The Pranking of America

Near the end of eighth grade, my friend Chris, who lived on a nearby lake and rode the same school bus, gave me the locker combination of one of my chief rivals for the social ignominy that went with the title of Class Brain. The brain’s name was David.

Using the com to gain access to his locker after school one day, I took an uneaten tangerine from my lunch bag and thrust it onto the coat hook at the back of his locker. I then closed the door, and there it remained. My own locker being just a few down the row from Dave’s, whenever I saw him open it, I slid my eyes over hoping to observe his reaction when he discovered the prank. If Chris happened to be nearby, we’d exchange wide-eyed glances in anticipation. 

Weeks went by. Chris, whose reward for giving me the locker com had been to witness the emplacement of the now-hallowed fruit, was moved to increasingly paroxysmal expressions of incredulity each time the locker opened and closed with its owner remaining oblivious to it. In this way, with each passing day the prank grew lusher and richer in its emotional depths even as the fruit on the coat hook withered, grew putrid, and dried.

Yes, I opened the locker a couple times just to make sure it was still there.

At length Chris and I could take it no more. Watching Dave hang his jacket on the tangerine at the start of the day and then retrieve it at the end was starting to feel a little degrading, even to us. Besides, at this rate, the school year might end before the prank was discovered… and then what? We might never be there for that delicious moment. We talked it over on the bus one day and decided to force the issue.

It was mine to do, but Chris wanted to be there. This wasn’t hard to arrange because we all had the same homeroom and our lockers were assigned together.

“Hey Dave,” I said at the next opportunity. “What’s that on the coat hook in your locker?”

Thinking back, it occurs to me now that what moved poor David to furious tears was his science nerd’s forensic realization, upon seeing the tangerine, that it was clearly not a partly rotten piece of fruit that had been placed on the hook that day as a prank: It had been there for awhile. No doubt, turning back to me and seeing Chris standing there grinning like a maniac added to the rapidly developing picture. The crushing emotional blow, which I had not anticipated and would not have had the heart to inflict if I had, was that in a flash Dave understood he’d been hanging his coat on this disgusting thing for weeks, and that he hadn’t even noticed.

For sheer cruel impact, it would have been difficult to devise a more perfect prank for this individual. Another boy probably wouldn’t have been able to quickly piece together the time factor embodied in the evidence, but instead would have instantly thrown that rotten piece of fruit at me as hard as he could, and thus evened the score.

But for Dave, no. Throwing the tangerine at me would have been a gesture of futility and defeat. Lucky for me, he was way too smart to do the simple, obvious thing.

Looking around today, I suspect that the vast majority of the American intelligentsia are basically in the same position as Dave in being royally, cruelly pranked. Thing is, nobody is going to tell them, and most certainly won’t figure it out for themselves. The big question we have to ask ourselves is, are we using our reasoning ability to avoid realizations that result in painful emotional impact, or are we willing to think, assemble the evidence, and construct our understandings regardless of any emotional pain that may result?

If you’re wondering how reason is functioning in your life — whether as a revealer of new lights on things or as a co-conspirator in perpetuating darkness, here’s a self-diagnostic protocol to run on your brain to help you decide what’s really going on: When was the last time you totally changed your ideas about something, forcing you to inwardly or outwardly recant a position you previously held as true? When have you discovered yourself to be completely wrong in your ideas?

That’s the point of thinking: to change our minds. If our minds are not changing — often painfully, as seems to be the rule with real growth — then we are not thinking. And that may be okay too, but let’s acknowledge what this really is: self-hypnosis.

To Dave’s credit, once presented with a fact, his intelligence led to the correct conclusions…and with them, emotional pain. Thus, while Dave’s reasoning ability played a critical role in the emotional impact of the prank, it also ended it.

However, the function of reason in the pranking of many otherwise intelligent people these days seems to run in the opposite direction: reason as an enabler of further self-deception, averting both realization and emotional impact, which in turn encourages yet more deception, fueling roguery without end.

 Zu klug ist dumm, as the Germans say: Too smart is stupid.

 In any con game, those who are convinced of their own smartness and rightness and who have built an identity centered on it are pretty much the easiest marks around.

 Here’s my working hypothesis as I negotiate the media landscape today:

· Bought-and-paid-for science is bought-and-paid-for science.

· Bought-and-paid-for reporting is bought-and-paid-for reporting.

· Bought-and-paid-for politicians are bought-and-paid-for politicians.

· Bought-and-paid-for “experts” and opinions are bought-and-paid-for “experts” and opinions.

Further, I’m assuming that since other people are writing the checks for these things, they are probably getting the results they want. I also assume that since I am not paying for these things, it is quite likely that my needs, values and interests do not align with the needs, values and interests of those who are.

If this all sounds reasonable but your first thought is, “Yeah, but how bad can it possibly be?”

…well, I’ve been asking myself the same question, and I don’t like the answers I’ve been coming up with. Lately I’ve even started to toy with the idea that those who are writing the checks might be asking this very question, but from their angle: “How bad we can make it for these dupes, and how fast? How much horribleness can the American people be induced to tolerate, and how can those of us writing the checks benefit?” 

These are not comfortable thoughts, but I can’t help that. Having been both the prankster and the pranked-upon, I remain on the lookout for rotten tangerines. They’re often surprisingly hard to see, but once I do see them, I’m sure not going to kid myself about it.

Careful what you hang your hats and coats on, my friends. 

Whether 'tis Nobler... to Speak with Ghosts

With Halloween and Election Day fast approaching (and just 72 hours apart), skeletons and ghouls now vie for attention with political lawn signs in front yards across the USA.

Seeking a temporary respite from both the plastic horror shows on display and the deeper ones now churning in the cauldron of the republic, I picked up a copy of Hamlet. I’m not sure why — it just called to me as I was looking for something to train my eyeballs away from these confounded screens. This is probably the third or fourth time I’ve read the play, but I didn’t remember the prominent role of the ghost until I started through it again.

