Cairns #57
Beginning of the Long Days, 2009
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.
Particulars
of Place (a nod to Freeman)
My Spring
Vacation wasn’t working out like I had hoped. I was ending up at Chrysalis
three of the days doing administrative work. My young days of wandering were
filled with a peace that I really wanted to experience again but I was beginning
to think that perhaps that feeling is a characteristic of youth and with middle
age, one’s sense of time’s flow has changed enough that that sense of peace
is beyond one’s reach. Finally on Friday I got away for three days.
April 17 –
Kayaking at Ahjumawi Lava Springs State Park.
Watched a gray
squirrel come down out of the oaks, move two feet beyond the undergrowth into
the open grassland between the lake and the forest. There it dug a hole, turned
and squatted, presumably defecating. Then it scraped the soil back onto the hole
and returned to the forest. I went up to the spot, saw the “track” that
defecation made, and then saw a line of them stretching along, two feet out,
from the border of the undergrowth. Like plants breathing our exhalations and we
breathing theirs, I wonder about this patterned flow from forest over the line
into the grassland. Do the grasslands experience it as an input of nutrients? I
see squirrels shaping their behavior to the line of vegetation but does their
behavior also help shape the line of vegetation and possibly alter it over time?
Later, as I
cruised the bulrush shorelines, I noticed pond turtles scrabbling into the water
at my approach so I started looking further ahead so I could quietly glide
closer and observe more. I think the two genders bask in different ways. Certain
flat promontories of mud extend out from the bulrushes; these few square feet,
all beaten down bare mud an inch above the water, had gatherings of three or
four turtles (males?) with shells that curved outwards, covered with thick,
green, distinct plates. As I saw more and more of these spots with craggy
turtles, I thought an inhabitant of this place would come up with a word for
these mud promontories that would mean “the place where the turtles hang
out.” But there was another kind of place where solitary turtles basked. They
(female?) had a smoother, darker shell that curved down along the edge. These
places were recesses in the bulrushes, extending away from the shoreline about 6
inches into the bulrushes which formed a gothic arch above them.
The next day on
Hat Creek Rim, I watched really tiny, bright metallic green-faced flies
gathering and hovering on the upper edges of manzanita leaves. Their patterns,
their sensitivities are so out of my awareness yet the world is theirs, too. In
the evening I sat upon the earth, writing, content. That night I watched the
stars come out. It’s been too long since I’ve watched the stars fully come
out. The next day I awoke and fell back into slumber several times. I was
strongly within that sense of peace I had missed so much, delighted with how
close it had remained through all these administrative years.
It comes with
the welcoming acceptance/acknowledgement/openness/celebration of the equality
between myself and those green flies, the basking turtles, the squirrel. We are
equal in being alive at this time on this earth, connected through awarenesses
and behaviors with patterns that endure over thousands of years. This
“equality” sparked an image of a panicked man in the water, floundering,
expending energy trying to hold his head high above the water. But it is the
attempt to hold the head up high that requires the energy that tires one out and
creates the panic. When I allow myself to sink down into equality with all other
living things, I lower to a place where the buoyancy of the world floats my face
above the water enough that I can float with no effort.
Successive
Thoughts on Competition and Cooperation
First Image:
Alysia is playing an early empire simulation game with her class. Assyrians,
Babylonians, Hittites, Sumerians…Beginning of civilization including many of
our first stumblings into the system trap of empire which is: this generation of
leaders has the immediate gains of plundering another culture; following
generations reap the grim defending of over-extended boundaries long after the
gains have been mostly squandered on pleasure, vanity, and display.
Second Image: I
mentioned The Hand Game last issue. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA4eXoc4I2o&feature=related
The lesson
starts with a certain table of points and a procedure for determining the
distribution of those points. 95% of the time, students bring into the game an
assumption that the point of the game is to get more points than the other
person. This assumption leads them within minutes to a strategy where both
people are earning 1 point per turn. Then I point out that I never told them how
you win the game and that they had made an assumption. I then give them a
different definition of winning: together earn as many points as possible.
Within minutes, they have completely changed strategies and are each now earning
3 points per turn, three times as much as when they were focused on trying to
get more points than the other. When they were focused on getting more than the
other, they couldn’t even see this other, more abundant, possibility. Replace
competition with cooperation and one suddenly sees opportunities where one saw
only shadows before. The game becomes easy.
