Cairns

Cairns #49
Beginning of the Long Days, 2007
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.

I made it to the end of the school year and now I’m taking lots of time for myself. Plan on spending two weeks solo backpacking in Banff and Jasper the first part of July. Done a lot of sleeping. Kayaked my favorite stretch of the Sacramento, camping by the river and walking in the dusk beneath the territorial flights of the Common Nighthawk. Watched one flying directly above me. He does his loose, floppy flight but every few strokes he gives a nasal peent call while, at the same time, suddenly doing several strong, rapid wingbeats and rising upward on the effort. This succession of floppy flight and strong flight gradually propelled the nighthawk higher and higher. Then he tucks in his wings and goes into a 45 degree dive, accelerating until he pulls out with a feather-vibrating buzzy boom and then starts the process again. As I watched him, I could hear the other flying males within our soundscape. I can imagine that these males (and the females below) can gauge the strength/vitality of the other males by either (a) how loud and sustained the buzzy boom which is a function of how far and fast the bird dove or (b) how often the boom is heard which indicates how fast the bird rises back up to the dive point.

As I walked on in the dusk, I wished I could have shared the nighthawk time with some of my students. Talking about it does not capture the direct inflow of hearing freshly the world telling another story. Telling can’t capture the feeling of heading outward in the summer’s long, warm dusk (intentionally without a flashlight) for a walk beneath the gradually emerging stars. These direct interactions with the world are where the magic of learning lies and also where lies the magic of rejuvenation for the exhausted soul. The magic that lies in the direct interaction and can’t be abstracted is the heart of “phenomenology”. My daughter, Dawn, came up with a good simile for this when she was analyzing the difference between history as it has come to have meaning to her and history as presented in a textbook. History (or nature) is like an in-depth outline and a textbook is just the upper-level first and second headings of the outline. All the lower order headings are left out and that is where the personal connection forms.

I turned back in my roam when I saw the first star come out (not counting the crescent moon, Venus, and Jupiter which were shining brightly.) I remembered how my brother, sister, and I would sleep out in the backyard when I was probably 5 and watch the stars come out. Sometimes we would count the stars as they came out. Thinking the pattern of star emergence might be a good graphing activity I could do with Chrysalis kids, I came up with a systematic way of quickly counting all the stars in the sky. I then stopped about every five minutes on my stroll back to camp to count stars. 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 12, 42, 74. (What image comes to your mind when you hear of a roam out in the gathering dusk that did not end until 74 stars were out?

The next morning, I floated in the early morning light, playing in the eddies and the edges, drifting through insect swarms, watching butterflies on the mustards, swallows coursing a foot above the river. Often I work at staying in the middle of the current because it’s a more exciting ride. But playing on the edges gives a completely different sense of the river. I wanted to share this slow wondrous style of floating with Alysia so two days later, for our twenty-third anniversary we floated this, our favorite stretch of the Sacramento, again, starting in the golden evening glow, camping the night and then dawdling along the eddies and the shores all morning. A river otter lithely foraged amongst plants along the shore. S/he saw us, startled, judged us not a threat, and continued on. We floated slowly by, close to a slow eddy that would carry us back past close to the otter. A few quiet strokes got us into the eddy but as we floated back up, the otter went into the river and dove and rose several times further upstream. We continued idling up, seeing the otter’s head occasionally surface before diving again. As we neared the top of the eddy, I saw the otter riding the current down past us. As we returned to the main current, the otter hauled out downstream onto a slow-falling sycamore tree projecting out over the current. We floated nearer. The otter tensed, prepared to dive back in, but then held its ground. As we floated by five yards away, we looked one another directly in the eye. Felt good. Eye contact - a direct communication from soul to soul.

We’ve had two cats, James and Panther. James, a golden tabby, was the lover cat. He sought you out for love. He shamelessly rolled on his back, begging for a belly rub. Each summer when time flowed long and slow, I would occasionally indulge in the experiment of finding out how much belly-rubbing he needed to be sated. I would sit down beside him with the intention of rubbing his belly until he got up and walked away It never happened. Every time, the experiment ended with me getting up 15-30 minutes later with James still sprawled there loving it. James reminded me of a calf roper who throws the lasso down right where the calf is about to step. James would trot ahead of me when I was walking and roll onto his back right where I intended to step. If I stepped awkwardly around him, he would roll to his feet and run ahead and repeat within a few steps.

Panther, a well-named black cat, was spookily opposite. He always kept his distance. Panther was yellow eyes watching from up in the tree, on top of the shed, always some place 20 or so feet away. Usually he would bolt if you even took one step towards him. Maybe once a month he would approach me when I was sitting and allow a few seconds of petting before suddenly slipping away.

One of the great challenges of life and of culture is learning to distinguish between short-term and long-term gain. Long-term gain lies in investing in infrastructure, the future, and wisdom. These thoughts come to my mind because as the father of an 18 year old child, I am appalled at the number of credit card come-ons and ez loan offers she gets in the mail. If we want to develop a culture that helps us become our best, then we do not want our children already caged in usurious debt before they even have a chance to spread their wings. Congress abdicated the long-term interests of the nation when they allowed such harvesting of young lives for short-term profits.

Chrysalis’s graduating class this year contained a very high percentage of kids who love animals, love nature, care about the earth and want to do something for it with their lives. So we explored ecological writing more than I usually do. This exploration led me back to the internet archives of Donella Meadows, one of the wise systems-thinkers of our times who died a few years ago. I introduced the class to her with this wonderful essay. (http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/dhm_archive/index.php?start=25&search[]=systems) They loved her charming wisdom and we ended up doing at least one Donnella essay a week. (Because many of her columns dealt with current events, they are becoming dated but some of them are eternally wise.) Near the end of the year, I shared this 20 year old essay (http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn297gh1-certaintye) about the greenhouse effect. I chose it to introduce them to Donella’s admonition of focusing on leading causes, not trailing effects. Pay attention to changes in atmospheric gas compositions (the cause). Don’t wait until climate change (the effect); by then it will be too late. “This is so sad,” Daniel said. “What do you mean? I asked. Daniel explained himself with such purity of grief that I haven’t been able to set it aside. To be 14 growing up with gloomy news of climate change and then to read that the scientific basis was in place 20 years ago allowing knowledgeable people to make twenty year predictions that have turned out true and that the adults have done little about it. What does that do to your heart? So much lost. So much squandered. For what?

I’ve prided myself on staying in touch with the spirit of my youth as I’ve aged. But Daniel’s words made me aware that part of the real spirit of youth is a perspective in which the current state of the world is the baseline from which you will measure that which follows. The world of my youth is so different from that of Daniel’s. There was something very stable and sure of itself that came from growing up within the Baby Boom. This creates complacency and a sense of spacious time that is an artifact of that period and which is becoming a hindrance in these current times. How do I explain to Daniel why we have done so little about climate change?

“Global warming is very perceptible in England - some plants/animals breeding up to a month early, migrant birds which no longer migrate, warm winters and violent summer storms. English wine has not been as good since the twelfth century, and someone has planted the first olive orchard in the South West. Scary! On the plus side, the public here has really got the message, and there are lots of local initiatives to make up for the government's lack of urgency.”