Listening to Trees

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Walking more in the woods these days. Early summer woods, filled with grace, and I try to take in fully, as I have before, the existence of trees.  All my life, the part of my life that joins in the shared reality of modern humans, I have been assured that trees are simply wood. Wood is simply what? Useful. Non-sentient certainly. Western culture views trees entirely as a resource – like corn and oil and cotton.  Even Buddhist lamas are, in the main, uninterested in trees. I think we may be missing something.

As I sit in the spangled green and gold web of light and shadow that forests create, breathing the full resonant silence there, I marvel, really marvel at how much we have forgotten to notice about these remarkable living beings.  Consider dear reader, how trees quietly offer so much to other species – more than any other living creature on earth – without demure or resistance. Just endless provision. What bodhisattva could do more? 

Trees provide humans with wood to burn to keep us warm and cook our food, wood to fashion cups and toys and weapons and sculpture and boats and tools and pencils, and the daily comfort of furniture. Paper is the gift of trees. Paper to tidy our tender bottoms, paper to preserve our stories, our memories our collected wisdom and the vital instructions on what we have learned about how things work  to all the generations to come.  And of course wood provides shelter, and not only to us - trees provide protected nooks or sheltered boughs to house a myriad of small birds, insects, and animals. More anciently, trees offered hiding places, climbing places, protection from enemies and from weather. Trees provide fruit to eat, medicines to heal, shade from the hot sun. They cool the air, and bring rain where deserts would be without them. Indeed it is trees who give the energy of motion and life to every species on this earth - directly or indirectly -  where there would be none without them, for it is they and other plants who weave sunlight into digestible sugar and pass it down to those on the ground. Their buried remnants coalesce into carbon and oil, still holding the energy of  two billion years of sunshine behind us, and now power our cars and electric lights and planes in the sky.  

Staggering isn't it? Without them our planet would not have even a livable atmosphere. This Garden of Eden we have inherited would be a rocky cold desert with a nitrogen atmosphere without trees. Without them there would be no ozone layer to protect us from solar radiation; there would be no greenhouse effect to keep us warm.  

Even now, in this disintegrating, over-crowded, and over-synthetic civilization we have so unwisely made, trees provide balm for the troubled spirit, filling forest space with endlessly varied beauty and an intensity of healing quiet not found in other spaces.  Our species was birthed in trees. And now trees make possible our civilized life.  They have guarded and protected and fed and soothed us.  Trees in a profound and real way are the mother of life on earth, and now they even do their best to filter out our massive overload of carbon from the atmosphere to keep us from killing ourselves.

They do all this for us and other creatures and yet they pollute nothing, harm nothing, destroy nothing – save the rare incidents when a tree, pushed by wind, may fall and, without volition to do so, harm someone in its path. Even in death they offer their bodies to insects, feed a few more bears, house a few more small mammals, and finally enrich the soil. How can it be our culture never thinks of them, thanks them, honors them. Nary a tree deity to be found in any old pantheon.

Yet what amazing beings they are, standing quiet and uncomplaining through the millenia, broken in terrible storms, or radiant with bird song in the warm days of summer, whispering tree secrets to the wind that moves through their branches, reminding us below to listen, listen.  And these beings are alive – sometimes striving upward for as long as 2000 years and more, and now known to send chemical messages of support and nurture to other trees around them.  Why are we SO sure a tree is insentient? Julia Butterfly reported a tremendous increase in sap  production in the tree Luna as she moved about barefoot when sister trees were being felled nearby.  Have we truly bothered to check? They may be sentient.  Or they may not be sentient in the way we understand sentience. But it is definite that they are SOMEthing alive and something to notice and honor; indeed, they are central to all life on this earth. The heartsong of this place.

It wounds something in me when I hear trees referred to so cavalierly as board feet, or lassoed by pencil lines into cutting lots for timber companies to bicker over. The presence within a forest is something so much more powerful and graceful than any museum I can think of, A forest is truly sacred space, offering its wood and fruits to all living things to take what they truly need, but NEVER to desecrate into clear cuts  or tree farms.

Trees would teach us to be alive inside again if we will stop and listen to what is really here before us, gentleness incarnate, and such benevolent mystery beyond.  Will you go out into the trees again and listen with me?

