Activism on A Well-Lit-Path

The Prophets

Fri, 27 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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?

Inconvenient Truths

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Els jardins del Poblenou

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

strike here

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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 Standing Desk [β] - Day 40

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Standing Desk [α] – Day 14

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Standing Desk [α] - Day 7

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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:

Human rights in the mist

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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.

August 7th, 2011: A Day of Silence

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Follow the Leader

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Burning snow

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As I stood under the shower’s spray this evening, allowing the warm water to wash away the day’s dust and travel, I found that as the dirt left me, so did peace and security.

I looked at my hands, and as I passed them along my arms, I suddenly felt an urgency, emergency, imagined I was rushing to remove an invisible poison – radioactive decay – that had collected on my skin and sifted through my clothing, as I sat cowering inside my home, whose chinks and gaps would never be airtight, whose doors and windows were designed to breathe as a human breathes, to move air in and around me so that I might have fresh oxygen to light my blood and to quicken my pulse.

Lessons Learned?

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Lessons can be learned by watching.

A system is only as strong as its weakest link; make a nuclear containment structure (theoretically?) plane-proof and bomb-proof, still the generator sits outside, its water source exposed, and a shut-down reactor cannot power itself; powered by fission, not fusion, its “steady state” is detonation, not stasis.

A viable solution to the nation’s energy crisis (finite fossil fuels, unsustainable sources of electricity) and a response to a near-universal consensus that global warming is a dire reality (universal to everyone without vested financial interests) must not rely on building more, but on learning to live with and use less.

Our Daily Dance: An Intention

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I returned late last night from the annual Dance New England summer camp near Lake Ossipee in New Hampshire, and woke this morning with dancing tape still on a couple of toes, the echo of taut and trained muscle still in the sinews, and the ache of separation from that vibrant and affectionate community of dancers already wringing out some sighs.

A beautiful family event that has been going on for some 30 years, DNE Camp attracts top-quality teachers and chefs and musicians from all over, offering the best of what they have to upwards of 800 participants. The cost of classes, food and lodging is all part of the modest fee. This year, like most years, there were community elders in attendance, and adults who at one time were babies born to this once-a-year village; there were newly-inspired youth from all over the States and abroad; and toddlers to teens who arrived with their parents for this summertime camp.

Soliloquoys

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I. Our Daily Dance

The waning moon has this hour turned above the crowns of trees, and spilled its liquid light into the yard. So this evening is accompanied by a shadow of sun’s heat. The same moon that years and years ago was torn from earth’s belly, born from her and borne away on some celestial tide: once blazing with the fire that gave us life, now its patient ashes spy upon our daily dance, at times shy and out of sight, at times winking at our plight, or otherwise full-faced and offering its white-washed world for these our fine somnambulisms.
With no one’s arms to hold you from these sights, the dimensions fall one into another, you join the ranks of every color-blinded creature as it flies or crawls or navigates the night, employing sharper, duller vision. A leaf-rattle makes the paw pause mid-step, a stick snap shakes the courage of the smallest, while above the sudden flush of air or nearly-silent slant of wing makes cowering the act of statues, whose hearts race from one moment alive to the next, still alive, alive yet still, praying to not be prey, hoping for no tooth nor talon’s spike to rake the nerves.

Some of us are larger: suffer less.

But suffer even so, adventure when better ventures aren’t reached by opening fingers, opened hearts. A footstep starts the body where the spirit would prefer to stop. Still. A stick snap stops the world around the boots of men: who goes there? What would a man be wanting of the night, if not a hunt of one sort or another?

The moon will not stand still; her mother moves below her, always at arms-distance, always departing. The child spins as if to turn away; the weight of their connection means she’s always falling toward her elder. A pure, white face: smiling as she rises her hello, sad as she departs. A desert of desire, whose fires went out so long ago, depends on stars’ impressions to light her further face.
Who wouldn’t see a spark up there? Some ember that was better than its gray surround, some flickered flash of life that kindled past to second sunrise, companion star, golden guide to keep us honest and awake and in each other’s arms, to banish sleep in favor of a man or woman’s favored sleep companion.

II. Gift of Sight and of Delight

One can speak more plainly. An apple, for example: there was nothing woman ever gave a man that would be his unmaking. Genesis requires rethinking, since its metaphor is cactus-garden, is painful to embrace. If (for example) Eve opened Adam’s eyes, it was to preciousness of life. I suppose that might be blinding, but hardly expulsion from the Divine; invitation, rather.

There is some bland assumption by the readers of those ancient runes: a paradise was lost, to be regained at last when body’s been betrayed as temporary residence, reminiscent of a slum-lord’s tenement, reminiscent of a child who’s given no delight or - more likely - never found its gratitude.

I do not sign that lease.

Paradise is every moment, but skill in seeing clouded by emotions or events. The paradise of creation is in company of men and of women, building walls or raking them down, raising pillars of life or whirling in the great river of each other’s dancing, scratching at the earth or forging teams to push back need, or needing the sweet waters of ourselves to wash upon that labor, to loose the earth of us and make us one.

No, an apple, or a pomegranate, maybe have been a gift of fruit, of sustenance, of sight or of delight. The days that followed, simply striving to maintain that paradise. If missed, at times, or if (at times) we fail to be delighted, still there’s no mistaking it exists.

Thanks

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Today unlike other Thanksgiving holidays I find myself alone. The day began in silence, shrouded in fog from the eastern seaboard; it passed quietly in a town whose shopdoors shut tightly against profit and house doors opened wide in favor of family; and ended in fog from the eastern seaboard, backlit in a dusty red, dusky purple, then dark.

There was no turkey except for those roaming the wood behind my house, and no stuffing or potatoes or pie. There was, in fact, nothing special whatsoever, except for this contrast of need (a darker color?) to necessity (a pure white sheet).

Is today Ecoday?

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

If you haven’t been amazed at least once today, you haven’t been paying attention.

Meaning, there are so many mundane tasks begging this moment of your life, and the next and the next, that quite easily – predictably, I would say – an entire day slips along on that bubbling and familiar current, sunrise to its setting, and nothing remarkable seems to have come of it. Yes: the employee or employer or colleague at work who never fails to get under your skin. Or: the story about someone that someone you know knows, who won some money, lost some money, recovered or lost health. All of it swirls along the surface, most comfortably, as one day becomes the next, the wheel of a month becomes the wheel of a year…