Archive for the ‘Wild Grace’ Category

« Older Entries

The Lake of Transformation

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

On a still day, to gaze at Crater Lake is to rest your eyes upon one of the most peaceful and majestic of all natural sites. It invokes an internal stillness, a reflection inside as clear as the ones mirrored by the stunning waters. The lake is unique, almost overwhelming in its pacific beauty. Yet its beauty was only made possible because of one of the most violent volcanic events in earthly history. The furious collapse of Mount Mazama dwarfs most eruptions with which modern man is familiar. The transformation from that to this has been astonishing.

Standing in awe of the lake again recently—enough in awe to forget sunscreen and get a solid burn as a souvenir—I was reminded of the Buddhist imagery of a lotus flower growing out of the muck, as a symbol of transformation. I was also reminded of how unimaginative white settlers were when choosing their place names. Couldn’t they do better than the original suggestion of “Blue Lake” and the darker “Crater Lake” that eventually stuck? To me, it seems it should at least be called Lotus Lake or the Lake of Transformation, so that all who come to view it might ponder the process of transformation and be inspired by the possibilities of similar transformation within.

But my view is only another of the layers of views. The settlers’ rough names and legends of the lake’s origins were themselves layered over the native perceptions of the lake’s beginnings of fire, connected to the tribes’ underworld gods and the spirit beings in all things. And that too was only a layer from behind the veil of human perception—a layer we’ll never pierce. It’s all layered over that ultimate beauty, the waters of the Lake of Transformation on a perfect blue still day.

Even the lake is only beautiful in that clear way for very short stretches of time. For much of the year, it’s sheltered and plastered by snow in prodigious amounts: 649 inches this year. As July closed in, some of that 54 feet of snow still piled in high drifts too deep to allow the buried roadways to emerge. And by October, those roads will disappear under snow again for the next eight months. It will take four months to plow them, from April’s beginning. It is an extreme place.

Maybe that too is a clear reflection of the human heart: a place of extreme beauty born out of extreme fire, and still only warmly beautiful in the best of seasons. We must cherish those seasons, and see their comings and goings not as decline and decay or linear trend, but as a cycle, a rhythm of waves to ride. Must appreciate the beauty of the long winters between, and bless their own role in transformation.

It takes patience, this transformation. In this lake’s case, thousands of years. In our own case, stretches of time that only seem that long, when we’re busy trying to transform. It takes faith that it can happen, indeed that it will, if we alternate periods of work with periods of rest in that transformation, and know that part of transforming is simply coming to view the waters of such places as the Lake of Transformation.

That is all we did. We simply came to view. But what we saw transformed us.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Older Than Its Name, Wild Grace | No Comments »

Easter Rabbits and Machine Guns

Monday, April 25th, 2011

In the small town closest to the forests where I live, the annual Earth Day children’s parade passes right in front of the machine gun shop. Obviously, the “All Species Welcome” parade theme must include the species of people who mysteriously find automatic weapons a necessity here in the Oregon woods.

This year was a particularly joyous and confusing celebration, because the lateness of Easter meant that Earth Day and Good Friday coincided, leading to extra rabbit costumes parading past the weapons depot, although surprisingly, no one came dressed as Jesus.

The “All Species Welcome” parade is a sweet costume tradition to teach respect for the planet’s varied inhabitants, and every child gets a ribbon for participating. There were some fully adult children involved as well, but I noticed that they were not awarded ribbons—potentially leading to years of therapy over issues of discrimination and rejection.

Oddly, the all-species parade seemed to only include humans, albeit ones creatively dressed as everything from dung beetles to carrots, and the marvelous spider-on-wheels complete with Silly String web shot out of the back. Many people brought their dogs, but they were largely spectators, with the mutts looking quizzically at the passing parade of approximated species. The whole scene reminded me of the Martin Luther King, Jr. diversity celebrations I used to attend in a different, very white town: touching, heartfelt and largely theoretical.

It also reminded me that my own welcoming of species is also limited. The drumming red-breasted sapsuckers are welcome (see my post “Living with Drummers”), but I just had to eradicate a large unwelcome infestation of carpenter ants. We’re forever trying to keep the mice and blackberries at bay, and the bears are not welcome to ravage the garbage. All species are only welcome to a point, especially if they’re carrying machine guns.