"Do no harm"

A week different from other weeks. My landlord announced a month ago that we were to undergo fumigation – and launched a sense of heart deep upset that has lasted, as well as a to do list that has had me staggering, coming as it did in the same week that all my teaching assignments kicked in. 

         I guess many people have undergone this, and come out no worse for wear – and I have to admit passing many wrapped and toxic dwellings and feeling selfish gratitude that it was not I who had to live there when the wraps and the poison were striped away. Now I do, and, despite aching muscles from the dozens of trips up and down my stairs to remove food and plants and complaining cats from harm’s way as we went to play at being refugees on my mother’s couch for three nights, my own poisoned apartment is clear again, and things have finally settled back to normal.

And yet not normal. I have washed all the dishes, hauled up the plants, settled my relieved cats back into their familiar life of outdoor freedom and indoor sloth. But my friends, the spiders are gone, their webs trailing on the broom strands as I sweep them sorrowfully away. And presumably the unseen thousands of termites, the target of the assault, are also gone, corpses turning to insect dust in the galleries of their wooden cities beneath my feet.

I know only a very few, even among my friends, would share this odd sense of grief I feel – that harm was done all around me, terrible suffering inflicted on a massive scale, that I could not stop. Who worries about the pain of insects? They torture each other all day anyway right? Gnawing away in the jungle of life. I’ve seen the nature programs. And with all the miseries among us human beings, golden children of the food chain, who has time to think of these tiniest sentient beings?

And yet they are sentient. I remember the day I became aware of this when I took the 24-hour Buddhist vow to refrain from killing for the first time. It was an awkward, mysterious thing to take a real vow, to rise before dawn and set out oranges and flowers. Sit yawning on a cushion, and then dutifully kneel and try to repeat the inscrutably chanted Tibetan phrases a lama spoke, glancing at the translation on the alternate page between pauses. For twenty-four hours I was not to take what was not given, not eat more after 12 noon, not speak falsely, or cause division, or sit (inspiring self-pride) on a high seat. I would dress simply and flirt with no one, even the very handsome fellow across the aisle. And above all, I would not kill. Would make a real effort to notice all life around me, large and small, and harm none. A nun for a day.

When the morning sessions were done, I retreated to the porch of the cabin that was my little territory in the world that week (in a campground at Lake Arrowhead above LA). I sat alone, breathing the warm pine scented air of mountain summertime, feeling already a pinch of incipient hunger – probably from knowing I could not eat more that day. I concentrated instead on the minutiae of this world around me, the amazing number of small creatures alive and vibrant in the scrabble of woodland between cabins. And took notice at last of the smallest of them all, the ants.

Once noticed, I saw them everywhere, industriously hunting and gathering for their kin. Shiny black abdomens, querying antennae. And eyes. Eyes that took in the finger I laid experimentally in their path. The ant who first encountered it paused. Considered. He went back, and then forward again, feeling his way around the wall of pink flesh, wary. Time slowed. And offered a revelation.  This ant SAW me. Not only did I hold the image of the ant in my mind’s eye, he held me, some semblance of me – whether by smell or sight, in his. He worried, he evaded, he found his way around. If I were to harass him further, he would speed up, react in fear, run away. If I were to hurt him…

The world shifted for me in that moment. A little.

I do not know what death from Vikane gas feels like. But I took a whiff of the ammonia I set out in a bowl at the entry where the little skunk who has been living under our apartment makes his way to find shelter from this El Nino winter. The whiff brought a lash of vomitous pain, a shock to my whole system, quickly ended as I took the bowl from my nose and breathed out. I hoped the skunk would knock the bowl over as he entered or left, and then find the smell so noxious, he would not return. And later, I found that the fumigators used a similar technique, sending tear gas through the whole dwelling, to flush out small animals and prevent inconvenient corpses before the tarps came down. A measure of compassion, whatever the motive.

But what of the others, the spiders and termites and baby mice and who knows what others who could not escape so quickly. Imagine holding your own face to the bowl, not through one horrendous breath of ammonia, but on and on, through a thousand more, burning all over with choking pain and blind panic, until you were dead.  We don’t like to think of such things in our safe, sanitized human world. Yet this is the least of what we do to maintain it.

