Last post…..Saturday, May 14th, 2011

Hello everyone….

This is going to be my last post for the Serpentine Diary. I’ve been thinking about this for several months now and have finally made the decision to quit writing this blog. My heart just isn’t in it anymore and I’ve said all of the things that I really wanted to say when I started it. In the beginning there were ideas and opinions that were burning inside and wanted to come out. I’ve let them all out and they’ve illuminated a path to the kind of writing I really want to be doing and now that I’m working more I’m choosing to pour my ideas and opinions into a bigger pond (fiction) during the more limited time I have for writing.

Thanks so much for tuning in here and for all of your support and comments and love, it’s enabled me to find what kind of writer I am and for that I am deeply grateful. There is no way to delete a wordpress blog ….it just fades into disuse when the writer quits posting…..

with love,

Iris

Guest Post GW in Canada – Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

I recently read this article posted on another website that I write a regional blog for, CollapseNet, and it says so many things that are in my heart and mind, and says them so well, that I wanted to offer it here. You may not agree with everything John is saying and I don’t necessarily see everything exactly as he does but I felt his writing about our disconnection with the production of things and each other was simply brilliant. I hope you do too…..I’ve added italics to sections or paragraphs that I resonate deeply with, to words that fit my feelings so closely I could have written them myself. Thanks for reading….Iris

***********************

I’d like to share some more thoughts with you. They’re a little scattered as they touch on many issues. But the common thread running through them, I think, is how I’m trying to make sense of what is happening today in this collapse-world we are facing.

In my last post, I described a curve representing my diminishinganxiety and a rising sense of ‘serenity’ thanks to some basic preparations I have in place, such as a food and water supply. Since then, I realize there is more to it than that – there isn’t just one emotion or state but rather a whole range of states, feelings and emotions. I see my mood; attitude and perspective evolve and fluctuate – not unlike Brent Crude –subject to my speculations about the future.

I follow the unfolding events as closely as I can, as we all do, but there is so much going on now, it is difficult and time-consuming to follow everything in detail and understand things properly – the terrible events in Japan, the unfolding MENA situation and other crises and protest around the world.

It is also difficult, or impossible, to see how things will develop beyond a few days’ time. I realize I’m seeking to establish a timeframe in my mind for the moment things will unravel – perhaps this is an attempt to reassure myself. Will it be in two weeks (a nuclear conflict in the Middle East), two months (oil and food supply chain rupture globally), or in two years (as Mayan proponents would have us believe)?

But I can neither establish a timeframe, nor reassure myself completely. Between reading drafts, I caught Carolyn Baker’s article on Uncertainty, which is especially poignant for me now.  And in a sense, and quite perversely, I catch myself feeling almost ‘impatient’ for IT to happen, whatever IT is. The wait is agonizing. In some ways I just want it to be over and done with.

So strange a thought to have – impatient for the economy and society to collapse? Then I think about how we are poisoning the planet, and I think if only we could just stop – stop cutting down the rainforest, stop polluting our drinking water with pesticides, stop burning oil for electricity so that factories can make Barbie dolls. But I know we can’t, because we are all in the System and the System has its own rules, its own power and will keep going until it breaks. The break will be painful. We are all on this ship. You could ask the captain to change course (if there were a captain), and if there were, he’d have to listen to what everyone wanted, and most people just want to keep going in the same direction. You could jump off, but that water is cold, and you might not make it. Safest to run aground and climb down off the wreck, perhaps.
In preparing for the coming time, I envisage different scenarios for how things will disintegrate: will it be like Croatia or Rwanda where members of different ethnic groups kill neighbors they lived alongside for years? Will it be a slow or rapid transition?

One thinker I saw recently on Youtube said that in a very short period, all oil supply will stop abruptly, and suddenly all movement and contact between countries and regions will cease – cut off from each other – no trains, planes, telephone – just bicycles and horses. Back to the Middle Ages, with unchangeable iphones on the shelf and fuelless cars parked in the driveway. That could be ‘okay’ if it were handled in the right way, and people reacted calmly and intelligently, working together. The pessimistic part of my mind that had until now only imagined scenarios of doom and gloom is now making way for other types of scenario. The Japanese have shown us that dignity, solidarity, community, calm and caring can prevail over panic, selfishness, inhumanity and chaos. We can choose how we react to this.

I saw a video posted on Collapsenet the other day of a woman, interviewed on a national US news channel, who’d been preparing. She had a year’s supply of food, wind up radio and so forth. “But won’t everybody bang down your door?” asked the interviewer. “Well everybody knows where I live, and I’ll just share it with them.” This kind of altruism is salutary and will help us get through this humanely.

As I say, my thoughts are a little scattered, but there is so much to get one’s head around. Everything we know, the society we grew up in and way of life we’ve all got used to will soon come to an end. That’s a big one to deal with…I can understand why some people don’t want to face up to it.

I recently had the courage to write a long letter to my mother and sister explaining how I see things in the future, and I talked to my brother directly, too. They didn’t run away or call me crazy as I feared, but listened. They didn’t necessarily agree, but they were receptive. They know me to be quite sensible and I think this helped them take me seriously. Maybe I’ve sown some seeds, and as things unfold, they’ll start to come round.

