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 #39
Beginning of the Long Nights, 2004
The First Winter Rain and Filming Gopher Mounds
For those of you not familiar with California, our rain falls in the winter. Summer hills are grass
golden under the hot, dry, long blue sky. Sometime around October, give or take a month, the rains come.
Our first big rain fell this week. The golden grasses turn gray. A week later, the summer-dormant seeds
sprout, and a week later, their growing green will visually overcome the rotting gray and we will have been
pulsed into the next annual cycle.
The gophers start digging the days after the first big rain. Dark brown mounds of sifted soil flung
onto the surface contrast with the pale, flattened, rocky remnants of last cycle’s mounds. The aging process
of gopher mounds exemplifies “forms of the process” so well that I seek to capture it for my videos. What
a challenge! The patterns I see with my eyes are camouflaged to the camera. The main patterns lie with the
shape of the ground, not in its appearance. To visually feel shapes, the camera must move.
I remember my first real grizzly bear encounter in the backcountry of Denali. This big boar bear
rose up onto his hind feet and swayed his head back and forth over and over as he tried figuring out what
to do about this mysterious disturbance that had materialized on his path. Eyes being moved back and forth
amplifies depth perception, helping one see the shape of things. (One of the things I love about the film
version of Lord of the Rings is how Peter Jackson creatively moves the camera - scene after scene after
scene.) So I am playing with moving the camera smoothly around a gopher mound. But I can’t move my feet;
that shakes the camera too much. My feet must remain planted. I’ve been like the bear, just moving the
camera from side to side. But I am learning the camera can move in more interesting ways. It can be moved
by curiosity, by a story. I get a tingle when I think of the fun from this spiral of learning between me and this
world that produces gopher mounds in abundance after the first big rains. Life can be such fun when we feel
the dance of feedback leading us into a deeper participation with the mystery and delight of it all. From this
deep rootedness in the blessing of being alive, I speak the next piece.
Spinning Trances
My daughter is sobbing in her bedroom. “Why are we doing this?” Alysia is talking with her. I’m
here at the computer writing this because her crying broke open something within me and is having the same
effect on me as a speech thirty years ago. All sorts of pent-up thoughts are tumbling into this Cairns.
I was born in 1950, so I was entering my teen years as America was just sinking into Vietnam. I
grew up as a kid with World War Two comic books at the barbershop and war movies at the theater. We
played war on the playground. Though I was not “patriotic” in the McCarthy sense, America, of course,
should/would win wars it found itself within. It was our unquestioned heritage. As I grew up through high
school, I became more aware of Vietnam and that some people had a very different attitude than the one I
grew up with. As I grew closer to draft age, I tried to make sense of what was happening. My inertia was
completely with seeing this war through to victory. I’d hear Johnson’s speeches and read articles and
editorials talking of the light at the end of the tunnel and how if we just kept the bombing up a little bit more,
if we just.... The articles and the speeches kept me spinning along, lacking the grounding for a conviction firm
enough to deviate from the momentum of just going ahead. Until I heard the speech that grounded me.
I was taking a western bus out of Dallas, Texas on my way home from my freshman year at
college. A soldier on the bus asked if I wanted to spend the night on an army base. So I spent that night in
the barracks of Fort Wolters. There they trained soldiers for helicopter duty in Vietnam. Practically everyone
there was either going to Vietnam or had just come back from Vietnam. One of the guys in the barracks had
just come back as a helicopter machine gunner. He got talking about Vietnam. He said it was great. You’d
be flying over the country and if you saw someone walking down the road, you just blew them away. It was
great. You could go into a bar or nightclub and say, “Give us some women or we will shut your place down.”
It was great.
That was the speech. Ten or fifteen seconds of callous horrid truth. Three truths. One truth was the
content of what he said. The second, in some ways more horrid, was his disconnection with how “civilized”
people would react to what he was saying. The third was the implication this disconnect had for the chain of
command. The chain of command had placed a higher priority on inflating the weekly body count they used
to justify staying the course than caring enough about the Vietnamese to make sure that they weren’t mind-
lessly blasted into the scorecard on some 19 year old’s out-of-control whim.
My heart suddenly knew that we would never win this war, at least not in the idealistic terms that
the articles used. Suddenly all those other speeches and articles took on the form of posturings and rationali-
zations of people who were more concerned with economics or global politics or elections or national
prestige than with the Vietnamese people. Instead of being concerned with what was actually happening to
people, they were more concerned with taking whatever items of news made it out of that country and
knitting them into a fabric of belief that would keep people like me spinning in a trance of inertia.
