Confessions of an EarthQuaker

MLK Garden Gnome?

2009-12-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

It was really good to read some Martin Luther King this week. I had last read some stuff about King a year ago. David Hartsough, a Quaker peace activist who was active in the Civil Rights struggle as a white Freedom Rider, gave me a book by Dr. Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (2008). The main thesis of the book is about how history is trying to make King into a sweet black man with a “Dream” of little black children and little white children playing on a merry-go-round together. Harding insists that by the end of his life, King’s vision was much, much more radical than that.
(Note: Hartsough is still a serious peace activist, and when I passed the book on to Chris Moore-Backman, war tax resistor, he was inspired to expand his extensive study of Gandhi’s nonviolent philosophy to King and the civil rights movement more generally.)
Harding acknowledges that until the last few years of his life, King’s vision was largely focused on racial equality, with awareness of poverty as symptomatic, but not systematic. We know that King worked closely with, and greatly respected the perspective of his friend Bayard Rustin, whose perspective definitely tied together racial justice, economic justice, and pacifism. The Vietnam War was part of the catalyst for King’s more comprehensive critique, and eventually King had tied militarism, poverty, and racism all together, with a pretty indictment of consumerism as well.
Harding not only tracks King’s conceptual journey, however. Mostly, Harding is focused on the personal, emotional, and spiritual hammering that King took, which opened him to a more radical (root) analysis. Harding talks about King’s near-fatal stabbing, constant death threats, criticism from whites and blacks who supported civil rights while still advocating moderateness, disheartening efforts in the North, and even alludes to King’s smoking, drinking, and womanizing. In particular, however, Harding cites the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan, which killed three little black girls as a turning point for King.
This made me think of how Cesar Chavez ratcheted down strike operations after a union member was killed. To be a leader of a non-violent movement, and to have innocents involved in the movement killed, partially because of the tension created by your witness, must be a very heavy burden for persons utterly dedicated to Love as the motive force in the universe. Gandhi did not take it lightly, either.
Harding insists that the post “I Have a Dream” Martin Luther King was a substantially different man than the previous one. And, he points out; history is determined to water MLK down to a sweet-faced Negro pleading for harmony, instead of a powerful intellect combined with an abiding spirituality and a deep social critique. I think that this is also true to some degree of Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and W.E.B. Du Bois. The Apple computer ads that featured the public domain images of Gandhi, John Lennon, Albert Einstein, and even Jane Goodall tend to trivialize how radical these people were in their critique of the modern, technologized, consumer society, its politics and economics.
I went out in the backyard this morning to sit in the sun and read my MLK book, A Testament of Hope. At one point, I glanced up to ponder a point that King was making, and my eye came randomly to rest on the two foot high statue of St. Francis that is sitting in the middle of my Dad’s vegetable garden (to scare the birds away?). I asked my Dad about the statue and I think that he said that someone from his Franciscan affinity group had given it to him when she moved from a house with a yard to an apartment. The “Franciscan Affinity Group” originally formed as a bunch of Catholics (lay, monks, nuns, and priests) who were protesting the nuclear arms race at the Nevada Test Site in the 1980’s. Over the years, its composition has changed to include a few non-Catholics, like my dad.
I went to one of their meetings when they were considering whether to stop calling themselves the Franciscan Affinity Group since they weren’t all Catholic, or even theists. This was a conversation that had been before. They went around the circle and responded gently to the question, until they came to my Dad. My Dad was raised Congregationalist and has been Quaker since his undergraduate years at Whittier. He’s not Catholic. He took a long pause and then said, “Well, St. Francis opposed the imbalance of wealth distribution in the world, he dedicated his life to God, he loved the Earth, he opposed war, he lived simply, and he spoke truth to the greatest power of his day. I feel that I am a Franciscan.”
Francis of Assisi was a radical. He is also a lawn ornament; a garden gnome with fake birds on his hands and real bird shit on his head. The world-changing life and witness of this man has been lost, watered down, sanitized, made innocuous and even silly. Rosa Parks was not just a tired seamstress who wouldn’t move to the back of the bus. She was trained as an activist at the Highlander Institute, and she was part of a strategic action to end Jim Crow.
For all of these saints—Dorothy Day, MLK, Cesar Chaves, St. Francis, Rosa Parks, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and quintessentially, Jesus of Nazareth, the beating radical heart of their faith and witness still lives, despite efforts to turn them into Pablum, and these sacred hearts light the way forward for us in the darkness.

Gratitude

2008-11-26T13:16:00.000-08:00

GRATITUDE
(If this post seems a bit odd, that's because I originally wrote it for a different forum.)

About this time in the year of 1969, Joe and Joanne Magruder started to make arrangements to adopt a child. They had a healthy, brilliant and beautiful daughter, and they wanted her to have a sibling. Because they were very socially conscious people, somewhat idealistic, staunch members of a faith community, and also partly because Joe was a social worker, they decided that they could provide a loving home to a kid who might otherwise be raised by the state of California. Since they had a girl, they were disposed to adopt a boy, but neither one of them had thought much at all about adopting a non-white child. That was the adoption case worker’s idea.
When she sprung it on them, they were immediately amenable. Their faith life and their commitment to social justice and racial equality had prepared them, despite their privileged white backgrounds, to be open to this idea. Interracial adoption had been unthinkable just a few years before, and was still plenty unthinkable for lots of Americans. Two years after my adoption, the historic statement by the National Association of Black Social Workers was published in 1972, which took a “vehement stand against the placement of black children in white homes for any reason.” (http://www.nabsw.org/mserver/PreservingFamilies.aspx) Interracial adoptions again became very uncommon for a number of years, until more adoptions were handled by private agencies.
I was blissfully ignorant of all this, of course. I liked our collie dog, Missy, and I hadn’t learned to complain about the vegetarian diet yet. I loved to wear overalls (nothing has changed), and my big sister, Marie, taught me all kinds of useful stuff. In 1971 we got a little red haired addition to the family, Ann, (who married a Norwegian bachelor programmer two years ago), and we were five.
Over the years we learned to ride bicycles, and to cut swiss chard in the garden for stir fry. My dad experimented with computers (card sorters!) and solar water heating projects. My mom taught piano and allowed us to fast for a day with her in solidarity with Cesar Chavez and the migrant farm workers. We were SERVAS hosts (http://joomla.servas.org/) and had frequent international house guests the whole time I was growing up. We loved to swim, and camp, and visit our grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
My maternal grandfather was an Iowa farm boy of Danish descent who was too dyslexic to have gotten very much education. He couldn’t really accept me as a member of his family, and I felt his ambivalence, but didn’t associate it with race. I found out years later that my maternal grandmother, who was an Iowa farm girl and a devout Christian had told him, “That child is your grandson. Jesus said to suffer the little children, and YOU WILL SUFFER!” So, that was that. We all got along splendidly. All of my aunts were pretty and professional. All of my uncles knew everything there was to know about all kinds of things from how to plumb a toilet to how to make a killing in real estate, train a dog, or sharpen a knife with a whetstone.
School was odd sometimes. In 1997, when I was 28 years old, I was interviewed by Parade Magazine for an article on transracial adoption. The reporter asked me if being transracially adopted had made things odd for me socially when I was in school. I responded that it was a little hard to say. I had by then found that being double jointed, having a lazy eye, being Quaker, being bi-racial, being a good speller, eating a vegetarian diet, playing the violin and not being good at sports were also contributing factors to my unique social status in the school. Not having a TV was the topper! Kids were curious about my being adopted, but I had always heard it spoken of positively, and so didn’t have any hang-ups about it. In fact, adoption was spoken of so positively in our faith community and the family that my older sister once demanded, “What’s wrong with ME? Why couldn’t I have been adopted?”
Now I am grateful for all of the challenges that I had growing up, because they made me who I am and I like who I am. Without any grand plan or political agenda, my adoption was part of the movement of this country towards greater equality, inclusiveness, and living up to Christ’s directive to love one another.

In 2001 a childhood friend of mine got in touch with me after several years of lapsed communication. I was deep into my Master’s thesis on ecospirituality. Could the church rise to the occasion and become ecologically conscious? I’m happy to say that we’ve come a long way, baby.
My friend, whom I had gone to Sunday school with, had grown up to be lesbian, she said. I supposed that congratulations were in order. She wanted to have children, she told me. I thought that she, like many others over my lifetime, wanted to ask me about my experience of being adopted. Instead, she asked me to be a sperm donor and auxiliary parent!
I thought about it and prayed over it for a while. She and her partner were very understanding and tolerant of my taking this time to process my thoughts and feelings. It wasn’t that I was worried about a lesbian couple raising kids, but I do think that procreation is a very serious and holy undertaking, and I’d had parents when I was born who weren’t up to it. I wanted to be sure that I was sure. I needed to offer the decision up to Spirit. The Bible was very helpful. What a lot of different family configurations there are in the Bible!
We met and ate together. We talked very clearly and intentionally about what our expectations were. I asked about their finances, and other things that you ordinarily wouldn’t ask friends about. They needed to know about my medical history. Had I used intravenous drugs or had unprotected sex? I gave blood to find out if I had the sickle cell gene. We were clear that we would tell the child the whole truth from the beginning, and that I would be involved in their lives. My father, who by now had moved into adoptions and child protective services as a social worker, was very supportive and interested. He had helpful suggestions and good questions. My sisters and mother have also been very supportive. Love makes a family.
And, seven years later, I have a daughter and a son. I have attended their births and been part of their growing up. Their biological mother and I are both mixed race, African-American and white, so the kids are too—only they are two generations more mixed—blended! Their other mom is Latina, and the kids are growing up bilingual, because Spanish is spoken in their house almost as much as English. (It was a sad day when my daughter figured out that I couldn’t follow her three year old Spanish.)
They are precocious, beautiful children, and not nearly as unusual at their schools as I was when I was their age. 40% of kids who attend Berkeley High School in California check more than one box on the “Ethnicity” section of their registration forms. I imagine that will only increase by the time my kids are high school age.
Their mamas can’t marry one another yet. Their marrying is as unthinkable to some people as a white man marrying a black woman was sixty years ago. While most ethnicities were evenly split on the recent Prop 8 vote in California, African-Americans voted against same sex marriage by 78%. Apparently many didn’t see it as a civil rights issue. Some of the great black churches that were the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement half a century ago spoke out against same sex marriage.
Indeed, it seems that nearly every religion in the country is troubled by questions pertaining to gender, sexuality, and how best to faithfully proceed, and how to hold the church together. The ordination of women and homosexuals is contentious for some. Same sex marriage is a challenge for others. Some look to the book of Leviticus for guidance, tradition, and history. (Let us hope that the penalty for ‘rounding the corners’ of our beards has changed…) Others look to the example that Jesus set by associating with those whom society had deemed untouchable, and his teaching that the Law is one of compassion lived in the heart rather than legalistic piety forbidding one from healing on the Sabbath, or touching a bleeding man thrown into a ditch by robbers. One senses that these issues having to do with gender and sexuality are really only the flashpoint, though. The underlying issue is one of how the church can be relevant in a post-modern, pluralist society. The only way forward is with compassion on all sides. Christ’s teaching and example will never be irrelevant. God is not changeable, though our understanding is.
Martin Luther King, Jr. often said, “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” King couldn’t publicly acknowledge the homosexuality of his friend and strong proponent of nonviolence in the movement, Bayard Rustin. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin) Rustin himself said in 1987, “The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it's the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated." (Note that he said “barometer”—he wasn’t trying to set up a comparison of grievances!)
I am grateful today that paradigms do shift. I am grateful for an arc of history that bends towards justice. I am confident that despite its foibles and failings God still loves this great nation and is always accompanying us as we stumble towards righteousness. I am grateful that my kids will have the example of a bi-racial man as president, and before too long, a woman. Mostly, I am just grateful for my kids.

Bachelorhood

2008-09-05T13:32:00.000-07:00

There’s nothing good about it, but it is getting to be a fact around here. I’m a bachelor. In fact, since I’ll be forty years old in March, I am in serious statistical danger of being a lifelong bachelor. You can tell that I am a bachelor by this picture of my kitchen counter:

The only food thing in sight is my coffee cup, though I had my usual oatmeal with peanut butter and soy milch that morning. (Yum!) I spent the whole day working on physical tasks. One was to dismount and dismantle my clip/platform pedals in order to loosen the spindles a little bit—they are notchy. Another was to invent a band for my watch because while the old TAG Heuer, which I found lying on the ground in a pile of broken glass next to my boot in the Sepulveda/Wilshire intersection when I was a motorcycle courier in Los Angeles ten plus years ago, is still going strong, it’s band is problematic and costs $250 to replace! While swimming in a lake in PA this summer on the bike trip, I got out to put the watch in my saddlebag, realizing that if the band broke, the watch, which is stainless steel and not light, would sink to the murky bottom in seconds, never to be seen again. Sure enough, the next day the band broke. It’s just ridiculous that science says that clairvoyance is unscientific. I think that denying the existence of something that happens ALL THE TIME just because you can’t explain HOW it happens is unscientific and weanie-brained. So there!

I like the watch band because, as you can see from this picture of the back, I can have one half of the leather strap fail AND/or have one of the springbars that hold the strap to the watch fail, and not lose the watch entirely. I love redundant fail safes. Why? Because Murphy was an OPTIMIST. Murphy’s Law says, “Anything that can go wrong will.” However, in my experience, even things that CAN’T go wrong will. If McCain gets elected, you’ll see what I’m talking about. After all, in what reality could a majority of Americans be that dumb (AGAIN)? Or, in what reality could an election in the U.S.A. be hijacked by hanging chads and Diebold machines!?! Things that can’t go wrong, but have….
Another bachelor project was a bit more domestic. My stainless steel teapot, which I bought years ago at a thrift store, but which is definitely IKEA brand, did not survive being shipped to D.C. The plastic handle broke. So, I removed it, and made this handle out of a wire coat hanger.
The coat hanger handle is actually superior to the original in the following way: While the plastic handle got so hot that the teakettle had to be handled with a pot holder once it had whistled, the wire handle does not conduct as much heat, or radiates it better, and can be picked up with a bare hand. Very convenient when one is in a pre-caffienated state of mind! Also, the coat hanger was just hanging around, and a new stainless steel teakettle at my rip-off local hardware store was $47! As IF!

So, what about bachelorhood? I don’t think that it is the end of the world. I will need to incorporate it into my middle aged plan, is all. I have hithertofore always assumed that the woman who could be amused by finding the kitchen counter in the condition depicted above on a Saturday morning was going to pull up in front of me one of these days on her vintage Norton Manx motorcycle, take off her helmet, shake her hair down to her leather clad waist, and ask me if I needed a ride to the composting workshop. At this point, I haven’t even seen a Norton Manx on the road in several years, though I have been blessed in my life with the friendship, love, regard, companionship, collaboration, and partnership of some remarkable, beautiful, smart, compassionate, capable, ethical, magical women. Most of them are composters.

Project in the making: I started a worm bin without any worms. If you have a pound or two of Red Wrigglers (compost-specific worms—Don’t be sending me nightcrawlers now), put them in a sawdust pack in a cardboard box with holes punched in the sides all over with a hypodermic needle or nail or something, and send them to the National Council of Churches, Attn. Carl Magruder, 110 Maryland Ave. NE Ste. 108, Washington, D.C. 20003. Don’t put them in plastic. They need to breathe, and I need the worms! I’ve got several coffee cones and apple cores digesting in a bunch of shredded paper and some dirt from the yard. The Taj Mahal of Wormland is ready, and it just need tenants.

Other projects? New bungee for my Peugeot PX-50. You know how on Wallace and Gromit, Wallace may say, “It seems the bounce has gone from his bungee” to describe someone who is down in the dumps? Well, my old PX really had lost the bounce from its bungee:

I carefully uncrimped the ends that held the elastic and got a near-enough match from Frager’s Hardware. The roll of bungee material has sat on a shelf six inches off the floor for years, so all the outer layers were quite clogged with yuck. I carefully unwound about thirty feet of the stuff until I found the gleaming white stuff underneath. I then cut 24” right out of the middle of the roll, and rolled up the tailing thirty feet just as though I had not just done such an utterly despicable thing. I paid forty-nine cents a foot for my two feet and wandered home. I haven’t lost any sleep over it yet, either. Partly because my bike’s bungee has recovered it’s bounce:
The PX-50 is probably a ’69-‘74, based on my inexpert knowledge and research. Before ‘69 they had rounded, beautiful lugs, instead of the Aztec design my bike carries, and after ’74, they had Mafac center pull brakes, instead of the Mafac cantilevers mine sports. It is fun to think that my bicycle may be as old as I am. Real 650B wheels stock, all steel, generator lights work and everything. She’s got to weigh nearly 40 lbs. It’s a working man’s Singer or Herse, the old constructeur randoneuring bikes. The pomegranite orange is a head turner, and I enjoy passing folks on carbon fibre wonder bikes with their clipless pedals and aerodynamic helmets as I pedal along in my wingtips, broadfalls, suspenders, and goofy Bell Metro helmet. I hope I outgrow that!

I know that I am supposed to be dealing with some spiritual issue or earth ethics dilemma here, but I’m not. I’m just grappling with solitude. Mostly, I like it fine. On the other hand, I have lived in community for the last five years, and lived with my girlfriend the year before that. Living alone is—foreign.
So… Future Blog Teasers:

The D.C. Ecovilla.
My Work in D.C.—Big plans for Obama.
Does being ‘well-wheeled’ make you a second class citizen?
Plain and Simple.

O.K. That’s it for now. It will take me longer to post this with the pictures than it took me to write it. Luddites of the world Unite! Turn the crank! Pedal the Bike! Grow the Food! Rock the Cradle! Row the Boat! Kiss the Lips!

