Thoughts on home

Is the earth my home? This is the question I have been asking myself over and over again for the past couple of months. It seems funny to ask, since I have been weeding for a living and the earth is right in my face. I inhale it. I dig my fingers into it everyday. My fingers are so dirty I can't scrub the dirt off. Sometimes the earth smells so good I think of course I belong here, and when I open my heart to the robins and gulls who chirp and swirl around me I know the earth is my home. It is only when I look up and reenter the world of people where things go awry. Maybe because it is people who I blame for making the earth into a place that I don't want to live. I know though, that I must let my mind soar like a hawk. That I have to see everything that is happening on earth now as part of a natural cycle of decay, as natural as the decay and death of my own body, or of a beetle I unearth with my spade. And I must fully accept that I was born at this time for a reason to witness and be a part of what is going to happen to the earth. I must accept reincarnation in my heart, not just as intellectual idea, and that above all, I must remember that I choose and create every experience that comes my way. I have been living with the psychic pressure of tsunami building in me ever since I read that one was predicted to hit the east coast on May 15. ACtually, I 've been living with this pressure my whole life. May 15th is in two days. Everything has fallen away. I have reached a point where I don't care what happens really. This isn't because of despair, but because I feel like I at least accomplished two things that I was sent here to do. Wrote and published Siren, awakening people who read it to the possibility of apocalypse, and finishing Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary. No one's read it yet, but I am the living embodiment of its ideas. We are waves of sound and light. My wave touches all of you. Will it crash and break on the beach? Probably. But it will also sneak up on the shore like a lover's kiss as you sleep.

The Worm Bin

While flipping over rocks at Three Sisters today, I was delighted to come upon several red wrigglers! I had been searching through manure the past few months for the critters to no avail. Now that spring has sprung they are everywhere, wriggling through the wet soil up into the sun. Now I can start my worm bin. What is a worm bin, you may ask? I certainly had no idea before I went to EAT. The purpose of a worm bin is to create worm casings which you can use fertilizer, either putting them directly onto your plants or by brewing worm tea. They are easy to make. Just get a garbage can and poke some holes in it so the worms can breathe. Toss in some newspaper and some food scraps and some red wrigglers, and the worms will do their thing, digesting your food scraps into succulent casings. It sounds grosser than it is. The casings actually look and feel just like soil, not like the manure which they actually are. A worm bin is more practical than a compost pile if you live in a city. You can put it in your basement or under your kitchen sink. The worms should be red wrigglers, not the larger earth worms. Red wrigglers can be mail-ordered, purchased from a bait shop, or dug yourself--horse manure is a good place to look. To make worm tea take a handful of casings and add it to a five gallon bucket of water. AT EAT we dumped in two bottles of blackstrap molasses as well, since the sugar promotes bacterial growth. The tea should be aerated by stirring it for an hour or by hooking it up to a pump (like for an aquarium) if you don't want to do it yourself. Here on BI, a wormbin is economical as well, since we have to pay for our trash by weight at the dump. Plus you get to have pets!

Sadhana

Sadhana is a Sanskrit work meaning spiritual practice. It is doing the same thing day after day until it becomes an unconscious habit, like tying your shoes, only sadhana relates to more intangible things like the emotions. My hope is that if I do my sadhana every day I will be able to deal with my emotions the same way that I tie my shoes.

Sadhana

A scent upon the surface.
A dew covered mountainside at dawn.

Insects pass their mantra on to the bush birds
twittering as the sun strikes the far side of the valley.

Callused fingertips. A shaky hand.
Not many years left of doing.

A stooped woman leans forward to pick tea leaves.
Heavy basket slung across her shoulders. Crooked hips.

Who do you belong to the same way
the leaves belong to the branches?

The air is so humid she pretends she is swimming.
Nobody ever taught her, but she knows how anyway.

The game is to forget what you’re doing her mother told her.
When she was a girl she used to believe clouds had faces.

Do the branches wonder if they belong to the roots?
She’s lived her whole life in this valley.

At the end of the day she sits on her porch drinking tea.
The insects take up the mantra as the moon peaks.

Her children have all moved to a far distant city.
If she could write, she’d tell them how the earth turns when
she stands in place.

Vultures draft on currents of air she can’t feel so close to the ground.
There’s a road leading out of the valley.

I still might take it, she thinks.
I still might learn to write.

One last sip.
What do the leaves at the bottom say?

Go to sleep, old woman.
There’s work to be done in the morning.

The Internal Tsunami

It is rainy on Block Island. Ducks splash in roadside puddles, water pools on the street and the ground is soggy at Three Sisters, where I've been making sandwiches for the past few days. So much has been going on for me internally that I haven't been able to channel my thoughts into a permaculture focus, so I haven't written in a while. Maybe I should anyway. Restricting myself to permaculture only is in a way, focusing on product over process. With permaculture as my umbrella, the frame which guides my thoughts, then everything I go through is part of the process and equally valid, even if I don't relate specific permacultural facts in every post. This makes me realize how sensitive I am to criticism, how much I need approval. When I first started this blog someone wrote to me and told me I should have more ecological information and not so much personal information. I have felt self-conscious ever since if I don't write some "facts" in every post, which is ridiculous considering this is my blog! Self-censorship is an issue that has come up a lot in the poetry seminars I have been participating in at The Block Island Poetry Project. I like to think that I don't censor myself, that I go as deep as I can and don't fear what my audience will say or think. Compared to some, I think I don't, but I know that I do censor myself sometimes. Not because I'm afraid what I say will shock others. I've gotten over that. But because I'm afraid of the emotions I raise. Afraid of what they will do to me. Will they burn all that consumes me away so I will be free of the pain they cause? Or will they destroy me? This is where being an addict comes into play. Everytime you take a drink or eat or have sex in a non-sacred way, or whatever it is that you repeat over and over to numb your pain, you are stamping down that emotion so you don't have to feel it. I do this with food every day, and it is very painful for me. Recently I realized why I crave salty food so much. Most people seem to crave sweets, which signifies a need for nurturing. While I do need to be nurtured, I seem to act out my addictive impulses with salty food. What does salt do? It asbsors water. Water represents emotions. Every time I eat salt I am soaking up the emotions I am afraid to express. More and more I feel rage and despair building in me, like they are gonig to burst out of my body, like my body is not large enough to hold these feelings. I go about my daily business as best I can, but the strain is very difficult and exhausting. I feel like I am leading a split life. Like there are two of me walking around. I bet everyone feels this way, but I have a feeling that most people just push the feeling away and keep numbing themselves. Recovery is a process.....not a product. We are never "fixed." There is always a new door that appears before us. A new room calling to us in our dreams.

I call what I have been going through for the past month my internal tsunami. I got word from some folks on the Breaking Open The Head forum that an east coast tsunami was predicted for may 15th of this year. Many synchronicities made me feel that this was going to happen, that I was going to die in a tsunami. My name--Whitewave--the asian tsunami, which occurred on my birthday--the name of my publishing company, Tsunami. The name of my first book "Siren" and my second "The Apocalypse Diary." --and the many poems I have written in the past three years that feature a great wave sweeping everything away. I have since shifted focus to an internal tsunami, experiencing everything being swept away inside me, which is a more productive thing to do ultimately than to worry about finding higher ground on May 15. I am at a point where I almost don't care if I die, which isn't as bad as it sounds. There is actually peace to be found at this point, especially since I know intellectually we are all one--all part of one energy--an endless wave-but to know something intellectually is not the same as to know it in your heart. In my heart I feel separate, disengaged, despairing. Thoughts of killing myself come every day. I am lucid enough to know that these thoughts are part of the wave that wants me to let go--so dont' worry, I am not going to actually kill myself. I am just being honest with my words because my goal is to become transparent, to grow as much as I can, to be as simple as a bluebell blooming amongst lily of the valley at the foot of an ancient oak tree. I don't know what I have to do to feel the union I know intellectually. I learned something very important from the yoga teacher and poet Jeff Davis, who came to BI to teach at the Poetry Project. I asked him what one should do when one is experiencing dark emotions. He said the thing to do was to not attach one's self to them. To recognize that one is experiencing them, but not to fully identify with them. He said that this applied to what we perceive as positive emotions as well. Emotions are our teachers and the more we experience of all of them, the more our hearts grow, and the deeper our souls become. I asked him what I should do since I couldn't disengage and observe my emotions. He said "practice." And that is where things like yoga or meditation or AA come in. I have written here I think about how I think addiction is a substitution for ritual. It makes sense that practicing yoga or going to an AA meeting is something that would lead the ego out of attachment and suffering. Since that weekend I have been doing yoga again everyday, and while the dark emotions are still with me, I do feel better that everyday I am practicing. I knwo that if I stick with it this will work,because the one time I was uniequivocally happy was when I did yoga everyday for four months. Jeff Davis was a great teacher. I recommend his book "Journey From The Center To The Page."