My daughter sobs because what’s happening in Iraq suddenly hit her heart with full consciousness.
The end of innocence. And her sobs piercing my armor makes me suddenly aware of that armor. I have
allowed my spirit to grow confined within a psychological armor of intellectual discourse that protects/embalms
my heart from what is coming in through my senses, that changes reality to words.
I’ve allowed myself to spin rootless for months. I’ve been wrestling with myself for months as to
what I would write in this issue of Cairns that comes out around election time. Part of me wanted to write
something that might sway swing voters among you. But an equal part of me did not want to get political
with Cairns because Cairns is not about politics but about the things I can talk about from experience:
educating children, stewarding the earth, and helping one another be the best we can be.
But my daughter sobbing on her bed is part of my experience. I suddenly see that the label of
“politics” can be a conditioning spell which allows us to stay in a spinning trance. There is so much cultural
conditioning about “politics” and what one says within polite conversation that it is hard to simply speak
one’s truth. So let me here speak my truth.
I loathed this presidency years before it started campaigning for 2000 because its DNA evolved
in the rasping, blatant partisanship of the Republican House of the 90’s. Despite this, one of the only two
letters I wrote to my government during this presidency was a letter to Bush thanking him for going to a
mosque and speaking out against hate crimes in the evening of 9/11. I wrote him a thank you letter - and if
I did that, then millions must have sent letters saying “May God guide your steps as you lead our nation
through this darkness.” There must have been such a powerful convergence of righteous intent upon the
White House in those days.
And he did this with that.
With the whole world watching, he brazenly invaded a country, putting on “shock and awe” like a
scheduled fireworks show. His associates sought legal sanction for “cruel and unusual punishment” - even
before a trial or a conviction of guilty. He lied about the cost and length of the “operation” and subordinates
who spoke the truth were dismissed. No bid contracts (with subsequent charges and investigations of price-
gouging) were given to the vice-president’s former corporation. (Why are we so reticent to call this war
profiteering - one of humanity’s scummiest ethical behaviors?) Despite the obvious (because enormous)
expense of a televised war (look at what just his airplane flight to a carrier cost us), he kept pushing tax cuts
that went predominantly to the wealthy. As the deficit balloons to record proportions (which diverts more
and more of our tax revenue to financial institutions, so less money is left to achieve anything, making the
government less efficient), he continues to push tax cuts going predominantly to the wealthy. He has shifted a
large percentage of the money legislated to “reconstruction of Iraq” to “security” which is funding the
expansion of corporate-operated armies (many belonging to the vice-president’s former corporation) to a
better paid status than our civilian-led military. And bringing it back to people, he lied in order to set up a
situation in which tens of thousands of people would die.
And this is the part of his record he is running on as his strength.
If I could produce a political commercial for this campaign, I would open it in the darkened Golden
Hall of Rohan where Theoden, king, sits withered upon his throne, surrounded by TV sets with the
ggressively smug whine of right-wing commentators spinning spells of being afraid and belittling, always
belittling others. And then in strides Gandalf the White and calls America outside into the clear fresh air.
“Begone, Grima Wormtongues, your words are poison. Too long have you spun trances of doubt and fear
and hate. Come, America, out of the darkness of your hall and these spinning spells, awake into the fresh air.
Look out onto the vast world you actually live within. Breath deeply and regain your former will and strength.
Shake off debt and partisanship. Though there are things one can fear, there are greater things one can strive
for with hope.”
My Shifting Place
Someone placed a set of deep, meditative wind chimes high in a ponderosa pine on the flanks of
Mt. Shasta. They augmented and enhanced the spirit of the place in a way that led me to resolve to hang
special wind chimes in the big gray pine extending over my shifting place. This led to a several year dabbling
in making wind chimes. I wanted a low, reflective, measured set of chimes so I eventually made a set 4-6 feet
long tuned to the four notes of Taps.
My shifting place is an area along our ten-yard wide streambed where I feel my efforts are shifting
how the winter floods flow in a way that conjures up all sorts of imaginings within me. I go there often to
observe, reflect, and imagine. This summer, I finally figured out how to get up into that tree. Now the chimes
hang and late afternoon breezes occasionally breathe into a full note. Such notes inspired this aphorism:
A wind chime plays for everyone.
© 2004, Paul Krafel, P.O. Box
609, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609
Permission is granted to copy and
distribute (for free) this material as long as you attach this copyright
notice and my addresses so that a future reader can track down the source.