Naturalist Jim Conrad on NATURE, MAN AND THE UNIVERSAL CREATIVE FORCE Essays from his Naturalist Newsletter (c) Jim Conrad 2008 COPYRIGHT MATTERS: This publication is made freely available to anyone who wants it. You can download it, print it on paper, and give it away if you want. You can even print it out, bound it and sell the finished product. I got my payment living the days the book describes. Just don't change around my words and thoughts. That's why I'm copyrighting it, to keep you from changing it. If you feel like sending me a little money, then please feel free to do so. If you don't want to, don't feel bad. I'm just happy you were interested in what I had to say. Still, even a single dollar would be appreciated. If you do want to send some money or let me know what you think about the essays, my mailing address is at www.backyardnature.net/j/writejim.htm ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank the owners of the places where I lived during the years when I wrote the following. PREFACE In early 1997, at age 49, I pulled a tiny, hangdog- looking trailer into the woods of a large plantation a few miles south of Natchez in southwestern Mississippi and began living there. Mornings I'd work in the plantation's garden, then the rest of the day I'd study and work on the Internet. I'd strung wires through the woods for the Internet connection. During my years there, thanks to the Internet, I always felt well connected to the world, even though sometimes I spent entire months without speaking a single word to anyone. On the Internet I created several web sites and exchanged emails with people all over the world Still, in 2001, I began worrying that I was losing my ability to order my thoughts in a way that permitted me to communicate with others. Though I could think abstractly better than ever I was becoming an awful word-groper. Also, maybe around that time I was beginning to miss being part of some kind of human community. Consequently, each week I began issuing, via email, a newsletter. The idea was that this weekly exercise would make me think in patterns of the kind needed for regular conversation. Before long I felt my talking powers returning, plus I was gratified by how many people subscribed to the newsletter. Gradually a nice little cyberspace-based community crystallized around the newsletter. In 2003 I had to leave the plantation, but a newsletter subscriber invited me to move onto his unoccupied property a few miles east of Natchez, adjoining Homochitto National Forest. I took my trailer there and continued my work and issuing the newsletter as always. The next year I left there and began spending my winters in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and my summers in various places -- California's Sierra Nevada mountains, central Kentucky's Bluegrass Region, then in 2006 I began staying in Mexico year round, first in the Yucatan, then Querétaro state, and most recently in Chiapas state. Therefore, the following essays were written at different places. Usually you can't know where they were written, but that's OK, since nearly all the essays deal with topics that are not geography based. In fact, at this publication date I don't see that having the following essays in alphabetical order in any way violates the book's integrity. Basically I'm saying the same thing again and again, just with different words. I'm saying that all of Nature is a blossoming, and I'm here inside the blossom watching it, agog. You can find current information about where I am and what I'm doing by clicking on my name at my main web site at http://www.backyardnature.net. As I always say to my newsletters subscribers, I appreciate your interest in what I have to say, and I hope you keep paying attention to the world around you, too. ***** 6 MIRACLES OF NATURE While reading Bill Broder's The Sacred Hoop I was surprised to see his reference to Earth's "three miracles." Those miracles were: • that things exist at all • that life came out of things • that life became conscious of itself My surprise is that I had believed that I had thought up "The Six Miracles of Nature" all by myself, yet his three miracles were included in my six. Well, more than once in my life what I thought were original ideas (even original tunes) turned out to be old hat. Here are "my" Six Miracles of Nature: • that things exist at all • that things began evolving as soon as they existed • that life came out of the evolving stuff • that life evolved into many forms • that life became conscious of itself • that mere consciousness evolved into an ability to learn and to reflect When something came out of nothing, the Universe could have remained an infinite volume of hydrogen atoms equidistantly suspended in space, but it didn't. Miraculously, matter began coagulating, changing its nature in many ways, engendering stars and planets, antimatter, black holes and all the rest. Similarly, when life arose it could have remained like a virus, simply replicating itself for eternity. Instead, something charged the spirit of life with the capacity to evolve, so that now we have amphibians, birds, mammals, and whatever may emerge later. And when life became conscious of itself, it could have remained concerned merely with the pleasures and pains of the body, and it could have restricted its thoughts to the brain's genetically fixed patterns. Instead, now, at least briefly, some of us can sometimes rejoice in the abstract patterns of music and art, we can laugh at the good joke that we are ourselves spiritual beings stuck in animal bodies, and on occasion we can even glimpse the unity of all things. Maybe the Creator's crowning achievement on Earth so far is that some of us sometimes reflect back on the Creative Force out of which everything has sprung so rambunctiously and elegantly, recognize the beauty in it all, and feel awe and honor to be part of it. Astronomers, geologists and biologists can tell us approximately how long ago each of the first five miracles occurred. The First Miracle came about approximately 4.8 billion years ago, if I remember correctly the last figures I saw, and the Third maybe 4.3 billion, and then, if self consciousness arose with the first hominids, the Fifth Miracle ignited possibly 35 million years ago. I think that The Sixth Miracle is occurring just now -- "now" being the last few millennia. This blossoming is taking place as a greater and greater percentage of us Homo sapiens, at least sometimes, at least briefly, project our minds beyond thoughts dealing with the daily maintenance and navigation of our bodies -- the hurting feet, the mechanics of acquiring mates, power and status, etc. The Sixth Miracle flashes into being whenever any one of us reflects on the Cosmos, the selfless and beautiful abstract patterns in music and art, the pale-orange broomsedge field lightly touched with frost at dawn as the White-throated Sparrow sings its "I'm here" song... and is moved to emotion. ***** 99.97% AND A QUESTION The other day a scientist being interviewed on National Public Radio made the point that all humans on Earth share about 99.97% of their genetic makeup. Even some 98% of our genes are the same as those found in chimpanzees. These numbers are profoundly important, and I think every schoolchild should be encouraged to think about their implications. Technically, the concept is pretty simple. Our genetic makeup consists of encoded information. The encoded information is a set of instructions on how to put chemicals together to keep life going. The reason we humans share so much of our genetic code with one another and other living beings is that our different bodies use the same biochemical processes to stay alive. Both toads and humans breathe, and most of the genetic instructions for using the oxygen we inhale are the same for both toads and humans. Both humans and elm trees respire, and many of the chemical pathways accomplishing this are identical for trees and man. When this how-to information was encoded in the genes of the earliest, very simple life forms, it was passed on in the genes to subsequent generations who built upon the information as they evolved into new, more complex species. One consequence of accepting these facts is that it's easy to conceive of the Creator as being very engaged in formulating the code of life as it evolves and becomes more sophisticated through time. Another consequence of thinking like this is the notion that -- because the Creator has been working so hard on Earth-life's genetic heritage for at least 3.85 billion years -- the genetic code is worthy to be regarded by us humans as "sacred." Moreover, why shouldn't we rejoice at discovering that the Creator has placed each of us in a huge family of mutually dependent members of a rainbow of races and species, all sharing a huge percentage of the same life processes, feelings, potentials and aspirations? And why shouldn't the most holy act of all be that of loving and respecting all forms of life so intensely that you can't stand the idea of destroying them needlessly? ***** A SONG IN EVERY TREE The other day Alex somewhere in cyberspace wrote with regard to my short book "One Year in the Life of a House Sparrow." He said that having had House Sparrows brought to his attention, "... all of a sudden there is 'a bird on every corner, a song in every tree.' If you don't allow for it, your mind doesn't register. People don't expect sparrows to be fascinating, and thus ignore them." Alex has discovered something important: Human minds are wired so that we grow blind to everyday things. Maybe it's an evolutionary defense against the fact that if we could see plainly how many things can go wrong with our bodies, how tenuously society is held together, and how fragile the planetary ecosystem is, we'd all go berserk. The resulting desensitization, though maybe useful, produces a sad effect, because as we habituate and grow blind to the world's novelties and awe-inspiring features, apathy and detachment set in. Moreover, there's a positive feedback mechanism: As one thing after another drops from our radars, life grows less inspiring, and we see less reason to make efforts to know and care about the world around us. And when we just don't care, then we're more likely to live in ways that threaten and destroy Life on Earth -- which is the profoundly dangerous situation that has developed now. Several times in my life I've drifted into the no-seeing mode myself. Sometimes it was because I was trying too hard to achieve something -- maybe to succeed in a job or maintain a relationship with a woman -- and sometimes it was because of my obsessive personality, which can give me tunnel vision as I drive things into the ground, if I don't watch. So far I've always been able to shake myself out of these ruts. I'd consciously and ceremoniously take a few days of walking around reexamining my priorities and reshuffling my strategies for life. Then I'd forgive myself for having been so dumb and unfeeling, and make a new start. Here's an important point: Each time I've made a new start, nothing harmonized with and encouraged my rebirth more than paying attention to Nature. When I paid attention, Nature was always there advising me: Simplify; don't waste resources; take care of your body; keep growing... These profoundly important teachings are best taught by Nature Herself. The process works like this: You make yourself available, and then Nature takes over, first slowly healing, then slowly pleasing, and finally slowly bringing you into new awarenesses and more sophisticated manners of being. And that process is pleasurable, and makes you happy. ***** BARKLICE AND WORLDCOM In the growing dimness I lay watching my little herd of barklice while listening to All Things Considered on National Public Radio. As they spoke of the financial collapse and corporate corruption of WorldCom (based near Jackson northeast of here) the barklice grazed modestly on my back window's field of algae and fungus. One way of thinking about life in general, maybe the most fundamental way of all, is to note the level each living thing occupies on life's Energy Pyramid. Algae on my window collect sunlight energy, storing it in multitudes of tiny algal bodies. My barklice eat the algae, thus transferring that stored sunlight energy into their own bodies. Maybe a spiderlike harvestman (Daddy-long-legs) will eat the barklice, then possibly a Green Anole living on my trailer's skin will eat the harvestman. Maybe the little Sharp-shinned Hawk who occasionally swoops through camp will eat the Green Anole. No one will eat the hawk, so the sunlight energy first collected by my window algae may end up fueling the hawk as it streaks through the woods at the peak of its own energy pyramid. It's a pyramid because untold numbers of algal bodies at the bottom must gather energy to fuel just one hawk at the top. Most species occupy a fairly fixed position on the Energy Pyramid of Life. Humans, because we can think and have more flexibility in choosing what we eat, can choose our position on the Pyramid. A person who eats other animals is near the pyramid's top; I as a vegetarian am near the pyramid's bottom. On this pyramid I do not mind being closer to barklice than to hawks. One reason is because every time energy transfers from one level of the pyramid to the next, a lot of energy is lost. In Eugene Odem's classic textbook "Fundamentals of Ecology" it's stated that during the course of a year 20,000,000 alfalfa plants weighing 17,850 pounds are needed to fuel 4.5 cows weighing 2,250 pounds, which will satisfy the energy needs of a single 105-pound boy." Thus, because it is my nature to be sparing, I am comfortable at the pyramid's base. A second reason for being happy at the bottom of the pyramid is this: When a thinking human consciously chooses the barklouse path instead of the hawk's (not only in diet, but general energy-consumption in daily life), it seems that a magical thing happens. Somehow it appears that the energy conserved through making this conscious decision gets re-channeled into energy enabling greater liberty of thought, feeling, and spiritual awareness. I'm not sure how this works. I just see it happening. This observation seems to coincide with the teachings of the World's great religions. "The meek shall inherit the Earth" is perhaps another way of saying this. Yoga perhaps puts the concept to practice. The officers of WorldCom have found that by scrambling toward the top of their world's money- pyramid (in Capitalism, money is analogous to energy in real life) without respecting their environment's basic ecological principles (honesty, established procedures), today they find themselves in a mess, and a lot of people have been hurt. In contrast, in my little trailer not far from WorldCom's corporate headquarters, it seems that by anchoring my body close to the bottom of the Earth's energy pyramid not far from barklice, in an environment where my mind and spirit are given free reign, I enjoy a healthy, sustainable contentment and enthusiasm about life's potentials. It's like having a good view from a pyramid's top. ***** BARN SWALLOWS & BEETHOVEN One day this week I sat in my rocking chair in the barn door while the usual late-afternoon storm darkened the sky and growled. As I watched swallows cavorting over the Loblolly field, on the radio Beethoven's wonderful Eighth Symphony was playing. The symphony's first movement is often dark with wrathful emotions, yet every now and