Space looks like the ocean – where few eyes venture beyond the surface. This image presents our planet Earth, and scattered around it flecks that represent active satellites, inactive satellites, and debris: green, gray, red. Each object is much, much smaller than the dot that depicts it. Yet each dot is still a dot.

View the 3D presentation here

I looked at this picture of space crap, and imagined current or future spaceflights from Earth, tiptoeing into the sky like bathers at the polluted beach who, if they even dare swim, must pick their way through plastic flotsam and toxic jetsam and things that could, with any lack of luck, kill them. And as that metaphor surged up like a gritty wave, I thought of all the news stories citing our degraded oceans, the cradle of life made a sewer by the most self-centered, wasteful generations ever to wander the planet. Our destructiveness equal to our creativity, perhaps: is that a balance that Nature will always strike?

Our politicians continue to smoke the mirrors by talking about nothing of substance, and of making “security” or family life an issue of national governance, when much more serious issues continue to press.

Imagine you run a family farm, and one of the workers was painting a fence when 3 acres of tomatoes needed to be picked or rot on the vine. Imagine you run a business, and your accountant can’t explain where funds are going. Imagine you live in a village and one family is using the community well as a toilet.

The Gardens of Poblenou

I’ll tell you how I discovered them.

In September of last year, when Catalina was making her tour of European research groups, I was similarly engaged, researching the cities surrounding those research groups on foot, by bus, by tram and by train. The focus of her search started large and ended in pinpoints on the map; my search began in the pinpoint where we landed and slept, and spread out from there, a personal Big Bang, encompassing as much and as varied a landscape as possible.

There are places where effort is quickly rewarded, and others where you feel as though you are bailing the tide: no matter the size or your little beach bucket, or the passion you summon into your two human-sized hands, that water is coming in – lifted and poured onto the sand by the sun and moon! – and then out it goes again, while the waves tug at your heels and pull foot-fulls of grains out from under your feet.

The inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent liked the number forty. There are a couple of dozen references to 40, measuring days or years, in those ancient teaching scripts and histories that we’ve collected into the Judeo-Christian Bible. Forty days of rain, forty years in the wilderness, forty days on the mountain; forty years old, forty sons, forty cubits, forty baths, forty days’ fast.

Other than the numeric connotation (and the fact that everything is related to everything else), there was nothing biblical about the “Alpha” trial period for my standing desk. There was a flash of insight in the form of a worrisome news article, and a half-hour’s work shifting my office from the window that overlooked the garden and the apple tree at its center; the rest was riding out the alpha wave, waiting for a sign that would tell me to: a) land my standing desk in a more permanent place, b) take it apart plank by plank, or c) keep on waiting.

Physically, I feel good getting up to work in the morning. I think it’s because I don’t get up just to sit down again. My body feels energized most of the morning, mind alert, and my frame moves around while I type up the morning’s correspondence. Two weeks in, I remain happy with the switch to a standing desk, and am considering when to build my “Beta” version, levitating my old sitting desk one-half-person into the air on a hand-designed scaffold.

There is a certain volume of accumulated human knowledge — a kind of Encyclopaedia of Safety — that is based on the trial-and-error successes of generations. One entry in that tome might be as quaint as “don’t shit in your bed” (Any argument…?) Our Australian friends have several: “Don’t introduce species into an ecology with no known predators.” (oops), or “Don’t irrigate your desert with a limited aquifer.” (oops)

There are others:

On the NDAA:

I watch the world’s movements. It turns with the same steady footstep as always, but the humans aboard become frightened, startle at shadows and, collectively doing the best they are able (which is not always particularly good), make decisions tainted by their imagined or promoted fears.

You and I decide to speak, decide to support or protest, as individuals. We take the stage against the backdrop of historical forces. Those forces are greater than any law or political position: with or without a provision in some statute in some book in some library of some Congress, citizens will be hauled away if the power elite feel sufficiently threatened. When times are really bad, it doesn’t take much.

A couple of years back, Amherst architect Tullio Inglese spoke to our ecovillage group about ways to build greenly: these materials, that insulation, this heating source, those solar panels.“But,” he said, “pouring money into a system that gobbles energy doesn’t solve a thing. You have to begin by USING LESS.”

Not a new idea, and wonderful to hear it again and again. One reason we are protagonists in war is our hyper dependence on oil. One reason we are leaning over an economic precipice, and our poor human non-heroic legislators are hog-tied and unable to affect change, is because We the People are arguably (and measurably) the most materialistic and consumptive culture the world has yet produced.

The following re-post is a piece I wrote for our intentional community’s web journal. With a few years of painstaking research and trial-and-error, we assembled egalitarian tools for decision-making, legal forms for sharing land as partners instead of landlords, and some open-hearted yet strong ways of maintaining harmony within our Circle – even with a variety of personalities bumping into one another as we worked to sort this all out.