My Sweetheart Wants to Walk Goats

1-      My Sweetheart Wants to Walk Goats

We all wonder in these days what we should do.  My sweetheart wants to walk goats.  By walking goats, I mean that she intends to spend most of her time in the Northern California wilderness, walking from homestead to homestead with goats and a few companions and tend stands of wild vegetables along the way.  They would harvest seasonal vegetables for food, medicine, cordage & basket making material.  Milking the goats at least once a day, they would walk for a week or two, make a larger camp, where they would choose and slaughter a goat, process the meat & hide, make goat cheese, dry goat meat and so on.  To many, this may sound like a ludicrous endeavor, but I wish to speak to it in very practical and very political terms.

2-      Arhats & Bodhisattvas

 We all wonder what we should do.  In the Buddhist lexicon, there are two general styles in the path to enlightenment.  One is the path of the Arhat, where one chooses not to directly engage with members of society or even a spiritual community necessarily, in favor of allowing people themselves to best be the guides to their own enlightenment.  An Arhat is not removed from human interaction entirely.  If they are asked questions, they offer the best insight they can, and they then continue on.  The path of the Bodhisattva has at its core the desire to be of benefit to other human beings, and to allow this assistance to be the path upon which one travels to enlightenment.  At the center of both practices is the need for skillful means, a need for acting appropriately in situations.  The question becomes, 'what is appropriate for individuals in society, and can we, the generally unenlightened, ever truly help other people without imposing upon them our sense of duty, justice or will?'  The degree to which one is engaged or removed from a society can define whether one chooses to walk goats or chooses to do community-engaged urban farming, as two relative and personal examples.  Both are in a sense political, in that they are seeking to redefine how individuals relate to their landbase and their food, but both have very different implications for the arts of living and one's involvement with a larger community of beings.  One impacts exclusively, or nearly exclusively, human communities.  Urban farming is a wonderful way to educate people about the disconnection they have from their food and, coincidentally, their environment.  The environment sounds like an abstract term, but when we speak of familiarity with landbase, what we really mean is the trees you've marveled at, or the wonder you've felt by a running stream, so clear and clean you can drink from it, a freedom many of our ancestors held as a daily ritual.    Tending stands of wild vegetables may sound ineffective, but it is a way of directly supporting the landbase, or, to put it in terms of popular rhetoric, it is very directly being the change one wishes to see in the world.  It is a personal solution, but it is also a withdrawal from a way of life that is in dire straits.

To be frank, we are at a point of significant spiritual crisis, heretofore unknown in the history of humanity.  That is a lot to say in one sentence, but let me put it this way: there is a profound level of discontinuity between many people who are using many of the earth’s resources, and the understanding of the abundance, or not, of those resources themselves.  Again, put simply, we’re running out of many of our most basic resources for the sustenance of biotic life on the planet.  Topsoil, fresh water, ecosystems, mountaintops are all being eroded or destroyed at speeds that paralyze the imagination.  What do we, collectively or individually, do about it?  Do we try to educate a populace that is ensnared in the demonic dreams of self-importance that posit that no species exist save the human species?  Do we try to dispel the imagination of those in power, or those without power, to attempt to convince or suggest that the way of living as practiced these days is nowhere near what will best keep trees and rivers and salmon and eagles and ospreys around for another 50 years?  Do we write off a society that many of us hardly believed in to begin with and walk goats?  Do we plan attempts of restitution on behalf of the natural world; do we educate each other on the need to remove dams from rivers?  To stop clear-cuts in the United States, in Indonesia, in Burma, in the Amazon, in any number of other places where the vital, wild areas and native people are being irreparably destroyed?  Do we attempt to mitigate the destruction by passing a few laws to curb the ruthless and immoderate appetites of capitalism?  Do we walk away from all social obligations, as such, choosing the company of trees and rivers, in order to better define what is necessary and what is most helpful for ourselves, and the community of birds and fish and trees and shadows and whispers and elk?

These questions pit the individual practitioner against the overarching power structures of society, oftentimes, but they are necessary in these days, when so much is being redefined and commodified at such rapid speed.  When defense of the wilderness is viewed as anti-commerce, and larger religions have necessarily defined themselves as allied with commerce, it follows that only the individuals can stand up for the wilderness, until the time that the major religions define themselves as both in concert with the natural world and, in so doing, against the will of capitalism.

To speak of the need of defense for the wilderness and its relation to Buddhism, many mystical religions have primal need for wild places.  Buddha was in the jungle for six years.  Jesus' days in the desert and Mohammad's retreat to caves speak to this need as well.  These practices draw strength and insight from the wilderness.  But then, in Buddhist terms, why is the line of karma's interconnection so often drawn between the humans and other species?  If we do share an obligation of the Bodhisattva to benefit all beings, and these beings include non-humans, don't we need to immediately and irascibly defend natural spaces? Do we not need to immediately dismantle all state and corporate institutions which dominate the landscape?  Why have there been so very few defenders of the wilderness from the Christian community, the Islamic, the Buddhist?  