I pondered the significance of this while watching the parade’s celebratory aftermath. I watched a man in a cow costume consuming an all-beef hot dog—an act dangerously close to bovine cannibalism. Meanwhile, a woman in a zebra suit was busy duct-taping up the side of a leaking, inflatable whale, which sat in front of the giant “It’s the real thing” Coca-Cola ad on the side of the building next door. The whale wasn’t the real thing, and neither was the Coca-Cola ad, since it’s now merely preserved as a historical artifact. I believe the woman in the zebra suit was real, although I didn’t verify.

The celebration was all a perfect, amusing microcosm of the collision between ecological funk and the rural junk that piles up here. Our best intentions to care for the land’s life collide with the yards of rusting cars out near the clearcuts. We do our bizarre, imperfect best to all get along. And as a part of that, it’s good to gather and celebrate kids who are willing to dress up as bees, snails and other creatures great and small. Awareness of the earth and its life is a beautiful thing. The machine gun shop, however, was closed for Easter.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Wild Grace | 1 Comment »

Returning to Newness

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

I’ve hiked the Brice Creek trail for thirty years now. Among the Central Oregon trails near my home, it is home. It’s an exquisite stretch that wends its way along the waters through old growth and new, with elegant color in smooth stones beneath the creek’s clear waters. I know where the river bends are, there are favorite trees I greet. Memories are associated with the flow, stretching over several miles and much of my life. The more I’ve come to know Brice, the more I believe it to be one of Oregon’s most beautiful rivers, equal in color and grace to the Smith River near the coast, although smaller.

Yet every time I see it, I realize I’ve never seen it before. And that’s not just because I still forget sometimes where the trail begins to zigzag up the hillside to parallel the old flume, or because encroaching maturity begins to devil my memory. It’s because the river and I are so different each time we see each other.

You can’t stand in the same river twice. I recall that vintage wisdom (imperfectly). In fact, it echoed in my head repeatedly this past Sunday, as we walked the familiar trail that was different than ever before. A tree fell across it since last visit. The logs in the eddy by the carved rock channel had changed, as had the accumulation of logs downstream from the wide waterfall. The colors in the rocks had shifted with the recent flows, as lichens and other colors in the vegetative pallet blossomed. The light was different—and different again, five minutes later. Winter’s fallen leaves were in their final state of graceful decay, and spring’s new growths had already announced their optimistic efforts. Everywhere I looked I saw something previously unseen, and I saw it with a vision slightly different, informed by new experience. The newness was only heightened by my comfort and familiarity.

I was thinking this, as we watched the clouds part into wispy white and pure blue, remarking on the warmth of the wind and the speed at which the white wisps whipped by. It was a leisurely restorative hike back along the river, playing with foggy lenses as we crossed the bridge back to the car. Just a few gentle drops caressed us, from the newly returning grey. We enclosed ourselves in the machine, restored and enlivened by the new familiar creek.

Then it hit. A wall of wind and water came from the sky with a suddenness and edge I’ve never experienced. In a matter of moments, torrents of rain and 70 m.p.h. winds hit, ripping huge branches from the trees of the grove we were driving through, crashing around us as I punched it and slalomed through. If a full tree toppled, we were doomed.

We were lucky. We escaped with just one tiny dent on my hood I discovered later. We made it through to the next sudden road blockage, where several of us then had to get out to clear fallen trees and branches to continue. That got us to the next place down the line, the epicenter, where a massive tree had uprooted and come down across the road, thankfully killing no one but the fence on the other side. Three or four men with chainsaws were already there, cutting rounds out of it to make it possible to get through. The sudden wind already past, we threaded our way through a carpet of branches across most of the miles home. We made it… until a hundred yards from the house, where a century-old maple had come down across the road. Even the upper branches were an impenetrable wall. It would take neighbors and chain saws to get us through—and since the power was now out for the foreseeable future, our electric chainsaw was just another useless ornament. (These are the times when the myth of independence shows its illusions.) We are fortunate to have those neighbors. We are fortunate to have these memories.

