Reflections from The Cabin in the Woods

Six months in the woods.  But not without internet and left-overs and square dancing and cats.  A lot has happened in my time at Circle Pines but I've barely had the time to think much on this.  The leaves are falling.  Some trees already completely bare.  Bright yellows, oranges, and reds littering the paths.  Bare crooked limbs still reaching for the sky. 
When I moved here in the spring with Case the wild flowers were just getting their start.  We met Jonathan who taught us the sounds of the birds in the spring.  We were fortunate to have him show us around the property and the area.  He told us of the different birds that migrated through and ones that stayed.  This was the first year that I realized that different seasons have different sounds.  That different birds have different seasons.  

In the spring we observed the woodcock mating display complete with climatic whorling sounds finished with the whoosh of their dash back to the grass.  There was also the deep, baritone sounds of the bull frogs from Stewart Lake.  Some nights we could hear them from the cabin.  When I first heard them I thought that their low drone croak was either someone driving a speedboat (when there was a bunch of them at it) or a kid playing the trombone.  There was also the high chirps of the spring peepers back in frog pond.  Not to mention the countless birds singing including a Scarlet Tanninger that we caught sing its song to a red electrical box.  

Throughout the summer there was the hammerings and the cries of the Pileated woodpecker.  One rainy day in the garden a Pileated landed not too far from me digging around for grub, I was amazed by its size and brightness of its red head.  The sandhill cranes often trumpeted in the morning near the cabin, I think they may have slept in the field near us.  Kevin saved a Flicker from the roof his beak was crooked and eye swollen shut.  We don't know what happened to him.  We took care of him until we could take him to a wildlife rehab place.  His name was Jeffry.  We also found a box turtle that we thought was injured.  The front part of the bottom of its shell was all folded up.  We thought we were going to have to do surgery but it turned out that box turtles are supposed to have a hinges so they can fully close the front part of their shell.  When Case and I were cleaning out Juniors cabins we saw a cicada killer wasp attack a pair of mating cicada's and inject them with something paralyzing.  We thought that she maybe was laying her eggs in their bodies so Case wanted to keep them to watch them hatch.  But after research we found that they actually only paralyze them then drag them back to their nest.  Regardless the cicada's never woke up.  The firefly display was spectacular this year, among several other glowy crawly insects and funji that helped light the path back to the cabin.  In the night there was also the whinnying and the whining of the coyotes and the who whos' and the screeches of the owls.  The screech of the screech owl I think may be one of the eeriest sounds I've encountered in the woods.

A new wave of sounds has come with Fall as the birds migrate back south.  The birds seem to come almost with the wind in chattery flocks.  sometimes I swear there are as many birds in a tree as there are leaves. I wish the trees had as many apples as leaves as well, but the frost got them in blossom in the spring.  The Sandhill cranes are migrating, I haven't heard them by the cabin for weeks.     Fall has been a sad time for the deer around here.  Several hundred deer (maybe in the thousands by now) have been contracting a virus through midge flies that cause them to bleed internally.  This makes them feel hot so they seek water, so there are several that made it to the lake.  I've been watching one decompose at the intersection of pudding stone and the bunny trail.  When I found here she had just died, I was really sad because she appeared to have been a nursing mother.  But it is what it is.

The People:
This is what initially drew me to Circle Pines.  Two very influential women on my life had suggested this place to me.  Joy Pryor would talk about it to me when we were organizing Really Really Free Markets together.  Then later in my life I worked for Creston Community Gardens through Creston Neighborhood Association.  My boss there was Deb Eid, her and I got along real well.  She would talk about how she could speak more "radically" in the office and openly.  So me and her got along very well.  One weekend last year she set me up to come out to CPC for a work bee weekend.  I was hesitant as I had school and no ride.  But she emailed Tom and he came up to Grand Rapids to pick me up.   I was really glad. I had a great weekend.  Tom and I talked about renewable energy and sustainability on the way down, then he took me for a walk through the woods to show me around.  We had a lot of fun talking about stuff and by the end of the weekend he asked if I might be interested in a gardening position in the spring.
I also remember my first weekend here, having a sense of comfort and feeling at home.  I remember talking to Kat for hours about people and the world and going out to milk goats with Ron.  I don't really remember who else was at cpc that weekend.  But through out time I kept seeing Derick and Isabella, Gary and Mara, Johnathan, Bob and Anna, Crystal Micheal and Jonah,  and tons of other people whom I've enjoyed spending some time with. 
More recently I've been getting to know the other people that live in the area.   This is largely because MiLAWD held meetings at circle pines until recently. They all have their strange and radical quirks which I find enjoyable.  They are organizing to take legal action against the state of Michigan for allowing Fracking on Public lands. 

Summer Camp:
Summer camp is some strange whirlwind that seemed like forever while it was here and now I feel like it blew by very fast.   So much happened in each day.  It's hard to capture. 
I learned a lot from the kids.

The Conflicted soul of Circle Pines:
CPC's current functioning is largely unsustainable which seems to be the history of this place.
Though it desires and teaches sustainable ideas it seems that itself is incapable of making itself
sustainable.  This is because of its financial requirements to stay afloat.  The financial stress, shifts the vision of some (actually most) of its functions.

