Shanks Pony

I walk in all seasons, which here in Indiana number a trusty four. 

I walk in all emotional states. Sometimes to celebrate them. Sometimes to mend them. Sometimes simply to experience them.

Sometimes, as I walk, I pray.  

Sometimes too, as I walk, I cast my thoughts beyond my immediate experience, by means of memory. Thus to walk in different directions over the landscape, can also be to walk to different venues and destinations in time. 

People do not estimate highly enough the freedom there is to be had and enjoyed in walking. They consider the automobile a symbol of freedom. But in terms of choice of vector of motion, the freedom that a car can give us is slight. In a car, your movements are limited to the road itself. But to walk is generally to be free of such restrictive straight-line proscriptions, and straight lines, by the way, are unnatural. There are no straight lines in nature. Only the human mind imposes straight lines, and a profusion of them is inevitably tied up in natural destruction. Witness logging roads. Or the modern, machine-plowed mono-culture farm-field. 

It is said that walking is really a perpetual falling forward, which we arrest again and again with each laying down of the foot. Thus our feet prove to be something akin to guardian angels, that protect us time and again from harm with a knowledge and a timing all their own. By giving ourselves up to their protection we make self-locomotive progress: a kind of daily example of incarnational Grace.

I walk to two libraries here in town. I walk to church. I walk to the university campus for lectures and recitals. I walk to rehearsals as well as to coffee shops and cafes to meet with friends. I walk to concerts, and I walk back home humming whatever tunes linger--the last bright leaves hanging on the tree of the immediate musical mind. On many mornings I walk my wife to work, and in the afternoons, walk her back home as we talk over our respective days, and what was accomplished, and what setbacks we experienced, and what moments of enlightenment. I walk to the barber, and return home minimally lighter. I walk to the grocery and return more heavy-laden. I walk to the park. I walk through the park. I crisscross the park, sometimes touching the trees as if playing (with rooted beings) an unfair form of tag, but really blessing them. I walk down the block to my brother-in-law's, where the family vegetable garden flourishes, and return with radishes and lettuces and whatever else may be in season and delectable. Occasionally, it's true, all this walking represents itself to my impatient mind as a slow, duty-motivated chore, but for the most part, I walk without regret, and even prize the task. My heart is the lighter for it. My body the better exercised. My conscience clear of carbon. 

Note: It cannot be emphasized enough that a nine volt nomad, when walking, need not have in mind, or even pretend to have in mind, an immediate destination. In fact, for a nine volt nomad, the greatest pedestrian pleasure is often achieved with no destination in mind at all. Destination is so often tied to ambition and achievement, which should have as little place as possible in a low-voltage mental realm. Thus setting aside obvious goals in our ambulatory activities underlines our resistance to many of society's most overweening faults, among them hubris, naiive belief in the inevitability of progress, and optimism without reasonable cause.

But more on the matter of destinations later. The subject of the practical uses of walking (of which destination of course must be an integral part) deserves a post of its own someday, since I lump it in with a theme that requires deep and sustained reflection: to wit, the matter of physical labor, and our present-day disrespect for it. Our society's favoring of convenience over self-reliance, its death dance with complexity, and fixation on the machine.  The Hubbert curve in the years ahead will wean us from much of this, to the accompaniment of much wailing and grief. So why not live ahead of that curve? Why not, in the proleptic vanguard of adaptation, learn again to walk with joy?

For now though, to doggedly pursue my present course, I wish to enumerate what it is that, on my walks, strolls, walkabouts, and hikes, I encounter and experience. And here, out of a desire to cultivate my wit, I intend to strive for manful concision. After all, our mortal nature, both as readers and writers, is an issue to consider. And besides, I seek the throne of a toadstool in the electric garden of wit...and wit dear readers is a nine-volt virtue par excellence. Nothing thrives more on abridgement and concision than wit. Nothing shines more bright on less, except perhaps children at play, otters of all ages, and baby foxes. 