3-      The death wish

We all wonder what we should do.  My sweetheart wants to walk goats.  She wants to renew the landscape and not be a part of a suicidal, ecocidal machine, or if she is a part of it, she wants that interaction to be entirely on her own terms, within her own power and not to lessen any ounce of her wild spirit.  I can’t say that she shouldn’t go, and I can’t say I want to join her.  Not just yet.  This brings about a political and personal question; how much of any of our involvements in social activism have to do with us individually trying to reconcile our own past traumas experienced in the course of political engagement?  I wonder how much of my own past I am attempting to exorcise when I speak to a police officer about fulfilling their duty to actually protect and serve the populace of a city, and not just the landowners of a municipality.  That I ask them to question why they are being asked to clear sidewalks or secure neighborhood gardens with threat of force, when these places should be public spaces, not demarcated for private profit, when these places are in such genuine need for the people.  Are the police protecting only profit, either individual or communal?  If so, are they acting in accord with their own conscience?  What bizarre point in the history of the nation we are at when police are necessitated to enforce laws, in some instances, solely to raise money for their own viability, and that, by working so, they are enforcing laws to ensure the private profitability of the criminalization of the citizenry they are vowed to protect?

In many sections of the world, police and military have stood up against injustice, proclaiming that there is no line between cop and citizen, that we are all citizens and deserve equal respect.  Could such noble principles be present among the police in the industrialized world?  Will the cops lay down their guns and pick up shovels to help communities grow food for those who lack decent nourishment?  

This culture is infatuated with death, though it does everything it can to avoid it.  Superstars never age and these days, with endless facsimiles of past realities flashed into people's eyes, superstars never die either.  This is a worrying predicament for a society that is on the brink of self-asphyxiation.   We, as a species, are undermining the earth’s ability to support biotic life.  This is not hyperbole, this is the fundamental reality of our age, and our response to it will define whether we flourish as a species, or become a grand and brief flame in the history of our planet.   

There are so many tales of how this will happen; with terrorism, with disease, with famine, with climate change, even with alien invasion.  People have, for a long time, perhaps forever, wanted to both know where they were going, and perhaps more curiously, have wanted to have the importance of feeling as though they are at the end of times.  Yet, in our days, we can see through the lens of science, that we are actually reaching the practical ends of our support here on earth, and we do not have the capability to travel to the nearest star, where we might find another blue gem to despoil.  Though climate change is in progress and we are certainly already feeling the effects, we also have 10,000 years of agriculture to tend with as we attempt to rebalance our imaginations towards the genuinely sustainable.  The rules the planet has operated under for the last 10,000 years are being rewritten now, and the earth herself is treating the human species like any being with a virus.

Does it not make sense that in such a twisted environment, where relationships, towards oneself, with others, to be in companionship with the environment, are generally viewed as liability, does it not make sense that the response to that would be the leering culture that has death as a theme park attraction and, to speak personally, why is it that even leaving the death culture itself feels like a form of dying?

4- Agriculture as pathology

My sweetheart wants to walk goats.  Agriculture is a broad term, and when I use that term, I mean a practice that generally displaces people from their connection with land.  This has been so internalized in the current age that connection with land is seen either as a frivolity or as a sense of backwardness.  When I use the term agriculture, I mean a practice that deforests an area, the same practices that built ancient civilizations in Mohenjo-Daro & Mesopotamia, built those civilizations, and also caused their collapse.  When I use the term agriculture, I mean a practice that needs to build walls, because centralized, monocrop agriculture causes surplus, surplus that needs to be stored.  When I use the term agriculture, I mean a practice that raises armies, like the wheat it sows, pathologically identical in appearance, raises armies and allows its citizens to kill in war, and asks these same humans to return to ordinary lives of peace afterward.  When I use the term agriculture, I mean a practice that is willful in its use of slaves, often of conquered people from conquered lands, for rational human beings do not generally wish to overwork themselves in the abhorrent way this culture demands, and would be much happier, indeed as the prosperous are these days, to spend deeper time with friends and in nature.  When the rich are the only persons who can afford to visit the existing wild areas, it’s worth asking ourselves what sort of society we are creating.  The average Indian in the Americas worked an average 2 hours a day to provide for their needs.  These hours of 'work' were often accompanied by stories and songs and ceremonies. 

My sweetheart wants to walk goats and to practice a style of 'agriculture', which is closer to harvesting and tending natural areas of bounty.  She wants to ensure that her efforts are assisting the natural world directly to recover from the damage of 200+ years of colonization in California.  She generally does not wish to sign petitions, generally does not attend protests, but has fervent political beliefs.  Do we check-out of a system that seems to force us too often to act like a person in a codependent relationship, making excuses for ugly behavior, expecting change, when no, or pitifully little change is apparent?  I categorize clearcuts as ugly behavior.  I categorize mountaintop coal removal as ugly behavior.  I categorize tar sands oil mining as ugly behavior.  I categorize fracking as ugly behavior.  And my reasons for doing so are in part political, but mostly, they are practical.  If we keep destroying landscapes, are we not hurrying along the day of our own extinction?  After ingesting so many lies of technology 'making things easier for us', we have yet to realize that technology, as it is currently performed, is a pusher, a snake-oil salesman wanting to get an entire citizenry hooked on electricity, while the ability to support life is slowly and irrevocably eroded under our feet.  There are ways in which the Bodhisattva's tribute and effort begin to look more like codependent enabling, and the modern human positivity movements like turning a blind eye to injustice while reaping the rewards of enslaved peoples.  Modern agriculture as practiced displaces human beings from their land in 'the global south', as well as in the global north, and then enslaves those same individuals solely as instruments of commerce.