then there are bursts among the bassoons and drums that have always struck me as very like laughter. The whole piece is on the one hand deadly serious, yet, throughout, there are unmistakable explosions of horse-laughing glee. It's very like swallows playing in a stormy summer sky. History tells us that when Beethoven wrote the good- natured Eighth he was ill and profoundly disturbed by the political events and wars of his time. In the same vein, whenever I hear the Dalai Lama speak, he seems to laugh a lot, despite the plight of his people under Chinese domination. When I was in India I met several holy people and their faces always glowed with cheerfulness, despite the poverty and degradation in which they lived. In this world of collapsing ecosystems and ongoing mass extinctions of species, The Creator populates the darkening sky with playful swallows. As the storm broke and the Loblolly field heaved beneath wind and rain, those swallows took their time getting to safety. And I could only look on dumbly and feel ashamed that in my own life maybe I have been too slow at catching most of the jokes around me, and too clumsy ever to dance. ***** BIRD THERAPY Though quite possibly I am the most contented person I know, I have to say that anytime I look at a healthy, free wild bird it makes me even more cheerful. Just seeing the Tropical Mockingbird with the blue sky behind him, perched on the gracefully arching, yellow petiole of a fan palm next to my door swaying idly in the summery afternoon wind makes me smile all inside. In fact, often I've thought that if I had a millionaire friend I'd urge him or her to set up a sort of clinic where people with the blues or even hardcore depression could come, and I would raise their spirits back to healthy levels by introducing them to nature study, with bird-looking being the main therapy. It would be like an old-time sanatorium, except that instead of healing with hot mineral baths and weird diets I'd heal with bird fieldmarks and flower anatomy. ***** BLACK COW, FOGGY DAWN At dawn a few minutes before the sun's red orb rises over the grassy hillcrest to the east, I jog on the ridge road, passing by a black cow chewing her cud and standing in green grass. White fog in the valley beyond frames the cow, making her into a silhouette. Pat, pat, pat go my feet on yet another morning after so many hundreds of morning jogs just like this one. When I run, my body goes onto autopilot. I just ride atop the body, almost detached, watching images pass by. Today I'm running wondering what that cow is thinking, feeling, being. The other day on Public Radio a scientist spoke on new insights into the fact that higher animals may have emotions. How disheartening that this late in human social evolution we are still talking as if that were a revelation. When I was a kid on the western Kentucky farm we had pigs, cattle, goats, chickens, ducks and other critters, and from the first it was clear to me that all our animals had feelings. I used to hide in the chickenfeed bin spying on the hens so even at ten years of age I knew that hens had individual personalities. With my own eyes I saw that there were flirtatious hens and no- nonsense ones, hens who took good care of their chicks and others who were more concerned with their own comfort and interests. There were nervous hens and mellow hens, lazy ones and hyper ones. When we had fried chicken for Sunday dinner I'd wonder, "Is it the flirty one, or the sneaky one? Who will be missing when I go spying next, and how will the community get along without her?" In college I was assured that I was laughably anthropomorphic. Well, now I'm older than my professors at that time and I've certainly had more field experience than they, stuck in their offices and classrooms. Now in my white-bearded, bald-headed augustness I do hereby proclaim what I should have loved to hear any authoritative individual say back then: All higher animals have feelings, and often those feelings are as intense, meaningful and beautiful as human emotions. Understanding this is important. It's important to know that humans and other animals are all members of the same evolutionary Tree of Life, all enmeshed inextricably in the same ecological Web of Life, all composed of the same chemicals, with neurons working the same way, the same laws of Nature applying to us all equally, all of us together feeling, thinking, evolving from the same ancestors toward the same destiny. For, once we accept that other living things are of the same stuff as us, it becomes easier to see that what endangers them also endangers us. Not by diminishing humankind but by elevating other living things around us will it become clearer that all of us survive only as long as the biotic community of which we are part continues to function -- continues producing clean air, clean water, wholesome foods, open space... for us all. Black cow in green grass with a silvery, shimmering fogbank behind you, chew your cud and wonder at me pat, pat, pat down the little road atop the ridge. I leave you with this thought: That the most graceful element of this whole scene is that you reflect on me as I reflect on you, and we leave one another in peace. ***** BOTFLY REVELATION I remember sitting quietly looking at one of the sores on my right forearm when the grub inside the sore extended its white neck to its breathing hole. The white object appearing at the hole forcefully made the point that a foreign creature had taken up residence inside my body rather as a mouse might move into an old house. Until then I had imagined my body as being somehow inviolable with regard to such overt abuse. Of course I knew that every human body is occupied by untold numbers of bacteria, viruses, amoebas, mites, worms and other life forms, but this was different. I was coming eye-to-eye with a creature who had its own needs and priorities without regard to my own mindset. This situation clashed with the general notion that I think most of us have most of the time, and that is that since we are thinking beings with air conditioning and perfumed soap we are excused from obeying the more messy laws of nature in general. Certainly the main Western religions teach that we humans have a touch of divinity in us, and that as such the Universe exists as a stage for the fulfillment of human destiny. My botfly maggots didn't seem to respect my spirituality. In fact, my botfly larvae suggested that the Creator of the Universe is more interested in biological diversity -- more focused on the production and sustainability of a vast rainbow of mutually interacting species -- than in the momentary comfort or dignity of any individual organism, such as me. During the years since my botfly revelation I have seen nothing to contradict that insight. We all can see how human activity is impacting the Earth at this moment. Are not most of us in some kind of trancelike state of denial, believing that if we hike into the land of botflies, somehow we shall be exempt from getting bots ourselves? That if we spoil our Earth, somehow angels or a benevolent Creator will save us? Or even that spoiling the Earth is OK, because, when we all die, us good folks will go to Heaven? One also wonder's how the current Administration's attitude toward the Endangered Species Act and environmental protection in general squares with the nature of our diversity-loving Creator. ***** CALLUSES This week I've been grubbing Red Buckeye saplings from the hayfields and this has hardened the very slight calluses on my hands. I do just enough hoeing, scything and shoveling to keep respectable hints of calluses on my fingers and palms. These calluses got me remembering and thinking. For two or three summers during the 80s I worked in Ulm, southern Germany, home to "Europe's tallest cathedral." During my Ulm days, whenever I visited the cathedral I always went right to an obscure little carving in an out-of- the-way corner portraying a naked man absolutely shaggy with long fur. Apparently he was a famously pious hermit back in 1377, someone who swore off clothing and other of man's conventions, and in reaction to Germany's habitually cold and rainy weather grew long hair all over his body. So, the body can react to harshness in some surprising ways. Corned feet once served our barefooted ancestors well. Long before humans had tools and worried much about clothing, maybe all humans looked like the shaggy hermit in Ulm's cathedral. For, the time since humankind emerged from the Stone Age is just a tiny flash at the end of many millennia of humans evolving in the context of small family or tribal units, on the open savannah and in the forest. It's logical to think that today our inherited human genetic code continues producing humans meant to function in our ancestors' long-enduring world, not our recently appeared one. Moreover, our minds, like our bodies, must react to stimuli and the lack of stimuli as if we were still in those distant times. But instead of protective calluses, corns, and shaggy hide, the mind must protect itself with mental armor. Much of my thinking this week has been about what that armor might be. I think that maybe the most common mental armor is self delusion. Many of us have lost our identities as important members of any family or tribe, so our minds imagine us as centers of our own mental galaxies -- thus the "Me Generation" and the general decline of broader social structures depending on voluntary effort. Similarly, today the mind reels before the complexity of the societies we humans have invented. I think that the mind's main "callus" protecting us from this is our tendency to withdraw into and identify with gross simplifications -- inflexible, black-and-white doctrines like racism, nationalism, communism, the trickle-down economic theory, and the world's many religions. Grubbing up a Red Buckeye sapling in the middle of a sunny, windswept hayfield, I stare dumbly at the muddy, oversized root, and the sunburned, wrinkled hands holding the root. Crows call and I hear myself breathing. And more than a little I sense the out-of- whackness of being what I am, being just here, doing this, the way I am in all this greenness and blueness and odor of crushed grass and earth-smell on the wind and the oily smell of my own skin in the sunlight, the cool wetness in my mouth, the feeling of fresh air rushing into my lungs... indulging in the illusion that Red Buckeyes need to be grubbed out... And what could I do but just laugh and keep grubbing? ***** CHARLES'S CHOIR The other day the plantation manager hired Charles, a local day-worker, to come sweep out the Chapel. Charles and I have been buddies for years so when trouble arose he came to me at the garden. "What's that sound down in the Chapel?" he asked, and I replied that it should be quiet there. "It sounds like people singing in a choir," he insisted, and this was so unlikely that I just laughed, figuring he'd heard echoes of birdcalls, and suggested, "Must be ghosts... " A very worried look spread across Charles's face. He said he wasn't going back there unless I went with him. When I got there I found that the manager had placed a high-frequency "squeaker" in the chapel, one of those things supposed to clear out rodents by hurting their ears. After we'd shared a good laugh I got back to my work and began thinking about what different worlds people must live in, depending on whether they can or cannot believe in ghosts. When I lived in Belize most of my friends closed their windows at dusk, despite the heat and humidity, because they believed that malignant spirits entered on the night air. (Probably the belief arose to explain the effects of malaria-bearing mosquitoes entering windows at dusk.) The cook at the jungle lodge where I worked swore that once he had met "duendes," a Belizean kind of spirit without thumbs, who simply vanished as he passed them on an isolated road at night. When I was a child, I was a believer. My parents told me how a swampy woods in view of our western Kentucky farm was so big that it connected with "Black Lake Bottoms," which everyone knew as a place in which hunters had disappeared, a swamp so vast that it was actually part of all other of the Earth's combined wildernesses. I heard from my mother about shimmering, pale Swamp Angles there who with their very long fingernails hovered above the moldering ground, ready to tear out the eyes of anyone who entered at night. I remember as a child lying in bed quivering as the owls in that woods hooted, and the hoots echoed off the swamp's big trees. In the 70s when the price of soybeans soared, the vast swamps of my childhood were converted into soybean fields. Maybe this occasioned the biggest psychological shift of my whole life. The day they bulldozed and burned the last big forest near our farm and I saw that where owls had hooted among Swamp Angels there was just mud and weeds, my relationship with the metaphysical world was changed forever. But, the question remains: Is it more beautiful for the mind to project Swamp Angels into a forest and to thrill at the prospect of meeting them there, or to know what's "really" in that forest, and to find that now your thrills are of a subtler, more lonely kind? ***** CHILLY FOG & CABBAGE LEAVES During the middle of this week an "Alaskan low" came through and during about 35 hours drenched us with 1½-inches of cold drizzle. It was appropriate weather for rocky little islands in the Aleutians, not a California dry season, but we got it anyway. It was drizzle with fog. We couldn't see the other side of the canyon and sometimes everything more than two trees away was whited out. When it's like that the world is reduced to tones of gray, and things look flat. Trees are silhouetted and sounds are muted. Not a bird sings. Everything is subdued. Such times have their charm for a while but after a couple of days you begin craving color, pure sounds, warmth -- just anything to stir the spirit. Sometimes I remedy the situation by going into the garden and putting my face right down next to whatever might be there -- a cabbage leaf or an onion sprout -- where there's a vividness of greenness, textures different from those in ordinary life, and all kinds of intricate designs. Always, when you throw your head into a different realm like that, you discover whole new worlds of stimuli. Always there are other worlds to explore just by shifting your mental frame of reference. Friday morning National Public Radio aired a segment on people addicted to cutting themselves. When these people are stressed they react by slicing into their bodies. They bleed and hurt but it's an addiction hard to break. At first the behavior seemed absolutely inexplicable to me. But when I thought about it I began seeing how it might happen. I think this pitiful condition may bear upon my experience this week with the fog, the somberness, and the grayness and flatness of things. It may give me insight into why I felt the need to go look closely at a cabbage leaf, and why I feel like I need to keep telling people to pay attention to things. A self-cutter begins feeling disoriented, unsure of whom he or she is and unsure of what's supposed to be done. When they begin cutting themselves, see the blood and feel the pain, then they have proof that they are right there, right then. They see that in a world where everything seems messed up at least their bodies are working right, bleeding when they're supposed to, feeling pain at the right time. When our eyes clearly show