Scorzonera flowering at a farm in Paonia, Colorado [photo by the author]
Summer Solstice musings
Ecology & Consciousness: What Must Be Done
There are the things that must happen. Then there are the things we want, the things we believe, and the things we do.
By “we” I mean virtually everybody in the civilized world. This is the collective “we”: not merely a number of individuals, but their sum. A “we” with its own path, in which solitary efforts contrary to its direction are of no material account. A “we” whose existence is a fact quite apart from our thoughts or our emotions about it, or indeed from our very perceptions of it, which are so often inaccurate.
What must happen is no mystery. Consumption must decrease, and decrease drastically, in the interest of a liveable ecology.
Many specifics follow this general principle. We must use less water, land and fuel. We must reduce our manufacturing, our construction, our energy production, our mining, our transportation and our farming. Wasteful or inefficient practices must cease entirely. War must end. We can no longer afford an economic system that requires constant expansion. Further, we cannot sustain any “economy” in the modern sense of that concept.
These facts are fundamental. Any choice made as if they were not is against our own interest. People can debate whether this is also a case of ethics, morality or justice, but what’s beyond argument is that collectively we are making self-destructive choices. Our behavior is ecocidal and ecocidal=suicidal.
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New Mexico Postcard: The Call of the Sandhill Cranes
I arrived in the Gila River valley in New Mexico in mid-September to stay at a friend’s property for a few months. Shortly afterwards, migrating Sandhill Cranes began showing up too. I heard them before I saw them, and my first reaction was, “What the heck is that?”
If you haven’t heard the calls of a Sandhill Crane before, you might not immediately identify them as coming from birds. They have been variously described as “loud, rattling bugle calls,” a “deep chesty squawk” and “kar-r-r-r- o-o-o.” I’ll take a stab at the challenge and offer: “a moody trilling trumpet.”
You can listen to recordings online here, here, and here, among other places.
These helped jog my memory as I was writing this piece (since the cranes here don’t vocalize on command) but they all seriously lack compared to the real thing. They might capture the sound but not the spirit.
The first time a group of them flew overhead, I couldn’t help but to stop and stare in awe. Their silhouettes were certainly striking—with necks extended forward and legs stretched out behind—but it was their voices that really took my breath away. I will offer the words “haunting,” “otherworldly” and “preternatural,” though they all fall short. I felt like I was hearing the echoes of dinosaurs (and given birds’ evolutionary heritage, I guess I literally was).
But of course there is nothing alien about these creatures or their noises. It is I, raised in cities by a dominator culture, who doesn’t belong here, or rather, who doesn’t know my place, or how to find it. Such is the tragic estrangement of Western Civ.
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Our Deep Abilities
We shouldn’t assume that everything we know and sense is everything that we consciously know and sense.
We are constantly absorbing far more information and stimuli than we can focus on with our thinking brains. But it’s all stored and processed somewhere: subconsciously, intuitively, or in dreams, etc.
From there, realizations can pop out unexpectedly and we call such moments inspiration, insight or epiphany.
Artists, scientists and spiritualists alike attest to this reality.
All this is to say that we are both smarter and sharper than we believe we are, or than we let ourselves be. This is one of the great challenges of contemporary life: collectively, we are continually short-changing ourselves, hobbling our own abilities, and holding ourselves back.
To move beyond our destructive ways—ecocide, war, etc.—we must rediscover our own deep abilities and relearn how to exercise them deliberately.
Once, in the past—before we civilized ourselves—this was simply our everyday reality.
It is long past time that we return. Not necessarily to a specific set of logistical circumstances, but to our own natural and inherent ways of relating to life. From that place, everything else will change.
Gravel Lot Reverie
We pulled off at that exit because we saw a grocery store sign from the freeway. Our destination was still hours away and we wanted to have a beer when we arrived, but by that time the stores would be closed. So it was a practical thing.
I’ve been to quite a few, but not nearly all, of the exits on the 5 in the Central Valley but never this one. I had no memory of visiting this particular grocery store chain anywhere between Sacto and the Oregon border.
I’d been driving since leaving Ashland in mid-afternoon and the sun had just sunk behind the coast range here. The sky was lit up with a dusty orange glow. The summer was slowly waning from its peak as September approached and we were thankful there’d been no big fires yet. It felt like it was only a matter of time before everything burned—every last tree from Del Norte to Tahoe and from Klamath to Marin—but perhaps we’d be spared any record breakers this year.
That seems the most to hope for in these days of new highs, lows and days-in-a-row: that this month won’t be the hottest, wettest or deadliest every recorded; that some respite, however temporary, might be felt, if only for one’s nerves.
For, what is it to live in such times? When talk of “the end of the world”—in some sense or other—is no longer just crazy, like it was not so long ago?
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“Roadtripping at the End of the World”
My new book, “Roadtripping at the End of the World,” is now available! For a limited time, you can order an autographed copy direct from me. When these run out, the book will be available only on Amazon.
When you order the hard copy, you will also get the book in all its digital versions (PDF, epub, Kindle). Or you can order just the digital versions.
This book is a collection made up of eight essays inspired my travels around the USA and six interviews with activists I met along the way. A few appeared online previously, but much of the material is brand new.