During the Buddha's lifetime, Mohenjo-Daro had already come and gone as a civilization.  Theirs had walls, running water, heated pools, annual crops, granaries, all the signs of civilization present in the contemporaneous Mesopotamian culture.  Both civilizations had deforestation as a defining characteristic and, as Icarus's descent, both civilizations were brought back to earth when they had to 'domesticate' lands further and further away from where the people were concentrated.  Can we draw a line showing geometrically the distance of a human from their food, the level of abstraction of the natural world, other humans, the level of coterminal violence that is acceptable in the forms of overt and covert slavery, overt and covert oppression, of women, of those of a different skin color, of those of a different way of seeing?  Did the Buddha hear of Mohenjo-Daro, a locus of civilization that had failed to support the upwards of 35,000 citizens who lived there at its height?  Did he sense or see that over-reaching grasp, the society straining against that by which it had to define itself  and had told itself it could not do without?  Did he see, foresee, the inevitable rise of cities, of what's called modernity, with over half the world's 7 billion people living now in cities and nearly all surrounding environments so far depleted as to resemble ghost deserts where no birds, and scarce a human heart is bold enough to take up residence?  We are told by the demon-dust pushers that only the human economy must be serviced, at the expense always of the natural world.  But the world can function perfectly fine without the human economy, and can in fact thrive without it.  We cannot exist without the natural world, and everyone who is eager to say we can still eats, likely, several times a day, eats the food that still comes from the life-systems of the earth, still breathes the air offered by trees, by kelp, by phytoplankton, still is held, in the same way we all were, in the beginning, in the darkness, before we breathed the oxygen of this realm for the first time. 

  5 - The sky-clear flame

My sweetheart wants to walk goats.  There are questions of tactics, of what we choose to do with a life.  Within the Buddhist lineages there are many stories of creatures sacrificing their sense of self-cherishing in order to perform karmic feats.  In our modern time, such feats seem the realm exclusively of the mentally unstable.  Yet, within a society, if individuals begin to truly understand that the human species is wearing out its welcome, that it is operating beyond its means, and being sold further and further methods of addiction by a pimp uninterested in our individual, collective or cross-species health, then would it not follow that individuals would wish to radically alter or abolish such a system?  The other day a friend of mine and I agreed to stop calling whatever was happening currently 'revolution'.  I'd prefer not even to use terms that have gone around lately in its stead, '(r)evolution', or even the more poetic 'lovelucion', and prefer instead 'metamorphosis'.  Interpersonally, the 20th century, or the 19th for that matter were very good for the 'poor' of the planet.  Many were forced from their homes, some by gun-point, but more were forced by the point of debt and official government policies.  Is this the past that we are responding to in order to form the future?  Must we not form something that does not resemble the genocides and ecocides of the 20th century, but something that looks and feels far different?  

For if we are at a point of extreme sickness, as fracking, mountain top coal removal, tar sands oil removal, 2 mile long, 1 mile deep ocean trawlers destroying millions of years of growth in coral reefs indicate, then must we not then consider something, a state of interaction, of association, of society, which acknowledges these wrongs, but is not controlled by them?  If we respond merely to the problems of industrial capitalism, we'll receive a lot of work to perform, but I personally get the sense that what is necessary is something, a way of being, as to be unrecognizable by most of us.  This way of being is not ethereal, but rooted deeply in the earth, is not vague and does not waver.  It senses what the earth can provide and sustain and operates in accordance to that exclusively.  We are unable to inherit the bounty of billions of years of cumulative evolution of our ancestors, and the large leap forward presented by GMO and biotechnology are gross manifestations of the arrogance of the human species in assuming that we have all the answers.  There are reasons that nature took billions of years to sort out different organisms.  Evolution is a slow and stupid process for the most part, but it generally does have one thing going for it: it provides a minimum of disruption to ecosystems.  I find it hard to believe that by making further leaps into uncharted territories of genomes, gene-splicing, etc, we will not create further imbalances that will, like the wrecked ecosystems of wetlands, of mountains, of forests, of rivers, of seas, need to be contended with, if not right now, at some point in the not very distant future.

I spoke with another friend last night about righteousness.  We had just watched a moving performance of music and dance about fracking.  I said that I worried about the sky-clear righteousness that it is easy to feel when one studies the environmental catastrophe we have inherited, and begin to parse together the biologic bounty that has been utterly squandered within an eyeblink of geologic time.  There are plenty of reasons to get upset, but response is again something that becomes far more difficult to ascertain.  Do we walk goats?  Tend stands of wild vegetables?  Renew the landscape in a tiny way, knowing that as civilization begins to crumble, one is building not merely quaint skills, but ones that could be practically useful for survival, genuine survival, and not just for one, but for many?  Is this the path of the Arhat, to be removed from society to care for the later generations, to care for the seekers one meets on the solitary path?  To care for the creatures, the 'least' among us, as Jesus and St. Francis preached?  Is it the path of the Bodhisattva, to walk away from a society which is plainly so tone-deaf that it can't hear the planet wailing in pain?  I distrust my righteousness, and there are many times it is difficult to quell indignation when one realizes that another day has passed, and the forces of destruction have cut down many more trees, slurried many more sides of mountains, slashed many more forests, put more duress on many more people.