New Town

2008-08-29T06:29:00.000-07:00

I am living in Washington, D.C. now. I work for the National Council of Churches Ecojustice Program a stone's throw from the Capitol. Most of my blogging now can be seen at: http://ecojustice.wordpress.com/ I do intend to keep this "Confessions of an EarthQuaker" blog up. Over the years of my inconsistent work here on this blog, I have had many conversations that furthered my understanding of ethical and spiritual issues. Bicycle riders, Quakers, other people of faith, old friends, and plain folks have contacted me here, challenged me, agreed with me, gone far past my understandings, and perhaps most importantly, joked with me.

I'm grateful, and I'll try to keep up with this discussion. I am doing a big experiment right now, called "Try to change the system from the top." Hmmm... Doesnt' sound like what Jesus said, does it?

Prius Piety

2007-12-31T09:11:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago at Pacific Yearly Meeting I stood up in the plenary session to ask if driving the Toyota Prius was all Quakers had to offer as a witness against oil wars. I was roundly criticized afterwards for disrespectin’ what was for some a significant lifestyle choice that grew out of deeply held beliefs. In other words, I was told that a Prius with an FCNL bumper sticker reading “WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER” actually is, seemingly, a significant proportion what Quakers have to offer as our witness against oil wars, along with writing letters to our representatives, and holding candlelight vigils.
Now, don’t get me wrong; I love the Toyota Prius. I love that they tested it for years in vehicle fleets in Japan before they brought it to the U.S., so that if there were a problem it wouldn’t sour the American public on alternative vehicle technology forever. (I always love it when people understand that Murphy’s Law, like gravity, is a fundamental premise of how the world works east of Eden, not a quaint aphorism.) I love that Toyota took a chance on making the car a little unique looking on the inside and the outside. I love that a bunch of Hollywood progressives who can afford cars many times more expensive are driving them. I love that they sold out the first year, and that most of them sold on the Left Coast (Natch!). I love that everyone thinks that the hybrid technology is a revolutionary new concept even though diesel locomotives have been made that way since there was diesel locomotives. I actually love that you can feel and hear the road a little when you are in one.
Some of my best friends drive Priuses. (Prii? Hippopotamuses is more fun than Hippopotami…) Hello, Elaine, Kirsten, Steve, Marilee, Shan, Hollister et al! I was in the parking lot at Santa Cruz Meeting a while ago and almost a half of the lot was Prii, or the Honda Civic hybrid. (The Prius is vastly superior to the Honda hybrid, by the way. Oh, not technologically, but the Prius LOOKS like a hybrid, while Honda looks like every other Civic on the road except for a small decal. So, you don’t get the instant credibility that you get with the Prius.)
HOWEVER, over in the corner of the parking lot was a bicycle rack, where a beat and battered Bridgestone XO-3 was locked up securely. With fenders, front and rear racks, lights, and a single pannier hung jauntily on the traffic side, the battered eggplant (yum!) paint lent it the effortless air of authenticity. I know a Philadelphia Friend who rides buses and bikes right through the winter there as part of her witness against The Machine. There is a sweet little Univega Viva Sport in Las Vegas that puts in more miles than the Prius it shares carport space with some weeks, often with a child’s Tag-Along half bicycle clamped on. My dad still cycles a lot, and Elizabeth rides her bike to seminary. Chris and Carin and little Issa are car free, and Steven won’t even ride in other people’s private automobiles. My sister rides to work when it’s not snowing in Vermont, and Violet’s bike has a jive basket. Melody and Coleman ride recycled bicycles to town on Saturdays to do their errands, and Jen commutes to work on her sleek road bike, coming home at 2 a.m. at any time of year!
My neighbor, elder and friend at Sierra Friends Center, Dorothy, is in the John Woolman vein; she thinks that bicycles may be too hifalutin’, and occasionally walks the 14 miles roundtrip to town. After years of living these seven miles from town, I finally measured the distance with my legs, using that oldest form of transport, walking. Afterwards, I related to that distance totally differently, whether cycling or riding in the biodiesel truck (since sold—I don’t own a car anymore!).
The Prius still burns petroleum. It still relies on our continued paving of the planet. It reinforces/represents the imbalance of wealth. It is very resource intensive, and contains many toxic materials that are difficult to recycle. It perpetuates the illusion that the modern pace of life is sustainable, desirable, inevitable. It kills the same amount of wildlife as any other car its size (and it is much heavier than it looks due to batteries). In casual systems parlance, it is a ‘tweak’ and not a paradigm shift. It perpetuates the status quo, rather than controverting it.
The bicycle, on the other hand, is an honest conveyance, using only the energy available to it now, not ancient carbon mined from the bowels of the earth. It encourages mindfulness, and strengthens the body. It slows us down to the speed of life. It is a social mode of transport, rather than an isolating one. Its emissions are the smell of sweat and the sound of ratcheting gears. When we have just distribution of world resources, bicycles will be affordable for everyone and for the biosphere. Bicycles are elegant, simple, beautiful.
I understand, of course, that not everyone can ride a bike. My friend Shirley loved to watch her boys, Shendo and Sebastian, riding, but she had cerebral palsy and a great big, expensive electric wheelchair to get her around. (Rest in Peace, Shirley, and thanks for all your love and lessons.) All who own cars can explain why life is not possible without them—“I have to get from here to there because it’s my job, or relationship, or whatever, and there’s really no other way to do it because the bus doesn’t go there, and it’s expensive, and someone yelled at me on the ferry once, and I get cold at the light rail station, and my kids have to go to ballet, etc.” Perhaps you really are stuck. Perhaps you haven’t looked deeply enough of what is being asked of you. Certainly we need a better transportation infrastructure if we are all going to be car free (which we are). Still, I am inspired by the early adopters. The bell curve may not have caught up to you yet, but there are some out there unpaving the way.
John Punshon’s remark is still irking me. He called me out in front of the FGC plenary a few years back (Normal, Illinois), and said; “I can see that you are a young man who hungers and thirsts after righteousness.” I think that the subtext of the remark had a “self” in it before the word “righteousness,” but I could just be getting defensive. I do hunger and thirst after righteousness, it’s true, but not because I expect to be judged by a wrathful and jealous deity when I die. I don’t have any coherent sense of an afterlife, let alone one with different options (Up vs. Down).*
Perhaps instead of the button-pushing word “Righteousness,” I should go with the more Quaker-sounding “Integrity.” That more perfectly expresses my sentiment anyway. I am one who hungers and thirsts after integrity. That sounds right. The challenge is that the society I live in seems to utterly preclude the possibility of living a virtuous life; one of integrity.

Meister Eckhart wrote: “there are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the
Other half. They will give up possessions, friends, and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves.”

I offended one dear Friend recently who has worked very hard in the area of social reform with various Quaker organizations for decades. I asserted that I don’t know many Friends who are willing to give up “possessions, friends, and honors,” let alone “disowning themselves.” She knows many who are harassed by airport security because of their political work. These are people who could earn more in the private sector than they do in the NGO’s they work for. These people have made real sacrifices to live their Truth. I was more or less called a “whippersnapper,” and certainly took to heart her observation that I haven’t exactly set the world on fire myself.
Still, I feel that the total surrender that Meister Eckhart speaks of is all too rare in the world today, and in the Society of Friends. Yet, I am increasingly convinced that it is essential to our finding the spiritual groundedness and joyful non-attachment that will be necessary to remake our world from the earth up.
The text where Jesus exhorts us to “forsake thy mother and father and go with me” is not so much about family relations as it is a way of illustrating that even this relationship, which we have always had, which society holds up, which we believe we are entitled to, and which we assume God wants us to maintain, must be offered up, if required of us, as a testament to our devotion and to free us to follow our leadings. We are enjoined to withhold nothing from God. How then, will we justify the inability to surrender our automobiles?
It is all right for some to have a facile, plastic, relationship to means and ends. I suppose that some of that is inevitable, and it is good to have it as part of the dialogue about modern ethics. Still, if there is a panel on different religion’s approach to war, I also hope that someone at the table will cut through all the nonsense about “Just War” and point out a clear pacifist principle. In the same way, in the pantheon of how different religions deal with sin, I am glad that Quakers have stood for the notion that sin is not inevitable, and not just because sin doesn’t really exist. (Sin here meaning, “the missing of the mark” rather than some indelible form of irredeemable evil.)
I am also not claiming personal righteousness—if I had that, I wouldn’t hunger and thirst after it, right? It is not an accident that this blog is called Confessions of an EarthQuaker. Sometimes all I have to offer in my ministry is my own confession of broken heartedness and culpability. In this day and age, living according to any coherent ethics of compassion is a fearsome challenge. How will we live in a way that does not exploit people, carry the seeds of war, or destroy the biosphere? For myself, I sleep in a room heated by wood backed up by propane, turn off my coal-powered alarm clock (it runs on electricity, of course, but the electricity comes from coal), pull on my industrial cotton broadfall pants, light the propane-powered stove to heat the water for my coffee which has traveled from Sumatra to be on my shelf, and then wander into the bathroom to contaminate 1.6 gallons of what previously was potable water. Before I am fully awake, I have participated in the exploitation of coffee farmers, the destruction of the biosphere through pollution of water and carbon emissions, and I have nurtured the seeds of war that makes my lifestyle, modest though it may be by U.S. standards, possible. (The big three of ecological footprint are housing, transport, and diet. My diet is as big a footprint as my transportation.)
Perhaps what I can say here is part of my learning at Pendle Hill. Perhaps I should talk about my feelings. We do that a lot around here. When I think about the state of the world, and the way in which our global north lifestyles contribute to its continued decline, I feel sad, sick, scared, and mad as hell. When I see people seeking alternatives, experimenting, sharing their discoveries, and living their truth, I feel inspired, joyful, hopeful and loving towards those brave souls. In short, bicycles make me happy. Perhaps that’s all I should have said in the first place.

*My theory of afterlife is called the Cosmic Compost Pile. Since we know that in physics and in natural systems there is no beginning and no end, only cycles and processes, it doesn’t make sense that any part of me would just cease to be when I die. I figure that the Spirit, like the body, is subjected to radical entropy, but that the resultant material is enriched, purified, and ready to be absorbed into whole new cycles of life. It is possible that some lives are like an apple core in the compost pile, which breaks down rapidly, and others are more like an avocado pit, their energy breaking down more slowly, but it all goes around again. Of course, I can’t prove it, and I have never been shown that this is true by a mystical experience. I just like it as a plausible, prosaic, and nonviolent notion of afterlife. In the true Quaker tradition, I actually think that our eschatology tells us that the Kin-dom is at hand, and we are living in Paradise now.

Entropy

2007-12-13T15:20:00.000-08:00

Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegone, but that doesn’t mean that plenty hasn’t been going on. When I first arrived at Pendle Hill, I slept a great deal and ate and went for long walks, and stared at the trees turning colors and let go of much that I had been holding on to. Now there are some very subtle processes starting to happen within me. I prefer great dramatic epiphanies, of course, but I am mindful of the fact that it is really just subtle little shifts of sunlight, warmth, moisture, nutrients, and microorganisms that create the great harvest that we sometimes get from the Woolman Orchard. Also, great big events and movements in my life have often been catastrophic in effect and affect. Subtle is good…
Still, I have to admit that the primary trend feels a lot like entropy, dis-integration, coming apart. Of course, this is merely an ego perception, not reality, but the ego does get quite strident sometimes. I have done Advent consciously and deliberately for the last four years with the Sunday Morning Book Group at Grass Valley Friends Meeting. This is the right time of year for letting go, as trees let go of leaves. It is the darkening time when life is waning. This can feel like death to the ego, but spiritually I know that death always leads to new life.
I have been doing a great deal of reading. Much is going in, and I have a sense of searching through it, looking for key elements that I need. I can’t force it, but I will wake up one of these mornings, and it will be with me. I have committed to the process, and continually remind myself that the product (if any!) will come from that.
I have also done some writing lately, but it seems to be serving the function of making room in my head so that I don’t have to hold these elements, but can let them go and return to a waiting state. None of the things I have written have been elegant or even particularly coherent, and this is difficult for the ego too—I’m supposed to be GOOD at writing!
In fact, one of the things that I have recently had to confront is a pervasive, crippling perfectionism. I met a woman, Colleen, who is a professional organizer. She stayed one night as a guest of Pendle Hill because she lives some distance away and had two days of work in the area. She and I got to talking at the breakfast table. It turns out that she has read this blog! She mentioned being a professional organizer—not labor, but offices and homes. I talked about my challenges around neatness and papers in particular. She thought for a while, and then offered that a certain kind of person is such a perfectionist that they don't want to engage in things that won't come out perfectly. I looked at my life through this lens for several days--work, relationships, living spaces, ministry, hobbies, and even my personal aesthetic. It has been very enlightening, but also has involved some mourning and letting go of anger. So, now I am struggling with the theme: "Perfection is Imperfection: Imperfection is Perfection." The point is to engage with things despite the certainty that perfection will not occur.
There are some forces at work in my own brain that encourage me to do, to make, to accomplish, to act. One is that the Pendle Hill end of term tradition of Festival Week is coming up, where students do presentations of what their work has been about this term. Can I do a presentation of playing the violin, taking a nap, and eating an orange? (Actually, that would probably be accepted with alacrity.) Another contributor to my sense that I need to get something done is that I am the Kenneth Carrol Scholarship recipient, and am supposed to do some sort of Biblical or Quakerly scholarship that is of value. The third is all the folks who have contributed to my being here financially or otherwise. It is good to have accountability, of course, but it is also important to look out for the tricks of the ego. Early Friends always reminded themselves to “stay low” and listen. I think that this is what I am attempting.
During this time of dissolution and non-productivity, I have been exercising regularly in an effort to control my blood pressure without medications. My B.P. is not in the happy range, I am sad to say, but I am stronger, faster, leaner and more flexible thanks to a somewhat haphazard discipline of running, cycling, weight training, and yoga.
I have attended numerous meetings of Quaker organizations, since I’m in the East. I attended the American Friends Service Committee’s board and corporation meetings, Quaker Earthcare Witness’ fall gathering, the Friends General Conference Traveling Ministers Program consultation for emerging ministers, and have agreed to serve on Pendle Hill’s Racial Justice Committee as the resident student representative. I am hoping to visit with the Friends Committee on Legislation this winter as well, since I have been very impressed with their work.
My spiritual reading is the New York Times. I read the front section, ideally for half an hour, but sometimes it is more or less. The idea is to read with cosmic consciousness. Sometimes I laugh, and sometimes I have to stop and pray. Sometimes I put the paper down and go for a walk under big trees in the rain. Sometimes my tears fall on the page, and my heart aches. As time goes on, however, I am learning to see the beauty more and more. I can’t explain it, but it’s there.
I am also working on a project for sustainable travel to Friends General Conference Gathering this summer. The EarthQuaker Road Trip seems like a perfect fit with FGC’s theme of “Courageously Faithful.” The idea is for Friends of all ages to take Amtrak to Philadelphia (bikes go free on the train!) and then to cycle to Johnstown on a Pennsylvania State bike route that includes some Rails to Trails. The trip will involve service work, play, worship, and visiting with Friends Meetings along the way. Eight days and 259 miles is a pretty mild bike tour, so consider cycling a bit this spring to get ready. Hopefully there will be a link on the FGC website soon. Emma Churchman, a fellow student here, and Kristina Keefe-Perry are primary co-conspirators.
My FGC workshop proposal was also accepted. Entitled EarthQuakers Unbound!, it will incorporate my learning from last year’s experience. After a year of intensive scholarship, it will be fun to bring new understanding to this group exploration of the Gospel of the Earth.
I have also started to keep a dream journal. For the last two decades I have been a person who claims not to remember their dreams, or not to dream at all. It turns out that I just wipe my mind clean as soon as I wake up. By instead waking up and lying still in the position I woke up in, I can remember my dreams, then turn on the light and write them down. Individual dreams so far haven’t seemed to yield much, but looking at the nearly two dozen that I have collected now does reveal some very consistent patterns. It’s fascinating, really. I’m now reading a book about it, so I can better interpret. Jeremy Taylor’s book, Dream Work: Techniques for Discovering the Creative Power in Dreams, in case you are curious.
So, entropy, surrender, letting go and simultaneously continuing to practice my disciplines of exercise, spiritual reading, spiritual writing, worship and prayer are the business of these days.
An embarrassment of riches, surely. The world continues to hurtle towards ecogeddon, and I am preparing myself for something. Should I form a Quaker Worker house? Go to seminary? Give up and just make piles of money and have a good time while the planet is still inhabitable? Hmmmm….
Time to pray.

No Mas Muertes...

2007-06-14T15:29:00.000-07:00

This might seem like an odd summer break activity to some, but I am spending some time in a desert camp with No More Deaths next week. You can check them out at www.nomoredeaths.org

This, of course, requires a little bit of money, so I'm posting their boilerplate participant support letter below. If you feel so inclined, please make a donation with a "Carl Magruder" notation. I will do the sweating in the desert, and write about it here!

Weird way to prepare for FGC...

June 14, 2007
Dear Friend,

Each summer No More Deaths hosts hundreds of volunteers who come to the Arizona border region to help provide humanitarian assistance to migrants. Those volunteers take home with them a new understanding of the crisis along our borders and their place in that crisis. It is our hope that they will share their stories and experiences after returning home. This year, in an effort to further involve communities across the country, we are requesting our volunteers to ask their home communities for support prior to their arrival.
There are many ways that you can support a No More Deaths volunteer: prayers and regular correspondence are greatly encouraged. This is no vacation; many find their time along the border both physically and emotionally challenging. We also need financial support. Our summer projects are very expensive, so we ask our volunteers to raise a small portion of what it takes to support them – at least $100 per week or $300 per month that they are here. This money both supports our programs and offsets the cost of hosting volunteers. Enclosed is a brochure with more information on the mission of No More Deaths and our current projects. No donation is too small!
We hope that you will provide whatever sort of support that you are able for this volunteer before for their departure for the border. We also hope that you will be able to talk with them about their experiences upon their return.