Check out this excerpt: “Virgin Prairie: Rarer Than Old-Growth Forest”
The book is available at four prices:
- Regular Price (includes shipping in USA): $17.50
[purchase_link id=”8919″ text=”Add to Cart” style=”button” color=”blue”] - Patron Price (extra support for the author): $35.00
[purchase_link id=”8934″ text=”Add to Cart” style=”button” color=”blue”] - Solidarity Price (low income/student): $10
[purchase_link id=”8936″ text=”Add to Cart” style=”button” color=”blue”] - Digital downloads only (PDF, epub, mobi & azw3): $5
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If you would like to order multiple copies, please contact me.
That Time I Married Myself
Today, August 5th, is my wedding anniversary!
My Facebook relationship status is “married” and I’ve been surprised that no one has ever inquired about this. After all, most people who are married list their spouse on FB and show off couple pics at least every once in a while, but my profile doesn’t name anyone I haven’t posted any “here’s my husband/wife” shots. Maybe people just assume that my spouse is not on FB, or that they’re a very private person.
But that’s not the case, because I myself am on FB and I’m a fairly public person, and the person I’m married to is… me!
We Need to Stop Believing in “Belief”
“I don’t believe in belief. I think belief is a tremendously stultifying force. What I’m interested in is freedom, and I noticed very early that a belief absolutely precludes the possibility of holding to its opposite, and therefore if you believe something you have… limited yourself.”
―Terence McKenna (“Under the Teaching Tree,” 1985)
My own personal skepticism with “belief” first revealed itself to me at an early age. I was seven years old, attending Catholic school, and my class was preparing for our First Communion.
For those unfamiliar, “Communion,” aka the “Eucharist,” is a ritual at Sunday services in which the Last Supper story from the Bible is reenacted. This is when the Jesus character famously shared bread and wine with his disciples the night before he was hauled away by Roman officials to be tried and executed. “This is my body,” he said, as he broke the bread, and “This is my blood,” as raised the wine cup.
According to Middle Age-era Catholic doctrine, when a priest playing the role of Jesus intones these words during Mass, the bread and wine on the altar undergo a process known as “transubstantiation” in which they literally become the actual body and blood of Jesus. You read that right. These products of wheat and grapes do not merely symbolize flesh and blood in this ceremony; they are flesh and blood, in everything but their form. Quite the concept.
Seven year old me tried to wrap my mind around this, but I couldn’t understand it, let alone believe it. What was clear, though, was that all the grown-ups around me wanted me to do this thing, so I went ahead and did it. Maybe, I thought, it would make sense later; maybe “faith” would grow.
It never did. I left the Church as a teenager over sexual/guilt issues but that’s a topic for another day.
Belief is not monopolized by religion, though. Hardly. Throughout all of society, nearly everyone bases their lives on beliefs. Indeed, our notions of what constitutes “life” itself are steeped in belief. So many arguments are only battles between beliefs. So much that’s supposedly factual is merely belief by another name.
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“Home” as a Season, Not a Place
Painted Lady butterfly, bg: California Poppies
The other day (May 24, 2019), I saw a Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) near the town of Dinsmore, California. That’s in the northeast corner of Humboldt County, near the Trinity County line, just off the 36, on the edge of Six Rivers National Forest. The terrain is hilly, fairly steep and treed with Firs and Oaks of various species. Though this spot was only a little over 50 miles from the 101 to the west, it takes close to an hour and a half to drive there, due to tight curves and steep climbs. It’s out in the boonies for sure.
The butterfly had seen better days. One of their lower wings was over half gone and the others a bit raggedy-edged. Earlier this year, in southern California—specifically in Anza-Borrego State Park—I had seen thousands of them every day for weeks. There had been a bigger-than-usual migration (see here, here and here). For awhile there, I couldn’t drive anywhere without my windshield getting streaked with yellow and my grill filling up with dead bodies. Try as I might, it just wasn’t possible to avoid hitting them, there were so many. I felt a little less bad about it one day when I came out of a store and saw a couple of small birds on my bumper, gorging on the corpses.
Other times, sitting in the desert, a cloud of them would pass through, literally hundreds a minute, alighting on the many, many flowers and passing on. (A “superbloom” was in effect too.) For as many as there were, it was tricky to get good photos. They were shy of close human presence and never landed in one place for long. What I had to do was a pick a good spot and sit still with my camera turned on and pointed, waiting for one to flutter within focusing distance.
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Politics, Perspective & Imagination
I was camping with a friend in southern California recently and we were talking about politics. Not “talking politics,” as in weighing the features of the Green New Deal or arguing blue vs. red – that is, policies and parties – but talking “about” politics. I gestured towards some nearby vegetation to make a point.
“See those two trees,” I asked. “Right next to each other there?”
My friend nodded and smiled. She saw where this was going.
I jumped up, ran over and stood between the pair. With exaggerated movements, I faced first one and then, ostentatiously, turned around to face the other. “They’re coming from completely different directions!” I declared. Allowing myself a smirk I said, “That’s the perspective of a partisan Democrat or a Republican.”
I jogged back to her. “But from here, it’s easy to see how close they are to each other.”
Indeed, the branches of the two trees were growing in each other’s airspace, meaning that their roots were probably entangled under the surface. They were quite literally drawing their sustenance from the same ground.
I pointed up at the rocky hills behind us. “And from up there, the view is different again.”
“You might not be able to tell them apart,” she said.
I nodded. “And from here, we can only imagine that perspective, unless we go up there.”
This is why imagination is so important.
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