Well, I planned to write a blog today about bio-remediation at Abby's behest. She actually said she missed me! All the rain inspired me.......but I had to get to all this other stuff for some reason. All I can say is that it is part of my process. If people want info about ecoology there are plenty of places to get it right? Anyway, bioremediation, in a nutshell, is a process of treating contaminated water or cleaning up waste through natural means. It can be done by building marshlands to treat wastewater (marsh plants are masters at cleaning water) instead of having to chemically treat the water, or through using fungus. Did you know that mushrooms can break down toxic wastes, including nuclear waste? If you're interested in learnign more google Paul Stamets. He is a researcher in the pacific northwest who is doing amazing things with mushrooms that gives solutions for even the most dire environmental problems. The great thing about bioremediation is that it is another way to get off the grid. Cheaper and more efficient and better for the earth and the body. And aren't we the earth's body too? It even says so in the Bible. God created man out of clay, and Adam created woman out of his rib. While I would argue with the order of events here, not that it matters on a spiritual level, but on a political matter it certainly does, I find it kind of funny that the fundamentalists who claim to interpret the Bible literally are very often the ones who are so disconnected from the earth that they are the ones most invested in destroying it. George Bush anyone?

No more words left today, but I will try to write through what I'm feeling, because if I'm not sharing it, then what good am I?

Breaking Open The Head

The words have been coming in different ways for the past couple of weeks. I apologize to anyone who has missed me! I am almost done with my poetry manuscript--or at least I think I am. It is hard to tell when one is done in poetry. I would like to direct people to a really incredible forum at www.breakingopenthehead.com. I have been writing a lot here lately. Click on discussion when the website comes us. It is based on Daniel Pinchbeck's book, Breaking Open The Head: A Contemporary Journey Into Psychedelic Shamanism. I highly recommend the book and the forum. I have been learning a lot from the people on the forum...I will get back to permaculture soon, but right now, I would like to say that it is OK to feel angry. Any of you who feel angry, let it out! Just don't hurt yourself or anybody or thing.

I have been pretty overwhelmed lately. Definitely not together enough to tie anything I'm doing or feeling into permaculture, thus the long silence. I went through the supposed last stage of my initiation this past weekend. Initiation into what, I kept thinking? This question is what kept me from feeling inititiated I think. In the past, we had actual tribes to be initiated into. Now we have the feeling of the tribe,which is much harder to understand. I'll admit, I couldn't feel it in myself. What I was supposed to be feeling, according to my teacher, was a feeling of unity. A realization that everythign I have experienced so far, and that everything we have created no earth has been an illusion--what she called "playing in the backyard." The end of the initiation process was supposed to bring me "home," where all the concerns and games we play in the material world drop away. I couldn't get over my anger at the material world. I couldn't let go of my personal frustration at being a poet in a culture that doesn't care about or value poetry. I couldn't let go of my anger at the rape of the earth. What I have realized, is that I need to feel these emotions first, or again rather, I have felt them before, but somewhere along the way they became intellectual concepts before I had released them fully. So now I've been crying a lot and trying not to gorge myself on nachos when I'm depressed. I found out an interesting thing this weekend. My teacher was talking about why we crave sweet foods, saying it is because we feel a need to be nurtured. I asked her why one would crave salty food, since this is what I crave. She said that eating a lot of salt is a way to avoid feeling emotions--think of the way salt dries up water, what a cracked piece of land looks like after days of drought. So I am accepting that I need to feel some ugly things before I can feel at "home." And I encourage you to do the same, and to realize that something we see as ugly is also beautiful if it enables us to become fully present and whole.

Initiation, 20th Century

Hello to anyone who has missed me. I'm sorry I haven't been posting as much--my energy has been drawn toward poetry and to organizing an initiation workshop out here on BI this weekend, hosted by my spiritual teacher Maria DeMarco. Initiation, according to Maria, is an essential part of the soul's growth. The soul craves repetition--if it does not get it, addictions manifest. Many of the traumas we who came of age in the 20th century in the U.S. have experienced were the result of botched attempt at self-initiation, not that we (or at least me) are aware of it. This is why we need "healing," a term which I am going to do my best not to use any more, since it implies there is something wrong with us in the first place. When we realize that everything that we experience is what our soul needs to grow, we realize that we are all right. We don't need to heal from anything. Perhaps readjust is a better term to use.

In any case, I just read a great book, Women Who Run With The Wolves, by the Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Estes uses fairy tales to trace the stages of a woman's initiation. Unfortunately for me and many I know, we grew up in a culture that had forgotten these ways. This is nobodies fault. It is just part of our self-realization. What we are given to work with in these times. What the collective good ultimately needs as part of its cycle of growth. Using the stages outlined by Estes, I wrote a poem about the botched initiation many of us experienced coming of age in the 20th century. Each stanza is supposed to take seven years, thus each is seven lines long. See how many of the stages you can identify.....and know that it is never too late to go through any of them. They are not chronological.


Initiation, 21st Century

No.
Because I said so.
Stop that!
You should be ashamed of yourself.
You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.
Don’t tell anybody.
Don’t be scared. It’s just a dream.

Get back here!
Hold still, for God’s sake!
Santa Claus isn’t real.
Neither is the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.
That only happens in fairy tales.
This is real life, you know.
You’ll get over it.

Training bra
Deodorant tampons
Don’t tell Dad, please.
Blood-stained pants
Spin the bottle
Truth or Dare
You only live once.
Nobodies a virgin anymore.

Stealing from your parents’ liquor cabinet.
Getting stoned
Frat parties
One-night stands
Tripping at a Dead Show
Shooting up in a room with no windows
Overdose

Getting knocked up
Getting rid of it
It was no big deal
Fuck off, I don’t need your help
Going it alone
Is there anyway else?
Drinks are on me until last call.

God is dead.
There’s nobody out there listening.
It’s all in your head.
Get a job.
What’s wrong with you?
Did you think your life would be any different?
This is all there is. Work, Eat, Sleep. Repeat.

She used to be hot. Now look at her.
Stretch marks
Saggy tits
Gray hair
Wrinkles
Past her prime.
She's going home alone tonight.

What do you have to be depressed about?
You’ve got it all--a big house, a new car...
Lots of women would envy you.
Take this: Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax, Valium.
You used to have so much energy.
You’ve put on a few pounds, eh?
I want a divorce. You’re not the same woman I married.

You’re too old to go back to college.
No, we’re not selling the house and moving to Costa Rica.
If you don’t like it, then leave.
Why can’t you be content? I’m retired now.
I just don’t see a place for you in today’s competitive job market.
It’s already been done before.
Too late.

Get out of the way, lady
We’ve got work to do.
We don't have time for this.
I don’t know, your eyes aren’t so good these days.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard that story before.
Nobody cares about what your grandmother said a million years ago.
Aren’t you over that by now?

Look at her, trying to dress like a teenager.
Somebody should stop her from making a fool out of herself.
Did you see how she flirted with that waiter?
Pathetic.
If only she could see herself.
It must suck to get old.
Better off dead, I say.

Everything’s so confusing.
I don’t recognize my town anymore.
There’s no place for me.
No one can see me.
It’s always foggy now.
I’m a burden.
Why was I ever born?

My life has been a waste.
What’s the point of it all?
I keep forgetting everything.
Senile.
How did I end up in this place?
Nothing makes sense anymore.
When do we go play bingo?

Poor grandma, she can’t speak since her stroke.
She didn’t have a whole lot to say anyway.
I’d hate to be stuck in that room with the TV always on.
She probably doesn’t even notice.
Yeah, she’s totally out of it.
Shoot me if I ever end up like that, OK?
A waste of space.

Open wide, they keep telling me.
Breathe in, breathe out. The stethoscope is always cold.
She’s seizing!
Tubes down my throat.
Serves her right, she should have quit smoking .
In out, in out, in out. I wish they’d just go.
Hell is other people. I should have changed my will.

Do you think she can hear us?
Nah, she’s a vegetable.
Should we pull the plug?
We can’t. She asked us not to.
She would if she could see herself now.
When will she die?
When the power goes out.