us that we're the one seeing the bird's bright colors, when our ears tell us we're the very listener to the bird's pretty song, it reminds us where and what we are. Except when chemical imbalances are involved, active people in stimulating environments that provide positive reinforcement seldom get mentally ill. But, when the fog comes, color drains from the landscape, things go flat and sounds are only monotonous, maybe it's hard for some of us to keep grounded. Maybe when a very angry man puts his fist through a wall it's because he's feeling so desperately out of control that he needs the shock and pain to ground him better in the moment, his body, his home. Maybe when I'm concentrating on something and stick my tongue out, since the mouth and tongue have many more nerve endings than most parts of the body, what I'm doing is anchoring my consciousness in the present by feeling myself with my tongue, trying to keep tabs of who and what I am as the rest of me become absorbed in the thing I'm concentrating on. Well, I don't see much harm in sticking out your tongue when you're concentrating, but I do wish I could show these self-cutters and wall-punchers the therapeutic value of consciously seeking out cabbage leaves on foggy days, point out to them the silvery slug trails, the leaves' pink-crinkly margins, their reticulating venations, the randomly arrayed, tiny brown-rimmed insect- punctures, the leaves' voluptuous concavities, the cabbagy odor when you put your nose right there on a leaf... ***** CICADA NOSTALGIA Calls of the Annual Cicada always fill me with a special nostalgia. The sound evokes memories of heat-choked summer days in Kentucky during my childhood, and the feeling I had then of being surrounded by wide fields of soybeans and tobacco framed all around by dark green swamp forests on the horizon. The heat, the sunlight, the dazed feeling, the rustling of cottonwood leaves and the lonely sound of cicadas calling... But, it was more than that. It was while taking long walks in that environment that I began sensing and longing for the undefined, unimaginably magnificent and profound SOMETHING that surely lay just beyond my little world -- or maybe in that world itself -- if I could just figure out how to find it. The cicada calls became a kind of Ommmmmmmmmmmmmm for me, the sound of transcendent mediation, and of infinite possibilities. This week the cicadas reminded me of this quotation from St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380): "All the way to Heaven is Heaven." I wonder if anyone else out there has a touch of cicada nostalgia these days, and is in any way touched by St. Catherine's insight? ***** CLOGGED EAR About once a year my left ear gets infected, and this week has been its time. This has seriously reduced my bird-spotting ability. That's because most birders develop an uncanny talent for precisely locating the positions of singing birds with their ears before they begin looking with their eyes. I seldom notice this ability until it's gone. This week, with one ear closed down, I have been at a loss to say whether a bird was before me or behind me, to the right or left. There's a benefit to this loss, however, assuming that the hearing returns as it always has. That is, this reminds me of what an amazing invention the human body is. I am reminded of all the things that can go wrong with a body to affect not only its hearing, vision and the other senses, but also the sense of balance, blood-sugar level, the functioning of the heart and brain... Sometimes I reflect on the fact that back in 1947 the button on my body-machine was pushed, and I've been going every since with very modest maintenance, just providing it with fuel. In college I studied the chemical pathways involved in metabolism and respiration, how blood pH is buffered... It is all so complex, so majestically ingenious. It is amazing that we can ever feel good for a moment, yet I feel good nearly all the time. Every moment of feeling good is a tremendous gift. ***** COLD CROW OVER WINDY GRASS Sometimes it's as if everything in a landscape chimes in with the same voice. In a concentrated, harmonizing instant lasting less than a second the voice sums up everything around you. You never know when such moments might crop up. At the end of life, maybe all that'll stick with us will be the echoes of such vividly lived moments. I experienced such a moment the other day biking to the mailbox. We're on a ridge here so we're open to the wind. A coldfront was blowing in and that day the wind made whole trees heave and twist, showing the silvery bottoms of their leaves and sounding like waterfalls. On our ridge the sky is wide open so clouds say a lot. That day everything said was dark, ragged and cold. Most upland here is in hayfields and pastures, so fast- moving, almost violent waves of grass rampaged across too-green hayfields. It was hard keeping my balance on the bike, less because of the wind than because with dramatic, fast- changing clouds like that, it's hard to keep from looking at them. You want to know if that dark gray downpouring just to the west is about to soak you, and you want to see how that cloud curling upon itself so ominously will turn out. Looking up, you start falling to the side. Even the hayfields disorient with their inconstant, heaving borders. The coldness makes everything sharp, everything you feel, see, smell and hear is sharp, sharpness and raw greenness roaring and heaving and you're right there inside it all. A crow launched from a big Black-Cherry tree, or maybe it was blown from it, for it looked out of control, flying sideways and dipping and cawing. Seven black birds, maybe grackles, but my eyes were too teary to focus well, and those black birds erupted from the hayfield's boiling grass and went after the crow. At a time like this, they went chasing a crow! In that half second of black birds converging on the crow alone in the terrible sky I saw it all and understood it all, how even at a time like this seven black birds can feel such rage that they'll leave cozy pockets down in the grass to go screaming and swooping in a gyrating senseless world. I understood it all in that half second, laughed at it all in a fast, convulsive way almost like inhaling a mosquito, and then it was all gone, all gone and everything not a millionth as meaningful and intense as it'd been just a second earlier. I rode on, got the mail, and peddled back home, things still cold and windy, but now things not meaning much more than what they really were. Still, that day, I had that half second of vividness, and in that half second the whole thing had managed to get itself inside me OK. Henceforward, all cold, windy things will have an element of crow-in-the-sky for me. All heaving, bubbling reality will be black birds crazily exploding out of ocean-grass, I know that for sure, and I'm going to remember just how cold-green that ocean- grass was. In fact, when you meet me next time, that look in my face will be wind in a blustery, curdly sky, me trying to remember just how that curling black cloud resolved itself, and how that crow ever did get away. ***** COLD DAYS AT PEACE This has been a chilly week with several frosty mornings. With the plastic tarpaulin over my trailer, the windows plugged with Styrofoam boards, and blankets draped over the ill-fitting door, inside the trailer I remain comfortable, even cozy. With windows and door-cracks sealed, it's dark inside and feels like a small cave. At night I remain toasty inside a good sleeping bag and during days the heat of my computer and my own body keep the trailer's small space warm enough. I wear several layers of clothing and often work at the keyboard in fingerless gloves. My main problem is that sometimes the oxygen runs low and I must let in fresh air. Then heat escapes like a frightened wren. This entire last summer I never once turned on a fan (most days I wore clothing only for jogging and working in the garden), and I'm hoping to make it through this winter without once using the small electric space- heater kept for emergencies. Some years I've managed, others I've needed the heater, though never for more than a few minutes each day. This week last year we had a 14°F (-10°C) morning and I was glad to have the heater then. I used to keep quiet about my living style, especially about my insistence on not wasting energy. I know that most people who see how I live regard me as being either despicably miserly or else mentally unstable. When our hunters meet me on a road some of them address me as if I were a child, or the village idiot. Though they can hear that I speak normally, they haven't the resources to interpret my appearance any other way. When I am in a regular US home and either the air conditioner or heat pump drones on and on, it weighs upon me. I cannot but keep thinking of the vast environmental destruction being caused in the name of my physical comfort. Land lost to coal mining, the production of greenhouse gases, radioactive wastes... all to produce energy to have me feel cooler or warmer without needing to add or remove clothing. When at night I turn off my energy-efficient computer and my little 40-watt, high-intensity reading lamp, not an electron flows in my trailer. While I sleep, no ecological violence is committed on behalf of my comfort, and maybe that's one reason I sleep so soundly and awaken so glad. ***** COLORS AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT Sometimes I just pause and take in all the colors, textures and patterns around me. For instance, so I can sit in the sunshine and write this, I open the door to my room. Beneath the 15-ft-high ceiling the room's walls are painted gold. The doorframe, the pipes bracketed to the walls carrying electrical wiring, and the metal bars across my high windows are all blue. The ceiling is white concrete between 26 closely spaced, rusty-red rafters. The ceiling fan is white. The tiled floor, cool to my feet, is a mosaic of patterns -- green, pink, cream, brown, gray tiles, and a few multicolored tiles with snowflake designs and arabesques. The room's stone walls are nearly three feet thick, so windows and doors are inset amongst their own dark shadows. The ten-ft-high, dark brown doors are of heavy, rough wood, and opening them occasions scraping and screeching appropriate for a medieval dungeon. The sunlight pouring through, though, undoes all heaviness and gloom, and the floor tiles shine like a cheerful song. On the patio floor just outside a sunning green snake slips into the shadows of a thicket of bamboo palms. A yellow, black and white Great Kiskadee shrieks from a banana tree with glossy, green leaves. Drinking in all these sensations it seems to me that I could hardly live without them. Yet most people would say that they could hardly live without central heating and cooling, soft beds, sealed windows and plush carpets, even though the main effect of these items is to cushion, muffle, tone down, make tepid, sanitize and generally drain from our lives the sensations that right now I cherish and need. In fact, in my opinion, one reason so many people are neurotic or basically unhappy is that they live sensory deprived lives. Maybe obsessions with immoderate booze, drugs and sex are unhealthy attempts to reclaim the sensations our ancestors felt with the changing seasons, dawn and dusk, and simple living. In modern, consumption-focused society, I think that when it gets cold there are more reasons than for sustainability to put on a sweater instead of turning up the thermostat. There are more reasons for long walks and weekends at the park than exercise and cheap fun. And there are more reasons to fill one's head with flower anatomy and bird fieldmarks than merely to identify what is at hand. ***** COMFORTING VISIONS OF VULTURES & MAGGOTS A friend and I have been exchanging notions on what we want done with our bodies when we die. She's all for cremation, because she likes the idea of recycling her body's nutrients into her garden. I regard cremation as acceptable, but not preferable. My problem with cremation is that the petrochemical- powered burning process doesn't benefit a rainbow of natural decomposers. I prefer for critters and microorganisms to benefit as they convert my fat to simple compounds of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, my protein to simple nitrogenous compounds, and the calcium phosphate of my bones to ions of calcium and phosphate in solution. My preferred first step for this process is for my body upon death to be devoured by vultures, chambered by maggots, and to have my bones gnawed on by any animal disposed to gnaw them. I did not come lightly to this viewpoint. My middle-class, rural Kentuckian beginnings set me into the world with all the usual, culturally appropriate belief systems and sensibilities. Every reevaluation I ever made of my culturally bestowed predispositions was a painful process. I suppose that nothing would taste so good to me right now as a fried baloney sandwich with white bread and lots of mayonnaise. However, on mostly ethical grounds, I banished that pleasure from my life over 35 years ago. It seems nearly always to be the case that every significant circumstance is compounded of features arrayed in opposition. This often means that there's a narrow and forbidding gate to paradise. In the present instance, the consoling vision of my remains diffusing back into the mother ecosystem must be attended by the knowledge that the appetites of vultures and maggots will comprise the vehicle of my release. I accept this as a condition and, in fact, insist on it -- as one final gesture of generosity toward the mother ecosystem, and as one last ceremony confirming my confidence in the boundless magnanimity of the Creator of that ecosystem. ****** COMPOSTING THE DOMINANT PARADIGM My dictionary's first definition of "poor" is, "Wanting in material riches or goods." I wonder if the dictionary's editors meant to be as profound with their definition as it seems to me they were? For, in their choice of words they reflected this society's dominant consumerist paradigm by employing the term "wanting," when, in my mind, they should have written "needing... " A person is poor, I believe, when someone is "needing" of material riches or goods, not just "wanting" them... I became especially sensitive to these opposing concepts of being poor this week while draining water into the bathtub prior to washing my Kentucky quilts for the first time in a long, long time. That morning as the water poured, I made my rounds seeing what new plants were blossoming or producing fruit, how high my Moonflower vine had grown in the night, whether new mushrooms had sprung up, how my anoles and fence lizards were doing, and I was feeling prosperous and fortunate beyond description. Yet, I could probably qualify for welfare because my yearly income is so low. Despite my sense of affluence and despite my having much more than I really NEED, and certainly not WANTING more "material riches or goods," the world around me often classifies me as "poor." Moreover, many would be annoyed that on a weekday morning I myself was not in a car hurrying someplace to a paying job. The crystalline, soul-pleasing water gushed from the ground joyously gurgling and splashing after long confinement in the aquifer. The sun sparkled in the water and I drank deeply and bathed in it, and watered my plants and compost heap with it. What enormous potential I envisioned for us -- me and