets.
(I live in Colorado, so this is relevant for me. You can look up the data for your state on the Teacher Salary Project website)
Colorado
Annual spending per pupil:
$8,724Per inmate:
$30,374Change in average public school teachers' salaries over the past decade:
-5.5%I work with children for a living, so I stare directly into the faces of the future every day. I wonder what the world will be like for the children before me when they are in their mid-twenties and trying to make sense of themselves, of their ideals, of the society and climate around them. I wonder what I can do or say to help prepare them for the great unknowns that lie ahead. There are the basics of morality and civility, justice, courage, virtue, honesty, kindness, tolerance, patience, persistence-- but will this be enough to give them strength to face an increasingly mechanized world or one with dwindling opportunities for the renewal of one's humanity by the graces of the whisper of a canoe on the Raquette River or the mossy soothing peace of hot sulphury springs in the Elwha Valley? I can only hope there is something timeless and innately good that will transfer from the heart of my will and sincere interest in their well-being directly to them through a medium more subtle and potent than words or numbers. After all, a square is always a square, a triangle has three sides, pi is irrational and beautiful in its mystery and the forces that emanate from an earnest and devoted heart are palpable and lasting. The children will grow, and teachers will continue to try and often feel like failures, and the world will change in ways we can see and ways we cannot imagine and the waves will roll onto the beaches of Pine Island Bay in rhythms of the sea played out in delicate replicas, echoes of a movement immense and distant.
It's another day, and I am at the computer again trying to make sense of the world around me and trying again to recognize the heralding of the future-- the warnings, admonitions, recommendations and demands of a time not yet manifest but potently present in all our dreams and fears, anxiety and hope, intuitions and subtle thoughts. That is what this is about, the Future We Follow. In his 1905 The LIfe of Reason, the American philosopher George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I had to look that up because I know the saying but never knew where it came from. Apparently, Winston Churchill paraphrased it in a 1948 speech to the House of Commons. According to the National Churchill Museum Blog, Churchill also seems to have been interested in our ability to look toward the future: “When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”—House of Commons, 2 May 1935. You can imagine what was happening in the world in 1935. I certainly hope what we face today is not comparable to the activity in 1935, but I would consider it irresponsible to ignore the shifts in the global structure of society in which we find ourselves today and the dangers they might bring. This is why I've begun to write these often discardable essays to a still non-existent audience. With hope that we are not "want of foresight," that we are not unwilling to act, that we will not wait "until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong," I try to look at what is in an effort to see what will be. This is a little something I can do. A drop in the bucket, as they say. But the ocean is made of so many drops. I intentionally avoided all things political, all things civic and socio-economic that extended beyond what I felt to be the reach of my own direct action, for many years. The situation has changed now. Or I have changed. The future exists now in tremendous potential, potential to manifest in many ways, some of them scary. If Churchill could have seen into the future, I wonder if his words would have been stronger. We live in glimpses of time molded by what was and what is yet to be. As we study the patterns of the past, we must also keep an eye on the horizon. Two different capacities, both based on keen observation. One more imaginative, but both essential. We must all be Janus, gods of two faces.
There is something to this idea of thanking the evil in the world for providing us the opportunity to grow. This is particularly valid if one takes seriously the idea of reincarnation, of a self that continually experiences incarnation, comes to earth time and time again, so as to develop greater and greater capacities on a journey toward an archetype of being, a holiness or divinity. Though, even if one is agnostic, atheistic, anarchistic or completely lacking in any structure of belief or morality, it would seem to hold true that anything that challenges us forces us to grow if we decide to look it in the eye, to square up and take its punches. The capacity to love, though, stands to gain the most through such adversity. To wrestle with that which is different, perhaps even harmful, to grapple it to the ground in the ring of your consciousness, and, when you have it pinned, when the shoulders of its actions or beliefs or accusations are flat against the mat, you relent and ask, "Can you help me understand you?" and "What is it that ails you?" This is not an easy task and truly laughable to most human beings. But this seems to be an essential task in our times. We simply cannot survive very long in a state of anger or hate. And it's not a case of "loving the evil good" as the saying goes. The love and interest we cultivate for the most deplorable aspects of our culture must come without expectation. It simply must come because it is moral and good and our children, the humans who will populate this earth when we have gone--when the future of today has descended upon us--because the children are watching us. And they will imitate us even if they know deep in their timeless hearts that it is wrong. They will imitate us because they love us. They love us with all our fallibility, with all the mistakes we are constantly making, with the neglect and cursing, and absence and violence. They love us though much of what we do can be seen as evil. "Lest you become like children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven." The future is written in the faces of those children and the present is defined by our actions, our humility, forgiveness and gratitude.