A Poem For "Criminals

The End Days

Hello.
Nice to meet you.
You look kind of familiar,
like someone I knew when I lived
above that dry cleaners in Cincinnati.
Yeah, I know the toxic fumes will probably
give me cancer some day.
Yeah, I know people are always telling me
I look just like someone they know, too.
Maybe I remind you of your sister’s best friend?
No? Maybe it’s that guy your rode the ferry with
last summer when you went on vacation
to that island everyone was always saying was the
best place to get drunk in the northeast.
Yeah, those days are over for me, too.
The only good thing I can say about the blackouts
is thank God the memories are blurry.
Maybe I’m that person who freaked you out so bad
when you looked in the mirror on LSD.
I bet you’ve wondered if you’re possessed ever since, right?
Maybe I remind you of the priest your mother called
to exorcise your demons.
The one who took you behind the altar--
don’t worry you don’t have to confess anything to me.
We both know there’s an infinite supply of demons
making the rounds, we may as well make friends with the bastards
because they’re not going away.
Yes, I’m the bastard child of a pirate and a barmaid.
He bent her over the bar one night and I popped out
nine months later.
My mom tells me there’s no shame in being a bastard,
not in this day and age.
In this day and age I’m a pregnant fourteen year old
from the Dominican Republic who lives in South Providence.
South is the direction of the innocent child on the Medicine Wheel.
Providence is the power conceived by God to guide human destiny.
That’s right, destiny is coming our way.
Don’t listen to the President of the United States or the priests.
Hell is a sound bite.
The day the Twin Towers fell waves which had been galloping
toward our island for centuries struck the southwest point.
What a relief.
I know I sound callous and cold-blooded.
Believe me, I weep.
I am another yourself, says the Mayan code of honor.
In a way, the terrorists are right,
we do have one face,
except they don’t have another.
They look just like you and me.
Looks are always being accused of deceiving.
I’m here to say you’re not fooling anybody.
That was me you saw chopping down that mighty
redwood tree.
Everything is hard to believe.
Nobody loved that tree more than me.
You probably despise me.
Some redneck who doesn’t know the world needs to be saved.
Let me tell you, it ain’t easy feeding a family these days.
So whatta you want to do about it?
Throw stones?
Or plant seeds?

Process Over Product

My grandmother just sent me a heartening article from the Orlando Sentinel that demonstrates that process is becoming as important in U. S. culture as product, perhaps at a mainstream level. The article was about recent college graduates who are deciding to have adventures before entering "the real world." She sent it to me because this is what I have been doing for so long that this is real life to me--I don't have to put it in quotes! The article did operate under the assumption that these young adults would go into the mainstream job market one day, but I suspect that many of them won't. I know from personal experience, that once they get a taste of freedom, it will be difficult to put themselves back in the cage. Not to make anyone who participates in what is called the real world by cultural consensus here in the U.S., meaning the 9 to 5, forty hours a work week, feel bad about what they are doing. I know many people are happy doing this and find fulfillment in their jobs, while also being of use to society. But not everyone is the same, and when your culture tells you you have to be a certain way in order to view yourself as successful, it can be very difficult to follow a different path. Human beings are as diverse as Kinsey's gall wasps--none of us are the same--"the real world" as we know it just doesn't have a place for all our diversity. I find it encouraging that a mainstream newspaper is acknowledging this "taking a year off" as a trend, because this means more and more people are following their dreams, that wild and woolly realm where anything can happen, and always does. The more we experience, the more we grow.

The valueing of process over product is something I learned from working in groups at Earth Activist Training. We were given projects in which we were to re-design sites at the Black Mountain preserve according to permaculture principles. When my group first walked around our site we were pretty overwhelmed. We had only a few days to come up with a design that would be publically presented to the other groups, our esteemed teachers, and the Black Mountain staff. The pressure was on, and over the few days that we worked on these projects, much moaning and bewailing was heard from the groups, much of it from having to work in consensus. In consensus, each member has a voice in the decision of the group as a whole. It is not that the group has to agree with everything, which I thought consensus meant before EAT. A person can block a decision only if she or he has a strong ethical reason for doing so, and should voice her or his concerns early on in the process, instead of waiting until the end, so that the group has the opportunity to come up with alternatives ways to solve that person's issue. If it sounds easy, it is not. There is actually a well-developed protocol to follow when working in consensus that can definitely smooth out the kinks in the process if the facilitator can get everyone to follow it. The facilitator is the person who runs the meeting. It is her or his role to make sure that everyone who wants to be heard gets a chance, in due process, and to bring out the voices who may perhaps be more quiet in the group, also to help figure out how to use the talents of a person who is throwing wrenches in the process, to the best advantage of the group. Here's a list I wrote down at EAT of things a good facilitator should do:
1. show respect for each person in the group
2. experience-reflection-insight (it is the facilitators role to move the group through this process)
3. creating dialogue (facilitator stays neutral)
4. Engage the whole person
5. Recognize injustice and deal with it
6. Bring out the creativity and joy of the group.

Why do we want consensus decision making to be part of the world we want to live in? Hierarchical decision making is much more effective. The problem with hierarchical decision making for me, is that it doesn't allow for the growth of the soul. It is great for getting things done, but I don't think the soul starts to grow until we engage in all the emotions that come up as we work with people to get something done. Some people may not care about the soul's growth. They just want to get that garden design done and move on to the next project. Working in consensus will make you angry. It will make you happy. It might make you cry, but I guarantee you will be more fulfilled by it than if you just did the job and walked on to the next one. That's what happened to me at Earth Activist Training. Sure, I thought my group came up with a great design that I was proud to present to the community, but I was more proud of the things I realized about myself by listening and observing others in the group, even when the things I learned were faults. For the first time ever in a work situation, I was able to let go of worrying about what we were creating, and just enjoy the process. That's called living life to the fullest.

Finally, I just want to comment on something that has been on my mind this week. I saw Michael Jackson, who as most know is being tried for child abuse right now, on TV tonight. He looked like he was being consumed from the inside out. I felt sorry for him, although I imagine many Americans think he is sick and should be punished, even though he has not been declared guilty yet in a court of law. Michael is a sensitive, beautiful person who is absorbing all our shadow energy. This realization was made in conjunction with a conversation I head earlier in the week with a friend about our local "bogey man" here on Block Island. The Times had just run an article annoucing that he had been let out of jail, and that part of his parole was that he could no longer come to Block Island. I'll admit, this man scares me, but I think the level of invective directed at him doesn't take into the consideration that he is a scapegoat for aspects of our society that we don't want to deal with. I am taking a Jungian perspective here--viewing individual traits in people as part of our collective soul. If we revile those who act out these shadow traits, we only feed the shadow, giving it more strength to consume us. Criminals are scapegoats. People who are taking in that shadow energy and bringing it out into the light of day. I am asking you to reach through your fear and have compassion for them. By doing so, you show compassion for yourself. I'm not saying that people who violate the law shouldnt' be brought to justice. I am saying that we should reconsider our motives in agreeing to the laws themselves. This is not something that I see changing quickly, although it could if we let go of the illusion of separateness and perceived ourselves as whole, first on an individual level, then on a societal, spiralling outward to the planetary level, then the galactic, and who knows beyond that. To be honest, I think this is going to happen on a mass level very soon. If you open your hearts through compassion now then you will be ready to make this transition into whatever dimension this experience of unity brings us.

On-Site Resources

Something amazing is happening.

Permaculturists believe in using as many on-site resources as one can, instead of going out and buying new things. For example, scrap metal dumped in an abandoned lot could be used as fence posts or for a sculpture instead of dumping them into a landfill. Once again, it involves thinking like a creature of the forest. A squirrel doesn't go to the supermarket to get her dinner, she turns to the trees around her for food, and for storage too, stowing away acorns to get her and her brood through the winter.

People are also on-site resources. At EAT we were advised to look around our communities and see who our allies were. I had actually been planning to make a list of people I thought would be "on my side," meaning people I could recruit in the future to work with me on whatever projects I come up with to further my goal of creating a sustainable world.

The amazing thing is that I haven't had to make a list. My on-site resources are making themselves known to me without my speaking. Every day I make a new connection with someone who gives me that piece of information I've been needing, or who surprises me by making a comment that makes me realize we are less different than I thought. My aunt and uncle and I have been connecting much more than usual lately. Yesterday I was at their house helping them install a new printer for their computer and my uncle said it bothered him that we live in a culture where we just throw perfectly good stuff away. My aunt said she was goign to look for someone who could use her old printer cartridges that didn' t fit her new printer, and that she recycled her used cartridges. These comments showed me that they are not the people I thought they were, which helps me get out of my own sphere by realizing that I am not the only one who is changing, and that as I change, as I expand my energy, I create opportunities for people to reveal unknown aspects of themselves to me. This helps us create common ground, and gives me hope that if we can reclaim this common ground within our hearts than we will be able to reclaim the earth in common.

