Stuff

I woke up in a sweat, which is the usual consequence of the hot flashes that hit me at night, like lightning rolling across the hills.  However, this arousal seemed more the fault of a dream, where I gave some menacing street people some money, only to discover later that they found my home and further ripped me off.  I know this scene came from yesterday when I saw an apparently prosperous man stop and give another man who was sitting on the sidewalk, some money and engage in a conversation.   I wondered why I, passing the same sidewalk sitter, had not done the same.  Overhearing the two talking, as I unlocked my bicycle, I heard a scrap of information about the charity recipient, that he was trying to get a visa so he could work, and my sympathy moved towards him.  So he was not a street person by avocation, only in governmental limbo, trying the best he could.  This was immediately replaced by the thought that he was probably lying.

What is it that makes us simultaneously want to connect with others and stand in suspicious judgment over them?  My guess is that we are all in a state of insecurity, perhaps a remnant of our animal days where we could be attacked at any moment by a saber tooth tiger.  This feeling is often triggered by situations where money is exchanged for something we want.  Earlier this same day I bought two expensive objects.  First, a fancy raincoat, to replace one that had gone missing after twenty years of service.  The second was a framed photograph  I saw as we toured neighborhood homes in an "Art Walk."  The coat I undoubtedly will use over and over in this rainy climate, but I realized  my decision to purchase this item was determined entirely by the endorsement given by the helpful salesman, who said  he owned this very model and loved it.  Getting it home, I still am pleased with it, but I feel I might have been told what I want to hear, a time honored technique of retail sales.  What I don't understand is why it works so well.  Am I so desperate to ally with a complete stranger that I would put down hard earned money to show approval and agreement?

The second purchase was certainly of no use at all, yet I felt drawn by its beauty and felt desire to have it for my own.  Is this the same covetous nature that caused us to extirpate the Indians from the US, and now the seal lions who dare to take salmon we might otherwise catch and eat?  Of course I paid money for this item, yet somehow, as soon as I got it home, I was disappointed with it, proof of the folly of all shopping.  The potential to buy a piece of happiness is never fulfilled.  The real question is why, in the face of multiple lessons do we never learn?

I think it is because money is a magic system we have created to trick us into feeling good.  When we have extra cash, we look around for how to trade it for stuff to induce a positive emotion.  This transaction always ends up inferior to the truer ways of feeling good; the ones that involve personal effort or mastery or risk.  For the last ten days or so I have been smitten by a new website where you post one photograph taken each day, with room to name and explain your choice.  It has been a fun challenge to go out and take photos every day and pick one that you want to share with the unknown masses.  I discovered I do not have the chops to produce good photos on demand.  My success with photography comes with beautiful places I happen into, not because I have an eye for the shot.  And certainly I do not have the patience to tune a photograph into its best version.  Perhaps I was just acknowledging my limits in buying a picture from a person who makes a living with a camera.

It is interesting that the word "stuff" means both an essential essence and unclassifiable debris of possession.  Contrast "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," from Shakespeare, and the recent newspaper headline: "Piles of stuff complicated Southeast Portland housefire."  I guess we keep hoping to buy the former, but end up with the latter.

Sound of Music

At the Sign of Concordance

We arrive in automobiles
conveyed from city intersections
and airport concourses,
on a winding road
that ends at three rocks
splashed by the Pacific.

We come for strange music:
not pop or classical, not
techno, rap, house, emo, folk, trance
nor any of that ilk.
What we play needs at least a sentence
perhaps a paragraph to describe.

What we love needs even more room to explain.
Music yes, but also the way the sun
hits the face after a fortnight of rain,
the way we greet each other like distant relatives,
also the Sitka spruce, and elk,
and  Salmon River, S-curving to the sea.

What we do is very simple.
We take air sweetened by violets and alder,
wiggle our fingers and blow;
into story and meditation,
into history and dance.  We are magicians,
changing oxygen into happiness.

5/2/11
At the Wind and Waves Recorder Workshop

This Land Is Your Land

It was evening, the salmon feast had been cleared away, and the hundred or so participants in the annual meeting of the Oregon Natural Desert Association were hanging out, listening to the local country band, the Wheeler County Ramblers, or circling the bonfire outside the dining hall at Hancock Field Station, in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.  We were feeling very good, helped by a keg of microbrew and the righteous tiredness of having toiled on the side of the earth all day.

I had been with a group who hiked a very steep road for two miles to remove a half mile of barbed wire fence.  Most of us had joined ONDA on a fencepull before, so we quickly found an order to the work, first untwisting the metal stays that spread the strands of wire apart, and then unbending the wire clips holding the wire to the metal posts.  Once the wire was hanging limply, we cut it and rolled it into pointy wreaths, piling them for later pickup with a truck.  Finally, the more brawny members of the group used the levered post-puller to wrench the post out of the ground.

