The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth's evolving consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.

Cairns of H.O.P.E. #31
Beginning of the Long Nights, 2002

Quiet Sits
 The first rains of winter did not come until early November. The weather then became warm and clear for most of a month. By Northern California standards, the autumn colors were spectacular. Our fall colors are mostly browns but this year they were golden. The low autumn light glowing on the golden leaves has been beautiful.
 Alysia and I wanted the Chrysalis kids to be out in the middle of this beauty so we took her class (8-11 year olds) on an all-day walk around the Redding Arboretum. In the middle of this clear, warm day, we did a quiet sit where we spaced 25 students along a trail at approximately 50 foot intervals. The quiet sit went almost 50 minutes. Afterwards in a sharing circle, more than half the sitters reported falling asleep. That delighted me. Such naps tend to be deeply flushing in a very unique way; I was glad kids experienced them. But later I realized these naps were also ìauthentic assessmentî that at least half the class felt at home and safe enough within nature to fall asleep. No fear of spiders or snakes or whatever. That sense of ìat homeî was one of our goals in creating Chrysalis, though I never thought of kids falling asleep on a quiet sit as an indicator of reaching that goal.

Animal Trails
 Last weekend I went hiking up at Castle Crags, a very steep rugged granite outcrop in northern California. I followed the contouring Pacific Crest Traul for a few miles and then went cross-country, climbing a drainage in search of open spaces with wide views. Because my ascent was steep with lots of rock climbing on cruddy rock; I did not want to return that way. So I opted for making my way over to the prominent ridge dividing two drainages. It offered a longer, gentler descent than the drainages.
  The ridge started as a bare spine, devoid of soil or plants. Every 3-4 feet along the ridge was a pile of animal droppings. What a strategic location to pass on oneís gift of fertility! On the very top, the nutrients will spread out slowly in all downward directions, reaching first the pioneer plants on the edge of lifeís colonization, the plants that need the nourishment the most.
 Within a hundred feet, the bare ridge ran into manzanita. For those of you who donít know manzanita, itís a bush 3-5 feet high with smooth, rigid branches with sharp, broken branch tips. Pushing through manzanita is a strenuous, scratch-inviting experience. Manzanita was not the only plant I would have to move through. This area of California contains incredible diversity but it would all be a steep thicket. This was going to be an intense experience. I paused.
 In that pause, I realized that it was absolutely impossible for me to get lost in this situation. I knew the land well enough to know that no matter how I descended, I would have to encounter the PCT. And, if for some reason, I crossed the trail without recognizing it, I would come to a road in another half-mile or so. So all I needed to do was go down - by whatever route I could. Normally I navigate by ridge and drainage, always ìstaying foundî. But because of the manzanita, I decided to let the vegetation guide me and not even attempt the effort of staying oriented within the larger landscape. I started off down an animal trail that skirted the thickest of the manzanita. So started a lovely dance between the vegetation, myself, and the animals that had passed this way before. I was soon deep in the world of the animals local to this steep terrain.

 There were always trails to follow. I never had to crawl.  Rarely did I need to even crouch low or push aside thick vegetation. There was one very steep slope carpeted with pine needles too slick to stand on. I sat and slid down over the needles, slippery as snow. But other than that, there were always trails. The largest ones tended to contour across the slope. A falling tree had crashed recently upon a well-established  trail. I could see in the broken branches to either side the fresh marks where animals were picking out a new trail detouring beside the fallen trunk.
 The up-down trails interested me because Iíve done enough trail maintenance to know that a trail beaten straight down a slope will erode into a gully. So I tried not to tread on any trail that seemed too steep, bare, and straight. I didnít find any. The ones where erosion looked like it had started were now covered with leaves, apparently abandoned, with a new trail detouring around the area. In fact, on the steeper stretches, instead of a descending trail, I found a descending zig-zag of steps, hoof-created depressions to place your feet. Instead of a trough which allows water to concentrate and flow, the animals create disconnected, staggered depressions that gather rain and hold it until it percolates in. This ìtrail maintenanceî can be explained in at least two ways. Bare, steep ground tends to be slippery when wet. If you life in the area, itís in your interest to maintain trails that can be safely followed even during the stressful winter storms. Alternatively, if you turn many square feet of your home to bare earth, you and your children will have a bit less to eat. Either explanation leads us to the ìmindfulnessî that would develop among animals that spend their entire life within a few hundred feet of their birthplace.