this water -- and how many degrees of fulfillment I experienced at that moment! I wish I had a way to compost this culture's dominant motivating paradigm that assigns one to poverty simply if little money is at hand, and declares that one is wasting his or her time if not perpetually employed with earning a weekly salary. I should like to shred that paradigm and ceremoniously dump it into the straw and dried pig manure of history, then stand yodeling and lustily pee on it. What pleasure it would be one morning to see it black and spongy, steamy in the morning air and smelling wholesome and well intentioned. If I could do that, I believe I should enrich the whole world many-fold, and happiness would emerge everywhere like well-formed mushrooms from perfect compost. ***** COMPUTER, COMPOST, BULLFROG & ART This week I've had awful computer problems and I'm still not back to normal. For most of four solid days I've struggled to patch together parts from three old computers to make something that works. This Sunday morning I'm still having problems, needing to pound the table to get an image onto my screen. Thursday I took a break from my computer woes by going to say hello to the compost heap. I found it happily cooking along at an interior temperature of 138° (59° C). For a while I just stood there reflecting on how my activities could be so disrupted by a few electrons inappropriately digitally distributed, yet simply by lying there, all along this compost heap had been accomplishing exactly what it wanted. My first thought was that, by keeping things simple, that heap had managed to reach a kind of Buddhist perfection. Its high cooking temperature resulting from the breakdown of complex organic materials into basic soil-building nutrients and particles seemed to me a kind of biological equivalent to the path to nonexistence and Nirvana. But then I remembered that, actually, a compost heap is quite complex. Its proper function depends on the well-timed interaction of trillions of living individuals and thousands of kinds of individuals, from bacteria to millipedes. In fact, it occurred to me that nothing is really completely simple. For example, this week Larry Butts up near Vicksburg sent me a picture of a bouquet he'd created for his wife. It was wonderful, containing thistles, honeysuckles, and lots of other "weeds" and wildflowers from along his gravel road. One might say, "Oh, it's so pretty because he's simply stuck a bunch of pretty things together," but a closer look reveals that the arrangement was successful largely because it adhered to certain laws of proportion based on complex geometry, and color esthetics that were actually quite subtle -- whether while creating the arrangement Larry knew that his choices were sophisticated or not. Likewise, some would say that in terms of maturity and sophistication no human society has ever surpassed that of China's ancient T'ang Dynasty. Among the most treasured relics of that society are haiku by the great T'ang poets. And what, at first glance, is more simple than a haiku? Here is one I recently wrote while sitting next to our pond: A silent bullfrog... Of what good is such a thing Just watching me sit... ? At first glance, it's childishly simple, saying almost nothing. Yet, if you reflect on it awhile, maybe you can see that this poem invites questioning of the definition of "good," and one's own expectations. Maybe even it reveals something about me as I question these particular things in this particular manner... all in 17 syllables! It's as if in life at first everything is simple, but then you see how complex it is, but if you live long enough and if you mature enough, eventually you find simplicity in that complexity, but expressing that simplicity is not simple at all, for that, maybe, is the domain of art... Anyway, if during upcoming weeks I miss putting out a Newsletter or two, it's because my old homebrew computer has finally bitten the dust, and I'll be back online eventually -- unless I lose track of time while keeping my compost heap company. ***** CONSERVATISM & LIBERALISM IN NATURE This week's thinking about the conflict between trees who use chemical warfare to protect their leaves, and the bugs and fungi who attack those leaves, got me thinking about conservatism and liberalism in nature. Here's how that thinking went: All of nature flows in a great river of ever-evolving, profoundly experimental and somewhat romantic liberalism, yet within this river of liberalism occur innumerable eddies in which the local status quo is more or less conserved, and, when people are involved, mythologized. For example, the flow of evolution of Life on Earth toward ever greater complexity and interconnectedness is quintessentially liberal, but the species themselves represent conservative, fairly static expressions of local ecological niches (Species evolution appears to proceed in "jerks," not gradually, as Darwin originally supposed). Similarly, the lifespan of an individual human can be seen as a liberalistic gushing forward, beginning in a self-absorbed, ignorant state and maturing into ever more broad-mindedness, and concern for the larger community. However, the society-imposed routines, prejudices, and unquestioning allegiances to established power structures, which basically define a person's identity and facilitate the accumulation of material wealth, are fundamentally conservative in nature. You can see that I'm thinking in terms of classical conservatism (the idea of conserving the status quo, of being traditional) and of classical liberalism (embracing change, diversity and experimentation). Politicians often depart from these ideals for their own short-term gain, and this is never pretty. For instance, there's nothing conservative about Bush's deficit spending, and there's nothing liberal about Kerry's voting to make war in Iraq. I am convinced that in the broad scheme of things conservatism and liberalism are of equal importance. In the absence of liberality anything becomes like a crystal: Comfortable and beautiful, maybe, but forever stuck being the way it is right now. There are no currents of creativity, no blossomings, no births and rebirths, no magic anywhere. Yet, without conservatism, chaos reins. There's such roiling, undisciplined confusion that nothing can take hold, nothing substantial can ever be produced, and there's no stable perch from which to admire the rest of Creation. Therefore, as always, the trick is to follow The Middle Path. Do as Nature does, and artfully and lovingly mingle the two opposing inclinations. The forest follows the Middle Path when its liberal impulses send forth a great diversity of highly mobile, fast-reproducing and thus fast evolving bugs and fungi to consume the leaves of firmly rooted, slow-changing, trees. But nature protects its conservative components by granting them powerful defenses of their own. Because of this Middle- Path approach, the forest survives and itself continues to evolve and grow. Battle-worn, fungus-splotched, tattered leaves are expressions of an ongoing, very messy but very beautiful working-out of the Creator's ever-contending conservative and liberal impulses. ***** CRACKING PECANS For the last couple of months, about twice a week I've been spending an hour or so in the afternoons cracking pecans. Once I get a goodly number of pecan halves in my can I grind them into meal with the butt of my hammer's handle. Later when I'm cooking my cold- morning oatmeal porridge with its herbs and dribbled- in eggs I throw in a handful of pecan meal. I find that the flavor of fresh pecan meal cooked in porridge is much more robust than that of raw pecans. I enjoy my pecan-cracking sessions, and I regard that as a good sign. There have been periods in my life when my mind was too unsettled and my spirit too distracted to really enjoy simple, repetitive tasks. I think that two main changes in my life are responsible for my present pecan-cracking tranquility. First, at age 56, fewer hormones are flowing in my body, so I no longer must deal with perpetual libidinal urges to go find a woman. How I pity young people whose hormones rage through their systems like mine used to, and older people who think they need to keep their hormones stirred up. Anyone who decides that he or she wants no more children -- or never wants them in the first place -- should have access to medicine that neutralizes sexual hormones. What a shame that so much creative human energy is so often distracted by the same impulses that give dogs in heat their general character. Second, at last I am mostly rid of my addictions. When I was a kid on the Kentucky farm during the 50s and 60s, my family picked up hickory nuts each fall, and during the winters we spent long, contented hours cracking them. Then we got a TV. Soon we all craved junk food, the newest gimmicks, and we wanted to be like people on TV. Many old traditions ended, while our addictions to excess bore us all along as if we were leaves adrift on a river. Now I am out of that river and no longer feel the need to hustle to pay for my obsessions. The things I really like turn out to be very inexpensive, or even free. So, every morning when I taste that wonderful pecan flavor in my steamy oatmeal porridge, and I feel the wholesome pecan essence suffusing through my body, I am so thankful that now, at long last, I can sit with a hammer and a rock and simply crack my pecans in peace. ***** DANDELION SALAD AND POKE I'm lucky to have arrived in central Kentucky exactly when Dandelion leaves and Pokeweed shoots are perfect for eating. Several times since I've been here I've gathered fistfuls of Dandelion leaves, snipped them into stamp-size sections, poured oil and vinegar over them, sprinkled on a tiny bit of salt, mixed it all up, and, boy, it was good. I'd forgotten how good Dandelion salad tastes. Dandelion connoisseurs often let their freshly picked leaves soak in saltwater about half an hour before composing their salad. Also, they tend to mix in other kinds of leaves on the premise that the pure Dandelion flavor is a little robust for refined tastes. If you decide to pick some leaves for a salad, be sure they haven't been peed on by dogs, doused with herbicides, or coated with exhaust fumes from passing cars. Also, my experience is that once the big flush of fruiting heads -- the puffballs -- have lost their fuzz, the leaves are beginning to be bitter. At locations south of Kentucky it may be too late to enjoy the tasty salads I have. Finally, I wouldn't bother with the stunted kinds of dandelions found in most lawns because they might be too tough and bitter. The leaves I've been picking are from fields that haven't been touched for a while, and the leaves stand up like dark green, glossy rabbit ears at least a foot high. Most of my life I've also picked Pokeweed shoots. I'd just take the top eight inches or so of the shoot, keeping in mind that the purple stem below the shoot is poisonous. I'd cook the shoots, then pour off the water, put the shoots onto a plate, add salt and pepper and, when I felt particularly affluent and skinny, smear it all with butter. Well, one recent morning, since I don't yet have my campfire routines down pat, I decided to forego the boiling in water and just snip the shoots directly into my skillet, sauté them and then scramble my eggs into them. That tasted pretty good but apparently skipping the parboiling wasn't a good idea. I think my shoots, even though they were just the green tops, retained enough poison in them -- which usually gets poured off with the water -- to make me sick. I lost that breakfast about five minutes after I ate it, and I didn't feel well the whole day. So, there are insights here. The first insight is that the Earth is bounteous and good. The second is that it's not enough to simply make the mental flip enabling you to appreciate things like Dandelions and Pokeweed. You also need to know the art of taking advantage of these gifts, without which you may end up poisoning yourself as I did. In the past this art was communicated to us through traditions passed down to us from our families. Yet a third insight can be mentioned here. Not only have most people never learned about the wonderful things the Earth offers freely, but agencies within our culture actually cause people to despise them. Lately I've heard more than one person's disparaging words about Dandelions. So, it seems that our culture has passed through three doors on its way to alienating itself so thoroughly from Nature's bounteousness. The first door was losing the art of taking advantage of what was given freely. The second was forgetting that there ever was something free in the first place. The last was acquiring contempt for those things not hyped on TV and in magazines. Well, maybe one way to start the journey back to the first door might be to go out and pick Dandelion leaves for a nice salad, and eat them with proper ceremony and thankfulness. Or have some nice buttery Pokeweed shoots. Just remember to cook that poke, though, and then throw the water away! ***** DAYS OF PERFECTION Let it be known that I am not one to become so absorbed in nature's intricacies and minutia that I ignore the broad, simple glories of perfect days arriving unannounced and unexpected. If I'm engrossed in the wing venation of a wasp or the exact nature of a leaf's margin, and it's an afternoon golden and balmy served up like a sweet apple on a silver platter, I will reach for that apple. The nights this week have been glorious. A bright, waning moon and temperatures at dawn as low as 48° (9°C) made for cozy, profound sleeping. Awakening as the first light glowed in the east, sharp coldness sent me springing from the sleeping platform right into my jogging shoes, and within moments I was running through ghostly fog, water droplets coalescing in my beard. Every day this week friendly breakfast fires provided mugs of steaming mint tea, and my skillet-size cucumber "omelets" made with fresh dill and jalapeños always baked to a handsome brownness. I'd work in the garden as the sun burned off the fog, and then on the Internet I'd find my tasks pleasing and fulfilling. Sometimes I'd just wander around checking on seedlings, seeing whether the cuttings were taking root, and making sure the potted plants were healthy. Balmy, late afternoons were occupied with odd jobs and listening to All Things Considered on Public Radio, and then as the chill grew moment by moment I'd read into the night as the crickets grew ever more silent. I am grateful for it all, grateful to be at a peak of sensitivity, grateful to be healthy, and to have discovered how hard manual labor mingled with creative thinking and freely given service to the broader community produce in me something like happiness. I am so grateful for everything that when I pray I never pray asking for favors, only to give thanks to the Great Unknown that puts the is in is. Golden days, golden days... ***** DIETER'S GARDEN On the day I hiked through the woods after admiring the Woodsias I experienced this train of recollections and thoughts: The notion that the Woodsias had looked "so perfectly at home where they are" took me back to my early traveling days, to a delicious summer morning in Vienna, Austria in the 1970s, when I was visiting my friend Dieter. We were in the vast gardens of the old Summer Palace of Schönbrunn, where I had never seen so many roses, row after row of them, of perfectly trimmed hedges, and of acres of geometrically arranged