The volunteers were mostly from the ranks of the retired and near retired, contrasting with the youthful staff of ONDA.  During the hike and work we compared our lives, finding  intersections in our backgrounds,  and we looked from the high ridge to the vistas surrounding us.  Although the day was mostly cloudy, the brown hills were starkly beautiful,  with outcroppings colored by the volcanic ash formations for which this area is known.  The one stripe of green was in the valley where a curve of the John Day river could be seen, bisecting the spring hayfields. 

I was struck by how capable humans can be, whether in putting up this fence to turn a jumble of contours into a container for cattle, or when removing the same fence, erasing the legacy of exploitation, and giving wildlife another chance to roam free.  Once we have a purpose, we can do most anything we can think of.  This has been our genius and our curse.

Back in the dining hall, the Ramblers were dutifully playing through the top one hundred hits of the 1960's. and '70's.   Of course I  knew them all,  and something in me demands that I move my feet whenever a drumkit starts pumping out a rock beat.  As I was hopping around in some semblance of dancing I perfected around 1975, the band started into the Woody Guthrie anthem, "This Land Is Your Land."  Although I had never danced to this folk song before, I realized that this song has been the hymn of my whole life.  Whether I first learned it at school, or with the neighborhood activists who gathered the local kids for "Hootenannies," this song has perfectly embodied both my nationalism and revolution in one gesture.  This land will always be yours and mine, and how to have both at once, sharing with others and treasuring it for yourself, is the eternal tension of our life on this planet.

 

Sleepless In Seattle

     I have spent the last two weeks at the mercy of the flu.  It made me less able to fill my head with busyness, which changed my perspective from relentlessly purposeful to a more passive awareness.     
     "What do you want for dinner?" Robert asks, rising to the role of nurse.
     "I don't care, as long as it isn't a lot," I answer, for once throwing out all the various food rules I might otherwise invoke: as in, nothing we already had this week, nothing flown in from another hemisphere, nothing that swims in the ocean, etc.
 
      In such a mood, I stumbled on the Seattle Area Happiness survey, which I recommend, for a reality check about your own view of yourself. http://www.sustainableseattle.org/survey/GNH/en/.  Apparently, I have been exaggerating my degree of satisfaction with life.  Or more likely, I accept my cynicism as intellectual rigor, rather than the actual damper on pleasure that it is.  Anyway, I scored below average in happiness.
  
      Maybe I am too fond of the scientific method, but taking the survey made me think of the aspects of myself that pull me down.  One of them is the sheer weight of personal history.  Even when life is good in the present, I unconsciously measure today's happiness against the accumulated disappointments that have come before.  This is bolstered by the knowledge that I have proof of such disappointment, filed in shoeboxes in a closet, under the heading of mementos.  I keep cards, letters, ticket stubs, programs, and the like, in order to have a record of my life.  To be certain of my general impression of these materials, I open a box and start going through it.  Evidence of bad choices in love immediately overbalances best wishes in Christmas cards, good grades of my son, and proof of a steady diet of cultural happenings.  Reading such mementos  shows that I have a long history of struggling with disatisfactions, both in myself and others.  I continually resolve to change everything into some ideal that has yet to materialize.  No wonder I am unable to just be.

     Sickness has a way of focusing us back to the physical self.  I can't begin to philosophize about how I should live when coughing makes my ribs hurt.  But getting back to health, I do see a route to more happiness.  I begin to toss the contents of those shoeboxes.  Not everything, but the stuff that makes me feel bad.  Why did I think I would want to refresh those recollections?  After filling a grocery sack, I am starting to feel better.

Death in the Afternoon

     On Friday I boasted that I hadn't had a cold in a year.  Today, I feel a cold invading and taking over my body.  Almost as if the Gods on Mt. Olympus felt the need to illustrate the sin of hubris to me personally.  I'm sorry!
     Before I succumb to viral domination, I must relate to the issues of the week.   First, it is amazing how we have had an earthquake, a tsunami and now we are bombing a new country, and still I can't see that this has affected day to day life in the US in any way, except reviving my worry about being prepared for catashtrophe.  I think I have convinced myself and Robert that we should store some water and food, out in the shed, where we could get it if our house fell down and didn't miraculously kill us in the process.  Why is it so hard to plan for something that only might happen?  We don't want to face a probability of disaster.  The same tendency in us doesn't want to accept global warming.  I will get my plastic storage container and start filling it with food we can use up camping, when the apocalypse doesn't come after all.
     Today I cut down an old rose bush and pried the roots out of the ground, breaking the handle off of one old shovel in the process.  The flowers were not especially pretty ones, their stalks extremely thorny, catching our arms as we reach to turn on the nearby faucet, and I have a much better plan to start a kiwi vine in the sunny spot, but I still felt like a murderer, ripping out the bush that I am sure had been there for at least twenty years.
     Meanwhile, my neighbor Barb and I compared sightings of the rat that lives among us.  She saw it in the bird feeder and I saw it dart under our front steps.   We both revile the thing but are too soft hearted to actually hunt it.  I promise to put out a trap I bought a year ago,  but shudder at being responsible for its death. We are programmed to treasure life of all kinds, even as we also know we must kill to live. Modern humans have been responsible for so much death, for so many less important reasons than to eat, that where to draw the line has become hard to see.  Does a rat have a right to its life, just like an old rosebush?