Then what, to wit, as I walk, do I encounter both by habit and by chance? Well, to start with, sadly I encounter specimens of the automobile, some in farty motion, others thank God at least for the moment in a state of silent park. As little must be said about these as possible, if I am to keep my wit, for I do not look kindly on cars, given that they deprive the world of walkers, and in a host of other ways render me irredeemably grumpy. 

So to proceed. Objects of interest visible on my walks include the many homes of my neighborhood:  some of which are intended for humans, and others of which--martin houses, dog houses, robins' nests, and cold frames--are not. Regularly on my outings, I also sight ground-holes into which chipmunks and groundhogs will scurry, sometimes at speeds that suggest the hole is vacuuming them in. I also have witnessed raccoons and opossums taking refuge in the city sewers.  

I see flowers in great variety. I see trees, including my favorite native species, the dogwood--which in the springtime features flowers that really look like flowers, unlike say the maple, whose flowers are difficult to accept as flowers because they are so small and un-bloomy. I prefer my flowers large enough to be capable of gesture. 

When out on a walk I consistently wear a red backpack. This backpack serves not only to contain items that I wish to carry with me--apples or whiskey or volumes of James--but also to attract the attention of members of the public to my low-voltage but nevertheless mysteriously bright existence, a brightness produced in part (I am convinced) by the rubbing of my shanks against one another while in my pedestrian state, which you see imparts a sort of static electrical polish to my physical aura, an ambient electrical charge that surrounds me as with a halo of light. Call it the Ambulatory Aurora, after the goddess of dawn, who herself is clearly a pedestrian. For evidence of which I note that Horatio, Hamlet's good friend, informs us that "...the morn, in russet mantle clad/Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill." 

Mark you--"walks!" To walk is to mirror the morning. To walk is to model the dawn.

Walk to feel of the wind on your face. Walk to greet the sun. Walk if you dare with saints and visionary companions. I have for instance walked mile after mile with William Blake, a most marvelous and indefatigable walker, and a fine conversationalist about matters both infinite and eternal, though I must also mention that some of the dead who have offered to walk with me, I have had to refuse, as being the same tiresome ambitious bores in death as they were in life. Once for instance, I was forced to chase off Thomas Edison with a large stick, because he kept dogging me at my heels, arguing the case for infrastructural DC current. "Give it up man," I said. But he was unable to listen, for even in the regions of the dead (where by the way Tesla his great rival is universally celebrated) he has not bothered to purchase a hearing aid, being so egotistical that he cannot take part in mutual conversation with any other being, much less bear to hear his rival praised.  

Above all I walk for sanity. You see, as a nine volt nomad, sanity is always my first business, and practically my sovereign vocational goal. Sanity is why Jesus periodically got away to pray, and Thoreau went to Walden, and Buddha sat beneath the boddhi tree. Yes, walking is my boddhi tree. My cabin of logs and wattle. My daily wilderness away. Paradoxically it's the outer motion involved in the act that imparts the requisite inner sense of stillness, as the hurricane both generates and harbors the eye. And though my feet and legs and arms may be in motion, the inward remainder is still and calm. And the best of me can think.

HB

Impressment

For those who dislike camping, or who just fail to see its attractions, believe me, I can understand, and do sympathize. Yes, having in my time experienced many of the vicissitudes common to the pursuit, really I can comprehend why the prospect of shooing flies off the melting lunch-butter, or of lying on a cot in a damp nylon bag while it drizzles for hours on the tent roof, or of having to stumble four hundred paces to the bathroom in the dead of the night (coyotes howling) on account of a case of diarrhea--all adds up to an experience that fails to entice. Somehow though--I suppose through some anomalous short circuit in the brain--I am able to take the bad of camping and lump it in with the good, like a bitter turnip tossed in with a wholesome stew, but redeemed in the mish-mash and warm rosy sundown of composite digestion. Even a half-mile walk I take every evening down to the trash bins, to dispose of a tea bag or two or three or four (and whatever else leftover and comestible must be kept from the clutches of the masked artful dodger called the coon) I find I can turn into an opportunity to admire the rising moon or the acrobatic flitting of the swifts, or the gymnastics of the last few children on the playground as they hang from the bars and swing on the swings like the primates that they in some playful inner space very well know they are. Yes yes always always I thoroughly enjoy the time.

