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.