“If you can help others, help them,” the Dalai Lama said simply in a teaching I attended later. “If you cannot help, at least do no harm.” Not an easy prescription, as I learned, making my way gingerly around ants for the rest of my day of vows. Not a practical or easy thing, for apartment managers protecting investments, or hungry people who need protein, or barefoot people needing shoes. Once noticed in fact, the whole fabric of our comfortable living depends on the suffering and dying of millions of unseen others –most, though not all, insects.  What a thought. And even with that effort not to harm, it is impossible  to avoid participating entirely if we are to remain alive. Yet if we would be awake, if we would be wise, and someday be better than we are now, I think we must at least allow ourselves to know it. Step over that line of ants on the path when we see it. And try at least, to know and protect the sentient others of this world wherever and as much as we possibly can.   

Just a thought dear readers. 

First Book

My first actual book looking thing. AT LAST! Available to buy online no less (see link under My Publications at top left) as a pricey print on demand paperback sent to your door or a reasonable electronic download. And some good responses from peers at the college today. Take a look, any of you avid readers out there, still game for a novel written for 10-12year olds. Its a grand ocean going adventure, it I do say so myself. Five children at odds with life, running away from boarding school to cross the vast Pacific on a yacht to Hawaii. Never a dull moment, I promise, and little sprinkles of romance and beauty and encounters with dolphins throughout, not to mention the perilous STORM scene. If any of you actually do read it, you are invited to leave a reader review on Amazon (and please do click the link on - "request to make this available on Kindle" while you're at it). Lavishly undeserved praise not required. Just your honest opinion.  Enjoy.

Playing Old Maid

When I was a child, a little girl among a chatter of little girls, life had the sweetness of honeysuckle and each day filled leisurely from within, a personal chronicle of exploration and delight. We swung on the beach swings, wondering at the sensation of our long hair tickling as it dragged against the sand on the down swing. We peered into the armpits of small turtles, tried the taste of ants and laughed at eachother’s sour expressions. We practiced for hours to plant our small bare feet in every chalk drawn square of the hopscotch game on the sidewalk and jump over the one with the stone without losing balance. And, eating cookies served with milk in tall glasses, we played Old Maid, a mysterious game that carried the whiff of prophecy.

I was a little afraid of this game. If I lost too often would my destiny be captured somehow? Would I become this dread thing, this “old maid”? Did that grim little grey woman on the card, left in one’s hands when all the others were paired and gone, have the power to make that same future come to pass for the little girl that held it?

The future in those days, for little girls trying earnestly to imagine it, was offered to our view in lavish photographs in Life Magazine. Grown women with swirling belted skirts, red lipped, blonde hair shorn modernly, or pulled back tight. There were gay beatnik women, (happy, not homosexual) who threw back their heads at parties where everyone flirted amidst a haze of smoke. There were housewives perking Folgers coffee, mopping with a queenly air, for the home was meant to be a woman’s little empire, where she belonged, but also where she covertly ruled and showed her manifold skills and mysterious womanly talents. Everyone was meant to fall in love, perfectly, with the perfect person who had already been born somewhere, just for each of us to find and marry. And it was almost certain that we would be able to do so. No problem. It was fated. Unless, ever so oddly and sadly, something went wrong and we became Old Maids.

So now I am 61. Never married and thus, clearly, one of these lost ones. Yet having arrived, I look about and find I am often as happy again now as I was at 6. Many things have happened in those years of course. Many stories lived and many more stories – of others – glimpsed and pondered. Years of depression as it became clear there would be no perfect mate for me. Yet being an Old Maid no longer seems the catastrophe it was from the vista of childhood. This is I think is more than the “sour grapes” perspective of one who has witnessed more than a few promising marriages turn into living hells for the participants, for I observed many other relationships as well, in which love modulated into a lifetime of deep friendship. Not a bad life at all for those lucky couples. And yet now, comparing the geography of my life to the roads I could have taken, the quiet rich freedom of my days fills me. In subtle ways I chose this. I chose not to be bound by the lives and confusions and emotions of others close by. I had enough of my own. And now with retirement coming, there is the financial leisure at long long last, to start moving forward again. With writing, with meditation, with that journey I came to make.