We go together, my wife and son and I, always to the same Wisconsin state park. We stay for two weeks, and every morning of every day we go hiking, and every afternoon of every day devote to napping in our vintage canvas tent and to reading books and to daydreaming and study. We turn in every night around nine. This is when the sun goes down in June and the whippoorwills start their calling.

Then comes the hard part. Going back.

Right from the beginning, the drive back invariably depresses me. Picture now you're leaving the park in all its beautiful bright particulars behind you: its bluebirds and scarlet tanagers, its sandstone bluffs and jack pines, its waterfalls and fields purple with lupine and other fields dotted with daisies, and you pull out onto the highway and roll up the car windows and immediately yes immediately no longer are you the conscious alert observer or wakeful celebrant of the natural scene, but just another mobile encapsulated consumer participating in the hot flow of human economic blood, and the interstate here serves pretty much literally as an artery and you're an automotive blood cell moving along within the artery and here's a billboard for vodka and here's the exit for the water park and here's the body of a deer.

A metaphor to consider:

Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British navy, finding itself chronically understaffed, to Americans' consternation practiced what was called "the press" or impressment.  This was a form of forced conscription, and proved on the American side to be one of the primary incitements to war with England in 1812. Simply put, British captains out on the high seas had a habit of helping themselves to a few seamen here and there; these might be sailors on merchant fleets, or sometimes even the fleets of rival navies. The general routine went like this: take one powerful warship (yours) and swing it alongside a helpless smaller ship, have your own men draw a few sabers, speak the necessary number and voila! The number of men demanded was now yours.  All this was easy enough to accomplish, given the isolated situation of a warship on the open sea; usually there were just no other ships around to call you out or challenge you.

Now here's my question today, which is actually a two fold question that breaks into all sorts of other questions too, a sort of interrogative billiard shot that splits I think into all sorts of spins and ricochets of implication.

1. In the first place, isn't impressment a pretty decent metaphor for the way we treat the planet and all its life forms? that is, always as a ship to serve us, always as a resource for the taking, always as something to toy with to suit our desires. Just this morning I note that researchers have apparently cooked up a way involving neural implants and video game joysticks, to remotely control cockroaches. At first it sounds  like a joke, but no it's real, and, regardless of how you feel about roaches, clearly a case of impressment.

2. In the second place, given an economic system sustained by the impressment of nature, is it any wonder that the same system presses so many human beings into service to it as well, in ways both rank and subtle? The obvious recent case concerns the sweatshop workers in Bangladesh--the hundreds dead, the thousands affected by that building collapse. But consider too, another phenomenon: all the young people in the US currently seeking (generally at great cost) college degrees, though with little hope of finding work that will enable them to pay off their student debt, when, after graduation, that debt comes due. Again, a case of impressment. A case of "do this, whether it's good for you or not. Feed the machine." Moreover there's plenty of evidence both anecdotal and statistical to suggest that in the face of their uncertain, debt-laden future, students' primary concern surprise surprise in pursuing their degrees has little to do with growing into more thoughtful, informed citizens, or with enjoying and appreciating the fruits of civilization, or even with simply enjoying their youth; it has to do with arming themselves for a competitive workforce. You see, the culture itself has been hijacked for staff, and all of us hoodwinked into believing there is no way for us to prosper unless we live in conflict and competition with one another. Well, it's time to question all this. Time to quit swabbing the deck until we know the destination. And mutiny too if needed.

Find your way back to the home you love. Take passionate refuge in an independent mind.

HB

Two Week Hiatus

I am taking a two week hiatus from the blog. I will be on vacation (camping in Wisconsin) and away from the internet.