Third Image:
Watching a baseball game. It’s the 7th inning and the
bases are loaded. The pitcher is at maximum intensity. The batter is primed.
Each tries to create a masterful swirl of adrenalin and focused mindfulness. The
whole stadium vibrates with the intensity. Competition can wonderfully lift us
beyond our current conception of what we can do.
So is it
competition or cooperation we should practice? There are benefits in each; can
we bring the two together in harmony? We can - by seeing ourselves in
competition, not with one another, but with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Together (fellow humans, amimals, plants and geocycles), we are a team in a
great game with the Second Law. It’s not a fight to the death type of
competition. It’s a World Series type of competition though the game will
never end. The Second Law will never be beaten but it is not a villainous enemy.
It always plays by the rules and respects good plays on our part. It’s an
opponent summoning us to grow beyond our current limits. As we learn to see
ourselves in this way, we begin seeing many opportunities that were formerly
squandered in competition between ourselves.
The analogy
between water flow and money flow
This leads into
money flow. Some readers of Cairns are particularly interested in exploring the
analogy between the flow of water in a drainage and the flow of money in our
culture. Here I mull two intertwining aspects of this analogy.
The first aspect
is the wisdom of keeping as much water high in the drainage by helping the rain
soak in and by slowing down the rate at which water flows down and converges
into more concentrated flows. This is wise for several reasons.
1. Photosynthesis requires water. The more water
absorbed into an area, the more of the solar energy touching the area can be
photosynthetically absorbed into the cycles of life so that more energy is
available for creating possibilities.
2. Water transpiring through plants will return to the
sky to settle again as dew or rain or snow somewhere else. Only 11” of our
rain comes directly from the sea. All the rest is that gift being recycled again
and again, mostly through transpiration. Fresh water “creates” life and life
“creates” fresh water – one of the strongest components of the Upward
Spiral. This transpiration happens strongest where fresh water has the greatest
surface area contact with plants – on the slopes as groundwater, not in the
streams and lakes as surface water. So keeping the water high in the drainage
leads to more water high in the drainage.
3. As rain runs off, it converges which allows it to
flow ever faster, converging yet faster and faster. This fast flow becomes
erosive, carrying away the precious soil which absorbs and detains the gift of
fresh water.
Second aspect,
less mulled over in terms of money, very haunting in terms of my field work, is
that the shape of the flow and the shape of its channel co-evolve. They shape
each other through a spiral dance of feedback. “Shape of flow” is not only
how much water flows through the channel but in what distribution pattern. A one
hour rain on a parking lot, for example, will have a flow that reaches a peak in
about 5 minutes, stays high until the end of the rain, and then subsides to
almost zero five minutes later. Also, about 100% of the rain will have flowed
away. On the other hand, only a fraction of such a rain falling on a grassy
field will run off and most of that runoff will be in a gradual seeping away
over several days. The parking lot flow would graph as a sharp spike. The grassy
field’s flow would graph as a long, low sustained curve. That is what I mean
by the shape of the flow.
High peak flows
generate peak velocities which generate exponentially peak erosive powers. So
the parking lot flow, though it flows for only one hour, has enormous erosive
power which blasts a gully to carry that energy, a gully which then sits empty
and dry, bare earth for all the rest of the time. The grass field runoff,
however, has so little erosive power that it will wear away a slightly depressed
channel. If the seepage lasts a few days, this channel will probably vegetate.
This vegetation will force the flow over a broader surface, slowing it even
more. The vegetation will probably trap floating debris, an accumulation that
counteracts the slight erosion.
The gully cuts
down into the water table, draining the drainage faster. The downcutting gully
steepens all the slopes around it, pulling other runoff towards it like a
magnet. The shape of the flow and the shape of the channel co-evolve.
So, what does
this have to do with the flow of money? Look what happened to banks in the last
two decades. Banks used to be a local resource. For those people with the
opportunity to save, banks were a place you could “invest” locally and
receive interest. For those with a dream needing financing, the bank was the
place you can borrow that money. The local community of savers and borrowers was
enriched in both ways. But recently banks have become gullies. With their
penalties and charges and irresponsible giving of credit, they suck money out of
the local economy and chute it to large, convergent, distant financial
institutions that spin off paper speculative products. Financial institutions
downstream love this inflow. But upstream, more and more people are sliding into
debt and stress, getting hammered by overdraft charges and innumerable ways the
banks have changed the rules to extract as much of a person’s money flow as
possible rather than working with the community to help each person’s flow of
money increase.
