nightdream

Watch the clouds swell, cows drift across the yellow hillside

Watch the inky hawks circle and circle over blades of grass waving and fluttering in the field

Watch the squirrel flick its tail, clasping tiny fingers around a newfound acorn

Watch the flies zig and zag like magical green jewels

Watch the line of ants stream upward from a tiny crack in the pavement

Watch the shadow of a live oak stretch over grass as the sun dips lower

Watch your reflection, so still in a small puddle on the gravel path (the remainder of an earlier rain)

Watch the glinty sky-mark of a passenger jet traverse the great dome of sky

Steal this hour

Then watch and watch and watch

Nothing to do but watch

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A sneakered foot in a gravel parking lot with purple flowers on one side and a car tire on the other

Consider less discourse, more sensing. Watch, listen, taste, touch, smell. Senses are the contact points between person and world. Relating is a physical act.

Three points of reflection for living in connection:

ONE: Eihei Dogen in Zenki (“The Whole Works”)

Riding in the boat, one even causes the boat to be a boat. One should meditate on this precise point. 

TWO: Martin Shaw in Courting the Wild Twin

I recently saw a mist suddenly descend on my garden. It just rolled in out of nowhere. Everything changed, just like that. Very quickly, all appeared different. No shrubs, no apple trees, it was a foreign landscape. The dead felt usefully close, the silence deeper. In just a moment, the Underworld seemed present, as an atmosphere rather than a concept, a tangible, seasonal shift not a distant idea.

This world can be Otherworld, Underworld, heavenly, hellish and all points in between. It can still be Arcadia, Camelot, Eden almost. That’s why it’s confusing. We still get to go on holiday, drink wine, watch beautiful sunsets. We still pay insurance and kids still go to college. But there is something happening. An unravelling. A collapsing, both tacit and immense in scale.

We are frightened and do not know what will happen next.

And into that fraught zone drifts quite naturally the Underworld. This is not the dayworld, this is the night-world we are entering. The nightworld is not processional, tidy steps, and objective outcomes, but potent with insight, uncertainty and the need for dream-skill. The skill is witnessing the depth intelligence that dreams offer, the great plunge into soul’s magical disorientations. That’s how the earth tends to talk to us, rather than our strip-lit, strip-mined Morse code it has almost been plunged into silence with. It’s not the senate that talks with the earth, it’s the shaman.

But we are still using dayworld words. This is why so little works.

THREE: Joseph Chaiken in The Presence of the Actor

An actor should strive to be alive to all that he can imagine to be possible. Such an actor is generated by an impulse toward an inner unity, as well as by the most intimate contacts he makes outside himself. When we as actors are performing, we as persons are also present and the performance is a testimony of ourselves. Each role, each work, each performance changes us as persons. The actor doesn't start out with answers about living – but with wordless questions about experience. Later, as the actor advances in the process of work, the person is transformed. Through the working process, which he himself guides, the actor recreates himself.

Nothing less.

By this I don't mean that there is no difference between a stage performance and living. I mean that they are absolutely joined. The actor draws from the same source as the person who is the actor.

In former times acting simply meant putting on a disguise. When you took off the disguise, there was the old face under it. Now it’s clear that the wearing of the disguise changes the person. As he takes the disguise off, his face is changed from having worn it. The stage performance informs the life performance and is informed by it.

hello, reader :)

life of pi spoilers ahead

last night i was sad. i felt it coming on early in the day – that feeling that everything is wrong, that any other perspective is nothing but an illusion. i'm defective, i thought, not for the first time, the world is defective, everything tilts toward sadness.

but no, i said. i'm sad because i'm sad, and it doesn't mean anything. tomorrow may be different. five minutes from now may be different.

today is different. not happy, not sad. i've had moments of each, but yesterday, all that – i see now it was about the life of pi, about the hyena killing the zebra, tearing open its belly and eating its guts. it was about the hyena beheading orange juice, the orangutan that had been rescued as an infant and raised together with pi like a sibling. it was about pi stranded on that boat, terrorized by the hyena and the tiger, and about feeling sorry for them all – for pi and especially for the animals, who never asked to be put on the ship, who weren't willingly moving to their new zoo homes, who were stranded together in a 26-foot lifeboat when that ship sank.

i know it's just a story. it's all just a story. you, me, the whole thing.

yesterday i was sad. really sad. the kind of sad that wants to sink into despair. i was sad because i was sad. and it didn't mean anything.