These are little things, but to me they show a big shift in our society. They have the feel of revelation. I am seeing more and more every day, my inner vision expanding, my senses enhanced, and I am now overjoyed to say that my on-site resources now include angels! I have connected directly with angelic energy. It is there for all of us all the time, but can't perceived clearly unless our filters--our bodies and the energy around them--is clean enough to let them in. I have reached this point by freeing myself from physical addictions, from doing energy work with a shamanic healer, and by intensely examining my thoughts and reforming them to support the world that I wanted to live in, not the one I thought was "real."

Stacking Functions

Before I went to EAT I had an abstract idea of what permaculture was, but if someone had asked me to define it verbally I wouldn't have been able to (at least very clearly.) This indeed happened a couple of days before I left. One of my customers at work asked me what permaculture was. I started fumbling for words and decided to defer to my friend who was also sitting at the counter. Since she is an organic gardener, I thought she would be able to do it better than me. "Isn't it just common sense?" she said. "Planting and organizing things so they work together." Yes, in a nutshell, but as I discovered at EAT, permaculture is far more than a system of gardening, it is an entire system of thought, a way of thinking that is based on common sense. Unfortunately, many of us in our disposable culture have lost this common sense. Permaculture gives a chance to return to our instincts, to form our thoughts by connecting with the needs of the earth instead of the needs our disembodied minds create.

Stacking functions is common sense. I bet you probably do more of it than you already realize, even if it is just downcycling things. For instance, I use plastic shopping bags as bathroom trash bags. Obviously this doesn't take care of the problem of trash in the first place, but it is a beginning in changing the way we think. If we see everything as having more than one potential use, (the definition of stacking functions) we are creating a shift in our thinking which can lead to the sustainable world more and more of us want to see.

I used to argue with my friend who worked at the dump about recycling. He said it was just a band-aid. Something cooked up to make people feel good that they were doing something about "the environment." He was the first person who pointed out to me that we were in deep shit. Since he worked at the dump, he definitely had some earned authority. He was the first to tell me it was our current system that had to go. I was shocked at first. At the time I hadn't really perceived how deep our problems were. I was naive--meaning I didn't know the facts, and believed in the inherent goodness of my action. Now I am innocent, meaning I know the facts, but still believe in this goodness. So I recycle, knowing it is not going to make the difference I once thought it would, but that my action is a motion toward shifting the world toward sustainability, even if it is only in a symbolic way.

A lot of things we can do are like this. The Kyoto Accord, for example, which for those who don't know, is an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even though the amount of reduction it calls for is so small it would be purely symbolic in light of what our atmosphere needs in order to be healthy, it is still important because it sends a message to the citizens of the world that the governments of our nations care about the air we breathe, no matter what country we live in. The U.S., the greatest producer of greenhouse gases on the planet, has refused to sign the accord, which went into effect in January.

Stacking functions is something I do in every blog. I disseminate information and I clarify my own thinking about the world and myself. Isn't this what an essay should do? The word essay comes from the French essayer, to try. Try and look for ways to stack functions. I bet your common sense will find lots of ways, and then eventually you'll start designing your life so that everything will have more than one function. That's my plan, at least.

Here's a way I stack functions on a daily basis. Every time I chop vegetables I throw the stalks or skins that I'm not going to eat in a bag I keep in the freezer. When I have enough I boil them down to make vegetable stock. I still don't have a wormbin or compost yet, but when I do I will toss them in, thus getting three uses out of them.

Just a note--there is another meaning for stacking functions that relates specifically to garden design. Otherwise known as vertical stocking, or multi-tiered garden design, e.g. creating a canopy of plants with trellising or espaliering trees. Espaliers are trees that are pruned to grow out instead of up, forming a hedge of fruit. The idea is to have your garden look like nature, which generally does not grow in horizontal rows like the gardens we are accustomed to planting.

Relinquishing Control

It came to me last night that another great thing for me about this blog is that it enables me to practice relinquishing control, an important permaculture principle. When a permie designs a garden the idea is to design a system that works so well that the gardener can step back and let it flourish on its own. Anyone who writes or paints or performs knows how difficult this can be. We want the audience to "get" what we're doing--we want their interpretation to match our own. Of course not every artist thinks this way, but it has definitely been part of my development as a writer. We even talked about this in college in literary theory classes. It was called reader/response criticism, which believed that every meaning came from the interaction of writer and reader. As a writer this was much more appealing than the death of the author posited by Roland Barthes, or deconstructionism, which says that ultimate meaning is not possible because language is an arbitrary system of sign and system. Alas, I was seduced by these French philosophes, mostly I think, out of intellectual pride. Their works were so obtuse, my brain swelled when I was actually able to decipher what they were saying. Reader/response seemed so simplistic and banal because it was so direct. This elevation of complication eventually led me into deep despair. I gave up my dreams of wanting to be a word artist for a few years, but like a meandering river, I found my way out of the silt clogged byways and made it back to the sea, where I have been floating and catching waves ever since.

When I am able to relinquish control of my writing, I am able to let go in a multitude of ways. First, I stop caring what people will think and write whatever comes out of me. Second, I get the fascinating opportunity to get to know other people by hearing how my work has affected them. One can learn much when one views opinion as a character study instead of taking offense or feeling wounded that one has been misunderstood. As a creative writer, I have not had too many opportunities to relinquish control of my writing. I have published a book of poems, had poems published in lots of journals, and had a couple of people read the manuscripts of my two novels. I have also been in writing workshops. However, this is just a tip of the iceberg considering how much I have written! I'll admit, I have a desire to be heard by a large audience. Part of this is ego, of course, but part of it is also because, for a long time, I have felt that I was receiving messages that people needed to hear. One of my totems is the hawk, considered a messenger between the spirit world and this one. The hawk is far-seeing, flying high above the earth. It can detect a tiny mouse from a vast height and plunge down to clutch it in its talons. The mouse is also one of my totems, scurrying around in the grass investigating everything. Mice see the details. This ability to see the details and to see the big picture is a potent combination. I see a lot and I have a lot to say. As a poet, I have emphasized artfulness over transparency,--poetry is indirect, the language of the soul, like dreams. To me, the best poems don't give up their meaning easily. They have to be earned, like a lover, they flood through the body like ecstasy. However, I try to make myself transparent in my poems, which I do by exposing my vulnerability. Poetry is a paradox. An art form of words in which the best poems can't be explained in words. Interpreting poetry often reduces it, or more likely, reduces the interpreter, instead of expanding their soul until it feels, as Hildegard of Bingen wrote, a feather on the breath of God. In our culture of instant gratification and insistence on the existence of objective truth, poetry has been pushed to the fringes. Many people don't have the time to read it, or if they do, can't relate to language in this way. Poetry is not empirical. To me, it reflects the structure of the universe itself, each word in a good poem tolls like a bell, is a vibration that can't be contained, has infinite meaning as it opens up doors in our body and mind, poetry is the chariot on which the soul rides.

I think people who write do so because they have a desire to communicate. Naturally a poet, I sought out audiences in other venues as a writer because I have a compulsion to express myself. For a time I wrote for The Block Island Times, a good training ground for relinquishing control. However, because journalism is supposed to be unbiased, as writers we had to anticipate what would happen when our work was released to the public every Friday. I found this frustrating and deadening after a while. Sometimes when I wrote a feature I really liked, my soul got a snack, but newspaper writing never gave me a feast!

I've debated whether or not I should be so honest with the ups and downs of my daily emotional life in this blog. Is my primariy intent to encourage people to create a new world through permaculture? If so, then detailing my emotions may not be the best way if my feelings end up inoculating them, so that they feel the same way. I feel a responsibility. I want my words to encourage change. Language is such a mysterious creature. Where does it come from? On a physical level it is the product of teeth and tongue and voicebox. Language is our body. And where does our body come from? Our body is the earth. This is not metaphorical. There is nothing in our bodies that doesn't come from the earth. Except our soul--if you believe in the soul. Many believe that the seat of the soul is the pituitary gland. People have even weighed the body right after death and discovered that it loses a small amount of weight that may be the result of the soul's departure. Of course this could be gas leaving the body. People who are long-winded with words are sometimes said to be full of gas. But being long-winded can also be a form of play. For example, I am having fun with words right now, rolling them out, letting one connect to the other as my fingers dance--however language came into being, it is what structures our consciousness. Our mind is built on words. Do we want to build a house with a shaky foundation? No! I'm still up in the air about my intent with this blog, because to be frank, it is such fun to just write everything out, such a relief to unburden myself of my emotions, more fun than simply spreading information about permaculture. Whatever I decide, I will be aware of you my readers, and that by relinquishing control of these words I may form galaxies in universes I've never heard of.