It’s in our
mutual interest to strengthen local economies. Phase out tax mechanisms that
give corporations an economic advantage over local business. Income taxes should
be progressive with one goal being to recycle money that has flowed further
downstream back upstream. This is not done from a point of view of “poor
people good, rich people bad.” It’s done in the spirit of good gardening
like composting your kitchen scraps. Keep cycling things as close to the source
as possible, slowing down the rate at which the Second Law pulls things
downstream. Just as water nourishes photosynthesis on the slopes, so we want to
keep wealth high in the drainage. As wealth flows downstream, it loses its
potential energy. One of the patterns of history is that as more of a
culture’s wealth accumulates “at the top” (or downstream from my point of
view), that pooled-up money tends to go more and more into speculative financial
papers. For everyone’s sake, we want to keep the wealth spread out high in the
drainage. The more that remains upstream, the more the entire drainage benefits.
It’s the Hand Game insight. When we see ourselves working together rather than
trying to have more than the other, we see the world with a different spirit
that enables possibilities. And as the shape of the flow of money changes, the
shape of the channels through which the money flows will also change. They will
revegetate. Watching channel shapes inevitably change and revegetate as a result
of my Gaia work upstream is one of the pleasures of my work.
For Mom
My Mom might
have died last month. She went into the hospital at 91 with a kidney infection.
She went to sleep that night believing she would not wake up. I arrived in
Washington the following afternoon to an absolutely radiant mother. She was
radiant not so much because she was still alive as because she had willingly
gone to meet death and discovered she had experienced no fear, no regrets.
My memory is of
her face like a beautiful diamond. This was from her spiritual radiance but it
was visually magnified by hair now shimmering white framed with white hospital
blankets.
She’s back
home now receiving some assistance but going about with her life. I thought,
therefore, instead of writing about her death and what she meant to me in some
future issue, I would write about this remarkable woman now – so she can read
this along with the rest of you.
Certain stories,
told again and again, become a family’s motif. Certain stories about the
Bradley fortune and Marshall and Fields formed the motif of my Dad’s
upbringing and I heard them as a child. Maybe they’ve been mentioned to my
daughters but they are “people bent by money” stories and I am happy to let
them fade, to be replaced with a simple story our Mom has told us of a
transformative time in her life.
While a young
mother, she went back to northern Missouri to connect with her, at that time
already deceased, father’s childhood. Her dad, the one grandparent I never
met, was the son of a slaveowner. He no longer owned slaves when my grandfather
was born, the youngest in a long line of children (some already adults) to a man
in his 70’s and his second wife, a few decades after the Civil War. He had the
trappings of a “man of station.” However, the lives of most of his children
had spun off into alcoholism or insanity, infighting and sadness.
Mom found the
farm, now owned by others who let her walk around. She found family graves in
what was now a hog yard. She sat there like Solomon contemplating vanity and
realized that the most important thing she was going to do with her life, the
main thing that would endure from her time on earth, was how she raised her
children. And she came back from Missouri to do that with mindfulness and gusto.
Let me share five gifts she gave as evidence of this.
She was a great
one for using expert-assembled recommendation lists. So she bought our Christmas
present books off of librarian lists. Therefore, we received, from England, some
books no one in our town (hardly anyone in the country, at that time) had ever
heard of. Tolkien’s The
Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. When Gandalf fell into the abyss, I had no one
to share my devastation with. (Nor anyone who could tell me, “It’ll be all
right. He survives and comes back later.” ) It was a private world I
couldn’t explain to others but so real with its maps and languages and deep
history. I desperately wanted to find a key or a hidden door with which I could
enter Middle Earth. I wanted to be part of that world because it would inspire
me to be so much more than I was, to be my heroic best. There was another world
out there, there had to be, better than this world. At the time, this probably
appeared like escapism. But in hindsight, it feels like a powerful inoculation
against reductionism, an incubation of idealism. Now, as I live within this
world, one of my greatest sources of joy and work is a strong vision of another,
better world latent within this world. Every moment we have the choice of how we
interact with this world and that choice includes many opportunities that lift
this world upwards towards that better Middle Earth.