"Muslim Americans have helped raise more than $91,000 to repair vandalized headstones at a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, according to an online fundraising page, amid attacks and threats against Jewish institutions." -Reuters
My wife told me about this story tonight as I was stirring the sauce into the farfalle pasta I was preparing for dinner. She had just put our eighteen month old baby to bed and emerged from his room squinting and exhausted into the lights of the kitchen, checked her phone and read the headline to me. Something like, "A Muslim American group raised over $70,000 to repair vandalized headstones in a Jewish cemetery in Missouri." My wife and I have been experiencing greater than usual fatigue as of late due to the heightened tensions in the socio-political atmosphere, the consistent concern over either an injustice being committed or an international calamity erupting upon civilization, but also due to our baby not sleeping, depleted immune systems and too much driving in rush hour traffic. In this state, the news of this story washed over me, and, as I made my wife repeat the headline to me, thought-like images arose in my consciousness. I saw a face that has appeared on various media outlets quite frequently as of late, and I felt the presence of what I can only call a divine intelligence. Against all my self-willed intellectualized logic and informed feelings, I entertained the idea of the current social situation as a divinely ordained, last-ditch, far out attempt by a ruling will to stimulate humanity toward goodness. As though, noticing we were unable to summon the drive to demonstrate adequate empathy and enact tangible, benevolent and productive deeds, certain forces were set into motion to raise humanity to the level at which we should have found ourselves in the year 2017.
"'Muslim Americans stand in solidarity with the Jewish-American community to condemn this horrific act of desecration,' the fundraisers said on their website." -Reuters
"More than 3,000 people had donated $91,583 by late Wednesday afternoon." -Reuters
This was an impulse that rewrites the future. As I heard this news and sublime thoughts and pictures moved across my inner vision like a silent film, I sensed the future shift. In the dread of or interest in or hope for the world in which my son will live, a small flower bloomed in a desert landscape that hadn't seen rain in ages, whose sandy soil can barely hold water anyway, whose arid air and scorching sun demand cactus and lizards that only come out at night. Yellow petaled and thin green stemmed with roots like short and fragile hairs daring to reach down into the earth, the flower flutters in a tentative breeze.
There is a veil between human beings and truth that is quite daunting. Truth, though, has many faces, and perhaps, when we peel back the semi-opaque fabric we will find something unexpected- ugly, stunning, beautiful or perhaps something different each time we look. I listened to a speaker today at a conference, and he spoke of certain things being true for us as individuals and other, perhaps larger truths, that are valid outside of our own limited consciousnesses, true not just for we as individuals. Today we are engaged in truth warfare. Each individual has their version of the truth or perhaps their social or political faction's version of the truth, and there is very little room for or willingness to listen to- or more importantly-truly hear the truth of the other. The speaker claimed we cannot access these larger truths with mere thinking. We have to develop different capacities to recognize and acknowledge truth. This made me think there might be hope, there might be a face behind the veil that we all can recognize and agree it is just the face we were longing to see.
And this brings us to the future- to the future as it is presenting itself to us today, asking us to shift a bit to meet it as it streams toward us from the not-so-distant horizon. Our senses, at least those upon which we currently depend to make judgements, are no longer able to provide valid information for us as observers. Aside from the rare opportunities to gaze out upon a blue and gently frothing sea, or to peer up the damp and caverned wall-like trunk of a tree so tall that the top is unattainable, or to stare blankly at the reddening sandy rock of a desert sunset, the horizon a flat line as far as the periphery of your vision is able to absorb- aside from these opportunities so much of what we hear and see is illusory, partial truth or utterly and intentionally deceiving. Facts are comically yet realistically referred to as alternative. The future is asking that we reach into ourselves in an effort to develop the capacity to grasp truths that do not come through sight or sound, news-bites or tweets, facebook posts or your uncle after a few too many beers. Truth may be embattled, but it is invincible. It just may not be the face you thought you were looking for. You may draw back the veil and see nothing but a windswept landscape, mountain peaks, crashing waves, but you may feel something in the region of your heart, warm, familiar and comforting but still distant and barely discernible. The future may be asking you to follow it into a region of truth and understanding more like a warbling brook or a slowly falling oak leaf and less like right or wrong.