ACT I: The ghost of Denmark’s dead king, Hamlet’s father, walks past the night watch outside the castle Elsinore. This it isn’t the first time; it happened twice before. Seeing it again, those who witness this eerie sight let Hamlet know about it, and that night he joins their watch. Sure enough, the ghost appears again, this time motioning for Hamlet to follow, which he does.

King Hamlet’s ghost imparts to the prince a terrible piece of intelligence: He did not die of a snakebite in the royal orchard, as had been told throughout Denmark. Instead, he died when Hamlet’s uncle — now risen to the throne in the old king’s place — poured poison in his ear as he slept, curdling the blood in his veins and killing him horribly.

It’s a great start to a story, isn’t it? Especially when we add that the murderous new king and the old queen — this would be Hamlet’s mother — wasted no time in getting married and thus consolidating the power needed to cover for the crime. Isn’t that just richly evil? Hamlet evidently thinks so.

But what really strikes me now, as days grow short and the northern autumn takes a decided turn toward winter gloom, is the way Shakespeare’s classic play implies that the truth will out — even, if it must, by supernatural means. A ghost appears, bearing unsettling facts. And upon this hearing turns the destiny of the kingdom.

In the play, of course, it comes to Hamlet. I’d like to invite that on today’s political stage it could be any of us.

Though not to my knowledge often compared in this way, we see something similar in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Here again, there’s trouble in the realm, but in this case, interestingly, the action is driven not by the uncovering of concealed human crimes but instead by a circumstance where lawful edicts contravene the higher laws of love and nature. In the comedy, the very elements — the fairies and their kingdom — are in a parallel upheaval, and the lovers, fleeing to the woods from Athens and its laws, have numinous encounters there that ultimately right both realms. And it’s easy for people today to say of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Oh, that’s just a love story.” We might forget, but Shakespeare’s contemporaries would not, that in powerful families such marriages are inseparable from statecraft. This is serious business.

So: encounters with fairies, encounters with ghosts. Shakespeare seems to suggest that the fate of nations depends on something deeper than the day-to-day affairs that so often monopolize our attentions. Nature has a say. Who has the power, who has the right? Who is in the right? In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare asks: What happens when a secular law runs contrary to a higher good? In Hamlet, we are invited to consider how long can rule by criminal deception last, and what our knowledge of this requires of us.

To this last question, Hamlet’s soliloquy provides one answer, or at least outlines the scope of the inquiry. Starting with the words “To be or not to be…” this is probably one of the most famous passages ever written in English. However, immediately after asking his famous question, Hamlet offers a telling follow-up. Here are the first few lines, with emphasis added:

To be, or not to be — that is the question:
 Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
 The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
 Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
 And by opposing end them.

Indeed: “Whether ’tis nobler…” Now THAT is the question! What is the nobler course of action? The fact that these words so closely follow the more often quoted line tells us that for Shakespeare — or at least for the character Hamlet — these two questions run parallel: For the prince, “to be” is to be noble. Hamlet sees that the outcomes of his actions and in turn his noble title depend not merely on his birthright but upon the nobility of his character. His lineage may call him into service, but he’s basically on his own. Adding weight to this, as a royal, well he knows that his personal destiny is bound up with that of his nation. The consequences of the painful lancing of a tumescent boil upon the monarchy have to be weighed against the septic risks of its continued festering. Further, if we follow what he goes on to express in his soliloquy, Hamlet grasps implicitly that to fail to follow the nobler path is to risk losing not merely his position or even his life, but something deeper in himself. This is what makes Hamlet’s dilemma a “to-be-or-not-to-be,” existential problem.

Are we in any different position, today? History now bends around us, and the shape it ultimately takes will be our own.

The really tragic thing about tragedies is that the choices they present invariably lead to tragic consequences, regardless. All Hamlet’s choices are bad. After all, he could simply go along with the crime, become complicit in the public deception, continue his comfortable life in the royal court, most likely win the hand of his beloved Ophelia and in due time ascend to the throne. And all he need do to have all of this — wealth, power, privilege and the hand of his beloved — is to live a lie. This he will not do. The other option is, as we soon observe in the play, one hell of a bloody mess. Perhaps other courses of action are conceivable: maybe the prince could flee the kingdom, go into hiding, or live under an assumed identity. But what would these say about Hamlet’s sense of duty to crown and country? Such options aren’t even considered. Including them nonetheless, these are the main categories of response: stand and take it, stand and fight, or try to run away. Basically, all of his options are tragic.

Well, my friends, sorry to tell you, but it’s Hamlet time for all of us.

Consequently, “whether ’tis nobler” should be the question on everyone’s mind.

Stand and take it, stand for something better, or try to hide or run away. None of these will be easy going forward. Some, regrettably, may skip over both Hamlet’s ferocious introspection and testing of his own knowledge, and, fortified with unearned certainty, compound the crimes of state with miserable ones of their own. This is far from noble. Most of us, unlike Hamlet, will dismiss any bearers of unwanted intelligence, dress ourselves in whatever brand of sponsored deception suits our styles, and hold to such comforts as can yet be found in life. This is understandable: It’s easier. Once one starts to grasp the scale and scope of the criminality and deceit that brought the nation to this pass, it’s really too much. And I mean that literally: it is too much. Look at Hamlet: he goes a bit nuts. But while the risks to our minds are real, there may be greater dangers ahead. Faced with this presentiment, nearly all will choose to retreat into various forms of refuge, seeking distractions, groupthink, phony affiliations, addictions, or a pitiful kind of hope predicated on ignorance of facts and shortness of memory. Whatever assuages our distress or banishes the spirits that come bearing unwelcome truths will be called upon.