At a time when we are approaching the end of rapidly available energy, with many technologies in the works, but none, I repeat, none, able to power the engines of modern technology with the same flexibility as liquid oil, it make sense to ask what we learn from our days.  If my sweetheart walks goats, she practices each day the knowledge of which plants are safe, how to keep other animals well cared for, how to receive from nature what is offered.  The machine culture will continue for quite a little while, and those who swear allegiance to it will be fed and clothed commensurate with their level of belief in the system.  Violence will become more widespread, people the world over will continue rioting over food, armies will be called out and everyone who has a conscience or a soul will have to ask what is going on, and how much they really believe in a system that is more willing to shoot someone than to feed them.  If society continues as it is headed, towards militarism and fear, we, the caring hearts, weary worn with grief from losses, will be offered, as the Indians before us, smaller and smaller areas within the society at large, and we will at some point need to walk away from the death culture to spare ourselves the cruelty and passive brutality that they conjure and coerce so many of our brothers and sisters with.

I don't intend to swear allegiance to this dying system; rather, I intend to offer my companionship to nature, to the natural processes that take a long, long time to learn, a long, long time listening in order to better listen.

 6 - Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes

For much of human history, it seems we've been astonished and thrilled and inspired by stories of the underdog.  People root for the doomed Trojans, some for the 'doomed noble savages' of North America.  For some of us, the underdogs were not pushed back in grand battles, but in wave after successive wave told in the conqueror's language as progress.  We lost many many ancient trees here in California, cut down by the brief hands of man.  The redwoods went to buildings and mines, many of which have now, at least partly, returned to the earth.  Many massive sequoia were felled for no more human use than toothpicks.  We lost many people, and many many languages, many ways of seeing.  In learning the less-told histories of this land, we learn that the magic songs which coaxed rivers to flow and the sun to shine, are almost entirely absent from the human creature these days.  We learn in this learning the learning of loss.  We root for the underdogs, and the more one studies the language of the land, the more one roots for the little that has escaped co-optation, homogenization, the diseases of sameness.

For a moment, what of the colonizers and colonized? Once we feel the grief of being callously or kindly crushed, as a soldier or a missionary seeks to unutterably alter what they fail to see, what to them appears as narrowness is in fact belief in how Mother Earth embraces life, and to date, has tolerated the indulgence and arrogance of some of us humans who didn't have the good sense to disagree with a situation that didn't ennoble their heart, but paid in dollars instead.  It's a human sadness, of how the colonizers and the colonized were coerced so thoroughly, of how the modern magicians wooed the senses with chemicals, with lights and motion, how they covered the stars at night, dammed the flowing rivers or filled the air with the burned breath of ancient plants.

On the subject of resistance, principally modern resistance, three countries have had series of non-violent uprisings in the last few years in order to gain liberation from their oppression.  Tibet, Burma and Kashmir, all three had some form of violent government who seized power from the people, disallowed what passes for democracy these days, and, essentially, paid young people, mostly men, to move to a place as soldiers and brutalize native people from that land, people from a different perspective.  Modern colonialism happens directly in these places, even if it does not make much news in America.  Each of these countries, as I said, have held non-violent uprisings, mostly led by their religious leaders, monks in the case of Tibet & Burma, and the Muslim clergy in Kashmir.  None of  these countries have yet achieved autonomy, let alone independence, and their stories often languish on the back pages of news magazines, achieving the attention of the wider world only when a great many people are killed.  Is this actually the world in which we would aspire to live? 

I bring this up to directly question the efficacy of non-violent resistance in a time of ongoing global decimation of people and culture.  In what passes for the environmental movement in America, or even within the larger struggles for social justice, it is often posited that what is needed is not more radical tactics, but more people.  Individuals are asked to attend protests and encourage others to do the same, with the height of dissent being a symbolic act of non-violent direct action, namely risking or getting arrested.  If our success is merely based on numbers, and not on actual results, I fear that we will lose sight of the fact that the environment is being willfully eroded at an enormous rate, and that merely getting more people signed up, or signing on will not be the difference that the planet needs to continue the experiment of biotic life.  Over a thousand people were arrested in the summer of 2011 during the Keystone XL pipeline protests.  Certainly more people know about the Keystone XL pipeline, now over two years on, but we are also now over two years after the protests, and the Keystone XL is still up for discussion, and every day of those two years the tar sands have been grinding up the forests of Canada without relent or mercy.  We mistake gaining public support for actual efficacy if we deem awareness equal to resistance in this case. The same was exemplified during the second invasion of Iraq, primarily by the United States, in 2003, for which an estimated 36 million people protested for a single, clear objective: to stop the invasion of Iraq.

We ask questions of lost causes.  If suffering is a predecessor to statehood, do not Kashmir, Tibet & Burma deserve statehood?  I don't think that it’s appropriate to invoke indifference. Cynicism is the slick soil whereby oceans are set on fire.  If we believe in lost causes, if we believe people have the right to live without outright oppression, then perhaps we begin to believe in that other lost cause.  Perhaps we begin to believe that the ways of inhabiting the world that were thought to have died out are in fact alive and barely surviving, that the means of biotic support on the planet are actually in need of our assistance, that the human species is in fact quite possibly the largest lost cause we have been offered to date. 