Message From Hopi Elders

This message from the Hopi elders was received in December 1999. The Hopis have an ancient petroglyph called Prophecy Rock which outlines the fate of humanity. They believe that humanity is now almost at the point of the Great Purification that will mark the end of the fourth world. Just before the purification there will be many natural catastrophes like the tsunami, earthquakes, global warming, trees dying, land sinking and rising. According to the Hopi, the world, meaning the world of humans, has ended four times already. Many believe that the last time was by water, the great flood recorded in so many traditions worldwide, from the Old Testament to the myth of Atlantis. After the Hopi message is a permaculture poem called "The Problem Is The Solution" which looks at the ending of this phase of human existence as a positive thing.

TO MY FELLOW SWIMMERS:

There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold onto the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. We must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history we are to take nothing personal, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do our spiritual growth comes to a halt. The time of the lone wolf is over--gather yourselves!

Banish the word "struggle" from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

WE ARE THE ONES WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR.

The following poem was constructed from phrases and words I culled off the top of my head. The form is an adaptation of a Kato creation myth. The Kato is a northern California tribe. No research was done to write this poem. I'm sure there are many things you could add to it. Feel free, but remember the function these problems can serve when see them as a solution. The italicized lines are from the Book of Revelation.

The Problem Is The Solution

The witches must burn, they say Off with their heads!
Strap them to the rack, they say Thumbscrews, they say
Gouge out her eyes Cut off her breasts, they say
Bread and water, they say Don’t let him sleep, they say
Shove a burning rod up his ass He’s a faggot, they say
They say make him squeal Rape his wife, they say
Rape his daughters Fucking cunts, they say
Sodomize his mother, they say The witches must burn, they say
Cut off his tongue He’s a thief, they say
It’s deportation or the gallows, they say Let him hang
Put his head on a spike at The Tower, they say Drag his dead body through the streets
Lower her into boiling water, they say Stun guns, they say
Brainwash them, they say Your friends betrayed you, they say
We killed your family Cut off one finger at a time till he talks, they say
No blacks allowed, they say Whip her till she bleeds
Eventually you’ll say anything Lynch the niggers
Bomb the gooks Fuck off Mom, I hate you, they say
They say electrocute They say lethal injection
They say line up Fire
Videotape the beheading, they say We’ll send the tape to your wife, they say
This way to the gas, ladies and gentleman, they say You can choose one to save
Strip We want the gold in your teeth, they say
Your skin will make a lovely lampshade Fling her over the battlements, they say
The Inquisition, they say Auto da fe
Auchswitz, they say Incinerate
Hang, draw, and quarter her, they say Crucify
And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the Throne a book written within
and on the backside, sealed with seven seals.
Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?
Chronus was the first god, they say Zeus killed his father Chronos, they say
They say Odysseus, Hector, Aeneas Agamemnon, Thor, Hercules, they say
Mars and Aries, they say Indra and Ku, they say
Arthur, Lugh, Bran, they say The Vikings are coming! Run, they say!
Beowulf, they say, Cuchulainn Roland, El Cid, Sir Gawain, they say
Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they say Enki, Osiris, Seth, Jahweh
And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow;
and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
The Trojan War, they say They say, The Holy Crusades
The Hundred Years’ War, they say The War of the Roses
We need an Empire, they say King Philip’s War against the Mohawks
They say The French and Indian War They say no taxation without representation
The Revolutionary War, they say Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, they say
Newport, Rhode Island was the largest slave market in the colonies, they say
The largest plantation in the colonies was in Narragansett, they say
They say there were slaves on Block Island They’re not human, they say
War is a necessary evil, they say They call it Civil
They call it The War Between the States Then it’s Spanish-American
Then it’s The Great War, they say World War I, they say
The War To End All Wars WWII, The Big One, they say
Remember The Alamo, they say Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, they say
The Long March, they say Eminent domain
Here’s your reservation, they say The Ghost Dance is forbidden, they say
We’re taking your children, they say Re-education, they say
Communists, they say Korea, The Conflict in Vietnam, they say
The Cold War, they say The Soviets are going to nuke us, they say
We have to save Kuwait Desert Storm, The Gulf War, they say
We don’t understand why they hate us, they say Jihad, they say
Babylon must fall, they say Every American must die, they say
Go home United States! Bomb Afghanistan, they say
You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists, they say Ayatollah Khomeini
Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein Eradicate Al Qaeda, they say
The Iraqis will welcome us as liberators Weapons of mass destruction, they say
Islam is a religion of peace An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, they say
The Golden Rule, they say Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
We will hunt them down and kill them, they say Orange alert today
The War in Iraq, they say The War at Home, we say
And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat there
to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.
Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Peron, they say Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Pinochet
They say Charlemagne They say Alexander the Great
They say Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, Nero, they say I am a god, they say
Song Jong Kim, they say The Axis of Evil is preparing to strike
Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Omar Qadafi Franco, Stalin, Ceacescu, they say
Rwanda, they say Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, they say
Fundamentalists, they say Terrorist cells, they say
Cortes, Custer, Napoleon, Henry VIII Richard the Lionhearted, they say
They say Papa Doc, Noriega, Fidel Castro Christopher Columbus, we say
Himmler, Eichmann, Goering, they say Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Cheney
Condoleeza Rice, we say George W. Bush and every President of The United States of America who has dropped a bomb in my name Homeland Security, they say
And I beheld, and lo a black horse: and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
Justice will be served, they say All men are created equal, they say
No to the ERA Innocent until proven guilty, they say
No child left behind A thousand points of light, they say
Give me your tired, your poor, they say Genital mutilation isn’t grounds for asylum, they say
He had a gun, the police say They say we made a mistake
Mumia killed one of ours, they say Leonard Pelletier killed an agent, they say
Repent, they say Karla Faye Tucker must die, they say
It’s a hard knock life Rest in peace
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth,
to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
By axe, sword, spear, and mace, they say Smallpox, syphilis, influenza, ebola, AIDS
Catapult, crossbow, cannon, they say Crack, crystal meth, heroin, they say
Longbow, rifle, shotgun, bayonet, they say Strip mine, clear cut, drill, they say
Rape is an effective weapon, they say Slip her ruffies, she’ll pass out, they say
Revolver, machine gun, pistol, they say Napalm, Agent Orange, Round-up, Drano
Automatic weapon, they say Genetically engineered foods are perfectly safe
Grenades, mines, shells, they say They say no civilians were killed
B-52, rocket propelled, hummer, they say We’re cutting funding for the EPA, they say
Suicide bombers, they say We’ve trained dolphins to blow up ships for us, they say
Fighting machine, they say Cancer, famine, acid rain
We break them down in boot camp, they say Prozac, Xanax, Budweiser, Jack Daniel’s
The Atom bomb, they say Chernobyl, we say
Smart weapons, they say We say, there’s no such thing.
The end of this world is nigh, they say Hallelujah, we say!

My Tribe Calls Back

First of all, thank you for all of your feedback. It has been enabling me to integrate three permaculture principles to my writing, which is a reflection of my inner development--1. apply self-regulation and accept feedback, and 2. creatively use and respond to change, and 3. use small and slow solutions.

Sometimes when you're caught up in a cycle of change it seems like it will never just come to an end. This is a good time to keep the principle succession of evolution in mind. Remember that, just as a gardener plants cover crops to fix nitrogen in the soil, we plant seeds in ourselves and in our communities that will come to fruition when it is time. I am delighted to discover that it is now time to bring some of these seeds into fruition here on Block Island. Permaculturists believe in integrating rather than segregating, with the idea that many hands make less work. As I worked through the fear I revealed to you in the last couple of posts-- a fear that was stopping me from seeing my truth clearly, I now see that my next step goes back to the very first post of this blog, in which I called my tribe. Foolish me, not to know the universe would answer since I called so directly! My first step as an activist here on Block Island isn't going to be the act of ecoterrorism expected of me, or even just an act of protest, it is the organization of the tribal initiation of those of us here on the island who have been working on healing themselves, many of them with Maria, who are now ready to take the final step into taking on their roles in our tribe. Most of us have been working in isolation, which as we know from looking at a forest or a garden, just doesn't happen in nature. Nothing can flower alone, including us. We are nature. We need each other to create the vision of peace and sustainability we see. Now, when I look out at the snow-covered earth, I don't see it as barren, I see that it will soon be green and dotted with dandelions. I am proud to have a part in calling the Block Island tribe together and thank the universe for giving me this opportunity so quickly.