Many Thanks,
No More Deaths

3809 East 3rd Street Tucson, AZ 85716
www.nomoredeaths.org
(520) 495-5583
action@nomoredeaths.org

Yea, Though I Walk Through the Valley of Death

2007-06-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

Note/Disclaimer: I can’t claim that this entry has any profound spiritual, ecological, or Quaker content. I’m just trying to keep up with myself here. Some readers may be apalled to learn that this entry is primarily concerned with fossil fuel burning activites. Freak out!

I go to the desert to cleanse my soul. It may be some ancient affinity. (Past life theory explains a felt experience that many of us have, without being metaphysically convincing to me at all.) Whatever the reason, I find the desert soothing. There is something about being in a place where survival is not easy or a given. I also like to be in a place where the bones of the Earth’s crust are not too covered over with vegetation or even soil. I feel close to her then.
Things come scouring off of me out in the Mojave. I rolled the old Yamahootie Scootie down the Eastern Sierra, late in the day coming to camp in the municipal campground in Big Pine on Friday. Interactions at Sierra Friends Center zing around in my head as I hunt for possibilities, but I have traveled over and over these mental roads, and find no new turn offs or revelations for now.

It is too late in the day to try the desert road to Saline Hot Springs. I’m not on a dual sport motorcycle, I don’t have auxiliary lighting, and I’ve already rolled too many miles to try it. I did try the paved road out to the desert before turning back, but the little desert owls next to the road turned me around, one after another starting up and fluttering in the headlight. I don’t know which way they will go or which way to swerve, since swerving to avoid wildlife is a good way to crash. I run over a ground squirrel that can’t decide which way to go, and then one of the owls hits me in the shoulder. I decide to turn back for the municipal campground before something really bad happens. Too late for the squirrel.

The next day I cover 102 miles of desert dirt road. Initially, I’m heading to Saline Hot Spring. Twelve miles in, I’m in a low place where the road is winding through steep walls. In a left hand turn, a jeep suddenly rounds the bend ahead, traveling at high speed. I see it very clearly all in a moment: huge winch on the front bumper, two giant coolers strapped down on the roof rack, green paint covered with dust. What really gets my attention, however, is that the jeep is pulling a trailer, and though the jeep is all hooked up, heading down the middle of the one lane road, the trailer is totally broken loose, and jackknifing its way straight towards me. I am hard on both brakes, and squeeze up against the canyon wall where there are big rocks sitting in deep stand. The jeep also slows, and the wheels of the trailer hook up just before it creams me. The trailer leaps into line behind the jeep, and the rig blows past me, trailing a cloud of dust. I put the side stand down on a rock, and shut off the motor. Pacing it off, it is three paces from the front wheel of the Yamaha to the deep crescent shaped furrow dug by the trailer tires as it swung in behind the jeep. I don’t smoke any more, so I just take a long drink from my Camelback and pee on a little scrub plant. (I always pee on plants in the desert. I imagine that they really appreciate the moisture and nitrogen.) I notice that my hands shake more than usual, and that my heart beat is a little more irregular than usual. It is so quiet here when no motors run!

Thirty miles down this road, on the Seca II (XJ600), I glance in the rearview mirror reflexively. My little wood and canvas chair is waving at me. Why isn’t it stowed? Always willing to take a break on a grueling washboard road, I stop at the top of a rise (there’s no shade for miles), and check my load. My ancient tent and ground cloth have gone AWOL!
I backtrack. And backtrack. And backtrack. I can go a little faster, because I know where the deep sand is now. I don’t mind rolling my old street machine on these bad roads, because it is so familiar to me after owning the same bike for more than a decade. It’s not a special dual sport motorcycle made for any kind of terrain. “Specialization” is one of the traps of the consumer society. That’s why everyone has twenty pair of shoes—we need different shoes (we think) for different activities and occasions. We can’t just cycle in a t-shirt; we need a cycling jersey. It won’t do to just have one kind of kayak—we need specific types for different bodies of water.

My old friend Richard Graham (pronounced "Graim") convinced me that “all motorcycles are single track vehicles.” He comes from the era when a high pipe and knobby tires went on “scramblers” while the exact same motorbike with street tires and low exhausts was the highway model. (Possibly different handlebars and gearing too.) He motocrossed his FJ1200 Yamaha just to prove the point. My little Seca II is descended of that FJ1200, with half the displacement, a steel cradle frame, single disc brake, bias ply street tires that last forever, and a relatively upright riding position. It is considered an entry-level machine, but I’ve put upwards of 80,000 miles on this motor now, and it has kicked the hell out of every BMW I ever owned previously for simple appliance-like reliability. It's small enough to ride off road, to pick up when it falls over, and to keep me in check with the Highway Poltroons.

Nine miles back, I find my old North Face tent in the road. I reflect on how long I have had this tent (sixteen years, by my calculation!). I should probably seal the seams again, but it is in perfectly good shape after many trips, and all kinds of weather. I suppose a newer tent would have some cool features my old tent doesn’t have, but ignorance is bliss. Besides, there is the issue of familiarity (same root as family). I can set up this tent in the dark at the end of a 600-mile day on the motorbike or twenty miles backpacking in the dark in a stiff wind.

I’ve backtracked so far that I decide, “Hang Saline Hot Springs—it’s too hot for soaking anyway. I’ll check out Scotty’s Castle.” I’ve been to Death Valley many times, but never to Scotty’s Castle. I’m curious, and it seems like it’s on the way towards Las Vegas where I will stay with Friends. Then the pavement ends again…

The dirt road I’m on now is wide and fairly well groomed. It has some gnarly washboard. And it has some deep sand. Now, deep sand is the only thing that really scares me off road. From reading the Adventure Motorcycling Handbook, however, I have the impression that even a purpose-built dual-sport motorcycle, if carrying luggage, will have difficulty in deep sand. I have read many accounts of people motorcycling in these conditions where frequent spills are the order of the day. What is pernicious about the situation I’m in is that a) the road looks the same whether it is fairly firm, allowing 35-45 miles per hour, or if it is deep sand, necessitating much slower rates of speed. Higher speed smoothes out the washboard like magic. So, I bomb along blithely through the desert landscape, and then suddenly the motorcycle starts flopping about like a landed fish as the front wheel tries to tuck in the deep sand. Slowing down exacerbates the flopping exponentially, so the only thing to do is gas it. Cracking open the throttle when all signs indicate that a crash is immanent is counter-intuitive, to put it mildly, but it is the right thing to do. The ground firms up eventually…

b) is that Richard isn’t with me. Nor is Aaron, Abbott, Issa, Amy, Kristina, Nicola, Brian, Pete, Jeremy, Gabriel, or any other motorcycling buddy of mine, except Eddy Bear. Eddy Bear no longer has a corporal body, however, and so is of limited help, only occasionally giving advice, which mostly consists of yelling, “Give it some stick!” in his thick Cockney accent when I hit the deep sand and don’t want to roll on the gas. Point is, a wreck out here would be bad. If I was too hurt to ride, I could be here a long time. If the bike wouldn’t run, ditto. A very conservative riding style develops. And then I hit the end of the water in my Camelback.

It’s two in the afternoon, and I’ve been at this for hours. It has, I have to admit, ceased to be fun. I have another litre of water in my Nalgene, nicely warmed up, and pour that into the Camelback. I’m wearing my jacket to keep the sun off me and in case I wreck, but it is plenty hot out here, and I’m sweating in a decidedly porcine way. (Do you know that pigs actually have no sweat glands, just like dogs?) I look in on the gas in the tank, but can’t draw any real conclusion about how much fuel is in there. I'm glad that I bought 91 octane--in my old aircooled motorbike, it almost pays for itself in increased mileage. I haven’t gone so many miles since filling up (200 mile range), but I haven’t gotten out of second gear much either, so it’s hard to say when I might go on reserve tank, indicating less than a gallon of fuel left. (This isn’t as dire as it sounds when you get 50 m.p.g. in top gear at 55-65 m.p.h. Poor man's Prius.)

I need to pee, and consider that probably I ought to pee in the Nalgene, just in case, so that I could drink it later if something goes seriously wrong, or if I’m more lost than I think that I am. (Not all who wander are lost, remember, but I was starting to think that I might be. Gandalf didn’t use G.P.S…) Just then, about two hundred yards a way, a great black S.U.V. with tinted windows thunders past perpendicular to my track. Hidden by a trick of the terrain, I am back at the paved road! Civilization! Cold beer and cheap plastic crap can’t be far off. I’m saved.

The hundred and some miles to Vegas are relatively easy, except that the ultra-solid Yamahoo is spitting oil onto my new left boot. Tales of motorcyle repair in Tucson to follow.

Birthday...

2007-03-08T06:55:00.000-08:00

Today was my 38th birthday. It was more eventful than most birthdays are to me, so I thought that I might write about it. I hardly post to this blog anymore, though it has served as a very useful way for me to organize my thoughts and try to articulate my queries. The dialogue aspect of it is also very helpful--your comments and questions enable me to move my piece along the board...
The picture is of me in the Visalia Meetinginghouse after a long day of working at Self-Help Housing putting a roof on. I am writing a story for my seven-year-old friend, Emily. It was a serial--I wrote it nearly every night and mailed the pages nearly every day of the three week trip, and her mother read it to her at bed time. I think that this relationship between Emily and I was the great learning relationship of my 38th year. I had no idea how to enter into a close relationship with a child, and made many fits and starts initially, until Em's mother admonished me to stop being ambivalent. Then I prayed about it, and got very clear, and the energy between the Emster and I grew to be so full of love and care that people who had just met us instantly accepted us as parent and child. When a woman on Amtrak asked me, "Can your daughter play with our daughter?" I just smiled and said "Yes." Emily is small, freckled, blonde, with China blue eyes--it should be obvious to anyone that she has none of my genetic material, but the energy between us would seem to have grown to be even more obviously that of a parent and child
Unfortunately, the energy between Emily's mother and I was much more fraught with difficulty, never really recovering from a bad start, and has been mutually layed down. We are still neighbors at the Sierra Friends Center, and I see Emily every day, but I cannot make her promises now. There is not the dailyness of brushing teeth, reading stories, feeding Gecko. We share a history of flakey adults in our lives--me before the age of one, impactful but ancient. Emily on a much more continuous basis. It is an odd sort of bond. Having ADD and a great love of chonklit chip cookies are other common points.
So, discerning what is Spirit's way in this. Love finds a way, I suppose. More prayer, perhaps...

It is also the fourth anniversary or so of the Iraq war. I can't believe that it is four years and no sign of let up. (Of course I BELIEVE it--hell, I PREDICTED it--but it is still appalling.) I remember watching the first footage of the Afganistan invasion, all in eerie green night vision, from the Humboldt County Jail where I was waiting on bail on a trespassing charge during a forest action in the Freshwater Creek watershed to save 1400-year-old redwoods. It seemed to me then that the world was ending, but really we were just on the cusp of getting accustomed to yet another level of horror. Now the war and the clearcutting are not even part of my daily consciousness. They are more like a relentless background noise. Time to bring them up to full consciousness again. Creative solutions are needed.
The pounding horror does have its effect. This year I developed a mild form of psoriasis, which is mostly in remission at this point. It is a stress disorder, genetic, usually manifesting in people before they are twenty-five. It scared me at first, but I am used to it now. There's nothing to be done, and it isn't really a health issue, just an exercise in not becoming vain about one's beautiful brown skin.
The other health issue that came up this year is more serious--hypertension. My health care provider wants to put me on a diuretic. I want to handle it with more holistic methods, but there are only two significant places for improvement, since I eat a low sodium largely vegetarian diet, am not really overweight, and don't smoke, etc. I have to reduce stress and get more exercise.
On the whole, it seems like a good time, this 38th year. My work at the Woolman Semester is still challenging and meaningful. I still live in beauty at Sierra Friends Center. My ministry and opportunities for it are growing (more on that anon), and I continue to grow and learn. I'd like to keep at it for many years to come.
Blood pressure therapy time... I'm off on me bike!

People's Power

2006-10-29T15:34:00.000-08:00

This is what the power poles in Ejido Maclovio Rojas look like. They are very festive, with all different colors of wire coming off of them and heading off to this house, that street. Some of it is pretty heavy cable for carrying a good amperage over distance, but a lot of it is the cheapest gauge of lamp cord that you could hope to buy in the ferreteria, or hardware store. (Ferre refers to ferrous, or iron, I assume.) You see, the people of Maclovio have appropriated their power from the grid, and their water from the aqueduct. The land they acquired by homesteading it, in a legally sanctioned kind of land reform deal that isn’t that unusual in Latin America.
Here’s where they tapped into the aqueduct:

They did screw up one thing, however. They tried to choose land that was unoccupied and uncontested, BUT, they didn’t count on NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), and the incredible proliferation of maquiladoras (factories) in this region. Toyota, Hyundai, Toshiba, and other international corporations are encroaching on Ejido Maclovio Rojas. It has gone from an abandoned cerrito to some fairly hotly contested real estate last appraised at $98 million U.S. dollars! It may be that what saves Maclovio Rojas is that globalization closes the maquiladoras and sends manufacturing overseas to China, where labor is cheaper and there are even fewer environmental regulations. Of course, if that happened, the local economy would collapse as well…
Theft of water was the charge that put community leader Nikolasa into jail for four long years. The claim that the founders of Ejido Maclovio Rojas were profiting by selling water to the people was the justification for her arrest. Because Mexico has Napoleonic law, where the accused is essentially guilty until proven innocent, this was adequate to lock Nikolasa, a woman in her sixties who has uterine cancer and other health issues, up for four years. When she spoke to our students, many were deeply moved. She has never spoken to a student group of ours before because she has been in jail since before the Woolman Semester started coming here, though students from the old John Woolman four-year high school sometimes spent Spring Break here. She told us that she was sustained in jail by her belief in Jesu Cristo, and her knowledge that since her arrest had alerted the rest of the community leaders, who then went into hiding and were not arrested though there were warrants out for them, that she was not in jail alone, but that the whole community was continually with her.
The seed of the community’s spirit, which squatted on the land, living in tents and eating rattlesnake meat in the founding days, is still present in Ejido Maclovio Rojas. You can still hear about how, when the Federales came to boot them out, all the young lovelies came to distract the soldiers, asking for special dispensations, etc., while the people of the communidad pretended to move their furniture and belongings out of their houses, but were actually creating a blockade of Mexican Highway 2, which runs along the foot of Maclovio. When the traffic back up began to effect things in the United States, the Federales were called off, and the people moved back into their houses to fight again another day.
There are also other forces at work, however. There are many folks in Maclovio who don’t hold these old revolutionary ideals. They have middle class aspirations, and want to work in the maquiladoras and be able to sell their houses and move “up.” Because you cannot sell your holding in an ejido, this creates tension. Communidad, and not real estate speculation is the value that the community is built around. Will these old values hold?
There are factions now, and I can’t follow it all, but it seems to me that it bodes ill for the ejido. Larger forces are always at work—can the government really afford to let this upstart social experiment exist for twenty years? They are at eighteen already. Who is really behind the opposition group—The Choke (pronounced CHO-kay)? Are they funded with corporate dollars?
Meanwhile, the perros [dogs] wander the calles [streets], the Chicago nuns tut-tut at the anarchical architecture of the school across the way from them. When you try to run a Skilsaw up at the health clinic, the amperage may not be what you would expect, but the saw will cut eventually. The purified water at la tienda will never make you sick, the arcade is open, and the citizens of Ejido Maclovio Rojas are as sweet and dignified as any people anywhere. There is an open air market, a huge soccer campo, an Internet café, and a dance hall. Even an artifact as dull and utilitarian as a power pole has style and soul in Maclovio Rojas. I like it here. It’s just a little bit like paradise.

Ah, Mexico!

2006-10-29T15:21:00.000-08:00

On the one hand, everything gets more Mexico-like as you approach the border, until you start to think, “Well, this is almost like Mexico here, so it’ll probably be a fairly subtle transition.” But it’s not. You cross the line into Mexico (with hardly anyone taking any notice of your passage at the border—who cares what comes in?) and are immediately confronted with bewildering streets, strange signs and symbols, the different customs and rhythms of Mexican traffic (which you will perceive as sheer chaos), and shortly, the smell of Mexico.
The smell of Mexico is hard to describe (like most smells), and of course, it is not one consistent entity. It is composed of numerous ingredients. Firstly, there is no real system of emissions standards and inspections for vehicles in Mexico, and many of them are in quite bad repair and beyond the point where they would likely be retired in the United States. Secondly, the cheap, and in many cases the only system for dealing with basura, or garbage, is to burn it. You might think of Mexico as a non-industrialized country where the garbage to be burned was composed of mostly natural materials, but this is not the case at all. The garbage is as full of plastic bags and packaging, disposable baby diapers, putrescibles and old shoes as it is in the United States. In addition, in many places in Mexico the sewer system is not up to the challenge of toilet paper, so soiled paper this is put into the garbage and burned as well. It is quite a melange! It would be great if there were a single day when everyone burned, but such is not the case. It is all burning garbage all the time.
Where we are, at Casa Emaus, is on the crest of a hill between Tecate and Tijuana, overlooking the Ejido Maclovio Rojas. To the east of us the land still supports dairy, so this smell can be added. There are also a veritable plague of flies that comes with this proximity to bovines, though mercifully they don’t seem to be the kind of flies that like to light on people all the time. They love all food and food surfaces of course.
In Mexico, a butcher’s shop smells like a butcher’s shop before you get to the door. Various pipes and standing water emit odors. On this industrial corridor in Northern Mexico among the maquiladoras, there is constant diesel truck traffic spewing soot on the way up hills, and blaring the jake brake on the way down. Dogs frolic freely throughout, doing their thing.
To encounter a human being who is malodorous is very unlikely. I’m not sure why this is, but I have found it to be so. Within a couple of days, our little troupe will smell worse than any one hundred Mexican laborers you could find. I know this from personal experience. Having camped and sat in hot cars for the last several days without proper showers (there was a swimmer’s shower at the Salton Sea, which many took advantage of yesterday), we may already be there…
I think so romantically about the two-thirds world (and really, as the world goes, Mexico is decidedly a middle-class country). I think that I might really enjoy living simply in Nicaragua. I am convinced that the powers of fascism are running almost unchecked in this country, although it may be politic for them to do so under guise of some Democrats in power for a while (as happened under Clinton). I am prone to accept Thoreau’s maxim, “That government which governs least governs best.” Then, I come to Mexico, and I start to think that at least a functional municipal system of governance might be a good thing in as much as it might help us to bury for all time, rather than burn, our basura. As a card-carrying environmentalist I am opposed to “sanitary land fills,” but there are worse alternatives. Zero Waste seems like an end of pipe dream down here…

Luddite Glory!