Indeed, everywhere I looked I saw something previously unseen, especially in the moments after I thought I’d finished looking. You can’t stand in the same windstorm twice. In the twenty minutes since we’d left it, Brice Creek had undoubtedly shifted into another form, with fallen trees as new natural sculpture, transitioning from standing to laying down to nurture the soil. I can’t wait to go back, and see again what I’ve never seen before.

Posted in Liquid, Part of the Wind, The Beauty of Doubt, The Sun on Your Face, Wild Grace | No Comments »

Optimistic Presence

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

It’s my belief that the wisdom of the world is encoded within the elements of every animate and inanimate being, always ready to reveal itself if we’re aware enough to recognize it.

In that regard, I was taught the same wise lesson last week by surprising icicles and an inattentive baseball player. In fact, it was that repeated lesson which reminded me in general of the earth’s encoded wisdom.

It was damp in these Oregon woods, last Sunday, but not as cold as it had been in recent days. Time for a breather with the trees before another week of deadlines set in. Given the rain and general gray, I was tempted to leave my camera behind, figuring that the conditions left me little chance of using it. But I remembered one of the lessons the elements had previously taught me: Be ready to embrace the opportunity you cannot foresee. I took the camera. And as we walked the deer trail along the little seasonal stream we call Homestead Creek, what revealed itself was a rarity of icicles. Given water still warm enough to run, but air cold enough to deeply freeze the creek mist, the smallest streamside shoots had become the catalyst for ice forms many times their own tiny thickness. The temporary sculptures were magnificent, unexpected, and the first time I’ve ever seen them in over thirty years of walking this land. Had I not brought my camera, I would have missed capturing one of the property’s rarest beauties.

Back inside, I was working on my next book. As you may know, it’s taking me into the world of Major League Baseball alongside MLB.com’s beat writer for the San Francisco Giants, Chris Haft. We’re working on a book about last season called Castoffs, Misfits and the Power of Oneness. I was reviewing video and watched an odd little scene when the Giants were attempting to intentionally walk Adam LaRoche of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Assuming that outcome, LaRoche stood there with a bat on his shoulder as Giants pitcher Santiago Casilla accidentally lobbed an easy pitch right over the heart of the plate—which LaRoche could’ve clobbered, perhaps winning the game, had he been ready. But he wasn’t ready. He stood there dumbly as the pitch floated by him, forever lost. Be ready to embrace the opportunity you cannot foresee.

It’s a lesson that the world has given me so many times over the years. Remembering it at every moment has been the hardest part of successfully creating a zig-zag life that’s only gone where I could never have imagined.

How do you prepare for what you cannot expect? That’s the great question, and it seems the answer is through optimistic presence: being as attentive and mindful to whatever’s in front of you, without assumption of what it will be, and always with a mindset that the moment might have opportunity and beauty subtly encoded within it. Of course I’ve done that imperfectly even after all the times of receiving the lesson, but I’ve been amazed at how much opportunity and beauty have revealed themselves when I’ve come from that place of optimistic presence.

I was grateful to icicles and Adam LaRoche for being my teachers this time, even if neither knew or practiced the lessons themselves. And I wondered what lesson I might accidentally teach some other mindful traveler with my own inattentiveness, at a different moment down the line.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Liquid, Part of the Wind, Wild Grace | 1 Comment »

The Nature of Las Vegas

Friday, February 18th, 2011

If indeed everything remains a part of nature, as I maintain that it does, then even the Las Vegas Strip must somehow be a part of the natural order, even if one that seems upside down and headless. From a spiritual perspective, it might be argued that (depending on your beliefs) the existence of Las Vegas is evidence that God has serious mental issues, or that evolution does not always work, or that the grand cosmic plan is just really, really kinky. It is inarguable, however, that if you want to see the amazing Cirque du Soleil show “The Beatles: Love,” you have to go to Vegas.

So we went to Vegas. It was worth it. But was it nature?

Yes, I still argue, the Vegas Strip is nature, just as toxic waste and plastic and Lady Gaga’s egg are still nature, because at the root they’re all made from natural elements and their continued existence (and decay) remains dependent upon natural forces. It’s all inextricably part of this vast wilderness of a universe—at least until we figure out how to send our garbage through a wormhole.