Questioning Fear

Most of you who know me know that for the past few years I have been occupied with the subject of apocalypse--not preoccupied, I must say, since that would mean it was distracting me from more important matters. This has been the most important matter for me. For awhile (after Sept. 11th) I thougth that I was going to physically die soon. I didn't think this because I was afraid of terrorists, I just felt every day that something was going to happen to me and that I was going to leave my body soon. At the time I was drinking and had some very intense psylocibin trips that were leading me to believe this. It took almost getting in an accident in which two deer dashed in front of my car as I raced past the dashboard to make me realize that I was giving so much energy to this thought that I was going to manifest my physical death. Something within me chose to put on the brakes just in time and I missed the deer. The next day, with the help of the shamanic healer I have been seeing for the past few years, I decided not to drink alcohol anymore. She was able to make me see that alcohol was feeding the part of me that wanted to die, and that even what people consider a moderate amount, was too much for me. As I shifted into an alcohol free life, my visions of personal and global apocalypse shifted, as my fears became less dense and overwhelming, so did my view of the changes taking place on the earth plane. One day, while reading a difficult, obscure book by the poet Jorie Graham,so difficult I had to look things up in the footnotes to understand what she was talking about a lot of the time, I came across some information that changed everything for me. This is where I learned the meaning of the word apocalypse--to lift the veil--derived from the nymph Callypso who would have lifted the veil of mortality for Odysseus if he would have stayed with her instead of sailing on toward Penelope. I now saw the apocalypse as a great awakening, a time when the veil that blinded humanity was going to be lifted, when we would know our purpose on earth, and the purpose of earth in relationship to the galaxy. I became less afraid. As I started wandering in cyberspace and in books, I discovered that there were lots of other people out there who also saw this time as a shift in the consciousness of humanity, a shift into a multidimensional state of being in which we will collectively see beyond the veil of materialism and be able to connect with the spirit realm.. When we will realize we are teh spirit realm too, and that all we create is a manifestation of thought--this has been proven in quantum physics by experiments which show that human consciousness can change cellular structure. Check out the amazing book Messages From Water, by Dr. Masaharu Emoto, which has pictures of frozen water molecules, all of them different, as they respond to music, evil names, pollution, or prayer. This book truly proves that our thoughts creates our reality. It will blow your mind if you haven't thought of the world in this way before, and even if you have, it will give you proof that your intuition has been right all along.

These end of the world ideas may sound strange to some, but they are all over television and movies--I just actually believe them! I never took the X-Files seriously, or saw science fiction novels as anything but entertaining fantasies. Whether you call it the kali yuga of the Hindus, The Rapture of fundamentalist Christians, or if you believe the Mayan prophecies or the Hopi prophecies, this awakening is a mass phenomenon all over our planet that has been predicted since time has been recorded.

With my newfound sober outlook, I chose to follow the path of faith instead of fear, using my personal healing as a template for healing the planet. That is how I found myself at Earth Activist Training this January. Before I went there I wasn't afraid, when I left I was. I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn't feel the same fear as everyone else when I first got there. I told myself that I hadn't become afraid yet because I wasn't an activist like they were. Most of the people there were heavily involved in struggling against globalism and the Bush administration. They were exhausted and discouraged and terrified. I felt less than they because all I had been doing was hanging out on an island writing poetry and dealing with my own healing. I wanted to be involved in the struggle too, and by the time I left I was inoculated. I left scared and determined to fight for the earth like the beautiful warriors I met at EAT.

The most beneficial thing about this blog for me is it gives me an opportunity to make my thoughts clear to myself. By getting feedback from you I am able to look at myself much more clearly and deeply than I would if I was just wandering in my own mind. Well, I've come back to "my" senses now, and by my, I mean what I really believe, not what I picked up from others. I had a session with Maria today, and she confirmed for me what I already knew, fighting the system is only going to feed the system. There are two different dreams available to us on a collective level on earth right now--the one of planetary domination George Bush and his cohorts believe in, and the dream of abundance and peace that is now also possible on an energetic level. This is the apocalypse--the other world is already here. The energies on earth now no longer support the system of planetary domination. We don't have to protest it. It is going to die out on its own because there is nothing feeding it now but our fear. If we protest the old way, if we insist on setting up our new systems (like permaculture) in theirs, we will become infected with their despair and anger as their world dies, and we will not be able to fully achieve our vision because we don't fully believe in it. As a newly forged activist, this seemed like a betrayal of the cause and of my new friends to me. To a hardened activist, I imagine it must seem selfish, even deluded. All I can say, is based on the information I am receiving, we do not have to be sacrifices. This doesn't mean we can be complacent and everything will just work out fine. Every choice we make is important. That is why I am excited about permaculture and the ways it can help me live sustainably and help create sustainable communities that reflect the new energies here on earth. As for those who can't make the shift, I don't know what will happen to them. My instincts tell me that they will lose their physical lives in the old reality, never knowing the heaven on earth we are going to create in my lifetime, but since I believe in reincarnation, I know they will come back and be part of the process. This is not an easy thing for me to say. I feel foolish. I fear I will be misinterpreted, or that I will make people angry, but since I started this blog, I feel like I can't just leave this big shift in my mind and heart out. I am glad I was able to remember my truth today, but I'm also glad I went into that space of fear, because it's encouraged people to speak out to me, to reveal themselves and what they believe, to share pieces of their journey. I still believe what I said about the function of fear in the earlier posts, I am just happy to report that I am no longer feeling it, and because of this I feel free! And so excited to be living at this time on earth. If you are living now, know that you came into a body to be a part of this change too, and don't be afraid to trust the little voices in your head that tell you all is right in the world. Follow those voices. Love who you are and where you are. Don't be afraid of you wildest dreams.

My Greatest Fear Is Love

This poem is a companion to the blog entry right below this titled "State of Fear." I suggest that you read it first in order to receive the full resonance of the poem.


My Greatest Fear is Love

Nicole jumped ship two days ago,
baring her breasts from the top deck of the ferry
while we bobbed in her wake, hoping the police
would be too busy birdwatching to notice
her nipples, whipped stiff by the wind which
carried a shearwater right into view of their binoculars,
both eyes trained on the flight of a fugitive
searching for a steep precipice on which to cling.
They could have had her arrested for indecent exposure,
but just at the very moment her nipples hove in to sight,
a scourge of cockroaches caught their eyes,
scuttling out of the hold as the bilge
pumped the lower deck clean.
The lower deck has been scrubbed and hosed so many times
it forgets what it feels to be dirty,
and no longer appreciates
what it means to live clean.
I’m afraid I’ll drink a beer tonight because today
I ate corned beef on rye.
I’m a vegetarian, in case you’re wondering,
which doesn’t mean I don't still crave red meat--not raw,
but rare, which means sometimes
slightly bleeding.
What is it about the daily grind that makes me
gnash my teeth and bury my head
under a pillow of plucked geese?
I hope some of them lived to fly out of the factory,
otherwise my dreams are destined to flop at my feet.
My feet are tough as hooves from
scampering over rocks on the beach.
I wish I would dream of galloping hooves on a purple highway.
I could follow them west on any given day,
but that would be giving into my compulsion to escape,
when instinct tells me the only way to expand my reach
is to stand in place, waving as the last ferry leaves,
ocasionally rewarded with the sight of a shearwater,
or two pink nipples whipped by the cold wind
for their boldness at exposing themselves in a public place.
When I first fell in love, I learned that pleasure
means nothing without pain.
Over the years, I’ve pushed my lovers away,
even though it looked like they left me.
My heart is like the pieces of broken china
I’ve collected on the beach.
I’ve always thought it best not to ask for anything,
but the pain on the left side of my neck exhorts me, receive.
If I walk every day, I might find enough fragments
to reassemble an entire plate on which to serve
the remains of the skate I stole from the gulls,
because I wanted to see them as hungry as me.
Nicole threw rocks at me so my mortar would break.
I would have offered her my roots, but the tide swept them away.
All matter of things shall be well, Julian of Norwich proclaimed.
She was an anchoress, which means she chose to stay in place and pray.
They put food and water in the window of her cell
attached to the village church,
so she wouldn’t have to leave.
Some people called her crazy, some people called her a saint.
A cell is where bees make honey,
as well as a place where body and spirit are chained.

State of Fear

Are you afraid, someone asked me in the past couple of days after reading these blog entries. Of course I'm afraid--and I will delve into the reasons for my fear later in this post, but right now I want to go back to the Michael Crichton book my Uncle Herman mentioned to me earlier this week, as I know a little bit more about it now.

The book is called State of Fear. Its premise is that people in positions of power use fear to keep their suboordinates in line. I won't disagree with that. I see this everyday, even in simple situations like your average job, where the boss has to keep her workers in line by fear. I'm sure there are people who enjoy their jobs, but even if you do, you'll have to admit there are sometimes you just don't want to do what the boss wants you to, and that you have internalized an invisible line you know you can't cross without getting fired. If you're afraid you'll lose your job if you don't do what the boss wants you to, then you are being controlled, part of a hierarchical system that sees your needs as suboordinate to the needs of the workplace. Sometimes this isn't so difficult to tolerate, but sometimes it is, if you find yourself doing something that violates your ethics, or even just your spirit, that wants the freedom to express itself more creatively. I have definitely internalized this fear of authority in the workplace, and this fear has kept me from becoming who I feel I am meant to be. I have fit myself into many boxes that weren't me because I am/was afraid that I wouldn't be able to support myself, or ashamed that I couldn't, also afraid of being judged by people who I loved who fully believe that the hierarchical system of organization is ok.

