outside the sphere

I had a short lived obsession in highschool of looking at the emaciated bodies of holocaust victims, of starving 3rd world people. I had very little and limited understanding of history or the way the world worked. But still there was something within me that demanded to see these images, I would look at them in secrecy with fascination. Reality echoed through an image on my computer. History didn't matter, but it stood as proof to my inherent feeling of responsibility. A by-product of imperialism; of our disconnection;of the siphoning, for us to live the lifestyle we do. We are all guilty.
I sit right now in a coffee shop, my paper cup was made by Solocup in Chicago, Il probably from some boreal forest, from god knows where and what kind and what age the tree was. The coffee imported from some poor farmer in South America, where he/she likely has never even tasted his or her own roasted coffee. Whom would probably much rather be independent and have a garden to feed the family. And these books, and this computer. The electricity. The cheap oil at the expense at others well being. This is what I think about sometimes, this is what I have a hard time wrapping my head around, that I have a hard time escaping. It's impossible to break down all the things I use on a daily basis that rely on the suffrage of other people, the desiccating our 'natural resources'. It's inescapable.

Derrick Jensen says that "anytime some community sits on a resource needed by those in power, and chooses not to sell this resource (at a price convenient for the powerful), the people are killed, the community destroyed, the resource stolen"

Wendell Berry refers to Industrial Technology as being analogous to war.
He also says that "people who are willing to follow technology wherever it leads are necessarily willing to fallow it away from home, off the Earth, and outside the sphere of human definition, meaning, and responsibility."
Spaceship Earth?
'Away' where is this? my teacher asked with out an answer.

The law of conservation says that matter cannot be created nor destroyed only changed.
We were not made out of the air, we must take to create (MORE PEOPLE!).
Daniel Quinn says that "we are literally turning 150 (now 200) species a day into human flesh"
200 species a day are going extinct, this is far more rapid than any of the mass extinctions according to one statistic. Yet the human race continues to go.
And it literally seems to be a race to the end of something.
For the beginning of something.

I crumple the cup in my hand and toss it in the trash.
so it can be taken AWAY and forgotten about like
the thousands of people we displaced for military bases
hidden behind the veil of "National Security"

Bill McKibben says we need more community, conversation and connection.

What do I say? I just keep nodding my head. mmhmm mmhmmm mmhmmm

2011

The year I learned how to love. One year ago today I was on my way down to North Carolina. To the edge of the world. To revisit. The previous 2 years had been miserable. One year ago today I finally had some resolution. I had control again. I let go. Forgiveness. I was free again. Not to say that I wasn't still tormented by the usual winter blues.

I worked for MOKA for a while. I learned about life without words. I saw joy and rage in its most pure forms. I loved the people I worked with but hated the organization. I felt I was expected to improve someones quality of life, all the while mine was being degraded.

But the work experience eventually landed me a Job with Creston Community Gardens (thanks largely to my cousin). Where I got to teach people about stuff I cared about. Where I met Mac and Deborah. I was at first intimidated by office work. But after getting to know them, sometimes I would rather be in the office than at home or at a party.

I was finally in one place long enough to start a garden and to stay and watch it grow. Shane was cool enough, or didn't care enough to let me tare up his yard as I pleased. I planted Jerusalem Artichoke I had gotten from Jeff Smith. And neighbor Sarah brought me nasturtium seeds and other seeds. Me and her see swapped. She later brought me this beautiful heirloom tomato plant from Jeff, the seeds coming from his Italian great grandmother that produced some of the meatiest best sauce tomatoes I've seen (I have a pasta sauce in my freezer to prove this!) I planted sunflower seeds all over the yard from seeds I had saved from last year. Shane and I planted corn together. Josie brought me a tomato plant from seeds we had saved from a trillium haven tomato. I am still eating broccoli greens, Swiss chard, Arugula, Kale, and daikon radish from this garden into the New Year. Case made me a window box to have some food inside. I have some kale and stray dandelion greens growing in here.

Josie and I conquered another leg of the Smoky Mountains. Both of us in the '100 mile club' now. Since this year we had walked over 100 miles total in the smoky mountains. This year was the year of struggle. Each year focuses on something different. In the previous year we were deathly scared of bears and the year before was our first year and it was just magical and trying. This year was wet and I spent hours trying to make fires in the dark, we were low on fuel. The water pump didn't work so we ditched it.