***

A ‘shift in consciousness’ is often referred to these days, and I’ve wondered what that meant.

Is it a full realization of what we are doing to our planet, leading to a radical change in behavior?
Is it about working towards a closer relationship with the Earth?
Is it about going back to our roots, a way of life we used to have?
Or taking elements of those past ways of living, mixed with current ways of living, in a Venus Project type environment?
Is it about reconnecting with each other and with ourselves? Re-establishing local communities?

I’d like to digress a little if I may, before returning to the question above, because I wonder how it is that we arrived at this point.
Collapse is a rupture; an external or internal shock causes it – a dysfunctioning of an organism or structure. Healthy organisms do not just break down and die. So something that is underlying in the way we are living, or the way we view the world, has been eating away at us, at our foundations. Of course, peak oil is real, but is it not the symptom? Something within us allowed us to get to this point, knowingly.

I think the answer has something to do with connection and disconnection.
Technology is wondrous, but it creates distance. From a human point of view it surreptitiously allows us to accept the idea that it is okay to be far away from the ones we love – so long as we can call them or email them from time to time. The telegram, train, radio, motorcar, telephone, plane, television, and internet allow us to travel physically and on the ether – they help us keep in touch, but they also create geographical distance between people.

I recently started using Skype video conferencing with family members after resisting it for some time. It is actually quite brilliant in many ways. The person is almost in the room with you – almost, but they’re not. The advert for Skype shows four people –each, alone, in one corner of a computer screen – celebrating somebody’s birthday ‘together’, and each wearing a paper hat and holding up a candle. There is something quite sad about that I feel. Most cell phone and internet technology advertising tells us that by using their product, we’ll ‘stay connected’ with the ones we love. We’re anything but. It is only an illusion, or an inadequate semblance of proximity we once had.

I’m not saying everything was rosy when we all lived in villages together – there was surely much feuding and conflict. But to be able to draw a fair comparison, we’d need to look at what the feuds were about (property? ownership perhaps?…) – but in any case the relationships were real and tangible.

It’s occurring to me more than ever, the faster things get, and the more electronic things become, how human interaction is decreasing. It’s insipid.

I take my own products from the supermarket shelves (as opposed to the grocer of olden times who would get them for you) I can self-scan my shopping without the need for a cashier, get in my car (in my own private space) drive through the toll (the human having been replaced with a machine) etc etc etc. In fact I could almost go through the whole day without speaking to a single person if I wanted, all in the name of efficiency.

To return to the question above – is consciousness shift necessarily about going back to the Middle Ages or Primitive Living, and is that the only way to live and respect the planet? I really don’t know.

Many native peoples today still have this relationship. In Europe we began to lose it once we ceased to be hunter gatherers. The Celts still had it, a deep respect for and relationship with Mother Earth then came the Romanization and civilization of Europe and the process of urbanization, civilization and disconnection continued. The more people there are around, the less we know each one of them.

But surely we haven’t come this far, ten thousand years of human history to wind up back at the beginning? Not that that bothers me personally necessarily. I could quite happily live without the car, internet and phone, if everyone else did. As I mentioned previously, I’ve been working on primitive skills for some time now, to help prepare for collapse: trapping, tracking, hide tanning, primitive cooking techniques, flint napping, bow and arrow making, edible and medicinal plants and so on.

But the whole venture seems a little pointless in a way – to have come all this way, to end like this. To re-learn what we once knew and then forgot.
If we manage to learn the right lessons from all of this, turn it around, live in harmony once more like our ancestors did, will our children’s children’s children forget and repeat the same mistakes we are making?
We need to somehow weave these lessons into the very fabric of what we pass onto the next generation. Some failsafe way of making them remember.

After my family’s recent move from the city to the country, we’re fortunate to have a local farm production outlet nearby. It’s really something to meet the people who grow the fruit and veg I put on my plate, who rear and breed the livestock for the meat we eat.

More than ever, I am of the opinion that unless we can see where things come from, who made them and what with, I believe we cannot fully appreciate their true value. If this is the case, we subsequently lose respect for, and begin to take these things for granted.

The distance I mentioned above is not therefore just about relationships between people and people, but between people and things…

I have never yet been in a true survival situation, but I often practice the individual skills necessary to be able to cope in one, for example shelter building and fire-making. There are many ways to make fire without modern methods, but, making a simple bowdrill fire by friction typically requires the use of a knife and ready-made cordage. When I go for a walk in the woods, I take these two basic things with me, for I know I can always start a fire relatively easily.

At advanced survival courses at the Tracker School, we are encouraged to practice making our own knives from flint or stone, and our own cordage from plant material. I can and I have, but I know just how hard it is and how much work is involved to make my fire-starting kit. To find the right rock, to nap it into a ‘blade’, to cleave a branch in two for the fireboard, to carve a notch with this dull stone ‘blade’- to find nettle plants, to cut off the stinging leaves, to leave the stems to dry for three days, to pound the stems, remove the pith and retrieve the fibers, to weave them into string, to begin the fire-making friction process, then have the string snap on you sometimes, and have to do it all again! It is time-consuming, painful and laborious, but incredibly satisfying and rewarding.