2006-10-13T17:47:00.000-07:00

It's funny; we are constantly making fun of the Amish (perhaps a bit less so, given the recent shooting tragedy), as though to live a life with technology that supports your deepest values were ridiculous. In his essay, "Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau insists that it isn't good enough merely to petition the government to make choices that are consonant with our values, but that we should cease to participate in the immoral actions of our government "at once."

If I am to live a life consonant with my values "at once," I cannot wait for government or industry to create a life that recognizes the equality and worth of all persons and heals the bioshere. I am unlikely to live so long! Rather than wait for "zero point" energy, or be bamboozled by hydrogen, why not go with something that works now?

What the Bleep is the EarthQuaker Doing Now?

Yes, I have finally gone round the bend. First plain dress, now horsefarming, and next...? Carfreeness still eludes me, though I am currently very car light, with my greasel truck having carried me only about 100 miles in the last four months. Those were key trips, though!

One of the key things for living a sustainable life, is to have community, and, of course, I do. The Sierra Friends Center has many new residents this year, all of them wonderful. One of them is my partner, and her adopted niece. (It is her friend who brought his horse over to help us with the potato patch. We went the next day in work exchange to his place, and hope to have an ongoing reciprocal relationship.)

What could be better than a vivacious, beautiful, spiritual partner with her own delightful child companion?

She's better with horses than I am, and lots of other things as well:

Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting

2006-10-10T20:06:00.000-07:00

I had a rough time leading up to Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting last July. I was supposed to be one of two plenary speakers there, and I kept waiting for Spirit to give me my words, but it didn't happen. I had the right elder, however. Elaine Emily wasn't perturbed in the least. I think that she took it as a good sign that I had nothing to say!
The other plenary speaker was Doris Ferm, of Bellingham WA, who had specifically asked to speak the night before me. It turns out that she said much of what there was to be said on Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting's theme: "Seeking an Earth Restored." Now what? Talk about a tough act to follow! Her speech is available on their website, below.
I wrote some notes and an outline of sorts, for the twentieth time, but every time I started this process my whole crazy EarthQuaker gestalt came out with every thread I pulled. Finally, we had a worship before the gathering. The clerk of the Meeting assured me that Ohio Valley was ready to hear me, and I felt an easing in myself, though no language came. I knew how to open, with a song--your voice may be untrustworthy in these situations, by the way! Elaine checked my chi, we went pee, and off to plenary. Bob Schmitt had given me permission to have nothing to say, and dear friends were standing West for me. I felt held by the Spirit, humbled, tendered, and oddly ready.

I don't know how to make URL's work on this blog, but you can hear my plenary talk at: http://www.bloomington.in.us/~quaker/audio/OVYMPlenary72806.mp3
or navigate there from: http://www.bloomington.in.us/~quaker. You can also find Doris Ferm's speech here.

Where Will It All End?

2006-01-27T08:35:00.000-08:00

This is the EarthQuaker's washing machine. I'm going to replace the horrible plastic seat with an old leather Brooks Saddle that the former resident of this house gave me when he moved out. I think that it would pedal more efficiently with a longer set of cranks, but since I only have to pedal it for twenty minutes a week to take care of making my clothes as clean as they really need to be, I can probably just live with it.

The contraption is an unholy union of a discarded exercise bike and a 1930's era Maytag washer, complete with 'mangle' for wringing clothes. It was a student sustainability project which I oversaw at the Woolman Semester (www.woolman.org). When the students researched the ecological footprint of doing laundry, they actually found that it takes more energy to heat the water for warm or hot laundry loads than it takes to run the washing mashine for agitation and spinning. So, cold water and pedal powered agitation and wringing make up a pretty earth-Friendly way to get the clothes clean.

But what about refrigeration? Running this computee? Reading lights and the electric toothbrush? Can the EarthQuaker live an ecologically responsible life without running nekkid in the woods, eating grubs and berries? Where will it all end?

Oh S--t!

2006-01-17T15:30:00.000-08:00

The EarthQuaker whips past the animal barn, late to staff meeting. Love that Raleigh Superbe.
We are not called to renounce the material world, but to discipline ourselves to enlightened materialism. Stewarding those possessions we have is part of this discipline. Here is the Raleigh, its first time back to the site where I found it, obviously offered up to someone who would restore and love it. I've regeared it, lubed and adjusted all bearings, new chain, new saddle, upside downed the handlebars and taped, great new brake pads, and Carradice saddle bag. She runs like a dream. I didn't get the saddle clamp quite tight enough, however, which is why the saddle is tilted up a little too much--perfectly comfortable, though. Some cyclists don't ride Brooks saddles--what must they be thinking?

Who needs the Department of Motor Vehicles? Anarchists don't let anarchists drive cars...
(A more normal seat angle, before the ride home...)

Well, something magical happened today, almost accidentally. I didn’t really plan it, but I smelled it on the wind…
I was trying to figure out what was causing the shudder in the school’s hammered Chevy Astro van this morning. There was also a complaint of a fuel starvation kind of problem, but I couldn’t recreate that one. The shudder is very pronounced—no doubts about that one. I tried rotating wheels around, in case that would provide a clue, but eventually decided that I would just take the thing to the Chevy dealer, who has a lift, and knows the quirks of this all-wheel-drive vehicle. This van really embodies many of the things I dislike the most about motor vehicles.
Of course, if I’m going to leave the van in town, I need a way to get back to Sierra Friends Center, right? So, I loaded up my Raleigh Superbe. While I was in Berkeley I got a used Brooks B15 saddle (the one that is slightly wider than a B17, and no longer available) from the library bike collective on Channing Way. It was totally sunburnt and dried out, but I upturned it and wrapped it in aluminum foil two nights ago, and poured about half a can of Huberd’s Shoe Oil onto the under side. This morning I wiped it down, put it on the Raleigh, covered it with a rag, and rode to the end of Jones Bar Road and back. It’s hard, like a new Brooks, but I think that it’ll break in just fine.
Trying to put all errands together, I dropped off some library materials, left the van with the garage, and went to the DMV to register our Ford truck for the road, and get my driver’s license straightened out. I got a fix-it ticket for not having my current address on my license in November. Considering that the CHP stopped me on my motorbike for going 97 mph, this seemed like a pretty mild outcome. When the officer told me that he had clocked me going 97, I spontaneously ejaculated, “HAH!!” I think that he was unused to that response, because he did eventually figure out that he had the wrong guy. No, really—I wasn’t going anywhere near that fast.
Well, I sat in line for some time at the DMV, under the fluorescent lights. I thought about Scott Savage and John Woolman. I thought about Alan Stahler, the slight, bookish scientist who lived in this house before me, and was car free, riding an old Raleigh ten speed bike to town almost daily. I was called to the window. I registered the Ford for the Center, and I cancelled my driver’s license. Actually, I let the license lapse, since it expired last month (Ooops!) and applied for an ID card. I no longer hold a valid DL. I am car free!!!!
FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST, THANK GOD ALMIGHTY, I’M FREE AT LAST!!!!
It is an incredible relief to be car free. Initially, it will be a hell of an adjustment, but ultimately I am going to really enjoy living in the Light of sustainable transportation choices. I imagine that there will be some tough conversations with folks who just don’t relate.
I pedaled all the way home on the old “all steel bicycle.” I didn’t walk it once. It was a glorious, crisp day for a ride. The new Mathauser brake pads stop really well—I scared myself a couple of times, expecting the old lousy brake performance. I never thought once about the B15 saddle, so it must have been fine.
I feel somehow that this blog should be more dramatic, funnier, more full of spiritual conviction. The truth is, however, that I just feel relieved.

The EarthQuaker and John Henry

2006-01-06T10:03:00.000-08:00

Or...

I look up the trunk of the young Ponderosa pine as it stretches towards the clear blue sky above. The tree is straight as can be, and no breeze stirs her branches. I tilt my head down again and the sweat that has condensed in the top of my helmet runs off the brim and drips on the muffler of the ancient Stihl chainsaw roaring away in my hands. The droplets of sweat evaporate instantly off the hot metal, as if to say, the sweat off your brow don’t mean nothing to the Machine. The steel plate in my right wrist, legacy of a motorcycle accident years ago, throbs with the saw’s vibration and the blue tinged two-stroke exhaust gives me heartburn. I am doing the back cut now, having notched the tree in the direction I want it to fall. Slowly, she begins to topple. I hit the kill switch on the saw, and step back. The young tree, about forty feet tall, falls in slow motion, and lands softly on the forest floor. The saw is still buzzing away in my hand, though the kill switch is clearly in the “OFF” position. I throw the choke lever and the saw sputters and dies. Blessed silence.

“Thanks for your beauty and your life,” I say aloud to the tree, patting its now horizontal trunk. I sit down on the stump. I want to sacralize this sacrifice, but it is so profane that my words just seem like sentimentality.

In disgust, I carry the saw back up to the truck. I take off the helmet, bandana, earplugs, Kevlar chaps, long sleeve shirt and safety glasses. I drink a little water. It is about time to fuel the saw. When you are falling trees, it is good to put gas in the saw before it runs out. There are times when you don’t want to hear that skip, stutter, stall of a two-stroke motor running out of juice, like when a tree is just about cut through, and a breeze might send it any which way, rather than where you want it, while you are fussing with gasoline and two-stroke oil ratios.

As I reach for the gas can, my hand falls on the old double bit axe that I have put in the truck. I have sharpened one side to a keen edge for falling, and the other to a tougher working edge for limbing and knots. The handle is oiled with linseed oil, and a fresh steel wedge has tightened up the head nicely. It’s not a Wetterlings, or a Gransfors Bruks, but it is a good old American axe. It has a wonderful heft to it, light and strong, perfectly balanced. It weighs about four and a half pounds. The chainsaw weights twenty. I eye the next tree to drop in the thinning project. It is about the size of a telephone pole at the base. I need to drop it very precisely so that it doesn’t damage the trees around it. I put my gloves back on and pull up my suspenders.

A clean white chip flips out of the notch in the tree and lands at its base. The axe makes a solid thunk as it bites in, first from above, and then from below, a neat chip with every second stroke. The thunk is the only sound in the forest, besides my regular breathing. I get a rhythm going. I’ve never actually falled a tree with an axe before, but it instantly seems safer and easier than the chainsaw. I do get one bad bounce, however, and the axe comes rebounding back, glancing off the toe of my stout Wesco Jobmaster logger’s boot—that’s why Wesco makes ‘em like that. (www.westcoastshoe.com) I adjust my stance so as to keep my toes out of harm’s way, and start on the back cut. I am surprised at how well I can use the axe ambidextrously. Not only are all chainsaws built for right handers, but if I tried the thing backward, I’m sure I’d acquire the nickname “Stumpy” pretty quick.

Chainsaws are also notoriously polluting. Noise pollution is one form, and then there are emissions. A brand new chainsaw pollutes as much in an hour with a 39cc engine as a modern car driven 100 miles with a two litre engine! Once the saw is fifty hours old, it may pollute twice as much as it did new. And, you’re standing in that cloud of noise and poison the whole time you are working with the thing. Infernal combustion indeed!

After several more axe blows, there is a sound, almost too subtle to be considered sound. It is a feeling almost, coming up from the ground. I pause. The sound is clearly audible now, and then I can definitely see the trunk of the tree leaving the vertical. I step back, the axe responding instantly to its “OFF” switch, and watch the tree fall just where I had intended. This time when I thank the tree there is a true sense of reverence, respect, and gratitude.

What the Bleep is the EarthQuaker doing falling trees? I have been wondering that myself. The Sierra Friends Center got a USDA grant to do “timber stand improvement” on our 230 acres. We have planted nearly 3000 trees in the last two years, and cleared areas for that planting. What I am doing now is “thinning.” I cut trees that are under eight inches diameter at breast height if they are close enough to impair the growth of other trees that are more desirable as timber trees. The added benefits are firewood, a decreased fuel load for forest fires (we live in the highest rating of fire danger in the insurance industry’s system of assessment), and paid work for Carl to do. In a natural forest, there would be succession and we would just harvest the trees that matured according to sustainable forestry practices—our Timber Harvest Plan (THP) is very conservative and all officially approved. Because this whole area was mined and logged pretty brutally in the (to trees) not so distant past, there is not a lot of generational diversity in the forest, so there can be five “pecker pole” pines all within five feet of each other, and they impair one another’s growth. So, I am being an Ent and choosing which trees to leave, and which to cull. I actually have spent more time brush clearing for fire safety (eliminating fuel ladders) than I have been falling these trees. If the land hadn’t been logged, and if we were able to let it burn naturally, it would be totally unnecessary for me to do any of this work.

The wages for Carl part of the project is looking a bit spurious as well. This is hard, hot, dangerous, loud, poison-oakey work for a wage that after taxes really isn’t worth much more than saner work that I could do without sweating so much. The Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World or I.W.W. See: www.iww.org) who started my union would be disgusted with me for working with such old, funky equipment alone in the woods for poor wages and no benefits. I’m a bit disgusted myself. I wonder if I need to go see the high priest of Fellow Workers, Utah Phillips, for absolution. He lives right here in town. (www.utahphillips.org)

I’m going back out to the woods soon. I have honed my axe, and I've got my Welsh suspenders on (www.davidmorgan.com). In the old days, if a fellow showed up on a logging crew with a belt instead of suspenders, they sent him home as too green to be doing such dangerous work. Besides, suspenders are Plain (www.quakerranter.org). It is beautiful day to work outdoors.

I might just leave that chainsaw in the truck. It only has one advantage over the axe: it is quicker. And if I practice with the axe, that advantage will diminish. I’ve seen enough of where an emphasis on so-called industrial efficiency is leading the human race, and I’m not impressed. However, the USDA grant that is paying my wages is “your tax dollars at pork,” so how do you feel about my doing the job by hand?

When I was a kid, I loved the story and the song of John Henry. This contest between a “steel-drivin’ man” and a steam drill epitomizes the struggle to maintain one’s humanity in the face of the industrial age. In my childhood book, John Henry was a big, pleasant-looking black man with a mighty hammer. He hammered in the mountain, so that blasting charges could be laid and the rock removed to make a tunnel for the railroad.

The fellow who invented the steam drill
Thought that he was mighty fine,
But big John Henry made fifteen feet,
While the steam drill only made nine.

So, John Henry defeated the steam drill in the contest. Many new technologies are like this: the old technology is actually better than the new technology, but we persist with the new technology until it exceeds the old. Horse-drawn farm equipment was very good, reliable and efficient when the first expensive, unreliable, soil-compacting tractors came along. The bow and arrow in skilled hands could be a much better weapon than early muskets which were inaccurate, took forever to load, and occasionally blew up in a person’s face. The cellular phone is a similarly useless pile of poo, but its potential, and its performance when it does work, seduces us. These technologies rob us of precious things, trading “efficiency” for peace, safety, affordability, quiet, sustainability, and a sane pace of life. They require less intelligence, hard work, skill, and patience than the technologies they replace.

In the song about John Henry, this loss is given its due. We learn that:

John Henry hammered in the mountain,
He hammered so his hammer’s strikin’ fire,
But he worked so hard that he broke his mighty heart,
And he laid down his hammer and he died…

So, he dies with honor, on the altar of industrialism as symbolized by the railroads, which were both a product of industrialism, and a powerful instrument of it. To me it is particularly poignant that John Henry died of a heart attack. Lest we think that only the blue collar working man is sacrificed to the industrial machine, heart disease is the great killer of white collar cubicle dwellers whose hands are clean and who never sweat.

They carried John Henry to the graveyard
And they laid him with his hammer in the sand
And every locomotive that goes rumblin’ by
Says, 'There lies a steel-drivin’man,
Lord, Lord!
There lies a steel drivin’ man.'

Today the EarthQuaker will take a page from John Henry's book, and do his work with muscle power. I'm gonna skip the heart attack part though...