HB

Creed

I believe in a universe that participates in our lives
In birds that sing on our behalf and waves on lakes
That continually throw diamonds across our paths of thought.
I believe that metal and glass respond sensitively to our touch
And that car engines can be known closely as lovers.

This is not to say the universe is centered on the human.
Birds have their own centers, burning hearts of song
Bunched like grapes within them,
And the moon shines, yes without our gazing.
It is to say that all things are a unity,
A One that may manifest itself diversely
But blossoms from a single seed and may be
Imagined folded back into that seed.
It's to say the human is the bird and the bird is the human
And that when birds sing they sing a human song
And that when humans sing, they sing a song of birds.
It's to say the moon finds purpose when we look to the moon,
And that we find purpose when the moon reaches into us,
Swaying the cells of our blood in minutest tides.

To say the universe participates in our lives
Is to say it's time to begin anew:
Time to act from the spirit again in reverence for the One
The spirit apprehends. Don't the atoms of air
That oxygenate our brains take part in thought?
Aren't we porous, replaced atom for atom with the passage of years?
Then why disbelieve in unity, why involve ourselves
So thoroughly in separation--doubting, disbelieving
Insisting on proofs when they are right there in front of us?

From me O human, flows every aspect of earth's reality
I tell why the blackbird sings and have the shy willow
As my companion. I even contain your suffering cities.
Nothing can take these from me, but will you have them as well?
Will you put Earth's sorrow at your heart?

HB

Music in the Park

I play in a folk band, and yesterday we had a gig downtown here in Valparaiso, in the new amphitheater here. The weather was glorious and the farmer's market was on. Folks were milling around sampling cheese and sizing up the basil plants. Right in front of the stage was a splash pad--a set of fountain jets built into the cobblestone, from which, at timed intervals, the water shoots and retreats, shoots and retreats. The pad was up and running for the kids, and while we played up on the stage they pattered around down below in their bathing suits, many of them dancing to our tunes. Our harmony singer was super-charmed by these dancers, all of whom were kindergarten or preschool age. Between numbers she kept saying to them "thank you for your help." And of course they were helping; mirroring the music back to us, the way the lake water gives back the image of the lily, or the way a kite with its swooping and fluttering renders visible the actions of the invisible wind. There were folks on lawn chairs and park benches, some of them just talking with one another, some of them just watching their kids, some of them just being our fans, singing along with our tunes. Also there were two small domed tents out on the grass: "Shade Shack" one of them was labeled. Kids came crawling out of these and went crawling back in, like snails with multiple personalities. All in all, it was the most pleasant sort of way to spend two hours that I can imagine. And I call attention to that word "pleasant"--just a simple word, rather bland. Denoting nothing extraordinary, nothing thrilling, nothing spectacular. Just sweet mental manna. Just the ordinary daily miracle of perception and enjoyment, requiring nothing more from us than our social presence and a capacity for appreciation and immersion. All you have to do is be there, and you're part of the project. Helping to increase the joy.

One of the happier aspects of playing in such a venue at such a time, is that there's no need to feel any nervousness, no need to obsess over every note; you can just play and enjoy yourself, and allow your enjoyment to radiate exactly as it wishes to, to whoever cares to listen. You can give up the fetish of individual expression--something we place too much value on in my opinion, even at the cost of privacy, dignity and trusting relationships--and instead give yourself wholly over to the service of  that larger project of sweetly passing the time, the same project in which (again) everyone else around you is involved as well.

Note please I'm not saying something so simple-minded and lazy as--"you can just play and not really worry about playing the right notes, because no one's really listening." Quite the contrary! I'm simply saying that the motivation for getting things right is centered somewhere other than the self, with its often intemperate need to impose itself on others, or to match or exceed their expectations. Instead it comes from a general feeling of rightness in your surroundings, and a feeling of unity with those surroundings and with the general project of life as it's expressing itself there in that given moment. Ideally of course you should always want to erase yourself and join yourself to the band and the music and the emotional life of the audience--that's how the best music happens--but I'm saying that's often a harder thing to do under intimate conditions, in which the audience is right there, all ears, absolutely attending; that's when pride and worry and the desire to impress folks with sham virtuosity easily cloud the musical mind. At least for me. But give me surroundings in which I myself am witness to the true spirit of Play around me--again, children dancing, a fountain splashing--and it's all so infectious, it enters me and inspires me to "play" my instrument, and "play" it in the most literal sense of the word "play."