So when I go out with a knife and a piece of string, I know the value of these two things in a way that I never did before, and I know how much easier my life just got by having them. With my knife I can whittle wood into tools and trap parts, cut cordage, skin and gut an animal, carve a digging stick and endless other uses. Try doing all that with your fingers and fingernails and you realize how indispensable these things are and how far we’ve come with technology, and how dependent we are on it.
And when I’ve slept out in my shelter, no sleeping bag in -1°C, in a pile of leaves, boy do I appreciate coming inside the next morning, a hot shower and a cup of steaming cocoa heated up in the microwave!

I’m not saying we necessarily have to experience extreme hardship to appreciate what we have, but going without and experiencing difficulty certainly help us to. Always having things easy – light at the flick of a switch, food at the opening of the fridge, or a phone call to the pizza delivery guy, a car to go wherever we want whenever we want (and endless gasoline to run it) certainly diminish our ability to see what it took to bring those things to us.

I have a mobile phone. Who doesn’t today? But I don’t know how it was made, what parts are inside. If I crack it open, I don’t understand how it is put together nor what the function of each part is. Even the assembly line worker (if human) doesn’t know beyond their particular stage of the manufacturing process how to make a complete mobile phone. And I imagine that even the designer(s) probably can’t make a phone with their own hands from start to finish.

The increased complexity of things and of systems is leading us further down this road of not knowing where things come from, nor how they are made. We only ever know part of the chain. And this lack of knowledge impedes our ability to see the effects of our actions on the world, which are further down the chain (pollution etc) or further up the chain (pollution etc also) – by buying a particular product, we are not only creating demand for products yet to be made for other people, but also causing harmful industrial practices ‘upriver’ that are associated with them, which we are often unaware of.

I teach English as a foreign language. Some time ago I had a student who sold electrical household appliances for a large firm. He went to visit their supplier in China and during the factory visit he saw workers dipping components in acid baths with their bare hands. When I bought my washing machine, I didn’t see this part of the chain. If I had been fully aware, I wouldn’t have bought it. But what can you buy today that doesn’t have some unethical practice attached to it? And if I’m totally honest, even knowing that, I still buy electrical products, because my need for them (plus the fact that I am not confronted with the reality of the consequences) is stronger that my vague notion that someone somewhere might (or might not) be suffering as a result.

Many farmers spray GM crops with pesticides for sale to people in far off places who they’ll never meet. If they sold those products locally and their neighbors and family started getting sick, they would be unable to continue using those methods from a moral and ethical point of view. Again we are back to the question of disconnection. On CollapseNet, it is said that we will return to a local resource-based economy. What will or should it look like?

I don’t think that we have to go back to a point on the road where we are pre-civilization (primitive skills and living is not for everyone) but perhaps a scenario in which we know how to work the land, know how to work metal, leather, build houses from local wood, rear livestock, cook our own food and so on would be a good place to be again.

Perhaps the road doesn’t have to be a straight line that leads to another place, but a loop, or a spiral– all the things we (mankind) have learnt in all the fields of knowledge, we can keep with us on our journey, our walk, which leads us back to where we began, where we live simply and in balance with nature once more….
What do you think?

I’d like to correct the word I used previously – ‘serenity’. I prefer to say that in place of panic, incomprehension and unawareness, I feel a heightened awareness of the current state of affairs and the current instability in the world (heightened compared to myself before, not to others who are more informed and aware than I). And a feeling of alertness, readiness and preparedness. Ready as best I can, for who knows how this will play out, who will survive and who will not. Luck will play its part, and some skilled, prepared people might find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, whilst others who didn’t see any of this coming, may do just fine, adapting to the new set of circumstances they suddenly find themselves in.

So no guarantees just increased likelihoods. But as I feel more ready, and less worried about myself and my family, I have started to look outwards more. When I pick up my daughter from school, I see all the other seven year old boys and girls, their teachers, their mums and dads. Are they unaware of what is coming? And how will they cope when the food runs out. And I feel terribly sad inside. Should I tell them? I couldn’t bear to see those children suffer.

I know some difficult choices will have to be made by all of us. In a violent social breakdown scenario, we will have to choose between leaving our neighbors behind, and staying to help them, which would mean sharing what we’ve put aside for our own kids to help others. I know I can keep my family going for two months on what we have. Or I could feed my street for five days. But then what? And what about the next street? Difficult choices lay ahead…

Poetry: Textures by Holly Wilkinson – Friday, April 15th, 2011

I am being re-woven

by invisible threads

shifting, flowing,

rattling my core.

Cells flake away, fresh ones stir

replenishing this body

that houses my being.

I am releasing my hold on

time, sequence, expectation,

drifting away from the confines

of daytime doing

immersing into landscapes of dreams, totems, guides

vibrant and alluring

calling me, nudging me

pulling me into rich textures

of mud and twine,

encircled by firey  blossoms,

green spirally shells,

gatherings of rooted feet

igniting the flame

of my imagination.

I am longing

to decipher the code of

eagles and otters,

pods of mermaids

floating to silent melodies

toward the source of

light – wholeness-worlds

below the shimmery

surface of things.