Bean Power and the HPV Revolution

2005-12-25T09:10:00.000-08:00

Bean Power and the HPV Revolution

Remember the other way I said that I traveled by bean power? Well, it is true. I put the beans in my tank, and then I use the energy contained in this heavy fuel to turn the cranks on the most efficient mode of transport ever developed by homo sapiens—the velocipede, known in our common vernacular as a bicycle. If it helps you to take this machine more seriously, you can call it an HPV, or Human Powered Vehicle.
Now, the bicycle is a truly righteous form of transportation! The frame is made of the most recycled material in the industrial materials stream-steel. (What’s that you say? Your bicycle is not made of steel? What can you be thinking? For an exhaustive discussion about the superiority of steel for bicycle frames, go to www.rivbike.com and let Grant Petersen straighten you out. Seriously, though, it don’t make no difference what the thing is made of as long as you ride it.) The bicycle cannot be beat for efficiency. I am talkin’ maximum amount of expended energy converted into forward momentum—99% of energy put into the cranks turns the rear wheel. It takes one fifth as much energy per mile as running, and it is far more dignified! In addition, the bicycle is beautiful, healthful, quiet, honest, and sustainable. It is non-violent, taking away the occasion of oil wars, and it is a sociable machine, reducing isolation and putting the rider into her environment, rather than isolating her from it. In addition, the bicycle is a major contributor to the shapeliness of buttocks, which is why I really ride one. You just can’t exaggerate what a wonderful machine the volocipede is!
Though early “push-bikes” can be reliably dated from the early 1800’s, where the rider pushed his feet directly against the ground, it wasn’t until the latter part of that century that pedal power really got going. In the 1890’s the ‘Golden Age of Bicycles’ came in with Dunlop’s pneumatic tire, freewheels, coaster brakes, and the development of the “safety bicycle.” Over the years these machines have gotten more gears, better brakes, lighter weight, etc. In mechanical terms, however, even these early bicycles were so efficient that the improvements that have been made are mostly significant in terms of rider features and reliability.
The automobile totally messed up the bicycle in the United States, providing an arguably faster, flashier form of transport, and simultaneously making the roadways less safe and pleasant for the humble bicycle. Cars suck, as the saying goes.
After the take over of the automobile, say by the end of World War One, bicycles were largely regarded as a children’s toy in the U.S., but that changed during the “Bicycle Boom” of the late 60’s. Derailleur gears and the social revolution and ecological consciousness of the 60's and 70's made bicycling hip, chic, cool and stylish. Americans took to riding bicycles in significant numbers. However, even though there were many more Americans on the whole in the 1960’s than the 1890’s, there were many more adult cyclists in the "Golden Age" than in the "Boom." It was the first democratic transportation device! As the longbow was to warfare (suddenly a peasant could kill a knight before the knight could get within a sword’s length), so the bicycle was to transportation (before the automobile). It was cheaper, faster and all together less hassle than a horse and carriage. Women rode bicycles, at great benefit to their health, and female cyclists spawned the practical clothing movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, a milestone of empowered womanhood! I love bloomers!
What would Jesus drive? Well, a donkey comes to mind, walking is always a staple of the spiritual wanderer, but a bicycle wouldn’t be out of the question! Keith Helmuth suggests that John Woolman would cycle were he around today. ("If John Woolman Were Among Us")
Anarchist transport, that’s what! You consider yourself part of the counter-culture but you still let the Department of Motor Vehicles tell you if you are fit to drive? You pay redicudollars for car insurance? You can’t fix your car when the microchip gets out of whack or the carburetor starts leaking? You got a monthly car payment equal to a week’s wages? You ain’t no counter-culture revolutionary, you are a SUCKER, that’s what. You gonna be an anarchist, you gotta go with anarchist transport, and that is a bicycle—no license, no physical exam, no insurance, no payment plan, easy to fix. That’s how you give the Man the Finger in style!
Now, this is not to say that the bicycle isn’t legit. The bicycle is plenty legit. In 1968 the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic determined that a bicycle is a vehicle, and a person controlling a bicycle is a driver. You got rights and responsibilities. You got a right to be on the road and take the lane, and you got a responsibility to follow the rules of the road. Anarchy doesn’t mean that there aren’t any rules, you know. It means that there aren’t any rulers. At least the responsibility for cycling safely is reinforced by the laws of physics—on a bicycle the person you put most at risk by driving unsafely is usually yourself.
I learned to ride a bike when I was five years old. My dad had this tiny folding bike with ten inch wheels and solid, white, non-pneumatic tires. He would hold the seat and run along side and then he’d let go and you’d keep pedaling like mad until you realized that the old man wasn’t holding the bike up anymore, and you’d promptly crash hard. My big sister and I realized after a single hard crash that we had ridden independently quite a ways before we contacted pavement, and so we got on and rode unaided after that. However, after the inevitable skinned knee, my little sister felt betrayed and was delayed some weeks after this ordeal before she joined the rest of the family in two-wheeled bliss. (My sisters will of course remember this totally differently, and may respond to this blog accordingly, as they wish.)
[I wanna put in here that there is a way better way to teach kids to ride bikes, and I’ll tell you what it is. If the kid has already had training wheels on, that is o.k.—it teaches pedaling. You take the training wheels off, since they don’t teach anything about balancing and countersteering a bike. Then you put the seat down so that the kid can easily touch the ground with both feet. Then you take off the pedals. This arrangement allows the kid to sit on the seat and paddle the ground with her feet for forward momentum. Eventually she will get to coasting longer distances. If you observe her rolling down a driveway or other decline without crashing, she is ready to have the pedals back on and learn to provide her own forward momentum without relying on Gravity Drive. It is a kind of “no tears” way to learn to ride a bike, and hopefully will result in a lifelong love for and fascination with this mode of transport. I believe that the ability to ride a bicycle and do basic maintenance can contribute greatly to a kid’s sense of agency, which might otherwise go undeveloped in our pushbutton world. Also, no kid who rides to school will get diabetes or depression.]
What about metal, paint, rubber, plastic, etc. in the bicycle? It isn’t a zero-footprint technology, is it? Also, I have had concerns about labor rights in the manufacture of bicycles since so many of them are made in places with less than stellar records on labor, like Taiwan, Hong Kong, China.
Remember the theme of this three-part series? Righteousness is a trap, and yet giving up when we know that we aren’t really ‘living in that Life and Power that takes away the occasion of all wars” also isn’t an option. It is what Harvard theologians call ‘praxis.’ It is why the Quaker book is called “Faith and Practice.” We step forward in Faith, and change our Practice. When we do so, we are changed, the covenant community is changed, and the world is changed. In that new light, we return to stillness and seek further guidance. What once seemed safe and clear may become blurry and less obviously the Way. This is what has happened for me with biodiesel. Once it seemed like all that was being asked of me, and now I can see that it is a stopgap—that it represents a less than full surrender. The bicycle is an honest vehicle, using only the energy that I put into it. The “something for nothing” mentality is the single most destructive legacy of the European diaspora. From alchemists trying to turn lead into gold, to colonists claiming Peru for Spain, the driving tenet of Western Civilization has been “something for nothing.” Slavery of Africans was one experiment in something for nothing, and the transition from slavery to industrialism driven by fossil fuels was immediate in this country, perpetuating the adolescent notion that there is such a thing as profit. Profit means that people were exploited and/or the planet was stripped of something. These two things make the illusion of prosperity in America possible. Furthermore, when five percent of the world’s population uses 25% of its resources, you have a formula for resentment, and a mandate for war against the peoples of the world and the biosphere itself. How else to perceive global climate change?
Enter the humble bike. Sure, it has a footprint. The footprint could be smaller than it is, if we used greener construction methods. (Chris King Headsets are the very best available, and as green a company as you could wish. www.chrisking.com) Still, a steel frame will last a lifetime if properly taken care of. A good Brooks saddle will go 50,000 miles for sure. If every able-bodied person who can safely operate a bicycle on the public road did Katie Alvord’s experiment (Divorce Your Car), the ecological benefit of reduced car travel would hugely offset the ecological cost of bicycle manufacture. In this experiment, you get a map of your town and find your house. (Kids love this exercise, by the way.) You set a map compass to five miles, using the map scale. Then you put the sticky point at your house, and mark a circle with the pencil point describing a five mile radius around your home. Noting what is included in that area, you then commit to ride your bicycle to those places that are within the circle. If you want to have other provisos, such as ‘If I don’t have to get anything too big or too heavy,’ or ‘only during the day,’ or ‘unless it is raining,’ go for it. It’s not about living up to anyone else’s standard, but making it fun and easy for you; bringing your life in to right order as you perceive it.
After a long hiatus from cycling, I did this myself about five years ago. I didn’t even own a bicycle! Hard to imagine, given the current stable of eight! (I have a tendency to adopt and adapt orphans.) I lived barely five miles from work, so I started to ride there every day on a Specialized Crossroads that I bought new on a last year’s models sale. Only under rare and extenuating circumstances is it necessary to buy a bicycle new, and this wasn’t one of them. It was a mediocre bicycle, barely prepared by the bike shop which shall remain nameless. Derailleurs needed adjustment, headset was loose after the first ride, and there was so little spoke tension in the wheels that they were out of true immediately. Nonetheless, I began to ride regularly.
Now, I have been having some fun with this “Righteousness” thing, and I hope that you, the esteemed reader, realize that I’ve been tongue in cheek about that. I wrote before about John Woolman’s assertion that “Love was the first motion.” From the point of view of a panentheist (‘that of God in everything, and everything in God’), this is an all-encompassing, cosmic love characterized by awe. Brian Swimme has written, "The universe shivers with wonder in the depths of the human." Creation myth after creation myth (Genesis not excluded) tries to give us our context as humans. One of the strong consistencies in these myths is that once the human is created (always in some way a penultimate part of the story, just as the creation of fungi is the penultimate moment in mushroom cosmologies), the human expresses awe and gives thanks to the creator and the creation. This humble awe and appreciation is our fundamental relationship to our universe. This is the cosmic Love that is indeed the first, primary motion.
Now that you are feeling all touch-feely, let me tell you what I believe that the second motion was, for Gandhi, Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Teresa of Avila, John Woolman, and any other mystic you can thing of. The second motion is a lived system of ethics that grows out of and honors the Love. Faith and Practice, dig?
My point here, is that we must keep the first and second motions in mind at all times. Otherwise, our attempts to live in right relationship with the Earth become dogmatic, rigid, self-righteous, and (horrors!) boring. Jesus chastised the Jews again and again for having fallen into a legalistic system of piety, rather than an authentic living expression of divine love. This is the meaning of sin as a term taken from archery, meaning "to miss the mark." When an archer misses the mark, she goes and fetches (not fletches, now; that comes earlier) her arrow and shoots again. Very much more alive and dynamic than, "Now you've got a black mark on your everlasting soul, and St. Peter will make you sweat for it." So, when you are doing your ecological footprint at www.ecologicalfootprint.org, don't forget why you are doing it. Love.
"Is there Life in it?" is an old Quaker query used for discernment. I think that oaths and committments and resolutions are onerous when they don't have life in them. They may even be considered a form of violence, even if self-inflicted. However, they can also be a helpful tool for us in our praxis and living into "Pure Wisdom." (That's John Woolman, not Buddha). For me there is energy around this question of transport. I realize that the electricity running my ancient Macintosh comes from coal, nuclear, natural gas, or dead rivers, and that the solar panels on my roof will take five years to recover their own ecological footprint, but at this point the transportation issue is more alive for me. (I do have plans for a new, efficient refrigerator.) So, for 2006, I renew my old pledge, but with a radius of ten miles (because there is nowhere that I regularly go within five.) Exceptions will include large loads, really hairy weather (not just light rain), and night riding. For those things, I will burn biodiesel and straight vegetable oil.
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!

Is Biodiesel Righteous?

2005-12-22T17:42:00.000-08:00

America is the mobile society. We love to ramble. We got songs, movies, legends. You pretty much had to be a wanderer to end up in America voluntarily. Many of the Native American tribes were at least semi-nomadic. Also, our nation is vast. All of these things have lent themselves to the development of a mobile mentality. “Watch the police and the tax man miss me—I’m MOBILE!” the song says.
When we talk about appropriate technology, sustainability, lightening our pressure on the Earth, one of the first things we talk about is how to get around, despite the fact that how we stay put and meet our needs is far more important than how we get around. Our hypermobility will probably be one of the first things to go with Peak Oil, or any concerted effort to create a sustainable human society (whichever comes first), and it will almost certainly correspond with increased health of the human organism, but more of that anon.
I rely on beans for my mobility. No really, I do. I love beans. The two primary ways that I use beans for a transportation power source are that I use pinto beans, black beans, black-eyed peas, refried beans, soy beans, red beans or whatever you got to power my bicycle, and I use genetically modified soy beans to power my biodiesel pickup truck. Now, it is true that I actually put a lot of fuel into the engines of both my bicycle and my truck that is not derived from beans, but beans will stand as the representative of organic fuel source.

First, the truck: Is Biodiesel Righteous?