For there is another role for a solitary woman, the nun. The spiritual seeker. The cloistered, vow-bound version of this, whether Buddhist or Christian, does not yet appeal, though I see many of my contemporaries in Buddhist circles moving toward that door, and many the better for it. But for now, for me, it is Annie Dillards version of “nun” that appeals most. A woman amidst a life simplified, looking out on the world with no clutter between. Seeing time and lives manifold and holding them all in the cup of her heart.

Thus does what we fear most turn out to be what we most wanted – so often.

Defining terms

Time at last to write again. And more time coming, if my plans for semi-retirement, so promising at the moment, materialize next June.

There have been so many thoughts that crossed my mind over the years, declaimed themselves amidst the daily trivia as I drove on the freeway, or took a lunch break, and then retreated in the face of the common sense imperatives of the next class to plan or the next appointment or the next chore.

Now I am faced with a whole day of leisure and all the functioning technology one could wish for, (eat your heart out Dickens). Yet my mind retreats timidly. Nary a thought to find. What were they?

There is one that does come to me consistently, with every newscast in these years since 9-1-1.There is a muddle-headedness to term of “terrorist”, a lack of clarity to the concept that has had extraordinary consequences. That word has taken on such power in our current chapter of history. When the word is used - a hundred times a day it seems - it conjures rat-like humans who conspire in cramped apartments and plant bombs as some kind of past time, or twisted religious act. But truly, how can one wage a war against “terrorists” or “terrorism’? Is there any war that does not bring horrific levels of terror and pain to its participants and corollary victims?

Terrorism is defined as “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.” I guess it is the “political purposes” that connects it so strongly in people’s minds as an act of war. And, given enough scale, it surely is – as in the Algerian uprising in the 50’s, or the Shiite militias in Iraq with their methodical mass tortures.

Yet it is one thing to say one’s enemies are “terrorists,” as we do with fundamentalist Muslims who bomb our soldiers and nearby civilians, and quite another to define “terrorists” are one’s enemies. This makes no sense because terrorism is a military or personal tactic of war, a way to fight or force one’s point of view when other ways are not easily available. It is an especially cruel and ugly way, given its terrible toll of civilians and children, yet it remains a military tactic, not a movement in and of itself, and not an inherent quality of any group.

Would we not have thought it strange if our leaders in WWII had declared war not on Germans but on heavy bombists? What about tankists? Whole cities were incinerated by their (and our) bombers. Villages were leveled as tank columns rolled through supported by infantry. Enough terror for a thousand 9-11’s. Yet it would never occur to give the specialist soldiers who perpetrated such acts their own unique titles as enemies. The enemies were the nations at war.

Turn the idea around. Would we cease calling Al Queda “enemy” if they started fighting with heavy bombers and tanks and infantry? Of course not. We would find relief only in having the acts of war out in the open. The enemy would remain the same.

There is also an astonishing level of myopia and denial about the tactics used by ourselves and our friends in relation to this term “terrorism”. Imagine for a moment the impact on American citizens if any nation, for ANY motive, sent a drone over our cities loaded with bombs, under the command of a foreign youth of 20, with little or no knowledge of our culture or motives, instructed to pull the trigger whenever he saw something he interpreted as suspicious. Imagine that several public gatherings – weddings, parades, festivals, beach fires for large families – became scenes of carnage with the bloody burnt bodies of adults and children cast about like a scene from hell and dozens more sent in agony to hospitals. To be followed a few days later by a tepid apology: “We regret the recent bombing. We received erroneous information that a terrorist leader might have been in the group.”

Imagine the nightly dreams of those under such a flight path.

Imagine a part of California or Texas walled off, as Palestinians in Gaza are walled off, allowed inadequate food and water and medical supplies, humiliated when they tried to come out for work. Imagine a group of men in the affected area deciding to take action by sending rockets over the barriers, harming some tens of people on the other side. Then imagine the other side bombing the enclosed area for days using jets and tanks and bombers, targeting hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings, destroying the whole functioning infrastructure of an economy already struggling to survive, inflicting casualties on the civilian population at ratio of 100 to 1 to the casualties they themselves suffered. How can politicians and pundits keep repeating their mantra of “this is the only way to defeat terrorists” in the face of such on the ground contradictions? What clarity can such words possibly bring in such a situation? And if they do actually mean something, why is it so forbidden to apply them according to their meaning, without partisanship? How can it not be obvious that both sides are trying to terrorize the other into submitting to their own interests?