curlicue-bedded tulips and irises and other bright blossoms. "I never dreamed a place could be so pretty," I gushed to Dieter. Dieter, one of the most dignified and refined individuals I've ever met, glanced at me with pity in his eyes. Art history was a passion with him, and to him Schönbrunn's gardens fell within that domain. "You can think about it in evolutionary terms," he said, more or less. "Maria Teresa laid out the garden's plans in the early 1700s. Just a few years before that, there'd been a real question as to whether Vienna could survive the starvation brought on by a siege mounted by the Turks. In a real way, then, glittery, ostentatious Schönbrunn with its regimented flower beds and eternally clipped hedges can be seen as a reaction to those earlier times, a statement confirming Western man's newly acquired dominance over his environment." "These gardens are bright and totally controlled like an infant's playroom," Dieter continued. "There's an obsession here with bright color, ignoring more complex possibilities such as the mingling of leaf textures or the interplay of form and shadows. There's a single-minded fixation on simple geometric precision while ignoring harmony with the landscape, for example, and local folk traditions. This garden is an effort by Maria Teresa and the people of her time to convince themselves that with militarism and science they could overcome what they regarded as the chaos of nature. When I walk in these gardens, yes, the bright colors are nice the way children's bright balloons are nice, but, on a higher level, I am oppressed by the garden design's total lack of mature spontaneity, and by its insensitivity to its natural and cultural context. It's almost as bad as your mowed lawns in America where esthetics among the masses also remains at an immature stage of development... " The shock of having such a fully formed thought pregnant with so many alien assumptions laid before me left me speechless. Instantly I recognized veins of truth in his argument. All I could do was to sniff a rose and grin. In later years I learned how plantings could be arranged so that, for instance, gatherings of leaves complemented certain blossoms. There have even been times in this life when I also felt oppressed by naked, straight lines of tulips marching across mowed American lawns, no matter how bright the tulips' reds and yellows were. But, now in my graybeard days, somehow I feel as if I'm wandered through and then out of the whole discussion, and when I see a tulip wherever it is I just feel like dropping to my knees and poking my nose into its brightness. Still, I'd like to visit Dieter again, to see how his ideas have evolved. I'm sure that, as always, his insights will have developed beyond mine. I would like to broach with him this idea: From what I've seen, the most sophisticated gardens are those aspiring to look natural. Therefore, might not the final stage of esthetic development be when one loves best what is indeed natural -- the wild forest, the marsh, the meadow? I would like to ask Dieter if any garden he can imagine could equal the loveliness of the embankment I visited this week, where the native Blunt-lobed Woodsias unfurled so graciously among their homey little moss and liverwort companions. ***** DOVE HUNTING SEASON OPENS Monday was the beginning of Dove Hunting season here. I didn't know that until one morning as I jogged down Roxie Road a friendly neighbor pulled up next to me, rolled down his window and with his shotgun lying in the seat behind him told me as I trotted along. He wanted to be in the fields with his gun cocked when the sun's first rays cut through the fog. I suspect that I'll be rubbing shoulders with hunters until next February or so, so I'd like to be clear about my attitude toward hunting and hunters. Nearly everyone seems to assume that I, being a hardcore vegetarian, regard hunters as my mortal enemies, but that's hardly the case. The main hunting in this area is for deer. Since the larger predators, mainly wolves, have been exterminated here, if hunting didn't remove deer, then the deer population would explode. And, to me, starving deer seem much worse off than shot ones. It's true that I regard anyone who enjoys killing animals to have a poorly developed sensitivity to life. However, there are plenty of things to which I am apparently insensitive. Some would consider my hermit ways to be proof that an important part of my own humanity is underdeveloped. I haven't met too many perfect people. To me the important point about hunters is this: At least they have come to terms with what killing an animal is all about. I regard this as a much more enlightened state than simply eating animals without thinking about the creature who was killed in order to provide the food eaten. I regard walking into a supermarket and buying ground-up animal flesh neatly packaged under cellophane and stickered with a price as profoundly more obscene than blowing out the brains of any animal in the woods or fields. If I have a choice between being around a hunter or an average person who simply pays others to kill and prepare their animal-based meals without reflecting on what actually is going on, I generally prefer the hunter. That being said, if I have the choice between being with a typical hunter and being alone -- I'll generally prefer the latter. ***** DUMB LOVE AND PATRIOTISM When I left the farm for college in 1965 already it was occurring to me that maybe life wasn't as black and white as I'd thought. For instance, my parents were very loving, and my mother expressed a lot of that love in the form of rich and abundant food. Thus I grew up feeling wanted and cared for -- something that has given me a sense of worth and stability my whole life -- but already in 1965 I weighed over 300 pounds, and I got up to 340 before finally I took control. Therefore, are all forms of selfless, well-meaning love unqualifiedly good? Having emerged from love-inspired fatness with hypertension, hemorrhoids, flat feet and hypoglycemia, I'd say that even selfless, well-meaning love can have a dark side. Though I would never qualify my parents' love as anything less than perfect, my childhood experience suggests that love comes in dumb and smart forms. Dumb love is expressed without consideration for the consequences, while smart love takes into account more than the moment's hankerings. Patriotism is a form of selfless, well-meaning love, and as such there are dumb and smart forms of it. Dumb patriotism appears whenever the flag is followed no matter who is carrying it, and wherever it is going. Smart patriotism considers the who and where of flag- following. Today in America most people are indulging in dumb patriotism. Dumb patriotism has caused us to stand by while being led into an unwise, unjust and horrific war. It has caused us to accept bankrupting spending policies that have weakened us as a nation, and it has created an environment in which atrocities are committed in our name. Though decades ago I took responsibility for my body, to this day I must deal with the hypertension and hemorrhoids of my childhood brush with dumb love. In the same way, future generations will find democracy and freedom much harder to nurture because of scores being settled after America's current indulgence in dumb patriotism. How does all this fit into a naturalist's newsletter? It is because I am in love with the living things of this planet. The things I love are being destroyed, and they are being destroyed at an accelerating pace. Here are the prime destructive agents: 1): Unrestrained consumerism, which is a subset of dumb love, the love of granting one another and oneself instant gratification 2): War making, which is fueled largely by dumb patriotism in many countries ***** EVOLVING, COALESCING SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS This week I received a book from Newsletter subscriber Margaret Gee in Australia. Margaret was the book's editor. The book is a collection of thoughts, feelings and philosophies from celebrities and ordinary people worldwide. In the book, writer Jeffrey Masson tells how he has discovered that many animals appear to have access to certain deep feelings, and that to him those emotions are pure and intense. Dan Millman, former world trampoline champion, says that the four purposes of life are: to learn; to serve; to mature, and; to live moment- to-moment. Author Naomi Wolf recalls the Buddhist saying that everyone we meet is, in his or her own way, "fighting a mighty battle." Receiving the book was special not only because it was a gift from a stranger on the opposite side of the Earth, but also because it was an example of something that must happen if we are to stop destroying the Earth and its living things. What happened was that Margaret recognized the beauty and worth of diverse honest insights. Her recognition was itself an insight, so she became part of the insight network. She shared her insight with me, so I became part of it, too. Now I share them with you, and you become part of it. The problem is that the world is full of people claiming to have insights. George Bush's insight is that America must make war in Iraq and, as our social networks decay, reduce taxes for the rich. The beauty of insights, however, is that the Creator has set within each of us a bit of elemental wisdom harmonizing with the whole manner in which the Universe is structured. This is why it's necessary for us to stay sensitized to nature's paradigms -- the Nature- Bible. Above, when you read that the feelings of animals are pure and intense, that we must keep learning and to serve others, and that we are all fighting our own mighty battles, didn't the elemental bit of wisdom inside you glow and sing a soft song, letting you know that what was said was true? In contrast, when false doctrines are expressed -- even if one's unrestrained hungers and addictions require paying lip-service to them -- one feels a shameful turning-away inside. The elemental bit of wisdom inside each of us dampens in the presence of dishonesty and ignorance, and we can feel that. With communications so easy nowadays, we can share our insights quicker and easier than ever before. The elemental bit of wisdom inside each of us now connects along threads of mutual recognition in cyberspace and elsewhere with other elemental bits of wisdom crystallizing in amazing places worldwide, causing a whole new protective fabric of social consciousness to coalesce and evolve. Maybe, after all, we shall be able to stop ourselves from destroying Life on Earth. ***** FOCUSING With so many things in nature going on right now, my mind tends toward diffusion. For example, my thoughts are snared by the fluty song of the Orchard Oriole, and then come reflections on how this bird has just arrived from tropical America, and then I remember all the habitat destruction there and here, and then the question arises as to who will eat the bugs who eat the plants around me now, if not the Orchard Oriole, and what that will mean for these forests and fields... And there are dozens of such birdsongs and other things snaring the mind all the time, hundreds of meditations and questions associated with each, and thousands of potential scenarios... Something tells me it's not good to let the mind think diffusedly all the time, or even most of the time, so regularly I yank my mind out of that mode, and do focusing exercises. For example, this morning with my binoculars I walked around focusing my lenses on individual things, just looking at them for a long time, as if I were standing before a piece of art on a museum wall, and I kept looking until I was satisfied that it had seen something important there. I focused on a certain freshly emerged green oak leaf with sunlight rampaging through it. I don't believe there has ever been a design in all of Paris more expressive and perfect than the curl of that leaf just as it was during that particular moment of sunlit perfection. I focused on a feather with dew on it. I can't recall any painted picture in any museum anywhere evoking such pathos as that wrecked, wet feather. For long moments I beheld a yellow oxalis blossom all surrounded by green grass, and I saw -- really saw, saw as well as my mind could see at that time -- the grain in a weathered fence plank, and a cluster of pebbles in the sand at the creek's edge. ***** THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS This week's cicada nostalgia also reminded me of how I discovered some of the heretical thought patterns and belief systems that now make me who I am. Many of those ideas were accidentally smuggled to me in the form of discarded paperbacks of the world's classic literature. These were brought to me by my mother when each day she returned from working long hours in the book-selling drugstore of the next town. Usually the paperbacks had their covers ripped off because when a book was damaged the clerk could do with it what she wanted and no one was charged... Somewhere among those classics I was introduced to the Four Noble Truths discovered by the Buddha around 500 BC. They are: • # that man's existence is inseparable from sorrow • # that the cause of suffering is craving • # that peace is attained by extinguishing craving • # that this liberation may be brought about by following the Eight-fold Path: o 1: right attention to one's understanding o 2: right attention to one's intentions o 3: right attention to one's speech o 4: right attention to one's actions o 5: right livelihood o 6: right effort o 7: right mindfulness o 8: right concentration (through sitting yoga) At times in my life I have practiced several kinds of yoga and meditation, same as I have studied all the major religions. Today I still practice certain yoga and meditation techniques, but I've laid aside all the religions, and even the Four Noble Truths have come to seem flawed. I can no more identify with "Man's existence is inseparable from sorrow" than with "Man is born in sin." Also, I suspect any creed based on "right" anything. However, for me, "peace is attained by extinguishing craving" comes close to hitting the mark. This week the forest has been profoundly deep and dark, and with that worrisome blackish tinge like a minor chord being struck during a vigorous melody in C, I have walked the fields sometimes with a brooding mind. However, it has been a great pleasure deciding to rededicate myself to certain aspects of the Four Noble Truths. This week, memories and meditations have been like bright wildflowers blossoming out of season, just when they were needed. ***** FROG EGGS & RELIGIONS One morning this week while listening to Public Radio I wandered over to the little pond beside the barn to check on the frog eggs mentioned earlier. While admiring them and cogitating in the manner outlined above, the radio reported that officials in Georgia sought to remove the word "evolution" from that state's school curricula. That juxtaposition of my frog-egg reverie with the news from Georgia cast me into a certain combative mood. How dare they seek to rob me of one of the most important words I use when cataloguing the wonders I ascribe to the Creator. This news from Georgia got me to thinking this: Maybe now is as good a time as any to clearly and concisely explain why I am so anti-religious -- why I am a hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool PAGAN. It is precisely because I regard all religions as artificial, unnecessary barriers