Threshhold
 The focus of Shifting/Seeing Nature and of Cairns is on shifting feedback loops so that ìdownward spiralsî become ìupward spiralsî. I learned this summer that geology uses a lovely word, threshold, for exploring this topic. Threshold is a point along a gradient of change at which something dramatically different begins to happen. Before that point, things are stable. Past that point... An example is stream transport. Certain materials (such as sand) will lie in place within a streambed until a certain stream discharge is reached at which time the material will start to be transported. This level of discharge is called the erosion threshold for that material. Threshold can refer to small-scale changes such as the wind speed at which sand grains start to move. Or threshold can be the volume of rain at which the soil can no longer absorb all of the rain and runoff begins. The concept of threshold is increasingly being applied to large system analysis such as quantifying how vegetative cover alters erosion threshold so that erosion rates drop dramatically and soil formation dominates. A similar example is thinking of alluvial fans as having threshold levels at which deposition can change to downcutting - a change often linked to climate change.
 I mention this in order to plant a mental flag in your mind to watch for the word threshold - it might lead you to some good reading. (On the Internet, ìthresholdî doesnít usually bring up this scientific meaning. But if I pair it with ìerosionî or ìalluvial fansî or similar terms, I start finding interesting articles. Here is a quote from one article about bay muds that came up when I did a search for ìthresholdî ìerosionî:
ìOur results have shown that microbes can increase erosion threshold by up to a factor of three compared with abiotic sediments. A pattern emerges: microbial abundance and sediment mucous content increase as sediment grain-size grades from coarse sand to fine mud. In tandem with this change, there is an increase in the erosion threshold over that for equivalent abiotic sediment. This indicates a quantifiable link between sediment stability and microbial activity. ì

Systems Thinking
 One reason for creating Chrysalis was to introduce systems thinking into a schoolís curriculum. Kids learn about flows and feedback loops their middle childhood years. My class of 8th graders has become so savvy in this regard that I decided to formally teach systems thinking to them this year. I decided to use  The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge as a starting point. Though the book focuses on business, he praises systems thinking as the fifth discipline and introduces it to the reader. Part of the appeal is his assertion that systems thinking is built up from three elements: delays, stabilizing (negative) feedback loops and snowballing (positive) feedback loops. From these three units, more complex schematics can be built. Ah, the momentum of reading can carry one through a subject so smoothly that one thinks the subject is simple and obvious. Teaching it to kids can reveal the complexity that really exists.
 One of the first difficulties some of the students had was with his representation of feedback loops as circles. Thatís because the looping cause and effect is not a circle; it does not connect back to its starting point.  If ìasking new questionsî leads to ìdoing experimentsî which leads to ìobtaining resultsî which leads to ìnew insightsî which lead to ìnew questionsî, the new questions at the end of the cycle are not the same questions as at the beginning. The mind has moved through the territory to a new place. A spiral expresses this movement more accurately than a circle. This distinction might seem minor but my students pushed their understanding of systems thinking further when I replaced the circle with a spiral. Developing systems thinking within our culture is important. Too often things like circles instead of spirals can prevent communication between teacher and student in a way that leaves both groups wondering why the other group keeps doing what it is doing -rather than coming together in a burst of  intellectual sharing.
  I grew acutely aware of a second inaccuracy while preparing to teach my students about ìThe Tragedy of the Commonsî. The schematics in his book made no sense. (Being familiar with ìthe commonsî, I had read through this section (delighted he was presenting this important concept to business people) without really analyzing the diagrams. But when I looked at the diagrams from the point of view of presenting the concept to kids and the questions they would ask, the diagram led nowhere. I tried modifying it without success until I realized that central to the idea of the commons is a feedback loop that can develop in either direction. If the commons is treated with restraint, the pasture can increase in fertility. If overharvested, the pasture will dwindle in potential. Underlying this potential to develop in either direction is the concept of rates and the relative balance between inflow and outflow. The ability to go in either direction is the invitation to action. To skip over flow (as Senge does in reducing systems thinking to three concepts) is to miss many of the dynamics that offer opportunities for dancing with the loops, leading them in one direction or the other.