One day, about four years ago now, I was working at the Arcata Community Recycling Center, known locally as the Acey-Arcy (ACRC). This was a day job while I worked on my Masters degree at Humboldt State University. I was schlepping green glass to the green glass bin, and aluminum to the aluminum hopper. I was weighing and paying, directing traffic and generally carrying on. It was a Saturday, and we were plenty busy. Just as we got totally slammed, my beautiful accomplice in eco-living drove up in a beat to hell Isuzu pickup truck with a nervous undergrad from Humboldt State in the passenger seat. It was a very sorry looking truck, and it sounded worse than it looked. Smoke curled from its tailpipe, and the diesel motor rattled like catastrophic mechanical failure could occur at any moment. You couldn’t see anything in the mirrors when the motor was at idle, because they shook so much that everything was a blur. (Still do!) My statuesque Gaia goddess came over to where I was working, looking cute with her hair all piled up on the top of her head and a faded pair of denim overalls on.
“Do you think we should buy it?” she asked. “We’ve been wanting a diesel pickup to run on biodiesel. They are hard to come by. He wants $700.00”
I was busy and a little frazzled. The other guy on duty, Jay of the monodreadlock, was stuck at the aluminum hopper with some frat boy who had brought in a semester’s worth of Bud cans. Meanwhile the line at the scale was backing up. At the same time, the sight of my sweetie in overalls was making me realize how much I enjoyed being other places than here.
“You’re gonna have to decide,” I said. “If it drives o.k., offer him $500.00 If he won’t go for it, we can walk away.”
I did go over and shake the kid’s hand and try to do the guy thing about motors, but he clearly knew nothing. I gave my sweetie a lingering kiss and she gave me an affectionate swat on the buttocks. Reluctantly, I returned to the din and bustle of the Acey-Arcy on a Saturday, immediately picking up a tote that spilled sour milk all down my front as I watched the truck drive away.
Several weary hours later, as I coasted my Bridgestone MB-3 mountain bike (a $8 Acey-Arcy Reuse Depot score) up the driveway, I discovered that I was the proud part owner of a beat to hell 1982 Isuzu diesel P’up. I shucked my clothes on the back porch, went into the house, took a shower, ate a wonderful repast of stir-fried vegetables, and then got very distracted by my beautiful lover, and went to sleep early.
The next day, after Meeting for Worship, I looked over this crappy beige truck. The tires were bald, the bed rusted through in several places, the windshield cracked, wheels mismatched, seat totally trashed, and the whole of the thing inside and out was filthy and grimy. She did start fairly readily, however, belching a huge cloud of stinky diesel soot, and emitting that same gnarly rattle that I’d heard the day before. I put her in reverse and rolled out of the drive. I tooled around the block, noticing a terrible skreek in the steering, and crazy howling in the front end whenever I went over a bump. I got on the highway to see what she could do. I wound that little four cylinder motor up tight, so that we were going a scathing fifty miles per. I say scathing because despite years of traveling at Mach Schnell on motorbikes, and winding high-revving motors to redline, that little buggy was maxed out at the big 50! Shimmy, shake, roar and smoke! It was exciting, I tell you. I really felt that I was taking my life into my hands. To make matters worse, the clutch slipped really bad, the whole vehicle pulled hard to the left under braking, and the cloud in the rearview mirror would have made James Bond envious.
Well, I won’t bore you with the details, but I filled the tank with biodiesel, replaced the ball joints and lubed the front end, bought four used tires, changed all fluids and filters, replaced the master cylinder and one slave cylinder, battery, glow plugs, shocks, and adjusted the cable clutch. I still have that truck, which I call the Rough-N-Ready, today. She’s approaching the 300,000 mile mark, and the engine has never been opened. She starts on a dime, runs smoothe as a top, and gets over 40 mpg. Alas, I no longer have the beautiful eco-woman warrior who first recognized the hidden potential of the Rough-N-Ready, but that’s another story. She’s happy and healthy and out there in the world engaged in what Thomas Berry calls “The Great Work” of bringing about the “Ecozoic Era.” I hope she still wears overalls from time to time, because everybody needs to feel that truth and beauty are real things in the world.
I react my own biodiesel. Me and the Eco-Amazon got into it by serendipity-do while we lived in Arcata. Actually, it is important to understand how we got into it, so I’ll go into some detail, in my inimitable style. I want you to understand that these things don’t just happen.
Before I worked at the Acey-Arcy, I worked for the Berkeley Ecology Center’s recycling program. Dave Williamson, who makes a first impression of an overweight southern Bubba type, is actually a genius and a fierce eco-warrior. He looked up his job description and found that as the Operations Manager of the curbside recycling program, “fuel procurement” was part of his purview. You see, Dave never waivers from the first goal of any true eco-warrior or person on a spiritual mission. He adheres to the pursuit of Truth. He never deluded himself about curbside recycling. “It is a stopgap, end of pipe shell game really, “ he would declare in the booming voice of a man who has spent much of his life around loud machinery. “Plastic recycling is a total sham, creating the illusion of ecological responsibility while actually passing the buck. To do all of this in diesel trucks that get three miles per gallon is absurd!”
So, he got a few gallons of biodiesel. He did not ask permission. Take a note there, o.k.? You wanna do something worth a damn in this world? It is a pretty good bet that you are going to have to at least start the thing off without asking permission. Dave put our crappiest, slowest, ugliest recycling truck on a strict B100 diet. B100 indicates 100% biodiesel. B80 is 80%, B20 is another popular formula, and most of the diesel in Europe is B2, just for lubricity. Dave wasn’t going for half measures, though, so B100 it was. The crew at the Ecology Center was mostly Mexicanos, and they called that truck “La Vieja”—the Old Woman, with overtones of The Old Bitch.
Well, first off, all the accumulated crap and gel in the fuel system got broken loose by the biodiesel, and clogged the fuel filter. This is a spin-on filter with a water trap, and it is mounted on the outside back of the cab. It takes 74 seconds to change that filter, if you aren’t in a rush. Then the truck cleared her throat, belched a huge cloud of black smoke, stretched, shuddered, shook herself down to the tire treads and started on her rounds. By the end of the day she was running better than she had in years. Since the stack on these trucks is right behind the open cab, you more or less work in a cloud of diesel fumes, and it is physically strenuous work. By the end of the week the drivers were vying for a chance to work on La Vieja because her exhaust was so sweet. There were never any biodiesel related mechanical problems that I know of.
At this point Dave went to the Board, and got approval to run the whole truck fleet on B100. It is still the test case for fleet biodiesel use in the U.S. because it was the first, and has burned biodiesel the longest. When I worked there, I fueled trucks with biodiesel, drove trucks on biodiesel, and generally got used to the idea that this was diesel fuel, just organically based rather than petroleum based. Rudolph Diesel first showed his engine at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900. For the demonstration it ran on peanut oil. When the petroleum industry came up with a distillate that worked in this engine, it was called diesel fuel.
The eco-Amazon and I bought a little 1979 Volkswagen diesel Dasher and powered it on biodiesel that I bought from a graduate student in Arcata. That was in 2001, before the Rough-N-Ready. She called me on the phone from Berkeley when she first put the biodiesel in. The car ran quieter, and was no more underpowered on biodiesel than it had been on petroleum diesel. VW developed that chassis for an 88 horsepower gas engine, and for the diesel put in a 44 horse powerplant, so it was plenty underpowered regardless. It got an honest 45 mpg, though… It was an obnoxious appliance-white colour, so we painted it green (appropriate, eh?) with brushes in our driveway, and put thousands of trouble free miles on it. It we called it The Mighty Golightly, as a tribute to its light footprint and an invocation of the lovely Audrey Hepburn in the classic film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” When we went our separate ways, the Mighty Golightly went with her mistress until this Fall when the car died and was replaced by a 1983 Mercedez 300D, the crème de la crème of biodieseling transport.
We bought our biodiesel from the grad student who was making it out of local restaurant oil. Then, an organic farmer friend of mine with a Datsun diesel pickup truck asked us if we’d be open to his moving his biodiesel reactor into our garage. He couldn’t keep it at the place it was because it scared the landlady to death. My landlord was super cool and green and I said, “Go for it.” It wasn’t until people were making fuel in my very own garage that I learned to do it. Then I was unstoppable.
So, the Ecology Center, then a local source, and finally folks making it in my garage is what it took for me to start to make my own fuel. Incremental steps over time, not a single epiphany. This is another note-taking point, like the one about not asking permission. Even where a life-changing epiphany appears to have occurred, if you look more closely, you will almost always find a step-by-step process.
I’m gonna talk in a non-exhaustive way about the footprint of biodiesel, and just for fun, I’m gonna try to do it as concisely as possible. Most biodiesel burned in this country is made from virgin oil. Virgin oil comes from food oil crops, because that is what helps agribusiness. This oil contains more imbedded fossil fuel energy than it does calories of useable energy. There are approximately 10 fossil-fuel calories in every calorie that we eat, and biodiesel oil is at least that bad. Biodiesel made from recycled oil, like sweatshop clothing bought second hand at a thrift store, is less evil, but not quantifiably so.
Biodiesel creates less of all pollutants than petroleum diesel, except NOx, or nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide is bad stuff. Also, my truck still spits out plenty of particulates—soot—under heavy acceleration. The big claim is that biodiesel is carbon-neutral, and therefore does not contribute to global warming. It uses carbon that is in the current carbon cycle, not ancient carbon from the depths of the earth. Still, if you didn’t burn that carbon, it wouldn’t go into the atmosphere at all, right?
Could we grow other crops for the oil? Sure. We could grow oil palm, which yields 4,585 pounds of oil per acre. We could grow coconut, which yields 2,070 pounds. However, what we actually grow are the food crops that make Montsanto rich—soy at a paltry 345 pounds per acre, or safflower at 605 pounds. To grow high-yield oil crops, you would have to subsidize the first years as the trees grew, and to do that you would have to have the political will to spend a massive amount of money on an endeavor to save the biosphere which would hurt the petroleum industry. Brother, once you’ve got the political will harnessed to do that, you could do better than biodiesel! Hell, you could create a domestic rail system that worked, or something equally radical!
Seventeen to twenty-two percent of biodiesel is methanol, furthermore. We derive our methanol in this country from petroleum sources. So biodiesel is at best approximately an 80% non-fossil fuel. You can make biodiesel out of ethanol, but you need more of it, it won’t react as well with used oil, and the sources of industrial ethanol in this country are all controlled by agribusiness, which means genetically modified corn feedstock, and that stuff has got at least 10 fossil fuel calories behind every calorie of energy that ends up turning the wheels on your vehicle.
This is all fairly brass-tacks ecological footprint sort of stuff. Then there is the less tangible issues. Supporting ArcherDaniel Midlands and Montsanto is an issue. The oil "cubies" that I collect my used oil in from the local restaurants who "sponsor" the Friendly Fuels Biodiesel Works show the ADM stamp right on the bottom of the plastic jug, as shown (poorly) in the photo above. On their website, ADM prominently features their work on biodiesel and ethanol--expert Greenwashing, if you ask me.
Perpetuating the myth that the individual transportation pod can be made sustainable is another. The paving of the planet is not abated by “alternative” fuels. The illusion that the soul-killing, stress-producing, give-me-another-Xanax, pace of life that the denizens of the developed world maintain is not destroying us is maintained by biodiesel. The use of the internal combustion engine, which turns only 13% of the energy in its fuel into forward momentum is continued—it is an invention which would never get off the ground if brought on the market today.
Discouraged by all of this, and inspired by the passionate students of the Woolman Semester, a radical semester program for students interested in Peace, Justice and Sustanability (www.woolman.org), I did a project with two of them to put a Greasel brand (www.greasel.com) straight vegetable oil (SVO) kit into the truck. The kit works fine, and was pretty easy to install, even with two teenagers helping. (Kidding, guys—you were great!) The truck runs just as well on the hot veggie oil as it does on biodiesel or regular diesel. That eliminates the methanol question, and gets my fuel costs down to about ten cents a gallon. Not bad, eh? The switch on my dashboard that throws the solenoid fuel valve from biodiesel to straight vegetable oil is labeled “”Paradise” for SVO, and “Purgatory” for biodiesel. Still, there is a little more soot, the long term effect on the engine is not known, and most of my other criticisms of biodiesel still apply.
The big issue, and the thing that has been most gratifying to me as a biodieseler, has been that I feel righteous (and possibly even self-righteous) about not personally contributing to oil wars. However, we cannot turn the entire domestic vehicle fleet over to biofuels. We can’t even turn the domestic diesel fleet to biodiesel, because we’d have to farm every available acre of land, and since we farm with more energy than we’d yield, we’d end up destroying our arable land in a total loser proposition.
Biodiesel, my friends is better than fossil fuel, has some potential to be better than it is now, and is still a classic case of ‘You cannot destroy the master’s house with the master’s tools.” It ain’t paradigm shift. It is simply wishful thinking.
Enter by the narrow, gate, my eco-compadres. Enter by the narrow gate. Read on…

The Trap of Righteousness

2005-12-21T09:25:00.000-08:00

Various and sundry modern authors of note have written tracts about how we assess the value of technology. E.F Schumacher, Jerry Mander, Scott Savage, Wendell Berry and Katie Alvord come to mind. A multitude of rubrics for determining the appropriateness of a given technology have been proposed. Most of them are eloquent and comprehensible. A few are Byzantine or unnecessarily complex. All of them disqualify just about the entirety of modern technology.
One of the reasons that creating a sustainable future is a spiritual undertaking is that a spiritual perspective immediately means that we are focused on the process of life, and not merely the outcome of our actions. If this sounds like the exact opposite of religion obsessed not with how we live in this life, but whether we are admitted to an exclusive club after death, I won’t apologize: I believe that perspective to be anti-spiritual as well as defeatist. It certainly fails the old Quaker test of, “Is there life in it?” The Kin-dom of God is at hand, yo!
The implication of a process-based approach is that if we can determine the criteria for right livelihood, right relationship, gospel order, or sustainability—however we term that harmony—it will not only give us clues as to how to do things, but what it is meet that we should do. Much of our appropriate technology thinking takes as given our current lifestyles and values, and tries to figure out how to carry them on in a sustainable manner. We ask, how can we decrease the footprint of our travel from San Diego to Chicago. We don’t ask why the hell we need to go to Chicago four times a year.
Quakers assume that Simplicity is an important spiritual discipline for the individual. This is not to say that the concern about slave labor, or the overwork of stagecoach horses is not a key element of compassion, but that the simplicity we practice is really the act of holding God at the center of our lives, and not admitting impediments to our relationship to the Divine. When this becomes truly primary, we are ready to take quantum leaps into the unknown. We are ready to be Fools for God, walking when we could ride, taking Amtrak when we could fly, working fewer hours and for less income than we might, in order to put our priorities on our highest values, dreams, aspirations, leadings. The rejection of the Calvinist doctrine of original sin and the belief that Jesus’ atonement restored the covenant between God and humanity that was in the Garden set the stage for a belief that striving for Gospel Order is the business of our lives. This is what has seemed so naïve about Quakers over the last three and a half centuries. We are most famous for focusing on the abolishment of war, yet living sustainably on planet earth is no more utopian or naïve that trying to live without war. In fact, we may find that part of why we have not succeeded in outgrowing war is that our attitude about exploitation of Earth was constantly in the way.
In pursuit of right relationship, I have tried to eradicate the “Seeds of War” against the biosphere (which includes people, don’t forget) in my life. It has been a disappointingly unsuccessful effort. Last summer at a Joanna Macy intensive retreat for “The Work That Reconnects,” I went into the circle of the Truth Mandala and surrendered my own desire for righteousness. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, and yet there is no moral ground to stand on in our society!” I cried out. “I am compromised at every turn. The shirt on my back is made of the most heavily pesticided crop in America—cotton. Industrial mining gave me the stainless steel and seventeen jewels that make up my wristwatch. Feedlot cows died for burgers and the shoe leather I wear on my feet, petroleum makes up my eyeglasses, and all of it built by exploited labor.”
I have spoken of the challenge of righteousness before in a previous blog about John Woolman: “John Woolman and the Plastic Bottle or What Would John Woolman Do?”. It would seem that righteousness was within Woolman’s reach. “Right order” might work better, but remember that righteousness is not the same as self-righteousness, which I have also been accused of.
I want to say here that just because I gave up in the ritual space the obsession with righteousness, that doesn’t mean that I gave it up once and for all. Rather, I began a process of repeatedly giving it up, for the tendency to seek it is deeply ingrained in me. John Punshon first chided me during the question and answer period after a plenary address of his at Friends General Conference, saying, “I see, young man, that you are one who hungers and thirsts after righteousness.” The process of surrendering righteousness has, in the ironic (or paradoxical) way of the work of Spirit, also meant that I have had some openings in the realm of moving my life into right relationship. Life is a messy and complex business, and easy answers give way to new questions. Righteousness also fails the test of "is there life in it?"
This is where the beans come in. Frijoles. Yes, brother, I am talking about the magical fruit, yo! The more you eat…
Read on…

Home

2005-11-08T21:04:00.000-08:00

I came home yesterday. I won’t bore you with the three hour wait on the tarmac that resulted in missed connections, hotel in Phoenix, etc. Suffice it to say that I got home with about eight hours of sleep in forty-eight. I was exhausted, but not heart weary. Lisa picked me up at the bus stop in Grass Valley in her biodiesel burning Mercedez, took me by my cabin to drop my stuff, and down to the Ranch House for dinner.

We were a little late, and the community was assembled. There were exclamations and hugs and handshakes when I came in. The consensus was that I hadn’t gained weight, but I had more grey hairs than I did a month ago. I’m sure that it is just my Louisiana haircut that makes me look greyer.

We have a moment of silence, all standing around the big table in Doug and Dorothy’s house holding hands. There are sixteen of us or so. After a moment of worship, Mary, who is increasingly discombobulated by Alzhiemer’s disease, says, "I think that’s just the right amount of that." We giggle and agree. Dinner is introduced by the cooks, much of it harvested that day from our garden. Squash, carrots, garlic, onions, have come together. I am so grateful for this real food—I’ve eaten processed, commercial ly grown food for most meals over the last four weeks.

Naomi is concerned that Nora will be getting braces on her teeth. "They are just trying to make you perfect, instead of yourself!" she declares. She will be nine years old this Sunday. "I will still be myself, " Nora assures her. Nora just turned thirteen, and knows everything. "I’m going to try to keep my gap." She pushes her tongue against the back of her two front teeth, and a little bit of the tip sticks out between the gap between them.

Doug and Clayton are huddled with Eric at the card table that any other group of people would be where the kids were exiled to. They are discussing the installation of the new wood stove in the office. Doug and Clayton are tall men, both well over six feet with dark hair and square shoulders. In contrast, the students insist that Eric reminds them of a leprochaun-small, with bright red hair and an infectious grin. All three men are lean, with skin that has been burned by sun and wind, hands that know the feel of wood and steel and tools. The sense of regard and affection between the them is noticeable in the way they incline their heads towards whichever one is talking, nod seriously when discussing the importance of checking the floor joists below the stove before they install it.

Dorothy manages to be the hostess even though we have all been in this house eating dinner so many times that we know where the dishes go, where the balsamic vinegar is, where the Trader Joe’s chocolate treats are stashed in the top of the antique enamel stove that dominates the kitchen but isn’t used. Amy is at ease, more relaxed than I have seen her in a long time. While I was away she stepped out of the Executive Director job, and became our cook. Bob, whose wife Kathy is our admissions director, is taking over. Amy actually looks physically younger. When she says, "Why Mr. Magruder, we will have to figure out how to fit you back in around here," her husband Chamba corrects her, "Carl and Bob will have to figure that out, you mean." They laugh.

Having eaten, I am really feeling the lack of sleep and the long travel. I make my farewells and take up the manzanita stick that I carved when I first got here two and a half years ago. The night is warm, and I carry my heavy wool coat under one arm. My old stained fedora is on my head. The moon is hidden behind rain clouds, but the light gravel of the road picks up what light it throws. I know this road in the dark anyway. Rail fence on my right, the silhouette of old apple trees on my left as I walk past the orchard. "Good night, bees," I say softly to my bees in their boxes. "Good night, llamas," I call to the pasture on my right. Up past the barn I go, the walking stick springy in my hand as it taps the road. My muscles delight in the effort of climbing the steep hill, my breath comes easily. The air is mild, the night silent except the sound of running water in the ditch beside the road.

For two years my dream has been to create an intentional spiritual community here. The values of the sectarian world are so far from the values of the spirit, that it seemed to me we might go further in our efforts to live in Truth if we were a little bit separate from it. Quakers say, "Be in the world, but not of the world." Then we could go out into the world to work, and come back to the covenant community for spiritual sustenance. The housing group is meeting on Sunday. Will we make an intentional community here one day? The serendipity community we have has every aspect of an intentional community that I could want, except permanence. Might I live with a partner here, raise a family of some sort, study, learn, work, grow?

Instead, it seems that soon I will go forth from here. When I spoke to Jessica of Christian Peacemaker Teams in the sunny back yard of the CPT house in Douglas, AZ, she asked me if I had a home. "It is very difficult to do this work if you don’t have a home place to come back to," she told me. I have a home. I have more home than lots of folks will ever have in this crazy world. I just don’t know if it will always be there when I’m ready to return.

The air in my cabin is a little stale as I come in. I kindle the fire, and take off my hat, hang it on its peg. I tune my old violin with the tuning fork. It is very out of tune. I put a Richard Shindell CD on and play a couple of tunes with him. Put the fiddle up. Brush and floss. Bank the fire. Crawl under my sleepie bag. Turn out the night. Blow a good night kiss across the cosmos. It’s good to be home.

What Was Jim Corbett Talking About?

2005-11-01T07:33:00.000-08:00

Civil Initiative

On beyond civil disobedience is civil initiative. I am going off of the work of Quaker theologian, activist, and goatherd, Jim Corbett here. His work on civil initiative is a True Thing, and I believe that it opens a way toward radical faithfulness in full communion. Problem is, it isn't easy to understand...

Basically, civil disobedience breaks the law, and civil initiative upholds the Law. (Corbett distinguishes between law as in statutes, and Law in a larger sense.) Let's look at civil disobedience as it is currently practiced:

Our classic civil disobedience scenario was acted out three years ago at Easter. There was a mass held at Lawrence Livermore Labratories, where weapons of mass destruction actually are being developed. The catholic church (in the non-brand name sense of catholic) came together that day. We did stations of the cross and the whole thing. Very radical, inclusive, political, diverse, etc. We worked our way from station to station until we were before the gate to the Lab.

Then we did the Elm Dance. Joanna and Fran Macy brought the Elm Dance back from their travels to be with the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. It is a Latvian song that became a song of the people affected by radiation poisoning. Joanna's website says, "...Especially in Novozybkov, the most contaminated of inhabited cities, the dance became an expression of the will to live." [Joanna Macy's work is another True Thing. Check it out. www.joannamacy.net]

The elm dance is also wonderfully centering. For my part, the ceremony leading up to the gate was causing me more and more nervousness and anxiety. Then, the elm dance utterly grounded me, put me in touch with the earth, and turned an eclectic group of activists into the body of Christ (or whatever metaphor works for you).

Then we lined up to be arrested. The police department brings out its new recruits for this annual ritual. The cadets need to have some exposure to "crowd control" tactics, etc., so they take them out to Livermore on Easter for the most calm, predictable, safe, choreographed mass arrest scenario to be found. The cadets are in full riot gear: helmet, baton, bullet proof vest, shin guards, elbow gaurds, polycarbonate sunglasses, mace, etc. Only the full-on cops had guns, though, because the cadets haven't been cleared to carry.

The activists form several rows. The ranking cop reads us a clear warning: If you step across the line, you will be arrested for trespassing, etc. The first row of folks steps right up to the line, pauses to pray or reflect, some on their knees before the gate, before the line of cops, like supplicants. Then they cross the line and are politely escorted to the waiting van, just as a diligent doorman would escort an old lady to a cab.