Nonetheless, Las Vegas is also one of the most artificial expressions of nature anywhere. (Hopefully, anyway. But who knows what goes on, on the planets in the vicinity of Sirius?) It’s the only place I’ve ever seen in which humanity imitates its own cities. There’s a fake Paris, gondolas in the canals of a so-called Venice, a small imitation New York, plus the Sphinx and a pyramid and other atrociously mimicked Egyptian elements. At the time of our visit, most of these areas were incongruously decorated for Chinese New Year.

Meanwhile, real lions live in the MGM Grand Hotel, between the casino and the pseudo-rainforest restaurant, where electronically-animated creatures move on the walls and false thunderstorms rage exactly every thirty minutes. Down the street there are actual dolphins. Or if you go the other direction, there’s a beach with waves and sand, although it was closed when we were there. The beach was, ahem, broken. And although Vegas is a terribly dry desert, there are huge ponds and dancing fountains synchronized to music, down the street from where the fake volcano explodes every hour above the waterfalls. Keep going and watch the Sirens of Treasure Island skillfully sing and dance their way through a very sexual pirate battle on the high seas. Or just turn and watch the sidewalk and see hordes of people with three-foot-high margaritas slung on lanyards around their neck, running the gauntlet of fringe workers (almost always Mexican) who are paid to stand and hand out flyers for legal prostitution. To that end, in sidewalk news racks, you can pick up depressing, barbaric catalogs that advertise with such headlines as “Affordable College Girls.” You can see all sorts of other frightening creatures too, including Barry Manilow, Donny & Marie Osmond and Carrot Top, all of whom are permanent Vegas fixtures, apparently. You can also see the bizarre anonymous jobs that are created as the side effect of the spectacles: My job is to prevent Elvis impersonators from making money on MGM property. My job is to provide security for a fifteen-foot long falsely gilded rabbit. And so on. You see all these things while wandering through the intentional mazes of the casinos, built for confusion so that exits are not easy to find, and without clocks so that gamblers don’t notice how late it’s getting. And you have no choice but to wander through them, because the downtown monorail is built so that there is no path to it except through the casinos, where grim cigarette smoke lingers along with the other traps built to ingeniously empty your wallet, no matter the price to your soul.

Ah, nature. As beautiful as a pristine waterfall, yes?

The strange thing is, the heights of culture can be found within the artifice and grim vice. The blown glass creations of Chihuly bring staggering beauty to the lobby ceiling in the Bellagio, for example. For another, Cirque du Soleil, whose performance was astonishing in grace, precision and beauty. The very core of human evolution is found in these kinds of grace, in my view, so there it was: the pinnacle of realization of human potential, right there alongside the offensively ostentatious and squalid. They’re inseparable somehow. And that’s natural.

I’ve never been to India—despite the dubious elements of it recreated in Vegas—but have heard tales of parallel juxtaposition, a hundred times deeper and greater. Some of the world’s highest wisdom thrives in India, where its closest neighbor is poverty so miserable that living it shouldn’t even be called existence. What is it about the extremes, which draw each other?

Merely another natural principle, I suppose. And so is the principle that opportunistic species rise and crash hard across the earth. Like barn mice that breed in staggering numbers, only to die as quickly, the casinos and vices have proliferated at a dizzying rate. And now, if the tides do not turn, they too will crash as hard. The Vegas strip casinos have lost $6.6 billion in the past two years. That’s right, over six billion. They have gambled upon massive gambling and are now losing big. Will they recover? They’re gambling that they will. But what if the economic tides have simply turned, and insufficient numbers of people will now travel from Asia to buy made-in-China Vegas souvenirs after losing all their money at the poker tables? What do you do with a slightly-used pyramid or the other enormous re-creations of man’s most iconic structures? How much will a fake volcano fetch on E-Bay?

Never fear. Nature will still be the one to sort it all out. Nature’s beautiful thread is the fabric of all.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Wild Grace | 1 Comment »

Release, Receive, Renew

Sunday, January 16th, 2011

For the first year in almost a decade, I didn’t spend this New Year’s Eve walking around in circles. And I missed it, for walking around in circles has been one of the most enlightening things I’ve ever done.