between people and the higher states of spirituality to which they naturally aspire. We look into the heavens, experience love, or contemplate frog eggs, and we become aware that something, somewhere, has created these marvelous things and circumstances, and that this Creator and the creation itself are worthy of adoration. Human spirituality begins like this and should continue through our lives in the same vein, perpetually growing and maturing. The highest calling of every community should be to nurture its citizens' quests for spirituality, to inspire them toward ever-more exquisite sensitivities and insights, and to encourage them to love, respect and protect that tiny part of the creation into which we all have been born. Instead, religions divert the energies of our innate spirituality-seeking urges into the practicing of mindless ceremonies and rituals having little or nothing to do with the majesty and meanings of the universe. Religions insist that we must disbelieve the evidences of our own minds and hearts, and submit to primitive scriptures interpreted and transmogrified by untold generations of clerics who, history reports, all too often have hustled to promote their own bureaucratic and political agendas, and continue to do so today. In my opinion, anyone wishing to "get right with God" should begin with cleansing from his or her own life all traces of religion. And the first step in doing that is to get straight in one's mind what is religion (dogma in scriptures), what is spirituality (one's personal relationship with the Creator and the creation), and what is love (intense empathy and well-meaning). You do not need to believe in someone else's curious dogma in order to be spiritual, or to love your neighbor and do good works. Finally, why is a diatribe like this appropriate for a naturalist's newsletter? It is because this newsletter springs from my passion for all that is natural -- the Creator's Earthly creation. Natural things on our planet are now being destroyed at a rate greater than at any other time in the history of the Earth. That destruction is being committed at an ever-increasing rate by human societies such as our own that are more and more rationalizing and excusing their excesses in terms of religious doctrine. ***** FROST AND GREEN TOMATOES On Monday, knowing that the freeze that night would kill the tomato vines, I went around collecting green tomatoes, to store until they ripened. It seemed easiest to pull up each plant by the roots, then hold the vine before me as I plucked the tomatoes, so this I did. However, it felt funny. I felt queasy because all summer I'd babied those vines, and the vines had been good to me. I'd eaten from them, watched Green Anoles and Fence Lizards stalk quarry among them, I'd savored the architecture of their blossom anatomy and watched individual flowers gradually develop into perfect fruits. Yet now I broke roots and stems, plundered half-grown fruits, and tossed the mangled plants onto the ground to be forgotten. The uneasy feeling haunted me all day, and I wondered why. Something here touched a deep chord within me. Something toyed with my subconscious. After a couple of days I understood. The act of uprooting treasured tomato vines before the first big frost was nothing less than a metaphor for how I have conducted my own life at many critical junctures. Again and again in this life I have come to understand something that had been hidden to me before, and then I have quickly and irretrievably uprooted treasured, even sacred and certainly society-encouraged notions and beliefs, I have abandoned comfortable and safe routines, and at those times I have left much in my wake to molder as it would. When I had those pitiful tomato vines in my hands, prematurely ripping off their long-nurtured fruits, it was exactly like the day in the mid 60s when I became a vegetarian, like the day in the mid 70s when I stopped being a botanist at the Missouri Botanical Garden, never again to lead a standard life. It was like so many times I have behaved absolutely rationally, and perfectly within the letter of the unspoken contract between the world and myself, and accomplished a change that all too often was accompanied by pain on many levels. These words you are reading right now, and my being where I am and what I am, are part of the most recently planted, modest little tomato plant just poking from the soil, the latest seedling of many that have vined and fruited, and been pulled up before it faded naturally. We'll just see what happens to this one as my own Big Frost draws nearer and nearer. ***** GASOLINE MAKES PISTONS MOVE During Buck's visit he told me a story about his father, and when Buck does that he's going a long way back because Buck is well into his 80s. His story went something like this: "When my father was teaching me how the engine that ran the sawmill worked he opened up the engine and showed me where the pistons were. He explained that gas fumes exploding above the pistons made those pistons go up and down, and the pistons were connected to a crankshaft in a way that made the crankshaft turn, and the turning of the crankshaft is what moved the blades that cut the lumber. And then he said, 'When gas fumes are being used up there above the pistons, you make sure that back there at the blades there's lumber being cut.'" In other words, don't waste the gasoline. I remember those kinds of notions being expressed by my people when I was a kid in rural Kentucky. Back then I thought of such sentiments as hillbilly talk, for I had seen that people in movies and on TV didn't say that kind of thing. Today, however, I'm of the opinion that such thinking suggests a much more sophisticated and realistic assessment of what has value in this world and how humans should behave, than the general principles currently guiding our culture. Why is this matter relevant to a naturalist's newsletter? It is because I love living things and there is nothing more threatening to Life on Earth than the behavior of people who would ridicule the kind of close accounting favored by Buck's father. In my opinion, when someone jumps into a car and drives someplace just to buy a hamburger, that is the moral equivalent of environmental terrorism. When people set their air conditioners at too cold a level and claim it's OK because they're working hard and paying for the electricity, it is a display of profound ignorance with regard to the environmental costs in producing and delivering that electricity, and they are showing how uncaring they are for those who will come later and have to pay the real costs. When voters allow themselves to be seduced by political demagogues, especially war-making ones, it is a rebuke to the Creator who endowed us with brains that when used enable us to see through such people. How I long for the days when average folks with rough hands and honest smiles, and often with very little formal education, were endowed not only with the wisdom to speak in favor of frugality, self discipline, simplicity and country-style wholesomeness, but also the gumption to conduct their lives according to those sustainable principles. ***** GRANDMA'S BLACKBERRIES I wrote to my Grandma Taylor in Calhoun, Kentucky that blackberry thickets here were just white with blossoms, and her reply was sad. She said she missed seeing blackberry thickets the way they used to be, missed seeing the pretty blossoms and going gathering the purple-staining berries. It's more than that Grandma is in her 90s and can't negotiate the fields. The problem is that in my ancestral part of Kentucky small farms with hedgerows that used to separate fields have been absorbed into very large farm businesses, and the new corporate farmers are not the rabbit-hunting type so they just don't care that when they bulldoze the old field boundaries they wipe out habitat, which is another name for blackberry thickets. The fact is that my part of Kentucky has gotten cleaned up, neatened, sprayed to death, channelized and leveed, paved over, and generally ticky-tack- sprawled to death in the name of Wal-Mart and the right of people to be fat, have hypertension and buy big- screen TVs. I can visualize the white-flowered blackberries in Grandma's fading memory, for they survive in full glory here with me now, healthy and spectacular at this very moment out in the field between here and the Hunters' Camp as I type these words. If you could see Laurel Hill Plantation from the air, you'd see a large rectangle of forest surrounded on three sides by encroaching fields, pastures and suburban sprawl reaching out from Natchez 12 miles to the north. (St. Catherine Wildlife Refuge keeps swamp forest on the western boundary.) And it's funny to think why this island exists, why I'm able to live the life I have here with blackberries flowering just spitting distance away. At the root of the reason is slavery, which enabled the plantation's first owner to prosper and pass on his property to many generations. And the reason now is that selling hunting rights is very important to the current plantation's owner, and my blackberry thicket makes fine deer browse and cover, and that makes the hunters happy, who pay to hunt here. I owe my presence here, then -- and my nights of good sleep, my accomplishments on the Internet, my current writings, this Newsletter and the friends I've met because of it -- to the enslavement of Black folks, and to hunting. As I have written before, The Creator has a fine sense of humor. ***** GRANDMA TAYLOR Those of you who have been with me for years know that when I lived out of state and made my yearly visits to Kentucky it was to see and stay with my Grandma Taylor in Calhoun, in western Kentucky. Last Sunday morning Grandma died. Though that little corner of Kentucky is thickly populated with uncles, aunts and cousins, Grandma was my last close relative. It's only recently that I began realizing one way Grandma contributed to my being the kind of person I have become. Her contribution escaped me for a long time because Grandma and I disagreed on some important points, and it was easy to focus on our differences. Grandma was hard-core Southern Baptist, so our opinions on race, the nature of the Creator and some other things conflicted. We never fought, but we have sat at the table with our jaws set as if we were biting nails. But, the way I figure it, anyone born in 1911, who started a family during The Depression and raised seven children -- the last two mostly by herself -- can be excused for not believing as I do. She clearly never had the time or resources to develop a worldview based on the implications of the size and complexity of the Universe, of the behavior of subatomic particles, of organic evolution, and the genetic heritage and history of humans. In fact, when I think about it, Grandma accomplished precisely what I aspire to do. That is, she absorbed what information and insight she could during the times during which she lived, in the community in which she found herself, and then she lived according to the principles she recognized. Well, I try to do the same thing. It's just that I have access to different information and I define my community differently. Grandma and I have always agreed that if you say you believe in something, you are obliged to live accordingly. Under difficult conditions, Grandma fought her way into a hard-headed religiosity swinging the dual clubs of Bible verses and Billy-Graham pronouncements pretty much as I have bashed my way toward a homebrew spirituality wielding the cudgels of science and natural paradigms. In a way, then -- different as we have been -- Grandma and I are essentially the same stuff, the same melodies the Creator has played in different keys. It's more than even that. My experience with Grandma has made it easier for me to see and believe the thing that Nature is always saying through Her passion for diversity: That even opposites can enrich one another, and be worth caring about. ***** GRAPE ETHICS On National Public Radio they are presenting a series of segments on the subject of ethics. On Tuesday they explored the question of how unethical it would be -- if at all -- to steal a single grape in a supermarket. Some people insisted that it wasn't unethical at all while most took ambiguous positions saying that it depended on the circumstances. Only the professional ethicist asserted that taking even one grape was unethical. He further explained that in classical times people based their ethics on what was good or bad for society while today the ever-more-dominant paradigm is "It's OK if I don't get caught." In my opinion, an eco-ethical equivalent of the pilfering of a grape is the leaving on of lights when they are not needed. That's because we all understand the following connections: Burning lightbulb --> power plant --> burning coal or oil, or nuclear power --> pollution or radiation --> death of plants and animals. The ethicist on National Public Radio made an elegant point: He said that in classical times people cared about daily ethics not because they hoped to gain material reward from it, but because they felt that by being ethical, even in tiny, grape-stealing ways, it made them and their society stronger. In this same week when it was announced that Los Angeles's air quality is worsening for the first time in many years, and our president nixed higher fuel-use standards for cars, and continues to encourage suburbanites to buy gas-guzzling SUVs, how refreshing to have someone remind us that the ethical use of a single grape (or a single lightbulb) can have far- reaching consequences for both society and individuals. ***** GREEN TO MAKE THE HEAD SWIM All around my little trailer too-close-together Sweetgum saplings flaunt their new leaves right at eye level. Their profound greenness when the sun shines through them just makes the head swim. Above, the big Pecan trees are just beginning to put on leaves, so by looking up one can see blue and gray, but throughout the normal day I feel like a fish in an algae-filled aquarium left in the sun. The fish analogy is fitting because I feel as I'm breathing this greenness, swimming and dreaming in it, absorbing it and having it flow through my veins. The other morning I was staring into this three- dimensional super-greenness while listening on the radio about the upcoming Shuttle lift-off, and about the project in store for it upon reaching the orbiting International Space Station. The juxtaposition of this green-staring and radio listening conjured a flash of insight, or maybe even a vision. My fleeting, radio-listening "vision" was this: The Sweetgum saplings around me right now are doing exactly what NASA is doing with the orbiting Space Station. Both the Sweetgums and the Space Station are putting out their solar panels to capture energy needed to function and stay alive. For a split second I could see my Sweetgums as just as vulnerable and desperate for energy as the people in the Space Station, and I could see so clearly that once all romance is swept away, the basics are the same everywhere. Both the Sweetgum saplings around me and NASA are confirming and celebrating a fundamental formula around which Earth life has crystallized. That formula is this: the sun --> capture of sunlight energy --> that energy used to grow and evolve *** HOMOSEXUALITY IN NATURE The other day one of my favorite local folks dropped by to share some of his delicious blueberries, and to chat for a bit. This time his remark that got