I rescued a couple of starling chicks and raised them for a month.
How fast they grow. I brought them outside to stretch there wings

and they just flew away. That was it. I wonder if that was how it was for my mom...

the next minute they are gone.

I became vegan.

I adopted a cat, and called her Walter, after Walt Whitman.

I started the Wild Michigan Blog.

I made a good dog friend named Island.

I've held my friend crying. I've held my friends laughing.

I rolled around in the dust at dune grass with my new old friend Bob. I poured myself into Jen and ran away.

Remember the night it was storming, the hawkman climbed us up that dune and the storm blew all around us. Lizards and Crops circles and bagels for breakfast. We were the only ones who ever existed for just a little bit.

At Neverland, I fantasized staying forever. Of moving far away with all of my friends and people I've become acquainted with over the years. Hammock times were special. Barefoot in the woods. Friends. Family. Couchswing fantasy land.

Neighbor Sarah visited me one day with a seven-eleven cup of ice water with Bubby S Thompson. Both of whom I would come to love. Both would teach me more. She introduced me to Putt Putt's where I thought I had found my long last family. I just couldn't keep up with their drinking. As much as I wanted their love, and as much as I love the tall beers there. Sarah also introduced me to Wendell Berry. And helped me feel less like a crazy person, possibly because she's a little crazy to. But that's why I like her. She empowers me and encourages me. She makes me embrace my woman. She is woman.

Book Club times. Naked on beach at daylight. Embracing ourselves, embracing the world.

Mac's Cottage. We realized Island doesn't like boats. Beautiful singing angels of the night. Magik chocolate balls. Water color on the water.

And Case. I don't know if I will ever be able to explain this fully because my explanation keeps expanding. I never thought I would know something so gentle and understanding, yet fierce, passionate, and untamed. That time when we were walking through the woods at Nordhouse holding hands, there was some sort of electricity. Something that made the yellows in the leaves, and the greens of the lichen so bright.
Then there was this time more recently walking, home from the ducks and those oil horses. Beyond the mystical sea buoy. When your head was yours and mine was mine yet you and yours were also in mine and I think as you said mine may have been in yours.

And many many times in between.

Occupy Grand Rapids. Sweet painful democracy. I was a part of a major social movement. Those nights in ah-nab-awen, dreaming with the indian spirits. IT was so raw and alive and real.

it still is. I have retreated from the physical camp, but forever in my heart I hope the message of the movement manifests itself in whatever I do.

Shane and I played a show together this summer. IT was like a dream come true.
Brandon snuck into my bedroom the first night I moved back in with Brandon and
Shane. These guys are my family. The way I can get so mad at them and love them

twice as hard.

Erick moved back home. It's been decided that he is a genius.

Nick is one of my favorite song writers. Also one of my favorite people. I don't know if he knows this, even after I've told him a bajillion times. One of the humblest people I know.

Now it is late, and into the second day of the New Year.

I've spent hours going through photos of the past couple of years.

Our first significant snow of the year. Island and curled up at my feet
and Walter is resting on my left arm. I am laying my bed that sits upon
a door on top of a couple banana boxes.
I have only barely begun to explain the events of the past year and this one

has already begun.

I'm happy to be alive.

Biocentrism:
nature does not exist simply to be used or consumed by humans, but that humans are simply one species amongst many, and that because we are part of an ecosystem, any actions which negatively affect the living systems of which we are a part, adversely affect us as well, whether or not we maintain a biocentric worldview. Biocentrists believe that all species have inherent value, and that humans are not "superior" in a moral or ethical sense. (wikipedia)

“The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies.”
― Daniel Quinn

Walk Quietly

"our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. C.S. Lewis

I had a bean once

And it rippled in the people like the breath of a new birth.

So he raised his hands into the air, palms aimed slightly projecting out and also slightly toward each other.

I had a baby once. I saw it. It was a bean. I loved my little bean. I wish I could have watched it grow. How do you define courage anyways? I can think of a million things that I could be scared of if I tried.

off into the night they rode. what were you waiting for? In these arms I am free. Let me squeeze you closer. I swear we can get closer. Dances in the dark. dancer in the dark. dark. dark room. place. for people.