Sacrifice – Thursday, April 14th, 2011

Just when I thought our depravity couldn’t get any deeper……

Last night I caught an article on Truth Out about uranium mining in the southwest. For the first time I read the words “National Sacrifice Area”. Digging further into this concept brought a wave of despair, disgust and sadness that I haven’t felt (read: allowed myself to feel) in a very long time.

Living in the world today I’ve had to harden my heart much as anyone if they want to  do anything other than bury their head in the sand of…pick one; overwork, electronic toys, extreme vacations, gambling, sex, drugs, remodeling the house, playing the market. After all, I came of age on the hard stuff like atomic bombings, starving Biafran children and Viet Nam.

But this? The fact that my government has actually held meetings and made decisions and plans to designate areas of our lands too valuable to waste on preservation and guardianship and life? That we, as a nation, have ruined and despoiled whole regions of the country to the point of writing them off as a “National Sacrifice Area”? This I don’t know how to deal with. Adding the fact that the vast majority of these lands just happen to be on Native soil or in communities of poor people of all colors crushed me down to a place where getting out of bed this morning became the stuff of legend. This is what I read: from www.earthlight.org/2002/essay46_sacrifice.html.

“For example, the most polluted site under the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund program is at Tar Creek, Oklahoma. Toxic contamination from lead and zinc mines at Tar Creek has had significant impact on seven Indian tribes and three states. Acid mine drainage and wind-blown dust have poisoned many of the tribes’ sacred and ceremonial sites. The dust blows off the mine tailing piles, which stand like gray mountains hundreds of feet high above the flat plains. The underground mine system reaches into the aquifer, leaching heavy metals, and depositing them to the surface water of Tar Creek.

Tar Creek is only one example of how places and communities have been “sacrificed” for the American way of life. This sacrifice has been recognized by the US government in a National Academy of Sciences study, which concluded that some areas of the country could be used for national priorities irrespective of the resulting permanent environmental damage. Such places are designated “National Sacrifice Areas.”

Many of these areas are on native land and are open to resource extraction and defense activities. The Four Corners area of the Navajo Nation and the Black Hills of South Dakota, sacred to the Lakota Nations, have been officially designated as “national sacrifice areas.” Seventy-five percent of the US national uranium reserve is on Indian land under the control of the major oil companies. In fact, most of the armaments and munitions that supplied American forces in both World Wars and Korea came out of the Tar Creek mine fields.

In secular terms, a sacrifice occurs when a person or group gives up something in order to achieve another, greater good. In this context, it is important to ask what “greater good” is being aimed for–and to note that no one should have the ability to give up another person’s land or health for any reason.

A closer look at the western religious origins of the term is even more disturbing. The “sacrificial lamb” or “scapegoat” is symbolically understood to take on the weight of the community’s sins, and is then either exiled from the community or killed as an act of atonement. In that sense, the designation of many Indian lands as National Sacrifice Areas is a disturbingly accurate recognition of present reality.

Native communities are the scapegoats for Western consumer culture, bearing the burdens of the sins of the community.”

The vision of a bunch of guys sitting around a table and blithely coming up with the idea that it is fine to lease other people’s land, damaging it permanently in such a way that thousands of human beings (not to mention all of the other life that was carried and cradled there…) are forced to abandon the area, because we can’t live without munitions for our wars (Tar Creek) or power to run all of our toys (uranium and coal) is stupefying and I don’t know where to put it.

Imagine if we were talking about a building. I lease this building, I make it radioactive to where no one can go near it for 30,000 years and then walk away. The building is permanently ruined, sacrificed, for the good of myself and whatever I got out of the poisoning of it. No matter that no one can live there for 30,000 years. I held the lease so I have the right to do whatever I want.

But of course we aren’t talking about a building. We are talking about our lifeblood, the land. We are nothing without the land. None of us. When we live in cities we lose this knowledge. We begin to think that it is our right to have whatever we want when we want it if we can afford it. No matter that scores of people, animals, river systems, plants and other forms of life have to die for us to have it. We can afford it. We worked for that money and by god we deserve that iPod. Or that Prius or that Game Boy.  We are destroying the planet we live on and depend on for EVERYTHING we consume, we all know this, and yet we refuse to change our way of life in any meaningful way. Name one thing that you have right now that did not come from the land. Just one thing. We think that we can separate ourselves from nature and survive. What folly! We rule by virtue of numbers and tell ourselves that we are better, smarter and more deserving than the rest of the web of life around us because we are human.

The shame of belonging to the species of human beings is sometimes more than I can bear. I don’t know if it has always been there but an evilness has taken up residence in our modern life that is so vast it can make me tired of being alive. Because we are not really alive when we are in this collective evil. We only exist. When we are cut off from the web of life all around us, which we are a part of, we are not alive at all but merely conscious. Human beings are very clever but not overly intelligent. Not the brightest bulbs on the block are we? Clever because we can make nuclear energy. Stupid because we use it and carry the illusion of controlling it.