Be forewarned, however: my re-reading of Hamlet was intended to be such a distraction, and look where I landed. The escape I sought in the 400-year-old text turned into a visitation that brought me face to face with present circumstances, and now it haunts me.

Tobacco, Corn, and the Healing of America

“I just wanted to check in with you,” I say, speaking via cell phone while standing out in the yard in the afternoon sun. I had reached out to a friend who does live-in elder care several states away. It’s June, 2020. I’m trying to make sure this friend doesn’t fall into isolation.

“But I may not be able to talk too long,” I continue. “My son-in-law is working on the roof and may need help.”

“Is he working on a vent pipe?” she asks.

“Why, yes. How did you know?”

“I just saw him there,” comes the reply. Then, without preamble or a moment’s pause, she continues: “And by the way, that property where you’re living was once the site of Native American habitations. You might want to offer some tobacco to the land to help heal the wounds and bring a better balance.”

Maybe it was the closely sequenced pairing of the two kinds of long-distance seeing — one easily verified, the other less so — but I decided to act on the suggestion without delay. As I walked back toward the house, I recalled a conversation my wife and I had with a neighbor here on Indian Lake years before. The young mother told us that her two preschool-age children had been frightened at night and described people in native dress walking around in their house.

By coincidence, the phone conversation happened take place in the same year I had decided to grow a “Three Sisters” garden, a traditional Native American growing strategy in which corn, runner beans and squash are inter-planted. The experiment was part of my ongoing study of permaculture. Feeling motivated to start producing more storable food calories in our home garden, the previous summer I’d had two trees taken down to lay the groundwork for this year’s garden expansion. By the following June when this phone conversation took place, the corn, beans and squash were already planted and growing. In fact, I was standing right by these plantings as we spoke.

So the next question was, where to get the tobacco for an offering? Turned out I’d saved some dried leaves from a flowering tobacco species (Nicotiana Sylvetta) that I’d grown a couple years before, so I could make the offering as suggested. I’m not knowledgeable about things Native American, but I do like plants. I recalled I had seeds of three other tobacco species that I’d purchased a couple years before so I could give a live tobacco plant collection to a friend as a wedding gift. I planted the seeds. Two of the three (Nicotiana Rustica and Nicotiana Tabacum), grew.

Thinking about this project, however, I had to admit that I never really understood the reverence with which the people indigenous to this land have held tobacco. Why tobacco? Tobacco?!? Yuck! It made no sense. Growing up, my personal experience with tobacco was a world of smelly ashtrays in public places, cigarette machines in bowling alleys and cartons of smokes stacked behind the counter at the corner store.

But living plants are different than commodities. As they started to sprout in their seed trays, I found myself captivated. You have to hold a tobacco seed in your hand and then actually plant it to really understand what a miracle it is. The seeds are incredibly tiny, averaging 10,000–20,000 seeds per gram. Naturally, such small seeds germinate as tiny, tiny, tiny plants…but then, look out! Given the richly amended soil they need, they grow remarkably fast.

Within weeks the seedlings were ready to transplant into the garden. The space I found for them, appropriately, it seemed, was in a new garden annex adjacent to the Three Sisters Garden I’d planted earlier this spring. This was also near where I’d been standing during the phone conversation that started me down this path. The plants grew fast in their new home. But what happened next was unexpected.

I’d always been intrigued by reports I’d read from ethnobotanists and anthropologists around the world of indigenous peoples who said they connected directly with the “spirit of a plant” in order to better understand its gifts. People from the traditional societies of every continent share the same story. I’ve also admired herbalists like Stephen Harrod Buhner and others who have recovered enough of their indigenous wisdom to be able to perform similarly. I’ve never had that ability.

However, all my life, I’ve loved plants. And that’s what I did with these new arrivals. I thought they were adorable. I’d check on them the way new parents check on sleeping babies. I’d gaze at their fuzzy little leaves with wonder. None of this made a whole lot of sense to me, but then, does love ever really make sense? Still, I wasn’t planning on eating, smoking, or doing anything else with them besides offering them back to the earth, so the fascination, attention, and devotion I lavished on the tobacco might have seemed a bit strange given all the other work to do in the garden. I just wanted to see what they’d turn into.

In the morning I’d go out and visit the plants, standing in grass wet with dew. In the afternoon or evening after returning from a walk, I’d swing by the tobacco plants on my way to the house. Day after day, again and again like this. During dry spells, I’d water. And along the way, plenty of liquid plant food, to which these hungry plants proved incredibly responsive.

It was toward the end of July that the first “verbal bleed-through” happened. I call it a “bleed-through” because the words did not seem to come from a part of myself that I am familiar with. Two words: “Fierce compassion.” They came unbidden as I approached the growing tobacco plants, and instantly I knew that this was a simple and comprehensive way of characterizing the plants themselves. Soon thereafter, I realized it was also a very concise answer to my longstanding perplexity over why these plants have so long been held sacred by so many. Again, I am not a scholar of indigenous ethnobotany. Instead, I’m building my own capacity to connect directly with the plants in my own way.

A little more than a week later, another word came, this time in a slightly different part of the garden adjacent to the plants just after I checked on them.

The word was: betrayal.

I mention the locations where the various words came to me because each of these specific received perceptions felt connected with those very local areas, as if I were a probe stuck into the living brain of the earth, translating a signal. Each location impressed vividly in my memory because of the emotional impact of the experience there. Also, the words that came through were not ‘words’ as some might think of them, abstracted words from a page in a dictionary. Instead, they were living words that carried in their train full sets of relationships and associations.

This time, the word that came through was betrayal.

Riding in on that word, I saw that betrayal and broken promises function as a key emotional resonance point, a dynamic link between the experience of the people indigenous to this land and the current experience of the people now living in North America more broadly. This stood out vividly as the word rolled through my mind: We, the people of the United States, feel deeply, deeply betrayed.