One Christmas
she gave each of us three children a backpack and a down sleeping bag. My
backpack cracked during my first summer adventuring in Alaska but I still use
the sleeping bag. (Slept in it just last night and watched the stars come out
from Hat Creek Rim.) Mom had never gone backpacking but for some reason she
decided it might strengthen in us a sense of adventure and travel and
self-reliance so she gave us some of the basic equipment that path required.
Like most moms
in the 50’s, she wasn’t quite sure how to handle my brother’s devotion to
rock and roll and Ray Charles and little Stevie Wonder. But by my time in the
60’s, she had learned not to resist but to help guide so, probably from yet
another list (“rock and roll with intellectual merit”) I received Christmas
presents of records from a singer neither she nor I knew about named Bob Dylan
that I really came to like.
The biggest gift
my Mom and Dad gave me was my high school experience. My brother went through
our conservative small farm town’s high school in a way that convinced my Mom
it was too provincial and anti-intellectual and our lights would go out in an
environment of football, cars and girls. But, again from a list (the 10 best
public high schools in the country), she heard of a high school 240 miles away
in Portland, Oregon. She checked it out and liked it. So Mom and Dad bought a
small house near that school. Dad’s business required him to remain back home.
Every Sunday evening Mom and Anne and I would drive 4 to 5 hours to Portland and
each Friday afternoon we would drive back home and help Dad. During the week she
would take us to symphonies and plays and hockey games. I learned to ride the
bus downtown to the central Portland library where I could check out books on
everything. And the high school was great; it changed my life and many of the
goals I have for Chrysalis were born in that time.
Finally I must
thank her for the spirit with which she “endured” my wandering years when I
would be off hitchhiking and hiking in the wilderness without sending a postcard
for months. She welcomed me with delight and great food whenever I rolled on
home and blessed me when I set off again. Sometimes I would bring home people I
met on the road and she would welcome them and talk with them for hours,
expanding her world with their experiences. As a parent, I now realize how hard
this might have been on her – not knowing where I was or whether I was alive
– and yet supportive of my adventurous spirit.
For all this and
so much more, Mom, I thank you for the zest and purity of your life and your
beautiful love for life, the mountains, and your children.
The
Fountain
I was
wonderfully moved by the movie, The
Fountain. Moved in the sense that I was
propelled into a rush of emotional, intuitive visions that intensely nourished
my spirit. I watched the ending over and over again for a week. I recommend the
movie highly but with one caveat.
I loved it so
much I went to read what reviewers said. 80% of the reviewers hated it, thinking
it was pretentious, overly-long, a tangled mess with poor acting. The other 20%
thought it was a masterpiece with incredible acting. One generalization I drew
from the reviews is that those who thought the title had something to do with a
Fountain of Youth hated it. For me, the movie has absolutely nothing whatsoever
to do with the Fountain of Youth. (A Spanish conquistador is searching for
something but it is not a fountain.) For me, the title refers to something
profoundly bound up in the nature of the universe. So I think that maybe
reviewers who got thinking about Fountain of Youth imposed an image on the movie
that limited them from experiencing what the movie offers.
The movie is
profoundly non-linear. If you hold it at mind’s-length, not letting it in
until the pieces can be fit together, you will miss the magic. The experience of
life extends far beyond linearity and rationality and some movies, like shamans,
have learned to live in those realms of spirit. The Fountain is such a
movie.
Editorial
This link,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/opinion/26rich.html,
goes to a NYTimes opinion piece by Frank Rich that I believe is important
reading. In it, he presents timelines that suggest that the Bush
administration’s torture was not for the debatable purpose of obtaining
information important for protecting the United States but was used for the
completely criminal purpose of striving to create “information” that could
be used to justify an invasion of Iraq. His piece convinced me of the necessity
of a complete investigation into the Bush administration’s use of torture.
My email of paul@krafel.net
has turned funky. You can email me at paul@chrysalischarterschool.com
Past issues of Cairns and my videos are at www.krafel.net
© 2009, Paul Krafel, 18080 Brincat Manor, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609