If I write it down then nobody will hear me.

journal 9

we are brought up in the same community thus we have have some of the same understandings and ways to go about things. The wealthy do not have the same cultural context as the poor. Nor do they have much of the same language. Having more money means a better education and more opportunities. The vocabulary of a wealthy person can be more geared towards WHEN something will happen, because they will have the ability and the means to make something change. Where as a person living within the lower income bracket, their dialogue may be centered around how or if something will ever happen. Hope is a common theme. But hope can really bean an enslaving being itself. Looking foward to a possibility that may never happen. Accepting things the way they are for now so that a miracle might happen later. My friend Sarah Told me this story a while ago:

“A man has been locked in a basement. One thing that keeps him going is the hope that someone will come and save him. So he sits there with his head down going hungry and thirsty for days. Finally one day he breaks, he realizes that no one is coming to save him. He becomes hopeless. Within that hopelessness he realizes he has nothing to loose. So he becomes empowered to break out of the basement, because he has nothing to lose anymore except for not trying. So he tries his hardest to break free and escape, if his capture comes and tries to kill him on his way out it wouldn’t make much of a difference from him dying in the shackles he thinks. So he tries to escape, creates a new hope.”

Will our world need to become completely hopeless in order for real paradigm shift in everyone to occur?

Capitalism. We are brought up with it being the only way. The way it is. Represented by symbols. Money as a symbol for human time and worth. Giant buildings as abstractions, dollars creating invisible dollars on Wall St. I remember the moment I realized that the world wasn’t what it was cracked up to be that. I had read 1984 and started listing to Radioheads’ Hail to the Theif album all at the same time and it hit me. My frustrations with my life are a part of something bigger, that it wasn’t me. That I was feeling something real, that my depression and self loath wasn’t my fault but rather I was feeling the emotional temperature of the world. Depressed and discouraged. Some people don’t understand why there is so much more suicide, why people are on anti-depressants and anxiety pills. But in taking a step back it is quite clear and obvious, that the human race is sick as a whole.
In church we learn that the basis for a healthy life is a healthy foundation, such as God. In society as a whole our foundation should be our government, but that is cracked and unstable and uneven as we have built our goverment on an abstract symbol, money. Much if it in Wall St. not even actually existing.
On Social Justice. In the of Luke in the story of Lazarus it speak of a man who is so hungry that he would be grateful for the crumbs off of a rich mans table. Oscar Wilde expands and tells us to reject this idea saying, 'Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board, and they are beginning to know it.' He suggests socialism as an answer also saying that Socialism may mean the end of marriage and family life, since relationships will become more free and open. It will also mean the end of crime since criminals 'are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat.' Under socialism machines will do all the drudgery, leaving people free to live fulfilled lives.

Social Structures and world views. Continuing on the idea of the unstable structure of the government, I would like to add that much of our country is based on christian values. Capitalism is as it says based on achieving capital gain. Without stern restrictions and limitations to this, the abstract symbol of worth will become greedy and far bigger than us. IT already has become huge, we are controlled by this inflated faceless persons that we have collectively created and accepted and in our government receives a vote much larger than us. The common notion is that the world is F’d up but no one knows who or where to report to because it is this abstraction of something real that we are fighting that has this control over us. In our society CHARITY is viewed as one of the greatest forms of altruism. However, this is not true altruism as there is some personal gain and indirect benefits For example the Devos’s get a lot of support and appreciation for all of their Charitable donations, but in the end at the bottom weather intentionally or not (i happen to think intentionally) this is just another mask for personal gain, in the way of social status, and social support. “they can do this because the gave this.” But if I were to give the same percentage of my earnings and time to charity I would not barely be recognized for it. Politicians and persons attached to corporate names will often try to attend as many of those events as they can, but it is the trend that they only show up long enough to get a photo in. Often times not participating in the dialogue to create real change. This does not speak for everyone and all businesses but I do speak for a majority that I have had experience with and it’s all starting to come together, their actions with their intentions and each day I am further disturbed by the world we have created for ourselves today.