Of course, as we saw at Standing Rock and many other places, the betrayal of the indigenous peoples never ended. But if you look around now, as you read news reports, as you talk with friends and relatives, watch for the element of betrayal and how it lurks beneath the conversation of pretty much everyone you interact with when the discussion turns to public affairs. It shows up as blame, as despair, as anger, as fear and distrust, as depression, as extremism, cynicism, or nihilism. These carry strong feelings, so also look for projection, blame, distraction, denial, scapegoating, self-destruction and self-medication. Alone or in combination, these maladaptive coping strategies are typical of how we as a culture often work with strong feelings.

The betrayal was and is enormous. I’m not going to list events or cite evidence to support this point. Just look. Look and feel in your own heart, think back in time, and then look around you. My sense is, it didn’t just start this year or last, or even in the last decade or two. I’m not saying when it started, I’m just saying that I feel it reaching a crescendo. People feel betrayed, wronged, and the sense of wrongness is growing. As a nation, we feel a promise has not been honored. We feel deceived. And we feel it deeply.

I sat with this for a couple weeks, sharing with close friends what I’d seen and felt, and how it came to me. During that time, as often happens, the perception seemed to gather its own evidence, which is why I’m suggesting that my readers carry it forth into their experience and see if it has any explanatory power for you around what’s going on. For me, it does. It seemed especially poignant given that my original intent in growing the plants was to bring a better healing to the traumas of the society that lived here before me, in which betrayals figured so prominently. I had a growing, terrible awareness that our current situation as a nation is a completely foreseeable, natural and logical continuation of the betrayals that have characterized the relationship of indigenous people with the newcomers to this continent and their leaders.

On the upside, looking the reality of betrayal in the face allows for something else to happen. With betrayal, I was given a key to understanding the connecting point between the historical Native American trauma and the current trauma now facing the people of the Americas as a whole. I call this correspondence a point of “functional resonance.” The betrayal that we are now feeling is a problem with a leverage point outside of the present. To address one side is to begin addressing the other. But to truly address a trauma, one must recognize its actual emotional depths and dimensions.

This means feeling it.

Fierce compassion, indeed.

The essence of this fierce compassion is incisive, uncompromising honesty. The time has come to ask, as individuals and as a nation: Do we want a true diagnosis and remedy for our woes, or a mere palliative? Tobacco offers only the former.

As I continued feeling into it, and in total contradiction to all my previous experiences and negative cultural conditioning about tobacco, this plant is in essence a call to honesty and a more honest relationship with life as it is lived. And obviously, I’m not talking about people who “just need a cigarette to calm down.” That is a palliative. It’s an abuse of the plant. The plant doesn’t become less fierce when it’s abused. It becomes more dangerous.

My work with the living plants, by contrast, showed me the positive side of its fierceness. The fierce honesty it calls us to is demanding, multilayered and uncompromising. It’s compassionate because ultimately, the capacity for honesty is necessary to truly serve life. To see the gravity of a grave situation is a gift. Doing so opens doors that may ultimately help remedy our errors and mitigate the worst of the consequences of the mistakes already made, if enough people open to receive a bigger truth.

Only another week or so went by before the next big download came. By this time the larger tobacco plants had grown as tall as me and were flowering, topped with large sprays of trumpet-shaped white flowers. During a gathering I gave a little garden tour, stopping to look at them with a couple of our guests. Standing in front of the plants themselves I shared what I’d learned in my interactions with them, and the conversation took on a decidedly dark feeling tone. We then continued walking around the fenced perimeter of the garden until we reached a little garden annex where, just outside the deer fence, I’d moved some extra corn seedlings just to see if they’d make it. They surprised me, growing into fully mature cornstalks. I then noticed that one of the husks of this fast-maturing corn variety had already turned papery dry. I picked the ear — the first of the season — and peeled back the husks to reveal a stunning mix of deep red and orange kernels gleaming in the sunlight.

The mood instantly shifted. Holding the corn in my hand, I felt the stark difference between the energies of these two plants. Immediately I understood that corn offered the balancing principle for the tobacco. I could feel it. Over there, a few meters behind us, was the fierce and unyielding energy of the tobacco. Here, glowing in my hand, a humble ear of corn. One could hardly imagine a greater contrast.

Over the next couple hours during our gathering I had to go inside periodically to write down notes as they came through, and more came throughout the evening and over the following weeks as I fleshed out the insights. The download this time was comprehensive in both its diagnosis and prescription.

What came to me is that in basic terms life moves between the polarities of austerity and abundance, as embodied in the changes of the seasons, rhythms of exertion and rest, want and satiety, exhale and inhale. Austerityis a word many aren’t familiar with, and the image that keeps coming to mind is of Shaker furnishings: bare, stark, unadorned and utilitarian. Shaker furniture embodies austere design principles. Tobacco likewise embodies the principle of austerity, which takes the form of being willing to be stripped down and humbled, to become innocent of the guile and subterfuge of the mind, opening one’s self to receive a level of truth that comes from a clear inner connection with life.

Corn, on the other hand, is abundance. While the immediate effect of tobacco is to nauseate us and empty us out, corn pleasantly satisfies and fills. It’s no surprise, then, that people would pursue corn and reject what tobacco offers in its deeper spiritual manifestation. However, a healthy individual or society will check the impulse to indulge exclusively in corn-fueled abundance, and voluntarily enter into austerities. Only when I held the season’s first ear of corn in my hand did I realize how absolutely essential is the balance of these polarities: Through contact with the austerity principle one can enhance one’s ability to manage abundance without being corrupted by it. Failure to approach such austerities voluntarily is an invitation for austerity to come knocking on our doors instead. Collectively, this is where the rich nations of the world now stand.