Perhaps I should clarify. First of all, I suppose it’s not technically correct to say that I was walking around in circles, for the nearly-circular patterns of a labyrinth in truth lead a clear path from edge to center, along nearly concentric lines. There is no way to get lost, or go wrong. There is only one step in front of the other, with great trust that the path will reveal itself. In that way, the labyrinth mirrors the daily path of life ahead of us and behind us—one of many ways in which that meditation offers insight into where we’ve been and where we’re going. Having discovered that power, I spent most of the past decade celebrating the turn of the year at Ashland’s annual Sacred Walk to the new year, a labyrinth meditation ceremony with considerable community power around it. Since I no longer live in Ashland, I didn’t attend this year, and found no similar ceremony elsewhere to immerse myself in.

That left me to recreate the ritual in private ways; to find a labyrinth within my home forests and the thickets of my imagination, in which to accomplish the three main aspects of the meditation associated with the labyrinth walk. The first aspect, done on the path inward along the labyrinth, is to release whatever may need release from the old year. The second, at the center, is simply to receive whatever communication of spirit may appear. And the third, along the walk back out of the labyrinth, is to renew whatever may need refreshing as one year passes and another begins. In participating in each year’s Sacred Walk, I generally found it wise to walk the labyrinth multiple times with those aspects in mind, waiting for the one profound walk to rise forth from among them. Inevitably, it did.

This year I walked the labyrinths of the woods and the living room, thinking of what there is to release, receive, renew.

To release, it always seems I need to release my expectations of what the year would be—good and bad. Every season is a surprise; nothing expected manifests in the same way as the dream. In some senses, that brings disappointment; but in others, relief or even elation. Disappointed expectations can be positive as much as negative, and if so, offer a great chance to see the ways in which we’re underestimating the world—not giving it enough credit for resilience, unexpected positive outcome, love hidden in corners that were invisible until the sudden moment of discovery.

The same goes with successes, not as narrowly and externally defined as they are in the worlds of career and finance, but including successes within the heart and its ability to give, as well. If I only achieved the successes I expected or intended each year, what a disappointment each year’s transitional meditation would be. Success is rarely where imagined; but the qualities within the desired success can usually be found in the unexpected events and shared moments within the year.

So it is that every year I find I must let go of expected forms of relationship as well. Again, I may need to let go of expected limitations that didn’t prove to exist, just as often as I need to let go of heightened hopes that didn’t prove to be realized. In the end, if one approaches relationship with integrity, compassion and respect—with the desire to give primary, as the path to receiving—more often than not, the forms will find their ever-shifting ways, and the heart will remain full.

In the center of the labyrinth this year, where the meditation is simply to wait to receive whatever message arrives, this year the message for me was simple: affirmation, for all the difficult changes I undertook in 2010. It was difficult to let go of all I spent seventeen years building in Ashland, with radio, my creative world, relationship, friendship, home. Yet every motion I’ve taken has been met with the assurance of support that I’m on the right path, to open new creative horizons, to be home by my aging mother, to begin new relationships in all shifting forms. It was a huge sigh of relief at the center of the labyrinth, in the new forest where I found it. I felt a similar sense of relief for the world at large, too, even as old forms crash hard around us. That is necessary to give the new room to grow.

And so I walk outward again, into the new year, into the meditation of renewal. I need to renew my energy for all the demands of another challenging year—as if there was ever any other kind. Each year gives the opportunity to renew the desire to live according to mindful principles, no matter how imperfectly I always do so. I have to renew the quest to keep healthy in body, mind and spirit; to risk another level of intimate growth. I look inward during the winter hibernation season to make sure that I’ve cared for myself enough to care for the others around me, whatever that may prove to mean—although if I do that renewal sustainably, and do the giving cleanly, it’s within the giving that the renewal actually comes. It’s good to remember that, one step at a time, out of the labyrinth.

It’s also good to remember that although it may not be visibly printed upon the soil, in a life lived consciously, the days do mimic the labyrinth, and there is one path forward to trust, already waiting to be discovered. The renewal of that vision is what January brings, and may we all trust it as 2011 reveals its path through our human wilderness.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Part of the Wind, The Beauty of Doubt, Wild Grace | No Comments »

Stalking the Wild Candidate

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

It’s hard to tell the difference between hunting season and the upcoming election. Both involve camouflage, ambush and the stalking of prey judged to be less intelligent. Tall tales abound, and there are far too many news items about people shooting themselves in the foot. Mixed messages abound.