But then what happens when the enemy is a small group bent on revenge or moved toward mayhem by some other motive that has come to seem more important to them than their own lives? Was the group that attached the Trade Center buildings really the opening front of a “war” in any sense that was not rhetorical? Perhaps many Taliban members of wahabi sects in Pakistan and Afghansitan and Saudi Arabia rejoiced to see Americans damaged. Does that mean they were suddenly soldiers in a united army against us? They were not members of Al Queda. They fought back in an organized way only when we invaded their countries with large armies.

The people who attacked the trade center were criminals, worthy of receiving whatever punishment for such a horrific terrorist act the law provides for. However, by instead defining our reaction as a “war on terror”, our government began an endless war against a nearly undefinable enemy. And it is a war that creates its own endless causes and can end only when we are too exhausted to fight further. This way of thinking – or not thinking – on the part of the Bush administratrion, this lack of clarity in defining its own vocabulary, started a cascade of misery and endless retributions that will affect the whole world for generations.

Remembering Georgia

Remembering today. Not sure why, but the memory of a woman I met in my traveling days has settled in my mind today, a friend of a few days only, but a person with enough mystery and originality in her chosen way of life to occupy any writer for many pages indeed. Her name is lost to me – it has been 36 years – but I will name her Georgia, since the name would suit her. I don’t doubt she is gone from this world by now, or about to leave it. She was in her late fifties or early sixties when I met her, wrinkled from eyes to knees, with fine lines everywhere as if her body had shrunk and left her skin to do what it wished to make up the difference, draped over a well made structure of bird-like bones. Indeed that is one of the things that HAD happened to her that I know of. She showed me pictures of herself as she had been 10 years or so before I met her – in Texas, married to a businessman, dressed robustly in the wifely uniform of the middle class fifties, dotted blouse, long skirt fortified with petticoats, her hair in a teased blond buffont. And she was plump, even alarmingly so. Her blue eyes looked out from under a stiff thatch of mascara. Her lips were ruby bright, smiling falsely in the glare of the camera flash. She had just won a contest held by the Ladies Orchid Society of Houston or some such organization dedicated to virtue and flowers and middle class behavior control. She was surrounded by a coterie of similar women, sealed into a life different in every way imaginable from the one she lived now.

There was irony in her smile as she gazed down on the photo, self-bemusement that she clearly wanted to share. We sat in her small house some 12 feet off the ground in a tree, among a village of such casually constructed dwellings at the base the cliff that fronts the Arafura Sea in front of Darwin Australia. Lameroo village, it was called then, a hippie rest stop for traveling backpackers bound to Asia just to the north, or returning from it. One could live for almost nothing there in the early 1970’s – just get off the bus and settle into any recently vacated treehouse, or create one of your own. Join communal dinners at a nightly fire where a pot of rice and beans simmered and everyone was welcomed in to help chop vegetables and make music, to smoke hashish and linger in the slow Australian twilight, telling stories of where they had been or where they were going.

Georgia had one of the nicest houses in Lameroo, high enough to require a ladder. It had been cleverly constructed by a series of previous occupants, bright and sunny with an ocean view and with a real double bed mattress well shielded by tarps from the daily afternoon thunderstorms we all endured, replete with menacing black walls of rain and driving winds. A basin tied into the roots of her aerial kitchen held her plates and cups. A water container and foodstuffs were neatly stacked on shelves, and the pictures, of that other life in an utterly different place, were tacked to branches above us.