I was going through some 30-year-old papers yesterday and stumbled on this free write. I'm posting it as a reminder to myself that sadness comes and goes, even when it sometimes feels like it's all that there is.

hello, reader :)

I follow a half a dozen or so podcasts somewhat regularly, and one that I listen to most frequently is Crazy Town from Post Carbon Institute. The April 17 episode, Escaping Technologyism: Dreams of AI Sheep and the Deadliest Word in Film History, dipped a toe into the problem of plastics, and I want to dip my own toe just a tiny bit deeper.

The hosts touched on the origins of synthetic plastics, which spanned four decades or so, from the 1853, when Alexander Parkes patented the first human-made cellulose-based plastic (Parkesine), to 1907 when Leo Hendrik Baekeland created the first fully synthetic, fossil-fuel based plastic (Bakelite). Synthetic plastics were developed to solve the problem of overconsumption of natural resources. The popularity of billiards, which relied on balls made of ivory, was thought to be driving elephants toward extinction. The manufacture of hair combs was similarly endangering tortoises. With synthetic plastics, there was enough to go around for everyone. Consumption was democratized. Everyone could have hair combs, cigarette lighters, and sunglasses.

100+ years later, we see where plastics have gotten us. The ocean has become a colossal plastic dump. Plastic particles can now be found in human tissues and blood, human placentas, the animals and plants we eat, and the most remote environments on Earth. Hormone-like substances in plastics disrupt the endocrine systems of humans and animals, lowering fertility. Plastic kills and maims wildlife, ensnaring animals or clogging the digestive system of animals that mistake it for food. And it seems unlikely that humans will find a way to extricate ourselves from our plastic predicament anytime soon.

Everything about the way we live here in the U.S. depends on the abundance and convenience of plastic. Food to go. Fast fashion. Moving away from plastic reliance means living differently, more simply, with less. Even if everyone were ready to jump on board, lower consumption, be good planetary co-inhabitants to one another – a laughably implausible notion at best – even then, if we dramatically reduce our use of plastic, is there enough to go around? What will we make hair combs from? Toothbrushes? Clothing? Can we feed and raise enough sheep for wool and plant and harvest enough natural fibers like cotton, flax, and hemp, to clothe the masses? Will re-wear, modify, and hand down clothing through an extended life-cycle? Our arable land needs to grow us food and clothing, not consumer goods. If human consumption in the 19th century was driving wildlife to extinction, how will a world population increased nearly seven-fold since then – with an enlarged appetite for stuff – make do with much, much less plastic? It's going to require a massive change, and we're not going to float to our new future on the techno-optimists' pipe dream.

I write short posts because I like reading short posts. I'll be writing more about plastic, ecocide, the climate crisis, and living into The Great Unraveling. We're just getting started.

Related: Crazy Town Podcast The Limits to Growth Autofac by Philip K. Dick

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Video

  • Exploring hate: How antisemitism fuels white nationalism | PBS News Weekend | 2021 Excerpt (6 min) Full video (1 hr 21 min)
    [Eric Ward:] The first thing we have to understand is white nationalist or other politically violent movements are racially biased movements. They don't bring anti-Semitism or other forms of bigotry to our community. They merely organize the bigotry that already exists. Anti-Semitism exists in American society. White nationalists are tapping into it in order to build political power. It means we have to understand anti-Semitism, and one of the things we should understand about anti-Semitism is it doesn't just impact Jews. Non-Jews are just as vulnerable to the violence of anti-Semitism as the Jewish community.

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