Do we believe that humans can garner enough courage, perhaps this time not from technology, but from the natural world, where people have always drawn courage?  Enough courage to change the little things, and change the big things, to live a life worth living, to dream dreams worth dreaming?  To love people worth loving, or cry for things worth crying about, or grieve for the things worth grieving for?  To love, to grieve and to dream about the things that actually give us life, that have always supported us, and are waiting, ever so patiently, for us to once again realize our place in the natural world, one of many, those things waiting for us, ever so tenderly, to come home?  In coming home, we realize that we have many tasks for our hands, for our hearts, and that those tasks have been offered to us now, at our present moment, to help us, once again, to understand our place.

The Dragonfly

`The Dragonfly

A dragonfly begins life as an egg laid in water.   They grow and molt changing forms gradually in a process known as 'incomplete metamorphosis'.   Dragonflies molt eight to fifteen times, but spend a majority of their lives with gills on their rectum, sometimes for several years, feeding and living underwater.

~

Begin sitting down, with your knees bent and the soles of your feet resting on the ground.   Place your right shin on your left knee.   Twist to the left and dip your right elbow into the middle arch of your right foot.   Twist gently.   If you still can, dip your left hand, placing both palms flat on the ground.   If you still can, tip towards your hands, your right foot on your right elbow or upper arm.   When we encounter difficulties, we usually hold our breath.  Remember to breathe.   If you still have room, lean to the side and balance on your hands, extend your left leg, parallel to the ground.   You are flying.   You are weightless.   Breathe, and balance, and breathe.

~

Walking east of Summit Lake, in mid-autumn, lively insects cross your path, wily-nily.   A small bee nibbles the skin on the top of your hand and since you haven't said a word out loud for several days you let it.   It keeps nibbling.   It flies close to your eyes, batting your eyelashes with its beating wings, nestling into the bridge of your nose, and then nibbling the inside ball of the eye, the lesser twin to the eyeball, that thing you never thought had a name, that you now know is called caruncula.

~

East of Summit Lake, midautumn, lively insects cross your path wily-nily.   A sudden, golden dragonfly, black striped, speeds sideways, hovers above water, speeds sideways again.   You pause, your eyes, in all their motion, flicker and follow.   You cannot tell if wonder is holding you still, or if marvel has stilled your lungs with water.   Its flight forked lightning, swimming, slicing of air.   Its globes of eyes, the 30,000 ways of seeing in all directions and several realms of color unvisible to humans, seem to center on you, human, as it now buzzes to you and hovers, its four wings gathered sunlight holding it aloft, beating wind that ripples off its face facing you.   And you wonder.   You marvel.   The dragonfly leaves, zooms up and East, which is the way your feet are headed, the way you must leave.

~

In the Lower 9th Ward, in New Orleans, your body was pushed through several forms.   When you went back there you wept, nearly.  Covered in a white sheet, the Claiborne Bridge, that night where your hand dusted the brakes and shouldn't've, where mist met metal and stole your lover's left knee, your left elbow, is now your wreckage being painted, not repaired, in the late season sun and warmth, not heat.   By the Industrial Canal, you can see something small struggling.   You stop and look, a brown dragonfly wriggling on the bike path.    It is delicate, its wings beat erratically.   It looks like its dying.   You hold it in your hands, it flies slightly, you catch it, it calms, feeling the soft moistness of your palm.   You do not wish for it to die alone.  You carry it til its movements turn shallow and then vanish.   A friend says that maybe its not dying, but changing.   Maybe it needs to breathe the wild.   So you find a bush and set the dragonfly to rest underneath, near the ringed wattles of an abandoned sparrow's nest.

~

Twisted in the dragonfly pose, Judy balanced on hands as though the human sweat of the yoga class, the beating wings of lungs, lifted us into bright new form.   When I asked what she knew about dragonflies, her look deepened to crisp pools of iridescent light.   The Hopi and Pueblo peoples hold dragonfly as a protector, a medicine spirit, who helps humans heal from the wounds of this world.   She spoke of how on the day her mother died, a dragonfly landed on her, soft and visible, and near through tears.

~

And when Brooke heard about the dragonflies of this poem, she shared the story of her aunt, and how she had had a son who chose suicide when he was 23. She said he had gained the balance of four wings, and had become dragonfly, and then had the strength to visit her everyday.

~

When I walked back to the sparrow's nest, the late autumn bayou afternoon heat was close as i talked with Thomas. He had helped me open to New Orleans, helped me listen to marigolds, to dance the unbound waterbeaded sunlight, our throat-notes sounds and skins of sweet sadness, sweet joy.   I returned to the sparrow's nest and there was nothing.   Had it flown away, was it eaten, or did it pass onward, into air? Sometimes you get answers, sometimes, and sometimes it's late in the day, you hear the voice of a friend calling to you, and all you can do is turn your feet towards the dusk and start the long walk back west.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Heavier than Air

Heavier than Air

for Fritz Haber

He tautened, tightened and synched

the air, ratcheted in nitrogen and

found in the space the slow drop of ammonium

nitrate, the fuel that would keep a billion modern people from starving.

His glass of fine wine was lifted among

the highest societies a poor German Jew

from the country could pull himself up to,

but he yearned for higher air than the liquid

that shook life from the earth

to feed his generation of plants.

_________________________He longed for Goddom.

He rallied and lead a field of soldiers, squaring

off in the first big war of the modern

age. While Klimt painted the lovers softly, adoring eachother

in gold and maroon, Fritz Haber gave the order for the chlorine gas,

a similar invention to ammonium nitrate, to be let

loose slowly over the field at Ypres. It was early spring.