me going was that I knew how progressive he was on matters BUT, when it came to gay marriages, he just couldn't take it, and surely nature doesn't put up with things such as that. My first impulse was to not even react, for to do so would have been to walk into the trap set by the Bush Administration, the goal of which is to stir up fear and hatred among a certain sector of the electorate, to distract them from the fact that they are being asked to vote against their own economic interests. However, I couldn't ignore my friend's assertion that nature doesn't put up with such things as homosexuality. For, nothing is more experimental and broad-minded than Mother Nature. When you look at the Creation you clearly see that the Creator's plan is to create diversity at all levels of reality, and to evolve that diversity to ever higher levels of sophistication -- whether it's forming galaxies from hydrogen gas, or evolving Life on Earth. Moreover, just about any strategy furthering those blossomings is acceptable. Among plants, sometimes flowers possess both male and female sex organs, sometimes they are unisexual and on different plants, sometimes unisexual and on the same plants, sometimes flowers are designed so they can't self-pollinate, other times they have to pollinate themselves, and some plants skip the sex scene altogether by reproducing vegetatively. Among animals we find everything from the male seahorse who carries the eggs, hatches them and takes care of the young, to the "polyandrous" Spotted Sandpiper whose females may lay up to four nests in a season, each equipped with a different male incubating the eggs. Of course the common earthworm is both male and female, and some snails sometimes mate with themselves, producing offspring. The higher up the evolutionary scale you go, the kinkier it all gets. Among communities of mice and other mammals, when population density reaches a certain high level where diseases and famine threaten, not only does homosexual behavior appear but also parents begin killing their own offspring. It's always the case that the Creator chooses the welfare of the community over that of the individual. If you'd like to review online notes of a series of university lectures dealing with parent-offspring conflict, including infanticide and the effects of high population densities on higher mammals, go to http://www-personal.umich.edu/~phyl/weektwelve.html If you have access to a science library or can use a search engine artfully, references to technical, academic papers detailing homosexual behaviors in a wide variety of primates, from langurs to orangutans to pit-tailed macaques can be accessed at www.androphile.org/preview/Library/Articles/Werner/Werner20.24.htm Among human populations, homosexuality occurs at a certain rate in all populations. Thus homosexuality is natural and inevitable. Data suggests that homosexuality may be at least partly genetically determined. A semi-technical paper at the University of Texas with the title "Biological Correlates of being Gay - Biological Determinism?" is available at www.utexas.edu/courses/bio301d/Topics/Gay/Text.html In short, it's simply wrong to say that homosexual behavior is never natural. Why would the Creator create this state of affairs among humans? I don't know, but my own experience with human gays is that, on the average, they are more sensitive, insightful and caring than the rest of us, so maybe that's enough of an answer right there. With regard to the morality of it all, I would say that at this time when so many young people desperately need love and care, and so many gay couples want to provide stable family structures for providing that love and care, the Bush doctrine of institutionalizing laws to prevent gay couples from enjoying the kind of legal and social support non-gay families already have, is immoral. Moreover, since the Creator has made it so that among higher mammals homosexual behavior increases in populations under stress, and humanity right now, because of overpopulation and inequitable distribution of resources, is under enormous stress, the phenomenon of gays suddenly stepping forth to demand their right to establish stable family units while not themselves contributing to even greater overpopulation, can be seen to be not only natural but also, literally, a godsend. ***** HONEST IGNORANCE This morning as the eastern horizon just began to pale I stepped from the trailer and heard what sounded like heavy raindrops pelting the satellite-dish solar cooker. It wasn't raining anyplace else so I walked over and saw that large, dark beetles were plummeting from the sky and bouncing off the shiny aluminum dish onto the ground. Apparently they were attracted by the aluminum's brightness. The beetles were a species of Shining Leaf-Chafer of the Scarab Beetle Family, closely related to Japanese Beetles. What mysterious urgency caused this hoard of never- before-noticed beetle species to pick now to fly skyward, and prove vulnerable to the radiance of my satellite-dish solar cooker? I have caught part of a strand of events leading from one mystery to another, and I can hardly even guess at causes or affects. In fact, these days with so many extraordinary events blossoming all around me, I would say that after "awe," the sensation I am most experiencing is that of feeling ignorant. My lack of knowledge about the most ordinary and near-at-hand phenomena is absolutely appalling. I brush away a few leaves on the forest floor and what I see there fills me with a sense of shame for my stupidity. And yet, there is a certain charm in honest addleheadedness. For, the people I most admire assure me that they feel even more astonished about things and more simple-minded than I. Mostly I am speaking of people who are scientists and good teachers, or just regular folks who constantly, like me and my Sunday- morning beetles, bounce into things and fall back looking and feeling dumb. ***** HONEYBEE STING After I jog each morning I hose myself off but I keep sweating as I prepare breakfast at my campfire, as indicated by the honeybees who settle on my back, arms and legs as I work. I just ignore them and try to avoid annoying them. But Wednesday one got between my legs and when I took a step a bee thought she was under attack and I got stung. When a honeybee stings you the first thing you should do is to see if the singer has come off, for, if it has, the poison sac will remain atop the stinger pumping poison into your skin long after the bee has gone. Remove the stinger as fast as possible. A sad thing about the bee losing its stinger is that the bee then dies within a few hours. By stinging you, the bee is committing suicide. Therefore, from the bee's point of view, the question of whether the stinging must take place is a critical one. Stinging is not done lightly. A lot of thinking has been done about how bees could have evolved so that individuals are programmed to give up their lives for the community's sake. To understand the answer you have to think in terms of the bee community's genetic heritage being carried by the queen, not the workers. In this light, we are almost struck with a sense of injustice when we see how expendable the workers' lives are. There's nothing democratic or even-handed here. The workers are created simply to work for the community, to sting when there's a need, and then to die. Some serious thinkers have proposed that among such socialized insects as bees, the "individual" should be better thought of as the diffuse community of bees, not the individual bees we see at our flowers. In this concept the queen is seen as being like a gland secreting hormones and the workers are like corpuscles in the human circulatory system roaming about doing whatever the queen's hormones dictate. Is there really a rule in nature that a body has to be in one place -- that hormones must be transported in veins instead of on wings and six legs? We have examples of distinct species merging to form completely new life forms (fungi and algae merging to form lichens), so why can't the opposite be true, one thing manifesting itself as a community? For me these insights are important to consider because part of the bedrock of my belief system is that I regard human beings as being no more than highly specialized mammals. In doing so I'm not at all belittling humans, but rather regarding other animals as much more complex, self-aware and beautiful than most people admit. Therefore, if what's spiritually important in me is my "sense of identity," my "consciousness," or my "soul," in the diffuse bee- individual to whom I with great pride claim biological relationship, just where is the "sense of identity," the "consciousness," or "the soul?" Already it's known that consciousness or sense-of- identity doesn't reside in any particular cell or group of cells, or nerve or organ. Even people who lose half of their brain continue thinking and functioning as regular humans, perhaps showing only a certain "flatness" in their personalities. This thing we think of as our consciousness -- our selves -- appears to just happen, maybe as a natural consequence of being embedded inside a lot of complex electrochemical circuitry. If that's the case with bees, then how pretty it is to think of the bee soul as being focused in the hive, but diffusing outward into communities of flowers in the fields. Of course once you start thinking in this direction, then you come face to face with Gaia -- the Earth- Ecosystem-self-awareness-complex. In other words, maybe the Earth does feel, and react, like a single living organism. Certainly a lot of what happens appears to support that idea. For example, ecosystem- destroying humans on an overpopulated Earth are analogous to germs infecting a human body. As the human body reacts to disease by producing antibodies to control the germ population, Gaia's body does the same thing as diseases, famines and wars appear among us humans. And, beyond Gaia, the Universal self-aware complex... So, this was the train of thought blossoming from my bee-sting. How wonderful to be a thinking human animal. ***** HORSE MANURE & BUCK'S TRUCK On Tuesday I hiked upslope to my friend Buck's house where we'd agreed to meet and use his truck to haul horse manure from a neighbor's place to our garden. I hadn't seen Buck since last October but it didn't surprise me that when we met he just sort of nodded, didn't gush all over me, or even offer to shake my hand. Buck is an old fellow who has worked hard all his life and accomplished a good deal. He sees things with a level eye and doesn't care much more about social graces and clean work-britches than I do. When I was a farm kid in Kentucky back in the 50s my impression was that you only shook hands with preachers and insurance salesmen. All other people you looked in the eye and you could see what they thought of you, and you knew they could see what you thought of them, so what was needed beyond that? Hand shaking was superfluous city- stuff, and if we'd known about the kind of embracing and face kissing some people do nowadays we would have regarded it as perverse. Buck's truck was a 1928 Model AA Ford. You could start it with a hand crank if the battery got low. When we were climbing back upslope with our manure the truck stopped and I thought we were out of gas because the gauge registered zero. However, Buck rocked the engine and saw the gas-needle bob up and down, so he figured if there was enough gas for the float inside the tank to bob up and down we weren't out. He blew on the fuel line to unclog whatever he suspected to be stuck there, and then the truck started with no problems. The admirable thing about the old Ford is that it's so simple that its problems can be diagnosed and usually they can be fixed without a lot of fuss. Using such an unpretentious vehicle, you're more in control of your life. This same dynamic functions at all levels of living. The more simple your life and the more self- sufficient you are, the less vulnerable you are to a host of potential aggravations and dangers. When I see new cars in which you can't even open the windows by turning a handle, I just want to spit. How pretty it was to haul manure with my friend Buck. What a noble thing we accomplished that day. With what savoir faire Buck blew on the fuel line, and with what grace we pulled the whole thing off! ***** HOT, BREEZY AFTERNOON THOUGHTS Sometimes an afternoon's heavy glare and dry heat gets to you and you just have to lie down. However, you never nap for long. By early afternoon the wind has grown beyond being just a friendly, cooling breeze. Always, just as you are about to doze off, it blows over a potted plant, a heavy wooden window-shutter comes undone and crashes against a wall, or a gust simply blows through the room so rudely that you have to get up and look around. On such drowsy afternoons when the wind keeps you awake, you feel that the whole rest of the world must be quietly at siesta, somehow more at ease with the wind than you. You look around, the palm trees gyrate, dust swirls through the bougainvillea gate, iguanas keep their heads low atop the ruin walls, and you think, think, think... This week on such afternoons I've been thinking about an insight that has grown in me over the years. Of course I can't be sure that I'm seeing things clearly. I only know that the insight feels harmonious with how I perceive Nature to be. Certainly I'm not the first to come up with the thought. However, I did come to it in my own way. I feel a responsibility to share the insight, for it provides a possible answer to a kind of question I have heard many ask in desperation. Here is one form of that question: "Why do innocent, beautiful people suffer and die, sometimes horribly?" The insight is very simple, yet it is based on an assumption not very popular or understandable in our culture. In fact, the assumption is almost the opposite of what our culture imagines. Here it is: When a human or any living thing is born, it is not a matter of something unique arising from nothingness. Rather, everything is one to begin with, just that now there's another ephemeral opaqueness or maybe a tiny hole in the Great Unity's fabric. From the Unity's perspective, this opaqueness or hole is characterized by its lack of information, its lack of understanding, and it lack of senses arrayed so that the fabric and design of The Whole can be perceived, understood, and loved. Why does the Universal Creative Force bother causing uninformed, clumsily equipped beings to arise and evolve? I think it may be so that the Universal Creative Force can examine and know Herself by way of what we living things see and feel. We are not only words She uses in Her poetry, tones in Her music, but also we are nerve endings with which She experiences Her own being and Her own evolution. We must be made simple and crude, and made so that we must die before we understand much, else the opium of enlightenment would blunt our pains and end our fears, and the Universal Creative Force's nervous system would be anesthetized. When the innocent child dies of leukemia and everyone hurts in so many ways, then the Universal Creative Force feels through our pain the value and beauty of that child. The sharper our pain -- as well as the greater our joy over other things -- the more exquisite is the Creator's sense of self. Many insights can blossom from believing this. One important to me is that surely there's no greater responsibility for each of us living things