There is more to be said in reflecting on my summer, but I shall add more another day. 

Operation Infinite Justice

This is my friend Zach.
 *****
Through the phone I found you in fragments,
Like the IED that exploded and forced a piece in your head.
Holding on to the fragments of youth you kept in between the jumbled
stories of Afghanistan, murder and guns, in the name of our wonderful country,
 came flickers of unicycling, dancing, and singing,
and running around in your man thong or cooking dinner,
You introduced me to Olive oil. 

I'm angry.  I'm sad
War is Fucked up.
I miss you.

The Wisdom of a Dandelion

My cousin was swinging from the old maple in his backyard.  I joined by giving him occasional boosts into the air.  Being the concerned seventeen year old female cousin that I was, I inquired about his love life.  He told me of this girl in his class with blue eyes and swoopy blond bangs.  I looked to a dandelion that grew besides the maple and suggested he bring it to her.  But he told me that he didn’t want to pick it that “we should leave it there for everyone to enjoy.”  Such a thoughtful answer really caught me off guard.  Here I was supposed to be teaching him how to go about life when he incited such a virtuous piece of wisdom upon me.  I thought about this for a while and realized the whole idea of thinking that we can own anything we see is really detrimental to society as a whole.  That if everyone was to pick every flower that they saw for themselves or someone special, that it would be the end of all wild flower and in a chain reaction the end of life.

In Ishmael, a book by Daniel Quinn, a man responds to an advertisement created by a Guerilla seeking a pupil, they speak telepathically, learning lessons of the world.  Ishmael describes there to be two kinds of people in the world, takers and leavers.  Quinn wrote, “The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man...The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world" (Quinn 239).  Takers exemplified by modern society and leavers were the people of ancient cultures and tribes such as the Native Americans who believe in living in harmony with nature.  The takers seem to think that everything is of service to the human race.  The book goes on to suggest that the moment humans thought that they could act as ‘God’ that this marked the beginning of the demise of the human race.  My wise little cousin, by leaving that single dandelion allowed for it to propagate in the form of several more dandelions.

            The current collective mindset, the takers mindset of, “take what you can get” is not a sustainable mentality.  The world has limited resources and the human race is very inconsiderate to this reality.  But even in knowing this I feel a need to have ‘this and those’ things to survive in this world.  As if the world has created all of these false needs for people to fulfill, to keep people busy until someone figures out what’s really going on.  Mircea Eliade suggests that the human condition is that of struggle that “the modern world is in the situation of a man swallowed by a monster, struggling in the darkness of his belly.”  The modern world, the monster describes the current state of society and the act of being swallowed representing materialism, the need for work and the need for things.  He goes on to saying, “so he in anguish thinks he is already dead or on the point of dying, and can see no way out except into the darkness, Death or Nothingness.”   This second part, says that society often feels hopeless or destined to live a life of suffering, of service to the great machine.

            The most well-know literary example of a society swallowed up by its fear is George Orwell’s 1984.  The book fallows a guy named Winston, living in a radically oppressive collective society.  He locks eyes with a girl at work and falls in love with her.  He tries everything to avoid being swallowed up all the way by the thought police, but in the end it is a lost cause.   Some people believe we are heading towards the same sort of oppressive society as 1984 but others such as Karl Marx suggests we are practically living it.  Karl Marx said that “the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”  Basically that when electing someone to run the show that we only hope that we can choose the lesser of the two evils.  But the fact that society accepts the voting process we accept this illusion of freedom.

            Charles Bukowski in his famous poem The laughing Heart, encourages people to take hold of their lives saying that “your life is your life/don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission./be on the watch. /there are ways out./ there is a light somewhere./ it may not be much light but/it beats the darkness…”  Bukowski suggests that though society may have a large impact on human life, that there are still things that one can do that can give us light in dark.  He encourages people to seek those things and hold them close, that these things are the things that really keep us alive. Eckhart Tolle in, “The Power of now,” says that these things are “all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, [and] inner peace” (17).

            Philosopher Carl Jung advises that knowledge and self-awareness is key in not being ‘clubbed into submission.’  He says that “it is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption... the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul.”  That by quieting the mind and looking inward one can find something like salvation.

     Though the wold may seemingly be working against the human race, or rather the human race is working against itself; I still believe there is a glimmer of hope for us so long as we do not give up.  Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is destined to fight evil for the rest of her life and finds it discouraging that she can never make it go away completely, but finds worthy purpose in fighting to maintain the balance of good and evil.  This should be a good example for any person.  Keep fighting for ourselves and for the good of all people because it may always be a battle to maintain the good in the world.  If we stick together in self realization there may always be dandelions to admire in the spring.

           

Bukowski, Charles. "The Laughing Heart." The Best American Poetry. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. 

Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. New York: Bantam/Turner Book, 1995. Print.

Jung, C. G. The Undiscovered Self. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. Print.

Marx, Karl. "Famous Marx Quotes - Philosophy Paradise." Philosophy Paradise. 2006.

Web. 10 Mar. 2011.

Orwell, George. 1984. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Print.

Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of NOW: a Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Vancouver, B.C., Canada: Namaste Pub., 2004. Print.