One of the old ladies in my Quaker meeting is two rows ahead of me. Little old Quaker ladies are made of iron and grace. She is a tall woman, thin to the point of gauntness. She stands straight as she approaches the gate. She is wearing a wide brimmed straw hat against the springtime sun, and it has a small sunflower in it. The sunflower being, of course, the symbol of nuclear disarmament. When she reaches the line, she is directly across from a police cadet who is a full head shorter than her, and easily twice as wide. The breeze stirs her gray hair. She is singing "I've got peace like a river..." The cop opposite her is sweating in a decidedly porcine manner, his baton held at the ready across his chest, plexiglass shield on his helmet pushed up. He looks like a beetle bug. I suddenly think, "Which of these people is afraid?" It isn't the tall old woman with the sunflower in her hat, singing as she steps across the line to be arrested. Its the man armed and armored so that his movements are awkward and his humanity virtually indiscernable. As the little man arrests the old Quaker lady, she puts her hand on his forearm, leans toward him, and says something that I don't hear. Very solicitously, he leads her over to the van, like the odd short boy with the most beautiful debutante at the cotillion...

I am near the front of the line now. My sweetheart stands to one side of me, and my stepmother on the other. Friends and friends are all around, singing, praising. At the line my stepmother kneels, but I cannot--it feels too much like an obiesance to the cops, or the military industrial building complex behind them. (HeHeHe. I never stop.) Then, as I step across the line in this totally predictable choreographed performance, the ballet suddenly turns into something more percussive--a samba perhaps, or capoeria even. A second cop comes up behind the guy I am across from, and instantly I am being frog marched off to be searched by these two cops--one has my right wrist (the one with the steel plate in it) in a pain hold, and the other has my left arm (the one where the shoulder got dislocated when the wrist got broken) twisted behind me. I am walking on my tiptoes. I am taken aside, my pockets gone through, jacket taken off, hat taken away, frisked thoroughly (wedding tackle included), and my ID checked all the way out. Remember now, that everyone else is getting the stroll to the van. Can you guess why Carl might be getting the VIP treatment?

If you said, "Carl probably asked for it," you have extra homework. If you said, "Because Carl is a Beautiful Brown Brother," go to the head of the class. Now, this is a side issue about the civil disobedience thing, but the fact that it is so consistently practiced by middle class white people in the peace movement, is not without its implications.

I was totally calm during all this, remember. I had done the Elm Dance, was in touch with my God, felt the Earth beneath my feet. The cop holding my huge black Amish hat says, "Without us, you'd all be speaking Russian." I didn't laugh out loud, though I was amazed that he hadn't changed his tape to the Osama Bin Laden remix. Instead I said, "I know that that is your belief. My belief is that a world without war is possible." (Otro mundo es posible!) They bundled me off to the van then, without the pain hold. My sweetheart and my stepmom, both middle class white ladies (God bless them!) had both tried to wait for me, keep me in sight, make sure that I was o.k. They were outraged at my special treatment.

So, then to the chainlink holding cells built at Lawrence Livermore Labs just for this sort of event. And it is old homeweek! Oh, Quakers and Lefties from all over are getting together! The ceremony has impeded normal casual social interaction up until now, so it's "How are you?" "Has Dennis finished at Dartmouth?" "We were in Costa Rica last year and couldn't be here." "How is the new AFSC regional director working out?"

When we are taken a few at a time to be processed, folks are very solicitous, "Oh it's hot out here, why don't you go?" "Well, we are having a picnic at Aquatic Park with Helen's work, so it would be good for us to get home and prepare the salad, if you don't mind waiting?"

Catch and release. A ticket of some kind that says that they will inform you if you need to stand trial or something, for trespassing. Nobody gets trial. All charges dropped. There was a little suspense about this because of its being a post 9-11 event, but it is business as usual at the Lab.

In the car, I take off my coat. What is that terrible smell? It is fear sweat. While I was feeling all spiritually grounded, and emotionally supported by my community, and ideologically resolved for nuclear disarmament in my mind, my body was in full panic! There is nothing cakewalk about encountering cops or arrest, as far as my body is concerned. The thin veneer of civility that covers the totalitarian regime that we live under in the U.S. is something that I started to experiment with in first grade. As a person of color, the idea that the cops are the good guys is spurious to me, and ought to be to everyone. Of course, the cops may sometimes behave in an ethical and helpful manner; they may even protect and serve. It could happen. (One of my best friends is a cop. Really.) But what is abundantly clear is that they perform the function of jackbooted thugs of the police state much of the time, and that accountability is very poor indeed.

So, four themes there, just to recap. It's a little messy. First, earth spirituality in the form of the elm dance creating a sacred space for action. Second, old Quaker lady not scared, cop the very incarnation of fear. Third, race making different stakes for different people in the civil disobedience context. The main point for purposes of continuing the discussion of civil disobedience and civil initiative being: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE BEING TOTALLY SYMBOLIC.

Note: Gandhi's civil disobedience was NEVER just symbolic. It was usually also symbolic. The Salt March, for instance, really did provide tax-free salt to Indians, which is essential for life in any hot climate. It was also deeply symbolic, with a protracted walk to the sea, informing the British government ahead of time, etc. When they were busted, the admitted that they were breaking the law, rather than insisting that they were upholding the law. Gandhi often insisted on conviction and incarceration. Practitioners of civil initiative claim to be enforcing the law, and therefor never plead guilty.

I have nothing against civil disobedience as Gandhi practiced it, or even as the Lawrence Livermore Labs scenario practiced it, but I want to point out that the Lab thing was just about 99% symbolic (what would we do if we were allowed onto the lot?), and Gandhi's more a 50-50%. Civil initiative strives to be more like 100% just living into the kin-dom of God...

We were cited for trespassing. Nobody really wants to make a case that the Lawrence Livermore Lab should not be allowed to control who is or is not allowed on their property. This is not the point of law that we want to take a stand on, but it is the law that we broke. Our action was symbolic. In much the same way, when the U.S. started to bomb Iraq, the elders in my meeting, along with many members of the Nevada City community, sat down in the middle of Broad Street. They don't have a beef with Broad Street, traffic codes, Nevada City, Nevada City cops, the tourist industry, or Cathy Wilson, single mom, desperately trying to get her kid to daycare on time so that she won't be late to work and lose the only source of income she has, who has too may worries of her own to be overly concerned about some foreign war, and here downtown Nevada City is a total snarl because some folks are blocking the road on purpose!

CPT did an action in Douglas when I was there that involved painting crosses on the wall that the Border Patrol put up to keep "illegals" out of the U.S. I don't have any objection to this per se, but I don't really have an issue with the government's right to not have its property defaced either.

In "Sanctuary on the Faultline" Corbett points out that, "When the state violates human rights, protest and petition usually substitute for civil initiative." It is the protest and petition that I am tired of. Note, that I do not say that I am ideologically opposed to them. I think that they are fine--writing letters to your congressperson asking them to do the right thing is a fine activity. Marching up and down at some ANSWER sponsored march for peace is a fine thing to do. Still, one has to grin wryly when one hears the Mother Jones quote, "If voting could change anything, it would be illegal."

It is in the word 'substitute' that I find my issue. Protest and petition are poor substitutes for civil initiative. It is the difference between asking and telling, if you will. If we are protesting and beseeching in conjunction with civil initiative, fine, but without the "being church" of civil initiative, we are firmly in the realm of the symbolic, the indirect, the hopeless rubric of expecting the government to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. There ain't no God in there, at least not the God I'm willing to worship. Are we called to remedial charity, or preventative justice?

If you answered, "Both," read on:

Where remedial charity and preventative justice come together is in civil initiative. When we give food and water, and maybe even transport to the desperate migrante in the Arizona desert, we are being church. Clearly, it is the simplest act of charity to share water in a desert--that is a form of communion that transcends all religious boundaries, and even species boundaries. (I love that scene in "The Lighthorsemen" movie where one soldier says "to hell with orders," and takes off his Aussie slouch hat, pours his canteen into it, and waters his horse, even though he knows that he is risking his own life to do it. Then the whole line follows suit--a communion of man and beast.)

Giving water in the desert is an act of charity, clearly. However, is also part of a movement towards preventative justice. Communion transcends the distinction, but the distinction is still worth consideration. In the dialogue between civil society and the legal statutes that uphold it, it is important to practice the Law. The law codifies social contracts, not the other way round. In the 1980's when Central American refugees were coming over the border from Mexico to the U.S., there was an agreement that our country would never send political refugees at risk of persecution back to their countries, but we did it all the time. The men and women, and religious communities that harbored these people were therefore UPHOLDING the Law. You dig? In the Arizona desert, where over 280 people died of hyperthermia (opposite of hypothermia, though that happens too) last year, those who provide respite and medical care to God's children in distress are upholding the Law. Here is a place to test the laws, to further the dialogue between civil society and the statutes that govern it. The magistrate does not bear his sword in vane, but perhaps the sword can be used as it is in Tibetan Buddhism, to slice through the bonds of ignorance, greed and delusion, instead of persecuting the poor.

There are two young activists who are engaged in this dialogue process. They were working with an organization called "No Mas Muertes" this summer. On July 9, 2005 two No More Deaths volunteers, Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss, were arrested by the United States Border Patrol while medically evacuating 3 people in distress from the desert near Arivaca, Arizona. Their trial date was set for December. You can find out more at www.nomoredeaths.org. You can help by writing:
U.S. Attorney Paul K. Chariton
District of Arizona
Two Renaissance Square
40 North Central, Ste. 1200
Phoenix, AZ 85004-4408

The activists are furthering the dialogue, but the dialogue itself is what is essential. In all likelihood the activists will be given a slap on the wrist if convicted, but, if these two are convicted for giving medical aid to God's children in distress, the implication will be that private citizens in AZ are supposed to be able to tell what a person's migration status is by looking at them (Big Brother is deputizing you), and the effect of that will be for people not to give aid to anyone. The very principle of communion is on trial. What sort of world do we want to live in?

So, this is my civil initiative exploration at the current time. It is pretty confusing to me, so if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to you, it's probably my fault. Go read Jim Corbett's book, Goatwalking, and see if you can explain it better. Meanwhile, what does civil initiative look like if we take it out of its native Arizona? Should we take it out of Arizona, or start the Quaker Worker House right in Douglas, where some border activists feel a hospitality house is needed, never ask for people's citizenship status, but just provide hospitality, washing sore, blistered feet, as Jesus taught us to do, until we get taken to jail, as Gandhi taught us to do? Of course, these things are only possible in the context of covenant community. For more on that, read Jim Corbett's "Leadings" or "The Sanctuary Church" or Lloyd Lee Wilson's "Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order," or Patricia Loring's second (someday third) books on "Listening Spirituality." [Disclaimer: if you are a Quaker because you like hanging out with like-minded individuals who vote like you do and because you think that Quakerism is an anything goes religion where nothing hard will be asked of you, don't read any of the books I mentioned. They will destroy your illusion. If, however, you like Quakerism, but wonder where the rigor is, the spiritual communion, and the radical witness that is our legacy, I am inviting you, as many elders, notably Bob Schmitt, invited me to do, to take this trip. It's a scarey conversion experience, however--you may embark on a journey strange and wonderful, difficult and rewarding beyond all expectation. Swell music.]

Lesson One: A solitary Quaker is an oxymoron.

Interlude...

2005-11-01T07:28:00.000-08:00

MENDING WALL
by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Desert Angels

2005-10-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

So, who places the water in the Sonoran Desert on the Mexican side? Yesterday we found out.

Yesterday, we journeyed to Mexico. That is, we went across the border into Agua Prieta. The streets of Agua Preita butt right up to the border wall on the south side, and the streets of Douglas Arizona do the same on the north side. I am five blocks from the border now, at the Christian Peacemaker Teams house. I could walk to the border station into Mexico in fifteen minutes.

We went to the CRREDO in Agua Prieta. CRREDO stands for Centro de Rehabilitacion y Recuperacion para Enfermos de Drugadiccion y Alcoholismo. Here we met up with four Mexican men with a pickup truck. If you have lived in the west, you have probably developed some respect for what four Mexican men with a pickup truck can accomplish. They piled into their truck and we followed them in our rented van. They first went to fill up the 200 gallon plastic tank in the truck bed with potable water. Then we were off to the desert.

Our van just fits the twelve of us. Only the front windows open, but on these dusty dirt roads, we have all the windows up and the air conditioner on. It is close inside, and the van wallows sickeningly over the rough road. The men in the back of the pickup in front of us look much more comfortable, sitting on the gunwhales of the truck bed, swaying with the bumps, talking easily with one another, passing a cigarette.

Miles into the bush, we stop. Under a huge tree growing next to a desert wash is a blue plastic 55 gallon drum on a its side in a sturdy wooden stand. The Mexicans park their truck on a slight incline about 40 feet away, and start to uncoil a long, clear hose that will fill this desert reservoir. Gratefully, the delegation piles out of the van and we rubberneck around. It is apparent that many, many migrantes have rested here, just a quarter mile from the U.S. border, to catch their breath before the big push.

You see, there is no pressure on the migrantes on this side of the border. Mexico doesn't really enforce the border. After all, they aren't worried about hordes of U.S. citizens coming in illegally, and remittances--the money sent home by undocumented workers in the U.S.--exceeds the amount of new foreign investment that Mexico sees every year. In fact, when vigilante action on the border was really intimidating this last spring, the Mexican government gave bus rides to people preparing to cross the border illegally, so that they could try in less hostile places.

However, it was discovered that a startling number of migrantes were dying within eight miles of the U.S./Mexico border on the north side. This meant that people were crossing the border dehydrated, without adequate rest and water. Of course, this is also the zone of maximum enforcement, so there are vigilantes to dodge, Border Patrol is everywhere, and many of the border residents are also quite hostile. All of this may delay migrants, require them to hole up (which doesn't mean that they drink less water), and encourage dangerous night travel.

Attempts to put water on the U.S. side have proven difficult. Basically, if there is to be a water station in a given spot twenty-four hours after it is put up, it will have to be accompanied 24/7. Otherwise the water stations are vandalized--usually with bullets. It was therefore thought that water stations on the Mexican side would at least help, and they have.

Sergio, the natural leader of the crew of water dispensers, tells us that they have helped 5600 migrantes in the last year with food packages that they carry with them. Nobody knows how many people have benefitted from the water stations because they are not tended constantly. They have hauled thousands of gallons of water out here, however.

Sergio's story is just like that of any recovering hard core drug addict--"I lived for the next hit. I lost my dignity, money, family, health..." He worked as a coyote, helping people to cross the border illegally, for twenty years to support his habit. Then he got sober "by the grace of God." For two years now he has been the man on the ground for this water in the desert project, because his previous job experience as a coyote gives him unique qualifications.

Sergio is not someone you would want to mess with. Short and stocky, he is muscular with a small pot belly. His head sits on his shoulders like a cannonball, without the benefit of much discernable neck. He walks like a juggernaut, slightly bowlegged. His gait is even and unhurried, but in this sandy wash I struggle to keep up. It is easy to imagine him leading a band of migrants across this desert, mile after mile, relentless. He wears mirrored shades, but when he addresses the group, he takes them off, and his dark eyes smolder like coals, the whites slightly yellow and bloodshot, brows knit, he looks into you more than at you.

Sergio hasn't been out here for two weeks. He lost a nino two weeks ago, he says, shot in the head. I don't get whether this is a son, or a friend, or a sponsee at CRREDO, but it is clear that Sergio has taken it hard. He is a man in pain.

And pain is one way that God prepares us for compassion. Here is Sergio, with his backpack full of "Migrant Packs"--a Cliff bar, Gatorade, etc. He leads us down the wash to the border. A sorry barb wire fence stetches west and east, but is totally absent in the wash itself. In Spanish he says, "On the U.S. side you have cactus, chollo, mesquite. On the Mexican side, el mismo. How can you make a law against the existence of people?"

Desert Musings

2005-10-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

The sun is just coming up over the mountains. A supernatural symphony of colors rings around the tiny round house I am staying in. Pinks, purples, blues, oranges, yellows and deep red hang not only in the east, but cling to all the mountains that circle this desert basin around Douglas, Arizona. The mountains that I see to the south of me are well into Mexico.

Out in the desert this morning, dozens, if not hundreds of undocumented Mexican laborers, migrantes, are cocking an eye at the light that is harbinger of sunrise, wondering if they will connect with loved ones today, or perhaps a coyote who will carry them to Tucson or Phoenix. Or will today be the day that they are robbed by banditos, captured by the Border Patrol, hassled by vigilantes? Rising to make good use of the light and the cool hours of the morning, I imagine a small band of folks gathering up their scant belongings, taking a wary drink of water, and pushing on, to the north.

These folks are pulled on by the same life force that draws salmon to spawn, ducks to fly south, and which has drawn people to this continent for millenia. The inexorable pull towards Life, what the Greeks called Eros, pulls them. They are seeking greater prosperity, freedom, expression, exploration of this thing called Life. Most of them have a promise of work awaiting them. In 2003, money sent home by Mexican migrant laborers in America exceeded the value of new foreign direct investment in that country. It is fair to say that the Mexican economy is dependent on these workers.

It is also fair to say that the U.S. economy is dependent on these workers. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2001 58% of agricultural workers, 24% of private household services, 17% of business services, 9% of restaurant workers, and 6% or construction workers in the U.S. were undocumented workers. This is to say, the U.S. economy is totally dependent on this labor source, and has been since the U.S. beat up Mexico and stole the western states from her.

Immigration used to be much more humane, however. The border was a very permeable membrane, risk was low, Mexicans worked in the U.S. and then returned home. However, the trend, following closely the development of trade agreements, has been towards a more and more militarized border. The U.S. Border Patrol now has a $4 billion budget, approximately 11,000 agents, and an increasingly difficult job, as the migration escalation race is on.