than to perpetually struggle to sharpen our own senses, sensibilities and understandings, so that we may hurt more, feel greater joy... so that the Universal Creative Force may do the same. ***** HOT WATER & CHINESE The next morning, Saturday, at the same time as on Friday morning, I was awakened by a nearby flash of lightening and subsequent bone-jarring thunder. Maybe the arrival of the geese a day before the cold-front was no coincidence. All day Saturday it stormed and rained here, dumping over 3 inches (8 cm) of rain on us, in addition to the inch of rain the day before. Once I'd managed to prepare my campfire breakfast during the deluge, I found the storm much to my liking. For, it provided an unexpected quiet period for me. Most people seem to think that here in my little camp I spend a lot of time "hanging loose," just goofing off. In reality, each day I spend mornings working in the gardens and nearly all the rest of the time developing my Internet projects. I suspect that my days are at least as structured and intense as are the days of those of you with regular jobs. This is because I believe in what I am doing, and feel an urgent need to press on exploring the potentials of this life, especially now that it is clear that human society on Earth will never be the same as it was before. So, Saturday morning I couldn't garden and there was too much lightening to have my computer on. Therefore I did what I often do in such enforced rest periods: I fixed a big mug of hot water, and studied Chinese. People in our culture underestimate the pleasure in drinking simple hot water, especially steamy, pure rainwater. During my recent travels I as struck by how people often habitually sipped liquids -- coffee, sodas, Strawberry-Kiwi herbal tea, beer, whatever. To my mind, these people focused so exclusively on titillating their taste buds that they overlooked the more fundamental pleasure of simply refreshing the body with pure water. Tickling taste buds and gratifying the body with exactly what it needs are unequal pleasures. The one, though certainly having its place, is superficial, fleeting, and often damaging to the body or even addictive. The other is a natural and necessary maintenance, and when the water is hot on a chilly, stormy day its drinking satisfies in a deeply, perhaps atavistic, manner. Drinking hot water on such days has calmed the spirits of a million generations of our ancestors in their caves and dark lodges. Drinking hot water can be a kind of communion with them, and with the spirit of simple survival in a hostile world. I also find studying Chinese to be a deeply satisfying experience. I am afraid that people nowadays have forgotten that learning, by itself, can be gratifying. So, as rain tapped on my roof and I drank steaming hot water from my mug in this drenched little corner of the forest I wandered into the psychology of Chinese people as manifested by how their written language has evolved. The Chinese character for "good" consists of the symbol for "woman" next to the symbol for "child." How can you but be impressed by a culture that expresses itself in such a simple but profound manner? And what pleasure it is for the mind to be reminded on such a morning as Saturday's that the Chinese character for "fragrant" is nothing less than the symbol for "grain," such as wheat, set with the symbol for "sun." Thus -- the sun warming a field of wheat produces a fragrance. The glow caused by these insights harmonizes beautifully with the glow brought by steaming water on a rainy morning. ***** "HOW PRETTY HE WAS... " My cousin Miles Carroll writes "This week I found a crippled finch. I put him on top of my shed and watched him. By the afternoon he was dead, and I sure hated to see him go after holding him and seeing how pretty he was." That reminds me of once when I had access to a microscope and I spent a whole morning gazing into a single drop of pond water. I watched one-celled Amoebas and Paramecia migrating majestically through transparent, sunlight-charged water. I watched Hydras somersaulting across the slide surface, and there were wiggling green Euglenas with whiplike tails, and long strands of Spirogyra alga inside which strands of chloroplasts elegantly spiraled. At the end of the session I straightened up my creaky spine, withdrew the slide from beneath the microscope and... then what? I had become an admirer of the myriad little beings in that drop of water. Could I just wipe the slide on my sleeve and ignore the consequent genocide? I ended up carrying the droplet back to the pond from which it came, the theory being that my heart having been opened to these little beings counted for something. When I read Miles's letter I also remembered a quotation from a book by Charles de Lint: "... he had understood, better than anyone ... the beauty that grew out of the simple knowledge that everything, no matter how small or large it might be, was a perfect example of what it was." How wonderful it would be if every day each of us could open our hearts to at least one newly met thing. ***** HURRICANE KATRINA I've spent each of my last ten or so summers in the woods outside Natchez, Mississippi. If I had stayed there this summer today's Newsletter wouldn't have been issued, for there'd be no electricity to power the computer and maybe no phone. My heart goes out to everyone whose lives were upset by Hurricane Katrina, and I know that a goodly number of Newsletter readers find themselves in that group. I think that this is a good time in which to reflect on that feature of human nature which made this disaster worse than it had to be. This is an important subject because the same tendencies are directing us all toward even greater disasters. When New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Sieur de Bienville, engineers on the scene said from the very beginning that it was a bad location. It was a classic case of science being overruled by politics and big business. Today science points to water tables already too low in places where politicians encourage more growth and big business builds new homes. Science shows that wetlands are vital to Earth's Web of Life, but politicians and big business drain swamps and pave them over. Science says that global warming will cause catastrophic consequences for the entire Earth, but the President says that dealing with it would be bad for American business. At some point we must begin respecting the fact that when it comes to something as important as the continuation of Life on Earth, the ephemeral concerns of politics and big business should not be allowed to trump the hard-won, eternal facts of science. The thinking process must not stop there, however. The next insight to face is this: Politicians and big business are doing no more than providing the goods and services demanded by the general public. At the root of the current disaster, and most of the catastrophes soon to beset us, lies undisciplined consumerism by the great majority of US, the people. It is WE who require that the holy facts of science be denied in order for politicians and big business to accommodate the demands of our own intemperate appetites. If any one of us is asking what we can do to turn things around -- even if we believe that our efforts will be futile -- surely the best answer is for each of us to exercise more self discipline, deny our appetites at least a little, simplify our lives, become more self sufficient, and sensitize ourselves to the spiritual aspect of being a biological being profoundly enmeshed in and depending on a gorgeous Earthly ecosystem. ***** HYPOGLYCEMIA & SPIDERS My second Garden Spider has moved yet again, this time more into the tall grass and shrubs between my trailer and open-walled outhouse. I know it's the same spider because she has always made a web much larger and more perfect than usual, though she herself is smaller than normal. It's worth thinking about the fact that I can know this spider, for many would say that such small creatures have no identities -- they are all the same. This reminds me of an experiment I read about long ago. Different chemicals were given to a spider to see how each chemical would affect the spider's web. Most striking was how the spider given marijuana's active ingredient produced a sloppy web with many incorrect connections and holes. On the other hand, when the spider was given the active ingredient in LSD, the web produced was perfect, as if the chemical had increased the spider's power of concentration. It makes one wonder how much our own realities are affected by whatever chemicals or hormones happen to be flowing in our veins at the moment. Could just the right knock to my head or a change in my diet convert me from a happy hermit to a nervous land-developer overnight? I wonder about these things a lot, especially because I am hypoglycemic. If I happen to stoop for a while and then stand up, things go black and I'm lucky if I can keep standing. Then as blood sugar slowly returns to my brain I become able to take a few steps, though I seem to see things through a tunnel. Finally I return to full consciousness. I think that this happens to everyone, but with me it is a daily, sometimes hourly event. Thing is, during those few seconds when I'm able to walk but see things as if through a tunnel, I think I'm fully recovered, and actually feel happy that once again I can concentrate so clearly on the ground before me and walk with such self assurance. It's only moments later when I'm really normal that I remember back to my tunnel-walking moments just a second or two earlier and I realize that as I tunnel-walked my thoughts and insights had been profoundly limited. In other words, several times a day I remind myself that the very dumb can never know just how dumb they are. I am also struck that during the first few moments of "being myself," I can still recall exactly how it was to be "tunnel walking," and I am appalled at how self- centered and narrow the tunnel-walking headset was. Also, during those first moments of "becoming myself" there's a rushing feeling -- it's as if my soul were being instantaneously derived from the bright melodies in a lush, gorgeous symphony. The whole process is like passing from being a Republican to a Democrat to a member of the Green Party. By the same token, how can I know that when I'm "normal" there isn't an even more lucid state beyond that, one in which I could "be myself" if I only had the brain to go there? In fact, because of very brief moments of insight accomplished during moments of meditation, I am sure that those higher levels of enlightenment do exist. Recollections of insights understood during those brief moments of enlightenment have a little to do with why I am now a hermit in the woods. However, now in my "normal" state, I am really too dumb to explain to you clearly how my reasoning works ***** IF THERE WERE AN EINSTEIN TADPOLE In his essay "Religion and Science," Einstein considers man's religions from an evolutionary perspective. He notes that primitive religions concern themselves with gods who manifest themselves in more or less understandable forms (as plants, animals, rocks, symbols, humans), and their main job is to grant favors and protection. A later-emerging type of religion conceived of there being a single "God of Providence" ("providing god") rather like a celestially based, stern but loving patriarch in a large family. Our current major religions, including Christianity, are of this kind. Finally, there's what Einstein calls the "cosmic religious feeling," which conceives of a universality (which I would think of "the Creator") to which it is pointless to pray for favors, but which is so majestic and awe-inspiring that by reflecting upon it one is "filled with the highest kind of religious feeling," as Einstein writes. If my dishpan tadpoles were somehow to begin feeling a need for religion, I wonder what gods they would come up with? I suppose that some might begin worshiping certain alga cells some one of them had espied glowing a certain way suspended in the water in a beam of sunlight, or maybe they would worship their own reflections in the dishpan's shiny aluminum. The more sophisticated tadpoles might sometimes catch a glimpse of me with my magnification glass looking down at them -- this huge eye-in-the-sky, the God of Providence who thumps them cornbread -- and they would produce tadpole priests and tadpole mullahs and tadpole rabbis who would assiduously and interminably interpret and reinterpret the meanings of every little thing I did. And if there were an Einstein among them, I suppose he would just keep quiet and write in obscure forums, suggesting that it is hardly to be expected that the God of the Cosmos would be at the beck and call of every wiggly little tadpole in a dishpan... though in truth it is quite wonderful for this brief moment in eternity to be granted the perspective of a tadpole in sparkling water temporarily pooled on a random, laughing hermit's warped and moldy, falling-apart, outside table. ***** IGUANA FIGHTS, MONEY & ENLIGHTENMENT During the half hour of watching two iguanas fight I found myself thinking about this question: Why did nature create this species so that males must fight, and subordinate males on the periphery must suffer such frustration? Of course I knew Darwin's answer, for here I was seeing "survival of the fittest" at work -- evolution being powered by "natural selection." The strongest, most dynamic male would get to pass on his genes to the next generation, while the weaker or less adapted males would not. Since I am on record as regarding "Nature as Bible" -- as believing that enlightened human behavior should be harmonious with paradigms observable in nature -- one might assume that witnessing this iguana fight might convince me that human competition of all kinds is good. Since the iguana fight was natural, maybe I should champion the highly competitive free market system, and maybe I should even agree with the claim made by many evangelical Christian groups that material wealth is a reward from the Creator for hustling. There are different levels of interpretation for everything. At one level, two male iguanas fighting over territory and females are indeed like two capitalists competing over resources and customers. On the other hand, fighting iguanas and consequent rewards and punishments are not ends in themselves. They are no more than the means by which the evolutionary process fuels itself through natural selection. Evolution is the greater thing here, with greater implications for my philosophy of life, not fighting. Therefore, what is the meaning of evolution? The only way I can set my teeth into that question is to try to identify trends in the examples of evolution I see around me every day. After all these years of reflecting about the matter, I think I can list at least these three important trends of Earthly evolution: • Things generally evolve from simple states to more complex ones • The more highly evolved a system, the less it wastes and the more it recycles • The most highly evolved creations, we humans, have certain traits that less sophisticated creations don't, including the abilities to feel compassion, to recognize beauty and create art, and to think things out and act accordingly instead of always behaving instinctually Viewing my own society from the perspective of these three insights, I find that I must condemn some of its dominant features. For: • It replaces diverse,