I think a lot about movement and about the future. I think of new capacities we might be developing as humans, and the possibility that each challenge we face has the potential to make us more human--human in ways we can only begin to imagine. I wonder if the way we walk, the way we stand, the way we sit in our cars or on the subway or on the bus can change us and change the way we treat one another. We see people who are tired, tired of the world, tired of the cards they have been dealt. They wear it on their shoulders often, rounded and downward, hunched and protected from all that assails them. This too is the easiest position from which to view our phones and our computers, shoulders sloped into a bubbled concavity where we and our screens can commune alone, able to interact with the global population in utter isolation. How strange, this seeming paradox of vulnerability within solitary confinement. But if we are able to move through this, to stand tall as we tweet and roll our shoulders back while we type, we might start to notice the world around us, the living breathing laughing crying dirty dazzling world through which we parade. If our chest is just a bit more broad, I don't mean like soldier or state trooper puffed up and wide-stanced, but just a bit more upright and open, our heads allowed to rest just a bit more gently upon our poor over-worked vertebrae, perhaps our hearts would beat with a bit more ease and efficiency, our lungs open to allow more oxygenated air to enter our blood stream, our bowels and intestines better able to process the depleted foods we consume, our livers and kidneys more free to clean our used up blood of all the toxins we ingest. And then, perhaps, we would not be so burdened by our bodies or our machines, and we might be able to see one another as a brother, a sister, a mother, a father, a fellow human who holds the same failing organs, the same bile and hemoglobin and iron and tears. Then, we could be like super-humans with super-powers such as compassion and empathy for all beings. It's true, we face a great many challenges to our humanity these days, but we have so many opportunities to recognize a human-being in the villain with whom we so often disagree. Like Jay-Z says, "Go on, brush your shoulders off", roll them back and down then relax, open up the torso just a bit, see what you notice around you. Then maybe we can move past the disgust and anger and truly see into the heart of the other. It beats in fits and starts pleading for you to become a super-human and see them.
One hundred years ago, the Austrian born philosopher Rudolf Steiner spoke of the evil we would have to face in the future. He said that we must strengthen the highest, most noble and profound aspects of ourselves so that we could sustain the rush of blood to the heart that accompanies anxiety. Sustain this flood of blood to the heart without fear. Some years ago, as I swam in the depths of a year-long panic attack in which I regularly fell prey to the symptom of fear caused by my anxiety over so many aspects of the future, I read this from Steiner. In my memory, he also claimed that this feeling of anxiety is the natural state of the modern human. We are living in a world that leaves us continually unsure of the stability of our surroundings or even of our very perceptions. This gave me the permission to explore my anxiety in a new way, to observe it as it approached, like a train appearing on the horizon around a distant corner as I stood waiting at the station hearing the bells chiming, then hearing the engine of the train and its rattling upon the tracks- watching it coming but without being afraid of it-knowing it would stay on the tracks and not run me over. This was also helped by several trips to doctor's offices for fear I was dying, feeling my heart certainly was malfunctioning and could not sustain much more of its aberrations and excessive beating, and being sent home time and time again assured I was indeed in quite fine health--physically. So, between the doctors and dear nurses and Steiner I began to watch the attacks as they approached out of the future- watch them each time with lessening fear. Here was the future alive and kicking in the present. I do not think it is possible to have anxiety about something that is currently happening. It seems to me to be a state of being precipitated by the looming of the future, by the presence of the future impressing itself on the present. This is another gift from Rudolf Steiner: the idea that we can recognize not only the past as a shaping force in our present consciousness, our present joys and pathologies, but the future as well. As the past is a river pouring its silt into the delta of our today, so too is the ocean of the future crashing its waves upon the slowly shaping beach of this moment. Fearless sandcastles, a Tibetan mandala, meticulously crafted in a windstorm.
I have to begin this blog by saying that the word blog may perhaps be my least favorite word-especially for anything related to creativity, imagination or anything of any aesthetic value. Perhaps that shouldn't be the first line of my new BLOG, but there it is.
The Future We Follow began as a podcast, and it may become one again. For now though, it will be a place where I share some thoughts on the future, thoughts on the present and thoughts on the ever merging streams which form the confluence of memory, now and that which is yet to manifest.
Speaking of time, I have been in a slow moving, dark pool of molasses since mid January, with my attention continually drawn to and co-opted by the daily news relating the confounding and disorienting twists and turns of the political landscape. I am caught in a mire of disbelief which is really only rivaled by the delusions of grandeur and messianic complex of my early and mid twenties. Not since then have I experienced such a chasm between my perception of reality and that which was purported by the media and furthered by the general populace. The differences in my state of mind-particularly the sobriety of my present lifestyle and relative sobriety of my present worldview-make this fantastic parade of social upheaval simultaneously dizzying and joyfully thrilling. I am stimulated daily with the knowing that I have the capacity to exist in a wholly distinct paradigm of consciousness, of attention, of intention from nearly half of my contemporaries and cohorts in this social experiment. Sad, truly, a bit. But there is a comfort in knowing that the future is being painted by many artists and can be viewed from many angles and is guided by many angels.