Our downtown park is nearly brand new. Just three years ago in fact what covered that space was an eyesore of a bank parking lot. And how wonderful it is that, when the opportunity presented itself, certain bright minds in our city saw, in that space, as in a crystal ball, all sorts of possibilities for a renewal of civic life. Their hard work has borne fruit. And yet isn't it also sad, that for so many years there wasn't any space like this for us to enjoy? It's sad to think of all the fun we missed.

James Kunstler in his blog and books writes regularly about the infrastructure necessary to a robust civic life--parks and civic centers, community gardens, old opera houses, the lawns of court house squares--and I heartily agree with his assessment that America sadly lacks such socially activated infrastructure, and indeed has spent much of the last century industriously destroying or balefully neglecting what infrastructure it had once dedicated to the purpose of play and shared experience: letting the bandstands at the parks rot away, allowing the growth of the suburbs, like a tumor, bleed all shared civic life and social energy from the heart of the city. It is my hope that we've reached the limits of that immensely destructive experiment and are ready to admit the error of our ways.

So let's get on with it! Rebuild, replant, renew!

HB

Fractal Boy

I've always been fascinated with fractals, which are patterns that replicate themselves at different component scales. So that, say the inlets of the coast of Norway, viewed from space, resemble what you might call the "detail work"--that is, the smaller inlets on each separate fjord. Or the structures you see on a fern--say the curly cues on the leaf--at a distance of six feet, are the same structures you'll note when you view the fern leaf up close in your hand, or under a lens. Once you start noticing fractals, it's hard to stop. They transfix. They enchant: http://fractalfoundation.org/images/

It's a pet homespun theory of mine that the concept of fractals can be extended to the analysis of human behavior. Meaning this: identify any behavior of any individual human being, and you're going to find it reflected in the behavior of larger and larger human groups too, at almost every scale. Turmoil within ourselves has its parallels in relationships between spouses and partners. Feuds between individuals have their parallels in wars among clans and countries. And of course the virtues too--cooperation, generosity, good-will, mercy--are reflected upwards and downwards in scale. We even speak of nations as friends and individual human friends as allies.

So think back to the previous post, and let's put the theory to the test. Here's the nine-year-old me, expecting a great deal of juicy entertainment from a nine volt, and so desiring to have that nine-volt now, jetzt, pronto, after all why wait, why hold my horses, why defer, why suffer yearning, why pine? The question is this: can we draw a parallel between that boy in that impatient, go-cart-envisioning moment and society at large today, craving its resources and energy? Why yes, I believe we can. Although I must say I find the boy more charming. At least he can claim ignorance of the laws of thermodynamics.

By the way, I didn't get the advance. No, (sigh) what a difference just a few minutes makes sometimes. You cross the threshold of the interview room head held high and almost whistling with confidence, but exit the place like a deflated balloon. You take a chance and kiss the girl, but rats, she doesn't really kiss you back. Or you turn onto that rural road without the map, hum-de-dum just trusting to your nose; two hours later, you want to cut your nose off.  Well, that was how this nine-volt business went, I mean regarding who would advance me my capital. Not mein Volksbank. 

No, I wouldn't be given my allowance five days ahead of time on a Tuesday afternoon, said my parents.

"Why not?"

"Because allowance comes on Sundays, and if we started making exceptions we'd never hear the end of it."

"But my request is for something valid and real."

"Well I'm glad you brought that up," said my father, "because a nine-volt isn't going to be enough to run a go-cart."

"Yes it will be."

"No it won't be."

"But a car battery has twelve volts right?"

"True enough."

 "So why won't a go-cart go on nine?"