I believe that we are in the beginning stages of a collapse of human industrial civilization right now and for just the reason I’ve been talking about, clever but not intelligent. At least I’m hoping that we are. Truly, if we’ve devolved to the point where we permanently poison huge swathes of our beautiful jewel planet and designate it a “sacrifice area” to our modern needs then we’re due for a fall. A big one. And when this happens there will be a vacuum where our folly once was. The question becomes what shall we fill that hole with? More of the same or something radically different? We decide.

We decide if we want money and corporations and profit to rule or not. We decide if men unfit to raise a cabbage plant are in charge of our destiny, resources and children. We decide if we want destruction to be the way we move through the universe. We decide who among us has power. We decide with every choice we make. Everyday. Start anywhere and choose differently or die, taking the rest of life with you. It’s up to you.

 

Northwest Monsoons – Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

It’s raining again. Torrential comes to mind and it’s been happening for weeks now. Two days ago we had a huge storm with very high winds (unusual for this area) that knocked down a lot of trees; some people are still without power. This brings me to two items of import; my new job and onions. The job is in the deli department of our little grocery store. My first day was the day of the earthquake in Japan and the subsequent evacuation of nearby Crescent City. Tiny Cave Junction was filled with coastal refugees and I had to find my high gear immediately to contend with all of the people wanting food first thing after a long night. They had been woken by tsunami sirens at 4am and were in no mood for banter. They just wanted coffee and doughnuts and they wanted them now. The second day on the job was the storm just mentioned. Same humorless people only this time it was hot mac and cheese and chicken. I’m a firm believer that the very worst behavior that human beings have to offer revolves around food. Everything is cool as long as the feed holds out.

This leads me to the second item of import; onions. Specifically my onions. I bought little onionlings and during a brief burst of nice weather I planted them out in the garden. The worst of frost likely is over for us so I thought it would be okay. Forgot about the torrential, frigid, never ending rain. Now I’m worried that they’ll rot.  Which brings me to the intersection of the two items of import. Food riots are not caused by no food, they happen when people can’t afford food. As oil goes up in price our food is going to go up in price because of the asinine way we grow food.

I fear for our future because we have abdicated our most essential societal function to individual entities with no soul, compassion or sense of “doing the right thing”; large corporations. Large corporations are this way by definition and design. Although they are legally considered individuals they are also legally required to make a profit. Maximum profits are, in fact, their sole reason for existence. Maximizing profits at all externalized costs is the primary function of any large corporation regardless of what their mission statement might say.

We have willingly handed over what could arguably be the most important function of human beings, growing food (and preserving it, processing it, cooking, etc.), to entities that have no other function than to make as much money (not for all of us but for their shareholders) as possible and damn the consequences.

I’ve been cogitating this as I worry over my onions because there is nothing like trying to grow just a small measure of your own food to bring into focus how utterly dependant on things beyond our control we are. And here we sit, routinely consuming food we have no knowledge of or control over in any way. The entities in control of our food have laid down a banquet of toxic, scary choices produced not with the health and well being of the people and the planet in mind but the bottom line. Even organic food is subject to contamination by GMO’s and other vagaries. We’ve abdicated responsibility for the cornerstone of our health to companies that are designed to not care.

Where did we go so wrong? Everyone used to be involved, at some level, with providing food for the whole. For most of our existence on this planet it’s taken the village to bring home the bacon. Everyone gathered, hunted or grew food. Everyone was involved in preserving it, distributing it, cooking it, drying it or baking it. We used to possess a reverence for food (that perhaps only periods of starvation can bring) and had countless rituals of thanksgiving and gratitude for it. The collective planetary culture used to embody that gratitude.

Now our contemporary, corporate approach to food has given us a culture that looks down on agriculture as one of the most lowly regarded livelihoods. We’ve devolved into an urban culture divorced from the source of our sustenance; the dirt. If things were viewed with the proper perspective we’d hold the producers of food in the highest regard, far above investment bankers, stock brokers or lawyers and pay them commensurately. I believe that the people growing excellent food in the most sustainable way should be the highest paid people on the planet. Far above anyone else (no matter how many Noble prizes anyone might have won) because none of its worth anything if we can’t feed ourselves healthy and plentiful food. Food that is free of harmful chemicals and nourishing to our bodies. Food that does no harm. Food that wasn’t produced with the lowest cost in mind but rather the highest quality.

Growing your own food has become a rebellion for sustainability.  Know your food sources. Buy from local farmers and producers. Visit their farms, get to know them. The only way to get out from under the yoke of industrial food is to quit buying from the factories that produce it.

The corporatization of our food production is making us sick. Then we have to consider that we’ve also corporatized our health care. Hmmmmm……I could go a ways down that path but I’ve got to go out and try to get those onions under cover.

The Perfect Perch – Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

It’s been raining steadily for a week now and the river is running high. I love to watch the heavy water course along on its race to the sea carrying all manner of new driftwood that will fetch up in secret caches to be found by me and Captain come summertime. It feels kind of like money in the bank. Maybe better considering the state of banks right now. Lately, when we go down to the river in the morning to check on the water level I see more and more willow stems cut and stripped by the beavers. Captain rushes over to sniff them in detail while I watch the hypnotic flow of the water and dream of heat. Even in winter the water produces such a siren call it can be hard to resist plunging into the clear cold water. Sometimes, if there is any heat to the sunlight at all, I’ll go in anyway and Captain goes in all year long of course. In winter I don’t STAY in long and pop back out almost immediately with my skin glowing a deep lobster red feeling….um..ah..….refreshed.