I don't want to judge those who believe in our governing system, although I'll admit that my own experience of being judged, which has made me feel unloved, has led me into counter-attacks in which I do make judgments. My brother pointed this out in a reply to one of my blogs where he felt I was being condescending towards drunks, and I am glad he did so. By holding up a mirror for me, he was able to make me look at why I was dismissing people who drink--because I was a drunk too. By condemning drunks, I was feeding the shame I felt about being an alcoholic, and was able to see that I have not fully forgiven myself for what I perceive, on one level, as a weakness. By attacking others, I attack a part of myself I don't feel good about. I have many judgmental thoughts all day long. It is very hard not to, because I think these thoughts come to us to teach us lessons about ourselves. They are messages from our psyche that point out what we are afraid of. They are the places where we need to heal by accepting ourselves. In my case, this is often a fear that people won't like me--which on a deeper level is a fear of love, or the lack of it. Yes, my greatest fear is love. If you feel like you want to write back to me right now about what I should do to get over this fear, go ahead. I want to have a mirror held up so I can see my face reflected in your pupils. I only ask that you in turn hold the mirror up to your face and see what your desire to tell me what to do says about your own fears. The more I do this, the more I am able to see how connected everything is--which helps me let go of feelings of separation. This is a diary. I am doing my best not to hide my faults from you because I want us all to see these connections. My imperfections are a string I can follow back to the source of my fear, by showing them to you, I hope to give you the opportunity to do the same.

In the meantime, we have Michael Crichton writing about the state of fear--although I'm puzzled about his use of the double entendre in the word state, because in his book of the same name he seems to be working in collusion with the state to create the very fear he claims to be dissecting. State of Fear is about a group of eco-terrorists who create natural disasters in order to terrify the public that global warming is happening, when scientific evidence proves that it is a hoax. Although he claims this is a novel, he states that the footnotes to the book are based on actual scientific studies, so he is obviously deeply invested in his fictive opinions. The motive of the fear-creators in his novel is to raise money for his fictive environmental organization, who supposedly doesn't care anymore about the environment,but has become corrupted like any other organization with power.

Why Crichton would pick an environmental organization instead of our government, who is using the war on terrorism to do this in such a blatant way, doesn't just make me outraged, it makes me question his intentions to such an extent that I wonder if he got kickbacks from Cointelpro (yes they do still exist--the FBI's counterintelligence program). A couple of times since I got back from earth activist training people have joked to me "so what have you been up to lately besides eco-terrorism?" I laughed it off, because I knew it was meant as a good-natured joke, but after reading the review of the Crichton book I started wondering who came up with the word ecoterrorist in the first place. I am aware that there are some people who have vandalized property in the name of the environment, but I am not aware of anyone who has been blown up an entire building of innocent people in the name of forest defense, or hijacked a plane. By using the word terrorist to describe these acts of vandalism, the right is equating them with the people who have perpetrated these atrocious acts. As far as I know, far more activists are dedicated to non-violent means of resistance, because they are aware that if they adopt the methods of the oppressor, then they will ultimately become like the oppressor. I remember when political correctness was all the furor, and I'll admit that a lot of the new ways used to describe people were/are funny (meaning awkward, meaning what we really feel is uncomfortable with ourselves)-- but at the heart of the movement was a genuine desire to find words that enabled people to break free from labels that degraded or limited them in some way. The campaign by the conservative right to lampoon political correctness was an attempt to defuse the potential for people to break out of their assigned boxes. We may think it's funny, but it's a genuine threat to the powers that be. Therefore, I take offense to the word ecoterrorist. I'm not mad at the person who called me this, who is genuinely good-hearted, it just makes me realize how organized and intelligent and organized the right is in their campaign to discredit the environmental movement that they can make something so offensive seem like an innocent humorous comment, and when I follow this reaction, I rejoice, because it shows how afraid they are of us in the first place.

So afraid that they are the ones employing terrorist methods. Some of you may be aware of the case of Judi Bari and Darryl Cheney, two Earth First! activists involved in forest defense in California. On May 24, 1990, in Oakland, CA, a bomb exploded in their car. Cheney was injured, but Bari almost died. When she woke up in the hospital after the explosion, doctors told her she would never walk again. (She is now able to walk again.) She also found out the FBI was accusing her of blowing herself up--that she was transporting a bomb that was going to be used in an act of ecoterrorism by Earth First! The charges were dropped due to lack of evidence, but Bari pursued a case against her accusers in which she was able to prove that the FBI had actually planted the bomb in her car in order to discredit her and her cause. The FBI are the terrorists here, not Judi Bari and Darryl Cheney. Bari and Cheney had received numerouns death threats which the FBI did not investigate. Bari was also able to uncover that the FBI agents assigned to her case had links to COINTELPRO and the Big Timber interests who were opposed to her. For those of you who don't know, COINTELPRO, was the organization assigned to take down The Black Panthers and The American Indian Movement. The FBI claimed the branch was defunct, but Bari and Cheney were able to prove that COINTELPRO was assigned to take down Earth First! as well. And guess what? She won a 4.4 million dollar case agains the FBI, which in my eyes, proves that the checks and balances written into the Constitution, in some cases, are still working.

Why was the FBI afraid of folksinger Judi Bari? Why did they feel the need to brand her an ecoterrorist? I find it astonishing that there are people who care about money so much that they would be willing to chop down old growth redwood trees, but maybe they've never walked among them. Maybe they're afraid of what lives in the forest. Lions and tigers and bears, right?If there is one thing we humans have proved during our tenure on earth so far, is that we are extremely creative, so creative that we have managed to completely dominate our environment--not the environment. Ours, because it is something we share with every plant, animal, rock, piece of garbage, and nuclear warhead, on the earth. If we stopped calling it the and started calling it our maybe we would strop trying to dominate it! Again, choice of words is so important. I catch myself choosing the wrong words so many times every day, and am glad to have the opportunity to get feedback from people on this blog as if points out to me how imprecise my thinking is so often, and how I must never assume that people know what I am thinking when I have been sloppy or vague.

It is my belief that the people who control our country, and the people in control in many countries around the earth (who come together under the auspices of the World Trade Organization) don't want us to realizes is that we are not just extremely creative, we are infinitely creative, and because of that we have nothing to fear. If we don't cut those forests down people will starve they say, and that might be the case if humans don't use their creative powers to create a world in which no one goes hungry for lack of money. These fear-mongers are giving us an incredible opportunity--by standing up for the earth we open the door to uncovering our fears, and theirs as well. They are giving us the opportunity to recognize that we create the reality we live in. If we choose fear, we will live in a world defined by lack, if we choose to believe that there is enough for everyone, our world will reflect this back to us. Remember, the monster in the middle of the Labyrinth is afraid too. When you make it to the center offer to let him hold onto your string and lead him out. Like the spider, everything we need is inside of us. Every choice we make, every thought, every judgment, effects the web that we weave. What word do you want woven in the center of your web?

Succession Of Evolution

I just finished a complicated conversation with my friends Abby and John. I'm not sure if it was exhausing or invigorating. I do know that pedalling my way home, I couldn't get it out of my head, and that it took riding into a snowbank to bring me back to the moment right in front of me. I have had a hard time in the past staying calm when anger gets involved in a conversation. I feel like I'm being attacked and my natural response is to fight back. Today I still felt those things, but I tried my best to stay grounded and not take offense, as I know that will only close down the conversation instead of building the bridges I so desire. Instead I wonder where the other person's anger is coming from, where the impulse to dismiss my ideas comes from. Is it fear? If so, then what are they afraid of? Probably the same things I am. Sometimes when I ask why the person is getting angry, they say they're not angry, just passionate about the issue. Disclaimer--This does not apply to my friends I mentioned earlier in the post because I did not ask them these things.