For generations, our society has been literally awash in corn, veritable mountains of it filling silos, barges, railcars and ships. Not coincidentally, as a society, we have also been seduced by the abundance principle. Sure, if we’re talking about misery — suffering without need, meaning or consequence — of that, modern cultures have plenty. Picture all the chronically ill people eating corn snacks and drinking corn syrup-sweetened beverages looking at electronic screens that seduce them to buy more. Yes, we have misery, of this kind and many needless others. But of austerity and the capacity for true seriousness it bestows, as a culture, we have little.

Over the following weeks I considered how the corn taken from the indigenous people was handed back as liquor, and how ultimately the corn was refined and engineered until even our food became poison. The modern weaponization of food reveals a lot about our culture. And even without this ongoing horror show, abundance itself, taken to absurd excess and with no counterbalancing force, has proven intoxicating, disorienting, stupefying. In direct consequence, the nation’s capacity for seriousness has largely been drained into petty concerns: personal fortunes, financial shenanigans, political appeasements and intrigues, juridical abuses and the proliferation of “industries” devoted to amusement, obfuscation, sickening food, needless wars, useless trash, industrial imprisonment, and various other brands of mass-marketed or state-sponsored death.

So what is the austerity we’re being invited to, with increasingly insistent knocks upon the door? What forms help us to strip down, be humbled, become innocent of the guile and subterfuge of the mind, and open ourselves to receive a level of truth that comes from a clear inner connection with life? Austerity often looks like a taking away of things. In addition to the possibility of embarking upon the rigorous traditional teaching path of tobacco itself, austerity can take the form of fasting, for example, or of sacrifice. It can take the form of physical extremes: heat, cold, voluntary isolation, vigorous exercise or other kinds of endurance. It can take the form of discipline — even disciplined thought, for example — or spiritual or artistic practice. Any form of letting go can be an austerity, but especially letting go of habits and cherished beliefs or certainties. Pride, vanity, gluttony, sloth, etc… these are all just habits, too. Devoted service of any kind can also be an austerity. In effect, the basic principle of austerity is the cutting or dropping away of that which does not serve. In so doing it allows us to connect more deeply with the things that do serve, and then to build again from there. This is what I mean by true seriousness as an outcome of austerity, and austerity being the necessary steering wheel to direct our abundance in a life-giving way.

However, I feel a little cautious about extolling the virtue of seriousness given how much mock-seriousness flows through the media and our business and governmental institutions. For many, the habit of hiding within a parody of seriousness serves just as poorly as any of the other vices. In fact, for the habitually serious, letting go of that habit could very well be an austerity, since almost always such seriousness is a cover for something else, perhaps an ego-driven desire to be taken seriously, for example, or a need to intimidate or control others, or perhaps a need to maintain an inflated sense of self-importance. None of these in themselves are truly serious goals.

Stripped down and left open, however, we can arrive, be present and feel what there is to feel. What I notice in this emptiness is that the feelings of betrayal in the air are now meeting with those moving through the earth beneath my feet. They meet in me; I am a connection point. When I say that the feeling of betrayal is a place of “functional resonance,” what I mean is that standing at this point of intersection, any efforts made toward healing the terrible betrayals of the past will be catalyzed by unflinchingly surveying the scope of the enormous betrayals of the present, and vice versa. They are connected phenomena. It may seem like the past is past, so why bother? Or it may seem that the present is our culture’s just deserts, or that the situation is hopeless, or there’s really no problem, so why bother? But the past isn’t ‘past’ when it is present in my feeling body, and the present is just another opportunity to address the dynamic as a whole.

This is what’s coming to me now.

And I feel that, one way or another, it’s what’s coming to all of us. Therefore, it’s best to understand both the current winds that blow and the earth that yet trembles beneath us with the burdens of the past by understanding the emotional dynamics that connect the two. Healing this is serious work, but it’s better to undertake it now and willingly than to wait until the manifestations of the pattern get any more deeply engraved on the world than they already are.

Breaking the Trance of “Them” – Ethics for Empowerment

Excuse me, but I really don’t want to hear about “them” anymore. I don’t care about the documentation, the track record, the history, or how well someone makes the case that “they” are the source of the problem. 

I’m done. No more “they.” No more “them.”  No more blame. No more victimhood. In the long run, blaming simply doesn’t work.

So if we take discussions of “them” off the table, where does that leave us? What do we do?

Step 1: Begin with personal introspection. 

Adding to a conversation, whether through a letter to an elected representative, a meeting at a diner, or even a post on social media, is an action. Voting is an action. Campaigning and protesting are actions. Making purchases or donations are actions.

To be fully empowered in our actions, however, we must ask: Why am I doing this? What are my motivations?  What are the likely outcomes?  

Answering such questions is not as easy as it sounds.  Human motivations are complex. For example, am I puffing up my sense of self with feelings of righteous indignation? Am I using ridicule to diminish others? Am I experiencing uncomfortable feelings and looking for a catharsis or a sense of group affiliation to assuage these feelings? When faced with the latest outrage, pain or grief in the news, am I projecting rage, pain and grief from my personal life that I am unwilling to deal with more directly? Am I deliberately trying to arouse a defensive posture in another for my own selfish purposes? And I voting this way because I think it means I'm a good person? If I'm donating, who am I trying to help? What is my real agenda in choosing an affiliation group?  Do I just want to belong, rubbing shoulders with people who agree with my opinions? Do I need to feel “better-than?” Am I itchin’ for a fight?

The uncompromisingly honest digging required to answer these questions is a formidable task, but it’s essential if we are to act with the highest degree of integrity we are capable of at a given moment. Personal empowerment begins here. This is more than enough of a task to occupy a person for a very long time. This time is not wasted because personal empowerment absolutely has to begin with the self.