In the year she had been there, Georgia had shared this dwelling with a series of lovers, mostly merchant marine sailors who came and went as their vessels allowed them. Currently the man in question was a burly black haired Frenchman she favored with real affection, though I glimpsed him only once. When he was gone, she even sent him letters, dressing for the occasion of going up the cliff to the Darwin post office in a long hand embroidered dress of brilliant saffire blue and then carefully cinching it at the waist with a bright yellow and orange Nepalese sash she had been given. On days when she did not leave the village in the trees, she wore nothing at all, as we were all free to do (though I was shy enough to wear at least a sarong). Her greying yellow hair danced in curls about her always smiling face, and she moved as gracefully as a dancer. I met her one morning as we both went for water at a spigot on the side of a giant city cistern some half mile down the beach. When the long slow tide pulled out, the way was opened, though rocky, and we made our way carefully, laughing and telling our stories, water jugs carried on shoulder or head, feeling graceful and connected to the place. Natives out of time, warmed by sun and freedom, eager for the gifts of each novel day.

I was 26 that year, a natural time in life for adventures, for trying things out with all the daring one can muster. But Georgia? In years she was closing on elderly. In spirit, she seemed to have gone beyond all time. In my memory she lived at the edge of the world, wide open to joy, accepting the changes of each day, and never calling them loss.
Looking back now, less sanguine in my own early sixties, I wonder what extraordinary earthquake of the soul could have taken her so far. Was she mentally ill? She did not seem so. She bubbled, but she did not babble. It was a spiritual sea change that had moved her. And a fearlessness I had not ever seen before.

I remember her now perhaps because I have at last arrived at her time of life – in a far different place and state of mind. It seems to me sometimes that all my daring was spent in those years of traveling. Now I sit like a barnacle, locked into routine that has staled my mind almost into unconsciousness, too timid - so far - to let go of prudence even a little. In a year I face a decision, to retire with a meager monthly check and dare to try new things again - or stay on, cautious and fading, to a healthier income. The world calls to me again. Georgia laughs at me out of her bright eyed, wrinkled, ageless face. Love, she whispers. Live. Don’t be afraid.
I’m trying.

Ah Jarvenpa, and you non-commital millions following my (nearly non-existent) blog, you are quite right that i need to bestir myself. What a lazy blogger i turned out to be. First overwhelmed by the events in Palestine. Then lost again in the vast, yet compelling trivia of daily life. Yet writing should be nearly as easy as thinking shouldn't it? And I surely do that. So here goes. I shall try a new mode. More often, but short. And perhaps someday aspire to the the essays and profound observations Jarvenpa herself regularly creates with such easy grace.

The white pit bull - Zeus is his name - now lives downstairs, his owner and I having had a falling out. But he has left behind his sidekick, Gigantor, a minute female cat, barely out of kittenhood, who was raised with this Chenghiz Khan of a dog and lies there lazily as a mouth bigger than her entire body looms over her and a tongue longer than her length swashes over her. Gigantor is befuddled. She had only just gotten used to living in my apartment and is quite astonished that all "her people" have now vacated to the apartment below. Or maybe its mostly that i serve up Fancy Feast to any one who might like some about 9am every morning. And she has discovered, after a short life of nibbling Zeus's kibble remnants, that she does indeed like Fancy Feast. And several quiet hidden sleeping spots not subject to the sound of video game machine guns.
in fact I am quite appreciative of all the new found silence of my apartment myself - though i do miss Zeus. It all started one night when his owner - my former housemate's boyfriend, who had come with her when she returned to live in my spare room as the solution to a temporary housing crisis, returned from outside and encountered a skunk on my deck. The cornered skunk let loose, as cornered skunks do, and the boyfriend, after roaring by me to the shower with reeking dog in tow, was so put out that he couldn't stop roaring for hours - and would accept no apologies or explanations at all for the kibble i had left out that had drawn the skunks.
Sigh.
It was not violent in the end. But it was a glimpse of violence - of living with a man who is capable of such out of control emotion and it taught me a lot - mostly profound sympathy for the SO many who are trapped in such situations. We made up eventually. Mutual apologies passed by letter, and then grudging courtesies. But i asked him to leave and he gladly went. Fortunately the room below me opened up and made it easy for him to take girlfriend and dog and simply move out of my sight with no great hardship (he is unemployed and making him - and Zeus and Gigantor - homeless - was not a burden of conscience i wanted). The rent below is even less - since they are renting out the living room as well. The world's belt tightening all around me - but that is a topic for another blog.
Til soon, or sooner at least, i promise,
Ocean Lady