A part of me thinks that anyone that is yelling at someone is more than passionate, they are angry, maybe in ways that they aren't aware of. I also recognize that righteous anger can encourage people to make changes in their personal lives and in the world. Inner, outer, above, below--everything is connected. As my friend Maria said today when I mentioned how good it felt to be thinking about the world's problems more than my own, it's ok to think about yourself, you're part of the world, too. The danger, it seems to me, is when one doesn't make the transformations, whether inner or outer, that the anger is asking us to make. Also, that if we do make the changes without letting go of the anger, we will become like the person or system that was making us angry in the first place. Starhawk presents the case for this belief so well in The Fifth Sacred Thing. This is why I am committed to non-violence. I do not want to become like the war machine that governs our world, which leads me to the gist of the debate that John and Abby and I had. It began with me saying that I believed that all people should be paid the same amount, no matter what they did. I made a mistake by using the vocabulary of the system I don't believe in. I should have said that I believed all work should be valued equally as an essential part of society, and that the value of work should be measured in some other way. For me this would be something that is both less abstract, and less tangible than the dollar. (Funny that the dollar has such tangible weight since if judged by its material components it is actually worth so very little!) Without going into the details, (feel free to post them if you want John), John disagreed, saying he thought my ideas were totally unrealistic and too idealistic too implement in the real world. I said that I didn't believe they were too idealistic at all, and that even if they are, I didn't really care, that what I have dedicated my life to is creating a vision to aspire to, something I can do as a writer, by disseminating ideas in conversation with people who are kind enough to talk to me, and most importantly, in the way that I live my life. I have a way to go as far as how I live my life, but I can see now that many of the choices I have made which have kept me on the fringe of mainstream society may have actually come from my instinctual nature. For example, I hardly own anything. I thought it was because I couldn't afford things, but when I think about it, not owning things is really more in accord with the vision I see--a cooperative society based on reverence of the four sacred things--earth, air, fire, and water. I used to always think that the way the system was set up now I could never own a home, now I'm not sure I want to. While I see the independence that owning your own property can buy, I am not sure that I want to pay the price. However, it is necessary right now for some of those who want to change the current system to own land, otherwise they wouldn't be able to demonstrate to others how to live sustainably. This creates a quandary, because the intentional communites living cooperatively run the risk of becoming like the society they are resisting. Although I have never lived in one, I imagine constant vigilance is necessary.

The important thing for me is to live my truth to the best of my abilities, and this is all I want for everybody. I didn't set up this blog to make judgments, although I am going to show my weaknesses as they appear because I want this to be an honest record of my journey. Live your truth to the best of your abilities. John is a firm believer in the righteousness of the U.S. Constitution and an admirer of The Founding Fathers. Abby pointed out that the founding fathers were radicals who were idealistic themselves, also that they left a lot of loopholes in the Constitution because they couldn't figure out how to deal with them. It could be argued, that they planned our nation according to the permaculture principle called sucession of evolution, that they planted the Constitution in such a way to prepare for ideas that could only come to fruition in the future, that perhaps they believed that the timing was not right for some of the ideas they may have wanted to include, like outlawing slavery and allowing women to vote. I don't know, as I am not familiar with the backstory of the writing of the Constitution,perhaps Abby could fill us in here. As the conversation continued, I pointed out that Jefferson, the primary author of the Constitution, owned slaves, whom he didn't free until he could no longer support them. John pointed out that The Constitution had a system of checks and balances written into it so that the different branches couldn't become corrupt, and that the problem now is that they were corrupt, which is the source of his righteous indignation. Abby pointed out that in the original wording, Jefferson adapted the words of John Locke to say that our God-given rights were life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, and that this was amended to the pursuit of happiness that we are guaranteed now. I should have pointed out that no one consulted the Founding Mothers, but I can now. Indeed, the Founding Mothers weren't given a voice in the Constitution. Women didn't receive the right to vote until the 1920s. After the Civil War, I believe that black male Americans could vote, but only if they owned a certain amount of property. Correct me on this if I am wrong. I did point out that I thought our government based on the Founding Father's Constitution was corrupt because it was founded on the assumption that ownership of property was also a fundamental right, and also because the Founding Fathers, as we so often hear, included the words "the right to bear arms" within it. Our nation was founded when a group of people who had wrested the land from the original inhabitants (who could have taken it from someone else, I don't know, but who if while not living in total harmony with each other, appeared to be living in harmony with the earth. They certainly weren't generating landfills and dumping their garbage from barges into the ocean). As I was saying, our nation was founded when the colonists fought a bloody war for "independence" from the British. I put quotation marks around the word independence, because how can anyone say we live in a free nation if we are caught up in an unending cycle of violence? However! Just because the Founding Fathers couldn't live their truths, doesn't mean that we can't either. I ask everyone who reads these words to look in their hearts and see what lives there, and share it if you choose. What's idealistic about that? Who knows, maybe Jefferson would be glad to see us abandon the Constitution as a document that no longer reflects our current needs and, in the spirit of the succession of evolution, help us write a new one. After all he, like Jesus, was a revolutionary in his time.

This was an amazing and exciting conversation, which I've decided was more invigorating than exhausting after clarifying my ideas here. John and Abby, thanks for taking the time to engage with me.

To finish, I would like to quote from Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing.

"We believe there are Four Sacred Things that can't be owned," Bird said. "Water is one of them. The others are earth and air and fire. They can't be owned because they belong to everybody, because everybody's life depends on them."

"But that would make them the best kind of things to own," Littlejohn said. "Because if your life depends on it, you've got to have it. You'll pay any price for it. You'll steal or lie or kill to get."

"That's why we don't let anybody own them," Bird said.

One Calorie In/One Calorie Out--Take 3

I had dinner with my Aunt and Uncle last night. I'll admit, heading over to their house I thought my uncle as going to take the opportunity to tear my ideas apart--I also knew that he would definitely ask be about them, that I couldn't just get away with sitting out the conversation since it would only be the three of us. I'm not sure if I've grown less confrontational, or my uncle has mellowed, but my uncle heard me out while I explained what I had learned at EAT, and while he did bring up the experts I keep hearing about who say global warming is a hoax, that ecological disaster is not imminent, instead of getting flustered and angry, I said that even if that was the case, the reason I was attracted to permaculture was because it was a way of life I could feel good about participating in, which all three of us at the table agreed was a good thing. The dinner was delicious too! Thanks Aunt Doris!

My uncle mentioned a book called Fear Factor by Michael Crichton that's out now. From the way he described it, he said the book outlines how people in power use fear to control their populations, in this case global warming. My aunt was quick to point out that terrorism is the fear our government is using to control us. If global warming is a hoax, who is using this fear and what are they trying to control? According to my uncle, Crichton says that it is the large environmental groups, who by now are operating like corporations, who are trying to gain control this way. This brings up a lot of interesting things to think about in regards to power, and how power plays itself out in groups. Even groups with good intentions run the risk of being like the systems they are trying to change if they model themselves on the very groups they are trying to change. Thus, language is very important. I was going to say "overthrow" and "supplant" but realized that this was using the language of the oppressor. At EAT, we were taught the consensus method of working in groups, a non-hierarchical system that does its best to let everyone have a voice and choice in the decisions of the group. For those of you who haven't tried it, consensus is frustrating and exhausting, but I found it to be so rewarding in the end because I was offered opportunities to let go and enjoy the process of working with people, instead of focusing on the product, or end result. And this is what happened at dinner with my aunt and uncle too. Best of all, my aunt has said I can have a garden at her place this summer!
Look for more on consensus in a future post. whitewave

Broken Mirror

Broken Mirror

This is a poem trying to reach the source of a river,
and about spending your whole life in the eye of a hurricane.

This poem has invisible walls that hold the storm at bay,
and is trying to understand why the heart has to break.

This is a poem about how my mom made me oatmeal
on really cold mornings, and how on Sundays,
my dad made pancakes.

This poem grew up to hate itself for no discernible reason,
it didn’t tell anyone it was raped.

This poem wears disappointment like a brand name,
but refuses to explain.

This poem might explode some day,
but today it slumps in its seat.

This poem thinks it knows everything.
It’s looking for a fight.

This poem has eaten too much when it wasn’t hungry.
Now it wants to bite.

This poem is afraid of drowning.
It’s an alcoholic who only cares about the next drink.

This poem can’t see itself on the surface of the still pool
at the source of the stream.
This poem doesn’t understand anything.

This poem’s been aborted.
It says the earth is almost dead anyway.

A spurned goddess lurks in the caves of this poem.
Her tears are stalactites.

This poem laughs at pilgrims who crawl on hands and knees
to see a stone saint weep.

This poem wants to be slapped in the face.
This poem is so hard not even a diamond chisel
could reveal its gleam.

This poem has been chipped away like The Sphinx.
It doesn’t recognize its own face.

This poem has stones in its pockets as it steps off the riverbank.
This poem thinks it’s a martyr, when it’s really a saint.

This poem begs for love to find it.
Love says there’s no room for me, blame has taken my space.

This poem wants to be blind, to wait in the dark with its antennae
at ease.
This poem wants to feel its way.

This poem is so sharp, you could cut your wrists with it.
This poem is so ashamed.

This poem never thought beauty would look back at her
from the hospital mirror.
This poem shines with grace.