"Because there's the non-trivial matter of amps as well. It's amps times volts that equals watts, and watts is what you're most interested in when you're talking about power."

He let this little rainstorm of physics sink in, then went on with the most difficult news.

"Anyway, it's not the battery that makes the car go."

"What is it then?"

"Really it's the gas."

"Oh."

"What did you think it was?"

"I don't know. I guess it must have been dreams."

Now of course there are those who are going to say "well that's a charming story and all, but excuse me there is a real difference between the boy who wants to run a go-cart on a nine-volt, and a society that runs its transport systems and everything else on proven technologies." And okay sure, there is. Some. But I maintain that the two are not so different as we might like to believe.

The truth is that this two-hundred-year-old project that we call the modern industrial economy will not keep growing forever; the planet is a limited system and so perpetual growth is not even mathematically possible, much less practically so. Also, calling out "more more more!" louder and louder day after day, when it comes to irreplaceable resources, is both morally corrupt and stunningly irresponsible. Folks really it's time we all grew up. Time to stop demanding and expecting an advance.

It is the central conviction of this blog, that the world needs a new definition of progress: one that will look maybe to most people like regress, but no is really progress, moral adulthood, a growing up out of the perceived need for go-carts, by which of course I mean our power-hungry lifestyle heavy on the speed and the thermodynamic expectations, but also amazingly stingy with time, which is by the way the primary resource of love, in fact the only medium in which love can really be exchanged: love is to time-set-aside as waves are to water. We need a philosophy of material limits and we need to adopt it now, starting at home, with ourselves, one big change at a time. And we need to have faith that such change is possible, and not just possible, but potentially enlightening and full of visionary rewards: of work that will involve the whole of our being and resurrect in us an appreciation for the dignity of the physical body, of food that will taste like food again, of useful and beautiful things made by human hands.

So maybe you come to this blog as someone passionate about preserving the planet.

Or maybe you're someone who by choice and for a wider Simplicity's sake, stays at home with your kids, but always finds it hard when someone asks "so, what do you do?" meaning what do you do for money.

Or maybe you're a young person with no prospects for work and a lot of empty time on your hands. It seems as though the world ought to be a more promising place, but so far it's not giving off vibes of ever becoming so.

Or maybe you're living the life you always thought you wanted, but now that you've achieved it, find yourself vaguely and disturbingly disappointed. Is it the wrong stuff that you've been after?

Or maybe you're sick of the city you live in, its essential lifelessness, its sad language of sterility and loss written into every inch of its architecture and urban design, yes every vinyl drywall concrete asphalt plasticated inch of which says something trite about the great gray gods of money that care not a whit for us, no not a whit.

Welcome. And welcome to anyone at all who can imagine that simplicity and honest plain living with say vegetables and dirt and straw and cheerful catbirds and human conversations conducted free of interruptions and beeps might translate into an increased chance for human happiness; is it by the way possible that human happiness and systemic complexity may in fact be inversely related?

From the study window where I'm writing this I can look out and see a stop sign. It's bold and bright red, being reasonably new. Some drivers, when they arrive at the sign, duly note the intent of its message, and actually come fully to a stop. Others who are perhaps more impatient see the sign and slow down, but then, on noting no immediate threat from cross traffic, pretty much roll on through. Still others, it seems, just ignore the sign altogether. Do they not see it at all? Or do they just not care?

Now look to the left. That's my house. White and unassuming. Dandelions dot the yard, some of them the cheery essence of yellow and some of them white and ghostly and gone to mysterious billowy seed. It's June now and our small irises are blooming too--upright and prim. Our door is red. Come in, I'd love to talk: about creatures great and small, societies past and present, literature like slow food, and yes about dealing with hard changes we're up against at every scale, but also about all the allies that we still can rely on, oh say the sun and the sky above us for instance, and the dark rich life of the garden soil, which says to me along with Hopkins "there lives the dearest freshness deep down things" because it's true and all you have to do to see that and smell it is to dig. And of course you and I have one another too, as well as this sturdy project of conversation...

HB