Step 2: That said, since the laboratory for our introspection is housed in the larger structure of our life experiences, it is also possible and ultimately necessary to extend this depth of scrutiny to our own affiliation groups, which may include one’s faith community, profession, business organization, political party, advocacy groups and ultimately one’s own nation. In other words, we must begin with ourselves in Step 1, and only after establishing ongoing engagement in that step can we expand to those groups that comprise our extended sense of identity through association. 

In political discussions, for example, members and leadership of our own parties must face the heaviest scrutiny and be held to the highest standards. This is the most empowering stand one can take, because these are the people we vote for and who rely on us for support. Likewise, it is ultimately the organizations we work for, not some other ones, that we affect most directly. It is ultimately those advocacy groups we donate money to that we can ask tough questions of. And it is ultimately our own government, not the governments of other nations, that we can most immediately call to account.

Step 3? The next logical step, it might seem, would be to begin looking at the behaviors of groups with which we have no affiliation. But a curious thing happens as we move from the ‘I’ and ‘me’ in Step 1 and the ‘we’ and ‘us’ in Step 2 to ‘they’ in Step 3: We lose most of our influence.  

Despite this fact, my observation is that political discussions in social and other media typically invert the order of these steps, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, they start at Step 3 and don’t budge off it. This is dangerously disempowering. Although the perpetual imbroglio of news and social media may serve someone’s interest, I do not feel it serves mine. Most frustrating of all has been how my natural tendency not to move beyond Step 2 if I can avoid it leads to confusion when conversing about anything in a discussion dominated by a Step 3 mindset. 

My natural tendency is to hold my own party, my own nation, my own profession to higher standards. These are the things I identify with, these are the groups I belong to, and these are ultimately the things that reflect upon me most closely. When a person I vote for acts without integrity, I take it much more personally than when a person I would never vote for does so. When I see developments in one of my own professions – education – that appear to hurt children, I feel a much greater affront than I would if I were not a longtime teacher myself. And when my own nation acts with callous disregard for life, I take this much more personally than I do similar actions of other nations.

However, introducing this kind of thinking into discussions centered on “they and “them” reliably leads to misunderstandings. When, for example, Democrats talk about the humanitarian catastrophe of Bush 43’s invasion of Iraq, and I bring up the 40,000 estimated dead, waves of refugees and open slave trade that followed in the wake of Obama’s military actions in Libya, or an estimated 600,000 dead in Syria, people will say, “We’re not talking about that! We’re talking about this!” Then quickly, since it appears I have criticized a Democrat, people who identify as Democrats themselves will jump to the conclusion that I must vote Republican.  

Well, no, I generally do not vote Republican. And that’s exactly the point: I never voted for George W. Bush. As an American, I picketed (my sign read "War Destroys the Winner") and joined peace vigils in protest against those impending wars, so I did in some sense take that president’s actions personally. However from a purely political perspective, Bush and his party are a “they” to me. Because of this, I took much more personally, was much more disappointed, and indeed felt complicit in President Obama’s atrocities and gross malfeasance. Since I donated to his campaigns, I felt that he killed thousands of people, including children, with my personal backing. And this was in addition letting Wall Street fraudsters off the hook, green-lighting the GMO agrochemical agenda, rolling back civil liberties, expanding drone warfare and the surveillance state, viciously attacking whistleblowers, giving big pharma and the insurance giants free rein over US healthcare, militarizing local police departments with weapons of war, and many other things I hoped he would not do.  

But this perspective seems utterly foreign to many. From the perspective of the Step 3 mindset I so frequently encounter, if I criticize a Democrat I must be a Republican. If I shrug off Mueller’s indictments of Russian operatives and instead shine a light on the long train of US-sponsored assassinations, coups d’etat, military invasions, and support of terror organizations rebranded as “moderate rebels” or “freedom fighters,” I must not be a patriotic American. The simple fact of the matter is, as a US citizen, I felt complicit in the latter crimes, which incidentally far exceed in gravity those of Russian Internet trolls. So yes, I take them far more seriously. It’s my job to prevent such things in my affiliation group, even if that “group” is a nation of 330 million.

I grew up in the 1960s, when the phrase "America: Love it or leave it" was directed toward those who wanted a government whose actions aligned with their values, Southeast Asia being the focus of the many of the protests and debate at the time. The protesters, in case anyone has forgotten, turned out to be correct: The Vietnam war was a terrible mistake. 

Stuck in the trance of "they" and seduced by the relative ease of finger-pointing, one can easily forget that the tiresome chore of holding ourselves and our affiliation groups accountable is the only path toward personal authority and real power. This has practical consequences. When members of a political party or profession look the other way at the misdeeds of their fellow partisans or professionals, it hurts the profession, and it hurts the party. Perhaps the most devastating result of the personal and collective failures in our moral housekeeping is that our individual and collective lack of integrity leave us open to to external invasion and internal subversion. We become our own enemies. A lack of integrity invites dis-integrity, and ultimately, disintegration.

Conversely, consider what would happen if a US political party rooted out all its own corruption and started honestly serving the people, speaking the truth, and protecting the Constitution. My guess is, it would be unstoppable. Tapping into and motivating nonvoters rather than squabbling over “likely voters” would utterly reshape the political landscape.

From the forgoing, one may start to grasp how the currently fashionable politics of scapegoating is ultimately disempowering. The fundamental thing we need to do to change this dynamic is to focus, individually and through our affiliations and associations, on Steps 1 and 2. That in itself is enough to shift the balance of power. The process starts with inquiries about ‘I’ and then moves on to consider the larger spheres of ‘we.’ When faced with divide-and-conquer tactics, the winning strategy is to build a stronger self and a bigger ‘us.’ 