   
Our trip to Hawaii is receding into the past, but I will keep it alive with a few more pictures.

 

 The Stand-up Paddleboards we took a lesson on

 An old church on the quiet side of Maui

 A woodcarver in Lahaina

 A gravestone

Volcanic beach cobbles




     
 

This Side of Paradise

I went to Maui for a week and came back with a tan wrestled from an excess of rain.  The island is shaped in a figure eight, with two volcanic breasts spanned by a plain of sugar cane.  In olden days the sugar would have been taro and fish ponds, and before that, probably a wetland filled with invertebrates and minnows.
Because the Japan earthquake and tsunami came only two days after we left, it reinforced how vulnerable islands are.  When we were there the peaks snared rain clouds like a comb grabs tangles and every afternoon the wind picked up and blew the heads of palm trees like they were speeding down a freeway in a convertible.  There is just so much water sloshing around these chunks of rock, that they have no defense against the mighty ocean.

The job of tourists is to tour and we did too much of that, inscribing the letter eight with our tires and then up to the crater which rewarded us with only torrents of rain, and one little native red honeycreeper, the i’iwi, that we dared to look for in the downpour.  Even though the resorts were perfectly manicured around lovely beaches, we could not resist the lure of the one lane roads that led to a glimpse of Hawaii, before landscapers carved away the excess vegetation.  Like all places that humans have had their way with, the proof of true wilderness is slight and we traded a view of condos for pasture land and cows.  But at least the hills tumbled down to the sea without the line of concrete blocks sheltering pairs of vacationers each sitting on their lanais enjoying fruity drinks.  And yes, we were those people also.

The best thing about Hawaii is simply the warmth of the heavy air.  Since we evolved in the hot regions of the world, I think some part of our cells craves the heat and longs to throw off the drapings of cloth we normally shield ourselves with.  Uncovering arms and legs, is perhaps the most lasting pleasure of those used to a harder climate.  Just taking off the shoes for bare feet is a revelation, sending me back to childhood in Vermont, where we went barefoot much of the summer, and the washing of the feet before bed was the last act before slipping into bed.

Back home in the rainy chilly Northwest, I am confronted with what meaning I can construct from this desire to leave what we know for some other viewpoint.  Perhaps the need to wander is as strong as the urge to bare the skin to the sun and air.  This  has put us in all parts of the globe, just lighting out for the territory because it is there.  While we were in Hawaii, the humpback whales were there too, splashing and playing just off the shore giving their babies a warm birth before they migrate to the frigid Arctic waters where food is found.  I’m not sure the idea of home is as strong as we like to claim it is.  Certainly, we seem to crave the contrast between what we know and what we don’t, and the journey that pulls us between.

Songs in the Key of Life

I’ve told myself that this blog is only valuable (to me) if it induces semi-regular writing.  Two weeks is about the limit to my idea of regular, so I am here to honor the vow, but maybe nothing else.  Sometimes life steadily goes on but does not congeal into an idea of why.  These last two weeks have had the usual swings at purpose, but no homeruns of insight.

I planted trees with Friends of Trees two Saturdays in a row.  This frequency is unusual, but the experience is familiar, and both morally uplifting and physically demoralizing.  I meet  interesting people, enjoy the outdoors, get some carbon dioxide eaters into the ground, and use all those muscles I don’t challenge in my weekly marathons of sitting at a desk.  How could it be bad?  Yesterday had the added bonus of brilliant sun all morning.

Last week also saw the appearance of the uncommon son, the college junior home for the Canadian equivalent of Spring Break; although that nation at least gives it an academic patina, by calling it “Reading Week.”  All my motherly helpfulness returned in full force, especially since he had a friend with him, seeing Portland for the first time.  Despite my lists of important tourist locations, they mostly targetted food carts and bars, like you would expect of  21-year olds.

Then there was work.  What can you say about a job that I have done forever, but still manages to be equal parts of frustration, challenge, and fun?   Isn’t that the definition of work?  Something that compels but can’t ever be finished. 

Perhaps the best metaphor of meaning for my life is found at the swimming pool.  I go there to do laps, at least three times a week, sometimes four.  It is accurate to say that I have been swimming for almost all my life.  I’m driven partly by the sensual pleasure of the water touching every part of my body, and partly by the grim belief that if I don’t keep moving I will come to an earlier and more grisly end.   We are doubly motivated by a desire to find pleasure and stave off death.  We seem to bounce between each pole, sometimes feeling like a ping pong ball, sometimes thrumming harmoniously like a guitar being strummed.

Another frequent activity is playing recorder music with various sets of like minded players.  Last week I went to four such gatherings, a busy week.   I am not a brilliant musician by any means, but it is so satisfying to join a group that finds unity of purpose, and for a hour or two, has the tangible melody of our effort to listen to.  I’m not sure I need more than those harmonies on purpose.