REFRESHER COURSE ON WHAT I BELIEVE IN

This month's visa-renewing trip to Texas unfolded as if a guiding hand sought to remind me of why I live and think as I do. The refresher course began right before the trip when my Mérida/Florida friend Paul presented me with Robin Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which I read during the trip and now have finished. I passed on what I felt were that book's most important and beautiful messages in the April 3rd Newsletter.

Basically, the book says that the Creation Stories we tell ourselves profoundly affect us, and that the stories of indigenous Americans better prepare us for living in harmony with Life on Earth than does the Eve-banished-from-Paradise story we with European roots tell ourselves. Kimmerer reminds us that we're free to tell ourselves whatever story we want. Braiding Sweetgrass provided a new perspective seeming to support the decisions I made long ago to detach myself from my culture's dominant religion, and basic assumptions about what our lives are all about.

Camping in the desert instructed me from a different perspective. Ants working in a frenzy and suffering loss of life for tiny crumbs of oatmeal reminded me of this: We should assess proper value to things life can't get along without, such as drinkable water, clean air, protein and enough personal space to keep one's sanity. "One's numbers must be balanced with the availability of life's limiting factors," the ants told me, and then overhead flew a pair of Maroon-fronted Parrots, their calls like raucous laughs despite their being IUCN-listed endangered species. Especially in view of all the city sprawl, habitat destruction and waste of food and other resources I saw during the trip, these desert ants and endangered parrots urged me toward even greater frugality than I've practiced in life so far.

Then on the afternoon of April 6 as I sat in the bus terminal of Saltillo, Coahuila, downloading email, a message from Eric in Mérida drifted in, telling me of a good source of information on the life and teachings of Baruch or Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). Eric's mail brought to mind the pleasure I'd felt back during college upon discovering Spinoza. Already then, in the late 1960s, I decided that no one could ever do a better job articulating a view of life and the Universe that made as much sense as Spinoza. For me, here are some of the most important of Spinoza's insights:

Finally, as usual when I travel day and night on overly air-conditioned buses filled with coughing neighbors, I got a bad cold. "And don't forget," the cold-virus reminded me, "that no matter how profound and elegant is your philosophy of life, in the end you're still captive in a biological body that thrives, withers or dies in accordance with its own circumstances. You can make the body stronger with exercise and good nutrition, but that won't save you if you inherited lethal genes, or end up in a war zone, or in front of a drunk driver. In short, amid all this philosophizing, keep in perspective just what an insignificant, vulnerable, evanescent entity you are, and if you can't accommodate that insight, then at least try to keep a sense of humor about it."

And so, having been reminded by indigenous-American wisdom to show my thankfulness for what Nature/God gives us, during my trip I ceremoniously pissed on desert clumpgrass, offering up my water and nitrogen. I have coughed, wheezed and sneezed surrounded by mountaintop coyotes howling and yelping beneath an almost-full Moon, I've taken counsel with ants and fossils, indulged my passion for a rainbow of cacti, and I've sat long hours on buses thinking about Spinoza's teachings.

I feel a lot better for having done all this, so maybe I'm on the right track, and maybe having to break my routines by leaving the country every six months isn't such a bad deal after all.