Of Splitting Oak and People (and How to Prevent the Latter)

Over the years, a number of oak trees around our house have died or lost substantial limbs. Given that we occasionally enjoy a fire in the fireplace, the question became how to ready the wood for burning by cutting and splitting the logs. Cutting to length is easy enough with a chainsaw. Splitting is a bit harder without a hydraulic splitter. Since I don’t have one, I decided to go low tech and use a splitting maul.

It didn’t take long into learning how to split wood by hand before I realized that it was a lot easier to split a log when it was upside down, that is, when the orientation of the log being split is inverted relative to how it was in the living tree. (See photo.)

 
I’m guessing that the inner structure of the wood grain is optimized to resist the pull of gravity. This makes sense, from the tree’s perspective. The tree wants to remain whole and resist splitting. Since gravity pulls consistently in one direction, the tree will structure itself to be most resistant to splitting in that direction. So, to make hand splitting easier, I turn logs upside down, especially when there are branches and other knotty, difficult-to-split features in the wood. 

People are much the same, only it works on a subtler level: we split more easily when our values are inverted. 

Like trees, people attain their full stature when the inner structure of our values supports our wholeness, creating an inner resistance to splitting. Honesty, courage, and compassion are three values that require wholeness to operate. In turn, they reinforce our wholeness as they are cultivated. Invert any of these values and people start falling apart. They split. 

Invert all three, that is, dress up dishonesty, cowardice, and cruelty as virtues, and personal fragmentation is certain to follow. There seems to be a tremendous push right now to do exactly this. 

Looking at values through the lens of permaculture, my observation is that honesty, courage, and compassion functionally support one another as design components in the dynamic of a living person: Try being honest – fully honest – without courage. Try being truly compassionate without both honesty and courage. Try being courageous in productive, life-affirming ways without having your courage informed by both honesty and compassion. 

Such attempts invariably fail, because these values are functionally related to one another. Operating together within us and between us, honesty, courage, and compassion weave a grain that is resistant to splitting and protective of our wholeness, both as individuals and as a society. They help us stand tall and strong, like trees, and to support one another, like a forest. However, because each of these values both requires and generates wholeness, to the extent that any of them is weakened or inverted, individuals or societies will be more prone to splitting. 

This is deep-level permaculture, and it has political implications. 

Let’s assume for the moment that there are people in this world whose operating strategy is to divide and rule. If the analysis above holds true, then it makes sense that as our values are inverted, people will be more prone to splitting and, en masse, more pliant to the rule of others. 

 
How do we notice if we’re upside down on the splitting stump? Turns out it’s surprisingly simple: Take note of any messaging that attempts to invert these values, and observe the responses. The messaging can be internally generated or externally generated, so we can pay attention to our own thoughts, speech and actions as well as to the messages and behaviors of politicians, religious or business leaders, media, and advertisers. 

 
If a message or behavior suggests that truth doesn’t matter, or that we should be afraid, or that it’s okay to hate others or disregard their subjective experience, then that message is attempting to invert the values of honesty, courage, and compassion. Again, observe the messaging. You'll probably see values-inverting messages deeply woven into the prevailing social narratives, then parroted around by adherents of those narratives. 

To counter this, an empowering step is to look at the messaging we ourselves are generating. What signals and messages are we sending to ourselves through our own thoughts and actions? What are we transmitting to others? Are we vectors for honesty, courage, and compassion... or for something else?

So if you’re wondering how so-called progressives got to a place where they no longer complain much about war and war crimes, torture, genocide, nuclear proliferation, or civil rights abuses, or on the other hand how self-professed free-market neoliberals tolerate and even defend endless taxpayer subsidies for profitable industries-- there’s a clue. As individuals and as a whole, the population is breaking as values invert: where courage would prevail, we are riven by fear, where honesty would give us clarity, we are rendered schizoid by deception, and where compassion is needed we are broken by animosity. 

First our values are inverted. Then we split. As this continues, we don’t have the wholeness in us to resist further splitting. At that point, we’re just waiting to be taken to the fire. 

Alternately, we can right ourselves. We can notice where our values have become inverted and choose instead to reassert the values known to support life. As we do, we’ll notice that we are not mere logs inverted on the stump of humanity, waiting to be split, but part of a larger, living tree.

Unpredictable Grasshoppers and the Quest for Quality

A few weeks back I noticed a mature grasshopper perched on the edge of my kitchen stove.

“Now how’d you get in here?” I asked.

Most likely it rode in on a bunch of freshly picked kale. During the growing season there’s a daily flow of traffic and materials between the house and garden. This literally opens the door to the world at large, and with it, the unpredictability of the outdoors. Next thing you know, you look over and see a grasshopper on your kitchen stove, and it’s…

Hey, what exactly IS it doing? I peered closer.

It’s eating something! Looks like a dried piece of parsley that must have fallen off the cutting board when I was adding chopped parsley to some soup a couple days ago! I watch closely. After I duly recorded the event using my phone’s video camera, I cupped my hands around the grasshopper and took it back outdoors.

I’d have never predicted this event. That’s part of what I like about gardening: its unpredictability. 

Now before we explore how such unpredictable events are an inevitable part of reaching toward a quality life, I must acknowledge that yes, of course, there’s value in predictability. We like our routines and we absolutely need stability in our lives. We like nearby rivers to stay in their banks. We like nearby banks to stay in business. We like nearby businesses to stock their shelves with hardware and groceries. Predictable access to food, in particular, seems important.

But there’s also a value in unpredictability. Picture yourself traveling to a new town. You’re getting hungry, and you have a couple common choices. The first is, you can make your way toward the familiar signs of the nationwide restaurant chains. On the other hand, thanks to smart phones, it’s also pretty easy to find a little mom ’n’ pop Mexican place (for example), most likely off the main drag, with fabulous food and quirky décor that you’ll never forget. Or maybe, quirky food and oddly disconcerting décor. Ya really don’t know. So the question then becomes, do you want a memorable experience, or a forgettable one? Are you willing to take a chance on a new restaurant, or will you opt for something familiar and predictably mediocre?