There must have been birds singing as the dawn broke.

Fog mixed with fog and heavier than air, gas

dropped into the trenches where men were lifted out of

their skins to the sensation of drowning on dry land, drowning

in their own lungs, heaving, convulsing, retching, tearing at their skin

falling back to the earth to feed the field with their blue bodies.

When he arrived home, his wife, a scientist surrounded

by men, said what he did was wrong. I don't know

what else she said before he left the next morning

to command troops and gas, before she walked into the garden

behind their house, before she rested a pistol to her chest, the

cold iron on the shallow part of her breast, before she aimed

straight for her own heart and fired, before he heard the sound,

found her body and took his pistol back, before he left her there

to get the train, before his young son wandered alone

in the garden, wondering what had happened to his mother,

his son who would years later walk down that same hedgerow

as his mother and end his candle with his own two fingers.

And after Fritz Haber tried and failed

to ransack gold from the saltwater of tides

to pay his part of the colossal debt of the Fatherland

he went toe-to-toe with the Nazi laws of

1934 and resigned rather than sack his

Jewish contemporaries, some of whom were no doubt

present the first time a pesticide was synthesized,

a pesticide easily lethal to humans. The chemists conspicuously

added a smell so farmers could avoid the toxic gas

but a later, more dedicated group of chemists

removed the smell, and updated the recipe name to Xyclon-B.

The Play

You said the play
  showed Icarus wings
  made of copper by the hands
  of his father to fly his angel/
  son over the sadness of soil
  blown dry and dying over the United
  States.  What year by reckoning?
  Twenty-one hundred summers after
  that one grape was crushed on the cross?

The actor said you could tell no more
of human history than the dirty jokes left by
the greeks, the roman war stories or
the grain yields of the curve of land
between two main rivers.  I say
ask the trees to tell you of loss,
how they missed the kinship of humans,
how many friends they no longer hear
and how they yearn for their dear ones to call their name.

~for krc

Occupy the Farm - Hearts Face the Sun

a piece i wrote for the slingshot magazine.  it was necessarily edited for space concerns, but i wanted to offer this version as a more holistic representation of my and others experience with the farm last year, as we prepare to return to the land this coming weekend.

Occupy the Farm - Hearts Face the Sun

By David Grefrath

“Tell me what I should do

to keep the sun out of your coat,

to find a way to obey the wind

to find the pomegranate on

the other side of the revolution.” ~Nathalie Handal

On April 22nd, 2012, around 200 people gathered under the banner "Free the Land" and stood at the locked east fence of a plot of land in Albany, California named 'The Gill Tract'. Some in the crowd thought they knew what was going to happen, some were surprised that no cops had been seen yet, but what was to transpire was a shock to everyone.

Gopal Dayaneni stood on a truck and held a tomato plant in his hand. He said that he was going to go onto the land, beyond the locked gate, and that he was going to plant that tomato. The lock was cut and 200 radical and activist human beings walked onto the last 7 acres of undeveloped farmland in the East Bay. No sirens, no cops. The activists-turned-farmers began to hand weed and pile stringy Mustard Greens that had gone to seed. Soon rototillers & compost would be unloaded and begin to till the Earth; soon over 10,000 plants would be brought to the field to be laid in soil to grow and by the end of the day those 200 human beings would have taken part in one of the most successful direct-actions of a generation, Occupy the Farm. Their actions were the direct result of over five months of clandestine planning, a decade and a half of public struggle over the fate of the land and several lifetimes’ worth of dreams.  Late in the afternoon, Pancho Steirle climbed to the top of a redwood tree near the south fence and fastened a flag at the top of the tree. The flag has a single image on it, one of the planet Earth.

By way of a short form of history, Edward Gill sold 104 acres of farm land to the University of California Regents in 1929.  There has been speculation that the deed stated that the land be used for agricultural research in perpetuity, but the foundation for such claims remains unproven. What is known is that for about 40 years, between the 1950s and the end of the 1990s, the Gill Tract was a stage for some of the most dynamic agricultural research on the planet. In a time when use of DDT was a mainstay in farming practices, the faculty at UC Berkeley used bugs to eat other bugs and were able to severely diminish the amount of poison that was applied to both food & land, a practice known as ‘Biological Control’. After 1998 though, Novartis began funding research, and UC focus shifted from Biological Control towards gene-isolation, patent-track research. Since then, almost all research on-site has been 'gene isolation' related research, which has almost no applicability other than Genetically Modified Organisms.  The UC owns over 150 GMO patents, patents which earned about $155 million for the UC in 2011.

Despite this, the UC Regents had, for years, been working with plans to 'develop' the last bit of the Gill Tract farmland from an area of pre-GMO research to a Whole Foods and for-profit senior living center, ostensibly for those suffering from Alzheimer’s and other severe ailments, with apartments starting at $4,000 a month. Certainly people need groceries. Certainly our elderly need a place where they are cared for. That day in April though, watching the wild turkeys running through the fields, the deer graze among the eucalyptus, the question that the activists and radicals asked was, 'Is this the place for it?'