Politics
 The recent election was made more interesting by my concurrent teaching Constitution to my 8th graders. They ask questions like, ìWhat do Republicans and Democrats believe in? What is a liberal? What is a conservative?î In trying to answer these questions, I found myself first encountering certain stereotypical issues. Abortion. Gun control. Pledge of Allegiance. Gay rights. You can add others. I believe that to define liberal or conservative, you have to go beyond those issues and dig deeper. However, as I thought about those stereotypical issues, I realized that they all had something in common. They all have very little effect on the flow of money. They are fundamentally non-financial at their core. This makes these issues perfect tools for dividing and distracting the electorate if oneís main interest is in gaining control of the government for the purpose of  using it as a tool for concentrating wealth - something most Americans would oppose.
 After the 2000 election, pundits talked about how evenly divided America was. Maybe, with the development of focus groups, polling, targeted advertising, and electoral efforts focused on a few swing races/states/precincts, the real story is not how divided we are but how we have been divided up so evenly and set against ourselves.
 The flow of money through the government might be the most important political issue in our time. A simple feedback loop happens when greedy money helps finance campaigns for candidates who, in return, will alter government so the greedy money receives far more from the altered government than was spent in campaign donations. Such a feedback loop can spiral so fast in a matter of years that the election process bulges obesely with hundreds of millions of dollars that flush away the trust and respect of the citizens.
 Part of this downward spiral is the destruction of an impartial media. The media makes so much money off political advertising that they have a self-serving interest in pronouncing as major candidates only those who can pay a certain amount of money to the media for advertising. Those who canít raise enough are labelled as minor candidates and thus donít receive consideration from much of the electorate.

Hospice options
 During my Dadís dying, I learned that the family has more end-of-life options than I realized or than I was informed by some. One choice is symbolized by the living will in which the person specifies that no heroic measures or life-sustaining medical procedures be initiated. (My parents had done this years in advance and I think they thought that would cover any problems.) The other choice was some form of suicide, assisted or not, where some sort of lethal drug or procedure is administered. Illegal and morally agonizing ground. Unfortunately, there is a potentially huge area between these two options. A person can find themselves in a medical state where - with no initiation of medical intervention - the person can live for months or years in a terminal state of misery.
 What I learned from one whom I respect very much is that families have a third choice. Over the years, many older people acquire a host of medicines that treat specific conditions. The drugs stabilize the condition and allow the person to live a relatively normal life. Without some of these drugs, the underlying condition will prove fatal in a relatively short time. Someone good at hospice care can look over the list of drugs the person is taking and spot the drugs that are essential to life support. One doesnít want to stop all drugs because the elimination of some drugs would cause medical symptoms that can be very painful or uncomfortable for the dying person. But by carefully eliminating certain key medications and compensating with symptom-relieving drugs, it is possible to guide the person through a relatively short, comforted terminal dying process. This option is called ìcomfort care onlyî.
 To put it another way, we needed to realize that life-sustaining medical intervention had been going on for so long that we forgot about it and that now, at the twilight, we can stop the intervention. For myself, the decision to cease life-sustaining medications feels morally more secure than giving life-ending medications. And it is legal unlike assisted suicide in most states. When we first talked to our local hospice, they did not tell us about this option. They donít intervene unless a physician judges the person is terminal within a certain time. For many people, the dying process is indeterminate if they maintain the above medications. And so hospice care does not kick in. But once we informed the attendants and hospice that we were moving to  ìcomfort care onlyî, then the physician judged Dad as falling within the hospice parameters and they responded with compassionate and accurate medical assistance. I pass this experience on to you so you know of this third option.
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Business Stuff
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© 2002, Paul Krafel, 18080 Brincat Manor, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609
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