I’ve always been a world class “the grass is always greener” kind of gal. Until I moved here that is. This morning I was down where the alder tree perch juts out over the river and I was remembering the time that I brought a friend there who had read one of my posts about it being the perfect perch to sit on and write with the river flowing lazily below. I could tell by his face as shock flowed briefly across it that he had been imagining something much more grand and glorious. In truth the alder is half dead, knobby with its bark peeling off. It’s nothing special really. It’s the location that makes it special. This is where the green grass part comes in: The most important element in true happiness is knowing when you have enough. It’s to be found in recognizing when you have reached your own personal good life.

You would think that it would be easy to spot when you’d reached your dreams but the tricky part is that, in my life anyway, my dreams don’t often look exactly the way I pictured them. The Lords of Cosmic Jest have a way of painting them different colors to see if I’m paying attention. The writing perch is like that. My friend had this image in his mind of what that place looked like very different from the reality of it but I’m betting he wasn’t taking into account things that can’t be seen, only felt and experienced. Like the sun kissing my skin as I sit with notebook in hand and ponder my good fortune. Like being able to stash the book in the branches and roll off into clear serpentine water when that sun gets too hot. Like being able to watch herons skimming low along the water to look for lunch. Like watching Captain searching the opposite banks for dog things, sniffing out secrets in the banks of willows standing red and gold against the buff sand and gravel. Like the feeling of peace, stillness and sublime joy I feel when I sit there.

I’ve had people look at me as if I was daft when I expansively wave my hands around my humble abode and say “It doesn’t get any better than this does it?” They look at the plywood floor and the pallet serving as my front porch and I can see their thoughts of “Hell yeah it could be a LOT better than this.” But the things that make my life perfect are not material. They are found in the abundance I feel here. They are spiritual things that I can’t own, ways of looking at the world and life. It took me many years to find this place and it was right inside me all the time.

Bertrand Russell quote – Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

“An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. But gradually the river grows wide, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”“An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. But gradually the river grows wide, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

Bertrand Russell

Darkness, Darkness – Friday, March 4th, 2011

Restless, and as e.e. cummings wrote: “turning from the tremendous lie of sleep”, last night found me out at midnight seeking the dark stillness. It was hot in the cabin as a result of my overly exuberant stoking of the fire. Sometimes I just can’t help it. I know I’m going to cook. I know it’s wasteful but I love to feed the flames.

I lit a candle, slipped on a  sleeveless summer house dress, shoved my bare feet into big black rubber boots, clipped Captain to his leash and set out for the river. I have to put him on a leash at night or he plunges through the woods after all manner of delicious smells emanating from beyond the poison oak patches. Then I can’t touch him for weeks which doesn’t sit well with either of us.

The path to the river slopes gently down and curves around the pond where Captain likes to tank up on cool, fresh water and as I waited for him to lap his fill I closed my eyes and let my ears wander. Deep quiet with just the whispering of trees and the dog drinking surrounded me as I let the feathery touch of the rain brush the heat off my skin.

I had automatically grabbed the flashlight that lives by the door on the way out but hadn’t turned it on yet. The clouds were thin and reflected just enough moon and star light to see by as we made our way down to the inky black water flowing swiftly past my house. The neighbor’s huge yard light winked on and off as we passed tree trunks large enough to block it from view and I thought about the fear behind the light. Was it fear of others, breaking into the house to steal or worse? Was it the fear of nature in the form of bear, big cat or something else? Or simply the fear of the unknown? No way for me to know as fear isn’t something people readily admit. That’s mostly why we light the night isn’t it? Fear of something.

But we need the night. Even when it’s dark enough to require a flashlight to get to the river without falling flat on my face, I love to turn it off once I get down there. If it’s misty (as it often is here in the North West) the river becomes a blurry, impressionistic painting of shadows and light when the brightness of batteries disappears. On summer nights the water sings its siren call and Captain and I wade slowly in to let the quiet current tug the hot day out of us and carry it away to the sea. Sometimes on these swims we’re joined by other creatures out on some errand of their own and it’s a really special feeling to be floating along and have a beaver or an otter or (once!) a deer swim right by you. It happens so quickly that all you can do is stare, hold your breath and bob in the wake. Even the dog just watches.

I love to float on my back and watch the stars glitter. They often seem to be trying to tell me something but no  matter how hard I listen I can’t hear their story, only wonder what the worlds are like that circle their fire and heat. Bats swoop and dive, catching dinner on the wing. Frogs sing frog mysteries as I wrap myself in the inky blanket of the world. I have always loved the night when I’ve lived in the country. The world is different then and more accessible. It’s easier to blend in under cover of darkness and the natural world seems to accept my presence more readily. Smells are more vibrant and in the dusky stillness of evening I can hear the voice of my heart more clearly.