Between 1998 & 2012, The UC Regents had courted counter-proposals for use of the land, the two major ones being the Bay-Area Center for Urban Agriculture (BACUA), and Village Creek Farm and Garden. Both were holistic responses, providing room for research and public involvement. Both had significant backing from the community, local NGOs and from researchers at the UC-Berkeley Campus. Both went through years of vetting and support gathering, only to be told, at the threshold of approval, that their efforts were unnecessary, and that the UC Regents were going to proceed with development plans to turn the area into a glorified strip mall. When a woman who had been working through official channels for over a decade to save the Gill Tract found out that we were going to occupy, she was overwhelmed with tears of joy.

On that day in April though, I was just amazed that we had got onto the Gill Tract, amazed that we had lasted into the afternoon without police arriving, and as the sun set to the west, with migrating geese circling overhead, we looked at a full acre which over 200 people had worked to weed and till that day; about half of which was already planted with tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, zucchini and patty-pan squash.  Food Not Bombs cooked a meal for everyone and we called a general assembly underneath 'the big-top'. We each shared our names and some of the story of how we got there. I said that the organizers had a number of contingency plans.  These plans ranged from 'What if the cops block the gate?' to 'What if the DA calls out mutual aid, and several hundred riot cops arrive, and rain down tear-gas, concussion grenades and rubber bullets?”  In the wake of the kettling at “Moving Day” Occupation the prior January 2012, where over 300 people were subject to random arrest, these were not idle concerns. Still many knew the risks, or thought they knew them, and they were there, had signed up for the farm, had signed up to be at constant risk of arrest, risk of detainment, and for some like Pancho, risk of deportation due to lack of official citizenship. That first night, I told everyone I was still working on a plan that said, "If everything goes golden..."

On the third day, the UC response on the radio was that they were to arrive at the Gill Tract that afternoon and begin negotiations. The organizers continued integrating people's concerns and prepared to meet, but the only negotiations that commenced was that the UC Regents turned off the water to the site. Two aspects they didn't take into consideration are that the City of Albany’s plant storage site is also at the Gill Tract. Their move to dry out the Farm was also drying out about 150 bare root trees that were due to go to residents of Richmond & Albany as part of a free fruit tree planting program. Their move also turned off a fire hydrant at the West end of the site, a move which infuriated the local fire department.

And then something unexpected happened. The farm continued thriving. 3 storage tanks were offered by supporters of the farm, each tank holding 255 gallons. Members of Occupy the Farm volunteered their pickups and gas to carry the tanks.  Private citizens of Albany and the East Bay volunteered to provide water from their own homes. And so a move by the UC Regents designed to weaken the Farm ended up showing even greater community resiliency, as day after day, truckload after truckload of water was unloaded, and plant after plant was hand-watered by people defying the University's Police daily warnings of arrests. Also in the first few days, curiously, the Albany Police stated they would not interfere with Occupy the Farm, leaving the policing to the University of California's private Police force.

In the first week, we held a number of community forums to discuss the future of the land. It had been known that the UC researchers operated on year to year leases from the Regents for their work, making many current and former researchers anxious about their continued ability to keep their research going.  At our first community forum, researcher Damon Lisch, who conducted research on the Gill Tract, bravely attended and said, 'if work equals ownership, then I own this land and you all are on top of my work. I can't tell you how upsetting it is for me to have you here.' During the first few days, Occupy the Farm didn't have a mandate from the organizers or those involved as to what we should do, vis a vis researchers. We were working with a consensus model, and Damon Lisch had concerns to keep his livelihood and his research going. Even as many in the group worked to reverse a perception of being ‘anti-research’, it was a reality that Damon Lisch and his research is deeply upsetting to some members of Occupy the Farm, who see it supporting GMO science  This in turn could be seen as a major contributor to the suicides of over 270,000 farmers in India.  The story goes that in that land, many are swindled to buy GM cotton seeds, often the only ones available in seed stores, and subsequently get tangled in a downward debt spiral.  When the crops inevitably fail owing to a lack of irrigated watering this then ends in the degradation of the soil and all too often to the massive number of farmer suicide.  No one thing is a sole cause of this, but the presence of GM seeds seems to be a major driving force.  In addition, GMO plants have a history of wreaking havoc environmentally, in the form of topsoil erosion, groundwater poisoning and ocean hypoxification. Yet all that is far from the Gill Tract, and there the group worked towards consensus and set aside two and a half acres of the west field for Lisch and 3 other researchers, all of whom perform genetic isolation work with corn genes. Additionally, a professor and researcher who was involved with the 1998 Bay Area Center for Urban Agriculture (BACUA) proposal, Miguel Altieri, had his farmland set aside. Altieri has informed many students through the years about the history of the Gill Tract and had watched in vain as the University of California Regents continued to push to transform the Gill Tract from a place where things grow to a place where things are sold. Altieri particular research has involved dry farming, a rather miraculous practice where many crops can be grown using only natural rainfall.

So the occupation continued. Each day the Police arrived and read a statement to people planting a row of chard or with a wheelbarrow of compost.  Each day Food not Bombs made 3 meals.  Each day we held a general assembly to discuss concerns.  There were festivals held at the end of the first week and another for Beltaine.  As time passed though, tensions grew between the police and protesters. The motto of the farm, "Farmland is for Farming" was more than a slogan to the organizers and to those who worked the land, it was also a way to manifest genuine non-violent resistance for a group of human beings who had seen pickets and marches lead to little genuine change, save discouragement and disillusion. It was also a way to harness the message of the Occupy Movement and to involve people directly in building solutions based on resilience as we practiced dismantling the dying structures around us. BACUA & the Village Creek Farm & Garden had tried official channels and had failed. Occupy the Farm seemed to be finally both inclusively addressing concerns, as well as preserving the land.