When it comes to home gardening (which is only one of hundreds of skills we hope the Green Hand Reskilling Initiative will promote), one of the biggest pros and cons is its unpredictability. The choice between growing your own heirloom tomatoes on the one hand versus purchasing store-bought commercial tomatoes on the other is comparable to the choice between trying out a potentially fantastic, one-of-a kind eatery you’ve never been to before versus having a forgettable meal at a national chain. The chains survive because people value predictability, and they make it easy for us to get used to a lower quality food experience. Bringing real quality into our lives takes a little more effort, and along with that effort comes an element of unpredictability: risk. For the would-be home gardener, the question can easily become: Why should I plant something when, assuming it even grows at all, a rabbit or a bug might come along and eat it instead?

However, something gets lost in the risk equation that sometimes tilts us toward choosing not only mediocre food, but also unsatisfying life experiences in general. Choosing a lower-risk, lower-reward path may seem like the safe bet in the moment, and eating (or living) that way may get us through an afternoon or even a year or two. But how, in the long run, can we really satisfy our physical, emotional, social, and developmental needs that way?

We can see the risks in risk avoidance in many areas of our lives. For example, yes, there are risks in dating, but there are also risks in avoiding those risks, becoming a loner or a homebody. There are risks in looking for a new job, but likewise there are risks in staying in a job that’s slowly killing you, just to pay the bills. Every truly expansive gesture of living seems to carry an immediate risk, whether we’re trying something new, making new friends, or exploring new destinations or approaches to living. And that’s what the Green Hands Reskilling concept is about: trying something new, making new friends, and exploring new destinations and approaches to living. Because in the longer run, risk avoidance carries risks of its own, and one of these is often a lower-quality experience of life.

In my writing I often use examples taken from gardening (maybe because I'm part grasshopper), since to me, quality food and the skills and sensibilities related to it are fundamental. But the transformative skills you share and learn could just as easily be how to launch a business website, write an essay, fix a bicycle derailleur or relieve stress through massage, yoga, or acupressure. And it’s amazing, once we start trying new things and living as though we’re really alive, to see the profound ramifications of our learning and our sharing. 

For example:

If you suddenly have a bike that works, you’ll show up in different places.

If you carry less stress in your body, you’ll show up in places different.

These things matter. Because, as I’ve explored in depth elsewhere, there's no telling where it all leads. Next thing you know, there might be a grasshopper sitting on your kitchen stove. I would never have predicted that, but there it was, and because of it, here’s this blog post. And now you’ve read it. 

Thank you! My life feels enriched! I hope yours does, too.

A Delicious New Future

I hesitated to post a picture of fresh garden lettuce to get your attention, but here it is: Taken today, Nov 2 2018, this is the Pirat variety from the Ann Arbor Seed Company.

And why does it get your attention? Is it because of the color? The visceral response to an image of something so green and healthy looking?

If so, all the better, because that visceral sense of aliveness and connection is fundamental to the Green Hands Reskilling Initiative as I experience it. The idea is very simple: Build community resilience through skill sharing. That’s it. If you do this, you’re a participant. 

But the enjoyment matters! On offer is the opportunity to feel the fresh aliveness of spontaneously generating our own abundance through sharing. Together we can make life delicious!

So take a minute and ask: Is that a vision of a world I want to see? How can I live into this idea? Where in my life have I shared my knowledge and skills lately? What would I like to do next?

Part of the reason I hesitated to post the picture, though, is because Green Hand Reskilling isn’t about gardening – it’s about cultivating relationships through the sharing of skills. Because of this, the Green Hand concept is exponentially greater in its potential than a mere green thumb. This isn’t a gardening blog or project. It’s about hands, not thumbs, hands that reach out to help one another.

I’ve recently been reviewing my blog posts and yes, there’s plenty more to say. However, each of these pieces is worthy of a second and even a third reading. Dr. Thomas Gwaltney, one of my professors at Eastern Michigan University, once defined educated people as those who read and who are changed by what they read.

I’ve done everything I can to fill each of my blog posts with content that, when taken to heart, can change us. Packed with ideas, like seeds, they contain hidden surprises. They’ve certainly blown my mind many a time while writing and even re-reading them. So please take a look.

But I also realize I have to do more to promote the basic idea of the Green Hand(s) Reskilling Initiative. The high-water mark I created with the published blog pieces, many of which were subsequently republished by Post Carbon Institute’s Resilience.org website, became hard to reach time and again on a regular basis. Just writing them required enormous growth on my part. However, I now see that the depth I’ve brought to my more formal writings needs to be balanced with more frequent and ongoing opportunities for community building and dialog. 

This is what I plan to do, because eight years after beginning the Green Hand Reskilling Initiative, I see no evidence that this idea has become outmoded. On the contrary, if anything, it’s ahead of its time: revolutionary in its simplicity and profound in its potential impact.

We need community more than ever, and the very things that are getting in the way of that —fear of our neighbors, distrust of strangers, binary thinking, disregard of anything that isn’t monetized and marketed, and a hesitancy to share that is rooted in a scarcity-based mindset — all of these need to be confronted now more than ever.

So, basically… I’m back, and on behalf of the Green Hand Reskilling Initiative I invite you to like, share, live, love, and join me and others on this journey. It may seem like a strange time of year to begin planting seeds (here in the northern hemisphere, at least), but you can expect many more ideas and images sown here and on the Green Hand Reskilling Facebook page in the weeks to come. 

The Green Hands Reskilling Initiative is an idea whose time is just arriving.

Hello!