One mixed message lodged in my mind’s eye is visual: as I’ve watched hunters rumble up our gravel road to the public forest beyond us, I’ve seen several dressed in conflicting layers of camouflage and anti-camouflage—military camo topped by bright orange vests intended to prevent other hunters from mistaking their friends for deer. One fashion seems to negate the other. They look like an argument.

With hunting and elections, it is indeed easy to mistake friends for prey and candidates for predators. It might be amusing if it wasn’t so lethal. May we all rest more easily when guns and ballots are again put down.

I’m grateful to live in a forest preserve where the deer can congregate without fear of becoming venison. (Certain candidates would be advised to hide in the trees as well.) We’ve had three fawns around lately, though they’ve been without their mother and we wonder of her whereabouts. Given the economy, she may have had to take a second job, and they’re latch-key fawns. It’s too sad to even consider that she may have been poached instead.

I feel a mixed message in my own emotions about hunting, even then—for I have no objections to it on some levels. Seeing the condition of many hunters’ cars and faces in these hard-knock places, I have to believe that subsistence hunting is a serious part of their game. This is sheer survival for some, largely in keeping with the natural order. Creatures gotta eat: a fundamental law of the universe.

I’d just like to see the survival struggles be fair. I don’t want to see hunters with night scopes and drones. I don’t want to see corporations considered people by law. Too many big guns, and the fight turns to slaughter—one that doesn’t cease until the ones who slaughter find their own food source depleted. If overwhelming force is used to stalk the wild candidates, they disappear, along with their significant voices.

Nature always returns things to balance eventually, so I don’t worry too much. No matter how many come up here hunting “damn deer and Democrats,” both have proliferated. They don’t even wear camouflage, and seem to do fine overall. Oregon’s mixed messages continue to breed quickly.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Hardest Good Days, Wild Grace | No Comments »

Autumn’s Leading Edge

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

Autumn’s sharp leading edge cuts into the soft greens of Oregon summer. The long light is fading, the crickets are slowing, and I hear wistful tones in others’ voices. The wistful tones would’ve once been my own, in younger days when seasonal sadness seemed endemic. I’ll miss the light and warmth too—not to mention baseball season—but in recent years, my wistfulness is fleeting to the point of subliminal. No longer do my moods fall and drift when the leaves do.

What seasons changed inside? From where did this equanimity come? It wasn’t in accomplishment, or any other form of external attainment. I didn’t find it on Craigslist, or in the pockets of a forgotten jacket. It was somewhere in the learning of a quiet embrace: I learned to hold the purpose of the seasons, as I feel them in my individual way. Summer’s time of outdoor exploration is brilliant and precious. It’s for celebration of that light; for activity and motion, wandering across the face of the wild earth. But the pace of that can’t be constant. Fall begins the slowing down, the letting go; and if there’s anything that lightens emotions, it’s letting go. Old wounds, unrealized expectations, the need to be in exploratory motion—these can fall away with the leaves. Who needs them? There is new life within the fall to find.

Come winter, there will be hibernation, reflection. It will be time to go inward and embrace the experience of the previous year, to rest by the fireside and wonder at the storms. I choose a creative project for each winter, and there will be many to select from this time, with abundance at hand. Then spring will bring its inevitable rejuvenation—a celebration of another form. I remember having a conversation with Canadian musician Harry Manx, who said to me (in a month I can’t remember): “This is one of my favorite seasons!” Then he looked at me and smiled further, adding, “I have four, you know.”

I have four as well. No need to hang onto a passing favorite when it’s equally replaced by another. No need for nostalgia or looking forward. Only a desire to look more deeply into the current day. This past Sunday, we looked into the day from along the trail to Parker Falls, a little-used trail not far from home. The leaf, the caterpillar you’ve already seen here were there.

The sky above us was painting its beautiful kinetic art.

The falls held rainbows, just as we held them in our vision.

The creek held the greens and the yellows of the deep, steep canyons.