The UC Regents called for a meeting to negotiate. Organizers from Occupy the Farm sent a half dozen people to attend, along with Dan Siegel, the lawyer who had battled the UC during the fight for People's Park, and who had been representing the Farm since before the activists arrived at the Gill Tract. The meeting contained little of note. The regents demanded that the organizers disband the farm; the Farm organizers demanded the Regents preserve the land in perpetuity for agriculture. The only genuine effect to come out of the meeting was that two days later, the UC Regents filed a lawsuit against all persons who stated they had attended the meeting, suing both them and 150 "John and Jane Does" for destruction of property, as well as remuneration for the ongoing policing efforts, with an estimated total cost of over a million dollars.

Still the farm persevered. Over the 3 weeks of occupation 80 rows of vegetables were planted, a permaculture Children's garden, the Ladybug Patch, was started across the street from Ocean View Elementary School, with many of the schoolchildren visiting the garden. A group of researchers who had been kicked off the land by the UC & Novartis in 1998 hosted a 'Return of the Seeds', which then restarted a seed-saving garden with the descendants of plants which had last been on the land more than a decade before.

As time passed, the Police stepped up visibility and farmers continued watering and planting. On Monday May 14th though, early in the morning, over 80 riot police from 5 precincts were dispatched to the Gill Tract. 7 were arrested, and the farm, in effect, went into hibernation. The UC Regents plowed under 40 rows of crops, the Ladybug patch and the seed saving library. Shortly afterwards, researchers began planting their spring crop of inedible corn. Curiously, UC Administration chose not to plow 40 rows of crops, much of the first day’s worth of planting.

Beginning in July 2012, organizers from Occupy the Farm began clandestine harvests of produce from the remaining plants, each event having an accompanying police presence. 8 harvests were held before the end of the growing season, which yielded a total of over one ton worth of produce. This produce was given away at free farm stands in Albany, Richmond and West Oakland, many areas which have a profound lack of available fresh vegetables. Also in July, the Albany City Council approved the Whole Foods development project and it’s accompanying Environmental Impact Report, a report which stated, among other things, that there is 'no prime or important farmland' at the Gill Tract. A group of Albany Residents formed the Albany Farm Alliance and gathered 1400 signatures in an effort to rescind the decision. The next month, in August, the million-dollar lawsuit filed by the UC Regents against the Farm Organizers was dropped. In September, the UC announced that the Northern portion of the Gill Tract was now to be managed by the College of Natural Resources for a period of 10 years, a move which put the Northern portion of the Gill Tract beyond the risk of development. Two days later a Whole Foods Corporate Spokesperson announced that due to delays, Whole Foods was no longer seeking to build a store at the Gill Tract.

Before the occupation, many of the organizers had thought that any of these outcomes were nearly impossible.  Yet organizers continued mobilizing around the land.  Sighting the Albany City Council's continued desire to have a development project on the site, Eric Larsen of the Albany Farm Alliance filed a lawsuit on behalf what is widely viewed as a highly deficient EIR, which will be heard in June 2013. As the Fall descended in 2012, the radical farmers planted an autumn crop of kale, collards & chard, intercropped with nitrogen fixing fava beans. The UC administration plowed under the fall crops in November. Even still, many of the plants that never made it to the farm were distributed to community gardens in the bay area. In December, Occupy the Farm took a series of clandestine soil samples taken on the south-side of the Gill Tract in an effort to highlight the lack of a genuine bioremediation program at the UC as well as continued lack of public access. Bioremediation remains one of the main stumbling blocks for groups, particularly in poor areas, to starting urban gardens and farms. Will the UC begin to use its public mandate as a land-grant institution to serve the needs of the East Bay and broader community?  Occupy the Farm continues to push for integration of public and private spaces for growing food and for the reconsideration of private property in an era where the commons are being continually turned into private profit.  Soon we will likely need public spaces, orchards, public food forests and communal spaces for planting more than we today realize.

January marked the publicly lauded 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech. I'd like to use this forum to speak on a slightly different topic and highlight another anniversary as well. February marked the 40th anniversary of the Wounded Knee Occupation on Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation. If the former event highlighted the possibilities of integration, the latter showed both just how far we remain from achieving justice and the need for a diversity of tactics in attempting remedy for unjust situations. We live in an era where autonomous zones serve as the incubation areas for the world that we all must lift our hands to create. From the endurance of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to the ingenuity at Gaviotas in Columbia, from spontaneous community building to save land at La ZAD in France to the beautiful, varied insistence of the Arab Spring, Idle No More and the Tar-Sands Blockade, to each and every border between each and every land, we must all begin to share and integrate lessons of DIY resistance and liberation. We are in an era as well of one of the most rapid extinctions of species in the history of the planet. If you are reading this, you are still among the living, and you have a duty to both the ancestors and the unborn to find your gift as a human being, and to use that gift in service of life, life which has surrounded and supported you from the first electric explosion in the womb and which will continue to surround and to support you beyond the time of your last breath. If all that seems like a lot, out on the farm the geese are returning, and the winter continues to soften the soil with rain. We breathe, and each breath fills our heart with gratitude for life.  As a movement, the earth our drum, we hold dirt stained hands, turn towards the sun, and begin another season.

~updated Summer 2013