Getting a Real Job – Monday, Feburary 28th, 2011

I’m a 99er and I’ve been looking for a job like a hooga haaga. For two years.  Just yesterday I was moaning to a friend about how bad the job market was, how there was (even if it isn’t legal) age discrimination and that even so I was weirdly optimistic about my future. There is doom and gloom on every side to be sure and yet, I’ve been feeling like everything was going to work out fine in the end. Like Jackson Brown sings, “I got no reason to feel this good.”

So imagine my surprise today when I open my email and lo and behold there is an email from my editor at Freelance Success saying that the essay I sold to them over two years ago was finally in a published book and that it had even sold enough copies to actually pay the writers. See? I KNEW it was going to be okay!

Okay, okay….the reality is that it’s only $75 dollars but it is oh so  much more than that. It is the first writing that I have gotten published and that makes it worth more than all the gold in the history of the planet. If you are a writer you understand what I’m talking about. And this brings me to what work really is, in the end.

I have learned that work is an attitude after all the froth boils away. Getting this one essay published in a collection has forever altered my attitude and that makes me mighty. I need to find work that will put bread on the table and allow me to pay my mortgage and now that work has another, shiny facet added to the whole. Now I can put this in the mix with craft and hourly wages and every other thing I do toward making a living and that means that I can go on living here, in the valley, in the place of my desire.  What a beautiful start to the week!

How Did We Get Here? – Saturday, February 12th, 2011

Talking to a new friend recently brought up the inevitable topic of how we both arrived at this most unlikely of places. I lived in Seattle for over 10 years following short stints in Tucson and Bend Oregon after growing up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

Just north of my childhood home outside of Boulder

Seattle is a beautiful place really; fondly referred to by its inhabitants as the Emerald City. It is green and clean (as cities go) with a magnificent array of mountains and the waters of Puget Sound for a backdrop. I’ve heard Seattle described as a lovely, rural city with a slow pace but it was the big city to me. Learning to feel the pulse of the earth under all of the concrete and steel of a city took years but I eventually learned.

After growing up immersed in the natural world the city is, at first sight, nothing but concrete, asphalt and buildings with people rushing all around, seeming anxious and tense. The smells of garbage, oil on the street and exhaust are overwhelming to the rural born. When I first arrived in Seattle the noise thumped through me like an explosion, scattering my thoughts and emotions but after my body adjusted and I began to relax I started to see signs of the living earth under the hard surface. Beneath the layers of people generated energy and momentum I began to hear once again the sounds of wind in the trees, birds scratching through leaves and insects walking across a hard tin surface by my window.

I gradually began to see the Emerald City through the eyes of enthusiastic urban friends that had come of age in New York City or Chicago. To them Seattle was an exotic place filled to the brim with wildlife and nature. They marveled at the trees and greenery everywhere, pods of Orcas in the Sound and falcons nesting on the roofs of skyscrapers. But where others saw abundance I saw emptiness. No matter how many parks and planters an urban environment has, human beings still dominate that environment completely. It’s all people all the time.

Despite good friends and a comfortable life I felt often as if I were starving. It was like standing in the dark on a cold sidewalk, looking in at a café full of good food, light and laughter but being unable to come up with the right coin to get on the inside. I was starving for the environment that allows me to move out of survival and into the “bright cry of alive” that e.e. cummings wrote about. When I’m in survival mode I forget about the things that I really need to be fully human, to be myself and I tend to just suck it up, soldier on, go to work and worry about the luxuries of my soul another time.

My life began to be a litany of ‘almosts’: I could almost see the vivid, deep colors found only in nature, I was almost happy, I could almost feel the breath of the living world on my face, but not quite. I spent years working downtown and in the process learning to know and love the hum of the city but there was always something missing.

It turned out to be a collection of “somethings”. In Seattle, a voice deep inside me counted the missing things and they tolled through my consciousness with a gong sound accenting each one: clean water, more quiet and fewer people, good smells, wildlife, lively and brilliant sunlight on the wind, less pavement (or no pavement) between me and that heartbeat of the earth. These were the things that I had as a child, the things that really mattered to me and I wanted them back. As I approached my 50’s I wanted to slow down and return to a life that was worth my time. By all outward measures, life was good, it simply wasn’t the life I wanted or needed.

I missed gazing through the rim of the Milky Way on a clear summer night. I missed frogs and song birds and dragonflies and the smell of clean water on my skin. I ached to build a wood fire when the cold grey wet days of a Pacific Northwest winter moved in, to enjoy the smell of wood smoke in the early morning fog and the to feel the dry heat that baked the soreness from my bones. Those desires comprised the nucleus of what my life currently lacked and pointed the way home.

Over 10 years had passed as I coasted through the ups and downs of building a secure life; I bought my first house, landscaped the yard like a woman possessed, painted everything in sight and added a greenhouse. I progressed through my ridiculously cushy corporate job with no huge desire to succeed but because it was what everyone else was doing and I went along with the flow, spending hundreds of hours commuting back and forth on the ferry knitting, reading, sleeping and wondering whose life I was living because it sure wasn’t mine.