The forest surrounded us with its gathering release, ready to let go, to slow down, to embrace the nourishing coolness and wetness surely on its way. Everywhere there is new life coming, so no need to restrictively grip the old. To embrace and to let go: paradoxically, they’re one and the same at times like these.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Letting Wounds Go, Part of the Wind, The Sun on Your Face, Wild Grace | No Comments »

F.W.A. (Flowaz With Attitude)

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Despite that the natural green growing world is my refuge of spirit and tranquility, it’s a rough mean place—as rough as the ghetto streets. As I wrote in Wild Grace: “The myth of nature’s boundless benevolence can be shattered in three words: things eat you.” They also bite, sting or poison you, shoot you with acrid skunk juice, and (if you’re not careful) make your shoe soles smell like the local wildlife’s fecal remnants. Given that we’re a part of nature still, it’s no surprise that harsh defensive tactics translate to city streets and pacifist’s gardens.

Still, I never expected to be flipped off by a bunch of flowers.

I find myself wondering: is this the floral equivalent of gangsta rap? Surely neither nature nor gardener intended their beautiful blooms to remind anyone of rude and violent music. But everything is interconnected—that’s the familiar spiritual truth. There are few degrees of separation between this meditative arrangement and N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton. There’s no true separation at all.

Personally, I’m at peace with that. I was never a fan of Niggaz With Attitude, given their misogyny and advocacy of violent mayhem—I preferred Public Enemy’s wildly creative and conscious raps—but I understood where N.W.A.’s attitude came from. My little high school trips into Compton for basketball and football playoffs were enough to convince me that living there could’ve made me violent too. As warped as it may be, violence is a defensive tactic in a harsh climate—a tragic survival adaptation. Alas, it’s still nature’s brutal way. So I get why N.W.A. shunned the “gangsta rap” label and insisted they made “reality rap,” because for them, it was reality.

That claim could easily lead me into another rap, about how much we create our own reality. (That’s a useful attitude, but incomplete in its truth. Ask genocide refugees in Rwandan camps if it’s only their viewpoint holding them back.) But I’d rather look at flowers than rap. This day, I thought about how this bunch of blooms—like N.W.A.—stood there blindly flipping off every passer-by, regardless of whether they deserved it. I wondered what insects might be brutally eating each other on and underneath the flowers, below my threshold of notice. I turned and left the Flowaz With Attitude to work on their new CD, Straight Outta Compost. It too will sell millions, if authorities say it shouldn’t.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Part of the Wind, Wild Grace | No Comments »

Evictions and Convictions

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

I’ve never desired to be a landlord, but from time to time I’ve been one despite myself. One of my principles in that unfortunate situation is to avoid killing my tenants if at all possible. Unfortunately, though, that’s a brutal choice I’ve had to make sometimes. I can’t have mice eating the food in the kitchen—even if one did thoughtfully place a piece of chocolate in one of my boots—and there’s no peaceful way to deal with carpenter ants who’ve taken up residence in the log house walls.

When I do have to exterminate unwelcome tenants, I do my best to treat them as a native hunter would: I ask their forgiveness first, I honor the life that they give, and I thank them. Then I squash the bloody hell out of them or spray them with some evil manufactured venom. It’s just the way of the world. It’s a green jungle out here.

Other tenants are theoretically welcome, but must be evicted anyway. So it is with the bat family who just moved in under the upstairs window sill, a mere week or two before the window was scheduled to be replaced. They’ll have to leave when the old window’s ripped out, so better to gently urge them to move on now. We don’t appreciate the guano on the deck door mat, either. (Note to tenants: it’s not a good policy to crap on your landlord’s shoes.)

Thus we’ve learned about bat eviction. We’ve learned to place screens hanging down from the sill, which allow bats to leave but not return. We’ve sat on the deck at dusk, and watched with fascination as they’ve emerged from more house cracks than we knew existed. We’ve marveled at their ability to squeeze through small spaces. We’ve flinched as they’ve swooped within inches of our faces. We’ve helpfully pointed out to them which of the annoying bugs they should eat right now, thanks, without honoring those buggy lives.

We’ve also noticed that they’re ignoring the bat house we kindly bought for them before eviction, in keeping with our convictions. And now they’re crapping on one of the deck chairs instead of the doormat. I suspect it’s a message about who’s really in charge around here. So it goes in the life of an accidental landlord.

Posted in Grace and Tranquility, Wild Grace | No Comments »

« Older Entries