I believe that people, all of us, have a voice inside them that tells their path to the good life: their own, personal good life. It’s that knowing but oddly unfamiliar voice that we can sometimes hear in the stillness of big changes like divorce, graduation from school or the birth of a child. In the death of someone we love we can hear the heart beat of the life we truly want to be living. It’s the quiet voice that comes when we stand at the fork, pondering direction, and it tugs us toward a road that we’ve always wondered about but have turned away from, back toward obligation and convention.

Perhaps it’s the path to learning to blow glass or going back to school; becoming a weaver or uprooting your life like a weed in a parking lot, selling the house and trotting off to the south of France to open an artist’s retreat. It urges us to do something that often gets labeled as ridiculous or impossible. This voice murmurs beneath all of the responsibilities and “shoulds” of our daily lives. This voice tells us what is most important in our brightest, liveliest and bravest souls.

The wounds and pain and ugliness of the city simply built up over time, little bit by little bit, until it became a heavy blanket around my shoulders. I had to tuck a lot of feelings away from the light of day to get through the day. My list of missing things grew.

I felt like time was running out on me, I was no closer to living the simple life I craved and the slippery slope of living for retirement was yawning large before me. I’d lived long enough to see many examples of how wrong life could go if you waited to begin your true life in the end of your life and I didn’t have to look any further than my own family for a good example of that trap. My mother had yearned, year after year, to live in a houseboat in Hawaii to escape the high, dry frigid air of Colorado. She was killed in an accident before she ever achieved escape velocity. My aunt retired later in life only to die of cancer two years later.

In Seattle ugly experiences began to catalyze my resolve to change my daily life, things that would happen in a flash and leave me feeling sick and disoriented or things that I was required to do as part of a routine that I thought ugly and wrong spirited.  It seemed like life was urging me to make the final decision to leave. Things happened that I couldn’t control but only die a little inside each time they happened.

The one that became the fulcrum of real change found me leaning over the railing on a soft, foggy morning in Bremerton, fuzzily sipping my coffee and waiting for the ferry to dock. Commuters are quiet on a misty Friday morning, everyone ruminating on what they need to get done that day, what they’re going to do over the weekend, their dreams from the night before, or that great wool coat on the person in front of them. Seagulls were calling out in the salty air and I heard the creak of the boats against their bumpers. I was already looking forward to having the weekend off.

A quiet splash below me got me leaning over the railing with detached curiosity, thinking there was likely a delinquent seagull down there rattling around a piece of trash. I looked just in time to see the impossibly innocent and hauntingly beautiful face of a harbor seal surfacing inches away, looking steadily at me. My heart quickened.  Time froze as we gazed at each other. I had never been this close to a wild seal before. She had surfaced through an oily smear floating on the top of the water that was still shining on her face as her dark, liquid eyes bored into mine, breaking my heart. It made me sick to my stomach. Tears leaped to the surface and rolled down my face as she sank down and swam away under the pier.

I turned away from the water in shame, feeling nauseated.  All the trash and oil floating in and on the water  crashed into my awareness as the guy in front of me flicked a cigarette into the water with a quick, distracted gesture. Immense guilt sat like a rock in my guts.

As a human being, this was my fault. Here I was, getting on a huge boat that leaked god only knows how many gallons of toxic crap into the water every day. I had ridden a bus to the dock. I drove a car like everyone else. I was surrounded by my fellow human beings, none of whom had noticed the seal and most of whom wouldn’t have noticed the oily water on her face even if they had. The ugly thing that I had just witnessed was our collective fault and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it in that moment except shove the grief down out of sight, get on the approaching boat and go to work. What had started out as any other Friday morning became “Seal Friday” and it was the beginning of my own personal good life.

In the city I had became harder and more immune to cruelty and suffering. I took my place in line to step over the guy lying in his own piss on the ice cold, wet pavement and didn’t allow the image and reality much space in my awareness because it’s just too horrible to let into your surface thoughts isn’t it? I choked back the evil smells of the harbor water front and got on the bus that would take me away without breaking stride or losing my place in the book I was reading.

Even though I knew that I needed to get out of Seattle to a greener, quieter, healthier place I wasn’t quite sure how I could accomplish it. Mortgages, friends, a “good” job with benefits and every other thing I could muster to argue against what I ultimately wanted rose to the surface and clouded my thoughts, urging safe, stable actions.

I believe that we, each of us (when we achieve adult status), make our lives what they are. Each of us have different hurdles to clear, different experiences to draw upon or expunge from our consciousness or different physical circumstances to juggle but ultimately it is up to us to forge our path. And I wanted to forge a new path straight to the source of all life: Nature.

It was difficult for me, as it seems to be for many people, to surrender and follow that deep voice telling me where to go and what to do to find my good life. It’s only in my 50’s that I’ve achieved a level of confidence high enough to reach for some of the golden choices that have surrounded me for decades and I still have to shout down the voices in my head that tell me it isn’t possible or that I’m reckless and stupid for even wanting those things or that I will fail. I had asked the universe for a new road to open for me on Seal Friday and I’d already decided I wasn’t waiting for retirement.

I said no to all the doubts, fears and cautionary voices inside my head, said yes to the sudden and unexpected series of events that launched me on the path to the banks of the Illinois River and moved to southern Oregon before even processing the decision to do so. I’ve never looked back and never regretted the decision to reclaim my soul.