Every action has an equal and opposite reation, right? So, what is the consequence of "hardening" the border? Almost three hundred people died in the desert that we know of last year. Forced to cross in more and more difficult places, migrantes are beaten by the desert, and die of hypothermia. The cost of being smuggled across has risen to as high as $1500 from $50 ten years ago. There are robbers in the desert. Reports of rape and human trafficking are frequent, and organized crime syndicates and gangs from as far away as Japan, China, Russia, and Ukraine are involved in the increasingly lucrative trade of weapons, drugs, sex slaves, false documents, and illicit transport across the border.

Sanity and humanity demand that a totally new approach to immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border be taken. If the "free market" is going to govern the flow of goods and capital, it must also govern the flow of labor—let the workers move freely to where their markets are! We could document workers, collect taxes on their wages, and develop a system to encourage U.S. citizenship, or allow seasonal workers to return home. (The border is now so tough that many Mexicans who would have gone home seasonally in the past just stay in the U.S. now.) Why can’t we do this?

The simple answer is racism. I know, I know, the race card. How boring. Must we go there? Well, yes, we must. Imagine if Mexicans looked like Scandinavians. Do you really think that we would be having all this trouble? In fact, imagine that there was a nation that also shared a long border with the United States and was primarily white, and had a huge number of undocumented migrants in the U.S.—oops! You don’t have to imagine it. Canadians constitute the second largest population of undocumented workers in the U.S. and nobody cares!

The Border Patrol was made up of a reconstituted Texas Rangers outfit. The Rangers were primarily charged with keeping blacks, Mexicans, and Indians in line. They developed a totally toxic racist culture, and this carried over to the Border Patrol. The B.P. has to some extent become a professional organization, with a reputation for sucking off the teat of the federal budget while making an appearance of tackling an utterly futile task. The rise of vigilante groups on the border is more disturbing. How could any person of color look at these beer-bellied white men in cowboy hats and jacked up four wheel drive trucks and not think of a lynch mob?

The sun is up now. Coffee is on. I put two litres of water in my pack, and jam my huge Australian hat on my head. My wool vest guards against the morning chill, but will soon go in the pack as the mercury rises. We are going to see the water stations in the desert on the Mexican side today. The tanks on the U.S. side are shot up or otherwise vandalized before many days go by, so activists have focussed on placing tanks on the south side of the border. What surprises await today? What shifts of perspective? In the study of ecology, we understand that the action in natural systems takes place along the borders—between forest and plain, or ocean and shore. Perhaps human culture and the Great Turning towards a just, sane, and sustainable society will get a further boost from the turbulence on the Border.

Christian Peacemaker Teammate...

2005-10-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

New Adventures! Yes, I have given up on the Red Cross--I am experiencing an absolutely nauseating effect from running around in circles. It is time to get with the faith-based action!

I applied for Christian Peacemaker Teams corps program in September. Their corps program requires a one month training at their headquarters in Chicago. It is a two year program of accompaniment and intervention (their slogan is "Getting in the Way") in places of conflict around the world. The trainings are offered twice a year, in the two most unpleasant months to be in Chicago--January and July. To me, January is very preferable to July for being in Chi-town. Before you can even take the training, however, you must participate in what CPT calls a delegation. These delegations are mostly international, and therefore costly. However, this October 22-29th there is a borderlands delegation in Arizona. This Arizona delegation is the only one I can attend given time and money, before the January training. Also, it is really cool...

Jim Corbett, a Quaker scholar and activist, was intensely involved with the Sanctuary Movement during the eighties. He has furthered the thinking about transforming government by taking Thoreau and Gandhi's work with civil disobedience further with a concept called "civil initiative." I don't quite understand it, but instead of disobeying the law, getting arrested, and pleading guilty, the activist actually upholds the law--usually international. So, for instance, since the U.S. had signed international agreements that said that it would never deport political refugees, its policy regarding undocumented El Salvadorans in the eighties was in violation of the agreement. Immigration officials routinely deported these folks, even if they faced persecution or even execution if they showed up in thier country of origin. So, Americans who were providing sanctuary to these refugees were actually agents of the law, and said as much in court. Very interesting. Here's the bulletin:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 19th, 2005

To help to defer the $400 cost of Carl's latest escapade, please contact Christian Peacemaker Teams at 773-277-0253, or e-mail peacemakers@cpt.org. You can also send a cheque directly to Christian Peacemaker Teams, P.O. Box 6508, Chicago, Illinois, 60680-6508. Specify that your tax-deductible donation is to support Carl Magruder's participation in the Arizona Borderlands delegation October 22-29th. It is tax deductible! I Thank you for your support.

LOCAL RESIDENT TRAVELS TO ARIZONA BORDERLANDS WITH PEACEMAKER DELEGATION

Carl Magruder, an EarthQuaker from Nevada City, Californina will arrive in Arizona on Saturday October 22nd as part of a delegation sponsored by Christian
Peacemaker Teams (CPT). More than 200 migrants have died in the Arizona
borderlands over each of the past two years, as tightened borders have led
economic migrants to risk their lives in the inhospitable desert. Douglas,
Arizona, where CPT will have a project throughout the summer, is considered
the most militarized city in the U.S. because of large presence of U.S.
Border Patrol agents. Anti-immigrant vigilantes have been active in the
region as well, including the "Minutemen."
Members of the CPT delegation will monitor human rights, engage in
violence-deterrance activities, and confront unjust immigration policies
through nonviolent public witness. They will also meet on both sides of the
border with human rights groups, government officials, and individuals
affected by immigration policies.

The EarthQuaker will return on November 5th ready to share what he has learned
about the challenges facing the people of the Arizona border region.
Christian Peacemaker Teams is an initiative of the historic peace churches
(Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, and Quakers) with support and
membership from a range of Catholic and Protestant denominations. CPT send
teams of trained peacemakers to places of conflict around the world, with a
seasonal presence in the Arizona borderlands since May, 2004. For more
information about CPT contact the Chicago office at 773-277-0253, e-mail
peacemakers@cpt.org.

John Woolman and the Plastic Bottle, or What Would John Woolman Do?

2005-10-16T12:04:00.000-07:00

Keith Helmuth has written an excellent pamphlet more or less on the topic of the implications of John Woolman's witness in modern times. It is called "If John Woolman Were Among Us: The Ecology of Automobiles and the Flush Toilet." As far as I know, it is no longer available, but it may be tucked away in your meeting library somewhere. It is an excellent read.

Mainstream Christianity has made a slogan of the query What Would Jesus Do? The Evangelical Environmental Network came up with a brilliant variation: What Would Jesus Drive? For modern unprogrammed Friends, with our universalistic tendencies, the query "What Would John Woolman Do?" may be more fruitful. (Of course, John Woolman did what he did as his personal response to the query, What Would Jesus Do?)

The essential dilemma is the same, regardless. This is the question of right action, and what determines right action. To the relatively uncontroversial assumption that one person’s actions should not contribute to the oppression, exploitation or harm of other individuals, John Woolman establishes a precedent for extending our sphere of concern to the non-human world. He mentions the plight of ‘dumb beasts’ and also talks about farmers abusing land in an effort to pay heavy debts. His concern for fellow humans goes without saying. This is what is meant by "Love is the first motion." Love is nice. However, if love is the first motion, ethics is the second.

Mainstream Christianity famously falls short of Christ’s revolutionary message because it assumes that virtuous action is possible within the context of the dominant society. This is the tragedy of Christianity as a state religion, as happened under Constantine. A revolutionary doctrine cannot survive that level of assimilation. What John Woolman explored was how far outside the dominant society it was necessary to travel in order to live according to virtue. This is the legacy that we can explore with our query, WWJWD?

Woolman’s stance against slavery was such that from a mere uneasiness with writing a bill of sale for a slave, he progressed until on his death bed he was refusing medicines that were derived from slave labor. Now, medicines given for smallpox in the mid-1700’s weren’t necessarily any great shakes, but it would have been reasonable for Woolman to believe that these prescriptions might have the power to help him to recover his health, or at least ease his suffering. Nonetheless, he refused them. He was also largely vegetarian by this time, according to an account of his death written by the woman whose house he died in.

To me, what this says is that there was a level of "taking up the cross" in Woolman’s day that was as tough as anything we might be called to today, as far as living into gospel order. He stood in opposition to the nation at large, and many members of his religious community as well, with regard to his stance on slavery—not an easy thing to do. He also made numerous personal "sacrifices" in order to rightly order his personal life—"downshifting" to a less demanding way of getting his competency (what we call earning a living) was one. Woolman also travelled on foot at times, declined the products and services provided by slave labor, refrained from using postboys or coaches while in England, and even modified his dress from the conventional plain dress that other Friends wore. He certainly met the requirement in the book of Titus to be a "peculiar person." To me, the challenging thing is that these things created right order to a significant extent in Woolman’s life. Is this still possible today?

I’ll take up this query in the next blog...

Whiner

2005-10-16T11:53:00.000-07:00

There were so many fewer questions
When stars were still just a hole in the heavens…

Well, I solved the basic Internet access problem by plugging into a phone jack in the cafeteria manager’s office at W.W. Lewis Jr. High school in Sulphur, Louisiana. (I first got a local, toll-free number from my Internet provider, of course.) So, access hasn’t been why I haven’t posted to this blog for a while. Instead, the problem is one of tone: I seem to have almost nothing to say except judgement, criticism, and whining. I’m wanting to say something dramatic, profound, hilarious, or at least informative, but…

Louisiana has no recycling program. No, really. They tried curbside, it didn’t work and it didn’t pay for itself, and they quit. Every plastic bottle, glass container, scrap of paper, piece of cardboard, and tin can in the state of Louisiana is landfilled. There is a little bit of commercial recycling, run out of Texas (on diesel), in the local area. Some folks recycle aluminum cans, because they have actual resale value. Otherwise, landfill, landfill, landfill.

After Hurricane Rita, there was no garbage service. People were evacuated from their houses for two weeks, so not a lot of garbage was produced, but as they came home HUGE amounts of trash were generated—roof materials, soaked and moldy furniture, etc., etc. Also, very few folks had the foresight during the chaos of evacuation to empty their refrigerators, so a whole lot of putrescibles found their way into garbage bags which then went out on the curb, and in many localities, have yet to be picked up. Many, many refrigerators and freezers are taped closed and placed at curbside, the contents to horrific to deal with, even to save the appliance. North Lake Charles, where I am today, smells like poo multiplied by puke to the third power. (poo x puke)(poo x puke)(poo x puke) Yikes! It is a borderline health hazard at this point, totally avoidable if people habitually did backyard composting.

I am, of course, highly critical even of curbside recycling. It is an end of pipe, half-assed energy intensive solution which is at its far end shrouded in mystery. Nobody in the city of Berkeley or Nevada County can give me a straight answer about where #1 and #2 plastic bottles go, let alone the much more difficult to recycle yogurt containers, #7 plastics, and other miscellanea that end up in curbside bins. The American Plastics Council, an industry front, encourages municipalities to pick up all plastics, sort them out, and then sell what they can to brokers. This creates the illusion that plastic is a sustainable, environmentally friendly substance when in point of fact it is petroleum. ('Nuff said!) The recycling symbol was never copyrighted by the hippies who came up with it, so you could put it on nuclear waste and get away with it.

Once the brokers purchase the plastic in lots, where they go becomes proprietary information, and impossible to track. The fact that a huge amount of what is collected as plastic recycling goes off the end of the sorting conveyor belt into a landfill dumpster at the recycling center is conveniently ignored. In the state of California, where cities have been required to reach waste reduction quotas, many places were found to be routinely counting this landfill in their diverted-from-landfill tonnage! Meanwhile, we still don’t require Coca Cola to use any recycled content in their pop bottles and guess what? Due to petroleum subsidies both official and unofficial, it is cheaper to make new bottles out of 100% virgin material, so that is what they do.

Even glass recycling isn’t what it is cracked up to be. (HeHeHe...) A huge amount of glass that is collected to be recycled is actually pulverized into cullet, and then used as road bed. Now, maybe there is some environmental benefit to not mining gravel for the road bed, but if a material doesn’t cycle again, I don’t think that it should be called "recycling." Besides, recycling glass shouldn’t contribute to paving the planet—that is just not right!

The reason that aluminum has such high recycle value is actually not in the material itself. It is in the energy intensiveness of making aluminum. Generally electrical current is passed through bauxite until it turns molten. The resultant material is alloyed and refined into aluminum. Making aluminum from aluminum requires 5% as much energy as making aluminum from scratch—that is why aluminum has actual resale value. Other commonly recycled materials don’t pay for themselves once the cost of collection, sorting, and transporting has been accounted for.

Recycling, like educating people, providing health care for the indigent, public transportation, voting, and a host of other things that make society work, doesn’t pay for itself in the "free market" sense. Of course, if you believe in free markets, I have a bunch of ocean front property to sell you in Idaho…

A materials stream that puts responsibility onto manufacturers for returning materials either to the industrial materials stream or harmlessly back into the environment, would give more of a true cost accounting. By internalizing what economists call "externalities," we could begin to explore the viability of the "free market" concept. The use of taxpayer dollars to repair damage to people and ecosystems created by industrial processes amounts to a massive subsidy for those industries. Could the nuclear industry make affordable electricity if it were responsible for paying the true cost of mining rights, remediation of mining sites, and true waste disposal? No way. Currently Coca Cola makes a profit on its pop bottle, and then we the people pay to collect it, process it, and send it to China where a fourteen year old girl will melt it in a big pot, breathing carcinogens and endocrine disrupters all the while, and turn it into a worthless plastic car which will come back to the U.S. to help Burger King sell a Happy Meal. Socialists used to say that profit was theft from the workers. It may be that profit is also theft from the earth and the future generations.

How does this relate to EarthQuakerism? For the answer to that, and other mysterious questions, you must read the next blog, "John Woolman and the Plastic Bottle."

If you have previously tried to post to this blog and been frustrated,I hope thatI have corrected the problem, with help from my brother in law...

Git 'er Dun...

2005-10-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

At 3 a.m. on Eighty east
It's in the nature of the beast
To wonder if there's something missing
I am wretched, I am tired
But the preacher is on fire
And I wish I could believe

Whoever watches over all these truckers
Show a little mercy for a weary sinner
And deliver me, oh deliver me
Deliver me to the next Best Western
-Richard Shindell

Well, I'm here in the Best Western in Lake Charles, Louisiana. After this I will stay in the staff shelter at W.W. Lewis Middle School in Sulphur, LA. Their mascot is the Rebel--a little Confederate fellow with a big hat and a saber decorates the basketball gymnasium where we set up cots today. I can't think of a room better suited to make fifty people all living in it an acoustic hell. This is supposed to be housing for the Red Cross volunteers who will be doing the Client Services work, not a shelter for evacuees. However, since we are opening the center tomorrow at eight a.m., what is actually more of a concern is that Baton Rouge sent us today--you guessed it--absolutely NO Red Cross staff, as of 5 p.m. So, a center opening in an area devastated by Rita that has had no Red Cross relief yet (the 800 number requires perseverence) will have only about twelve to fifteen workers to manage it. I hope that some local volunteers will come out of the woodwork. Otherwise it will be rough on everyone.

I am eager to actually have a job of work to do, however. Red Cross volunteers are told to expect some difficulties on what is called in ARC culture a "hardship disaster." We were given a bunch of hardship codes--air quality, food availability and variety, sleeping quarters, weather, transportation, and a few others. We can handle that. What is infinitely more difficult is that we have signed up to help, and can get very frustrated when we feel that we are not able to help. When you hear about Red Cross volunteers walking off the job, I'm willing to bet that it's not sleeping on cots in a room with a bunch of strangers, eating MRE's (meals ready to eat, for those who don't know the abbreviation), doing repetitive or physically taxing work, etc. I think that it is most likely a feeling of frustration with not getting things done.

I did see some interesting things today, and will try to figure out how to work my digital camera, not only to get its pictures out, but to post them here as well. There is a way to do it. I got a picture of a woman loading an Allstate insurance office into a truck and trailer because the roof had blown off, and a restaurant with no front which has experienced no looting since Rita hit--it's all just sitting there. The woods are blown down all over, and salvage logging operations are going on everywhere. The scope of the disaster is awesome even retrospectively. Again I am struck by the fact that there is only one fatality attributed to the disaster.

Partly, this is because after the debacle in New Orleans with Katrina, local and federal officials made a real effort to get people evacuated. The governor apparently told folks who were thinking about not going to do everyone a favor and write their social security number on their arms with permanent marker so that it would be easier to identify the body. Also, to write how many people were in the house on the garage door with spray paint so that the rescue workers would know when to stop looking for corpses. This got people's attention, and they evacuated.

I don't know what else to say, really. I didn't need to bring water or food, my sleeping bag will be useful. Psyllium is good to have...

I'm still not sure why I came, but I still haven't met any clients, except on the phone a little this morning--Ah... for a little while I had a job to do. I have no idea how I will get online, either. Wireless cafes don't seem to exist out here. Consider: I am in a full Best Wester, sitting at the only Internet terminal in the place, and me and the other guy in my group are the only two I have seen on the thing... It's not an essential part of the culture the way it is where I circulate. And I don't think it's that everyone is jacked in in their room, either. This hotel is full of first responders--linemen, plumbers, crane operators, loggers, and some relief workers. It is mostly working men in caps and camoflage clothes, overalls, interesting facial hair. They are showered and sitting in the lobby now in t-shirts with the sleeves sawed off and flip-flops. They are drinking Coors Lite, playing cards, and watching the news and car racing. There is a friendly festival atmosphere to the place for sure, but it isn't an online culture. It's just folks.

Funny? We went to the grocery for some vegetables and fruits (I must give tribute to those who have taught me to eat real food--thanks!). We also got some beer. NOthing but Coors Lite and Miller Lite left--and then in the back, a sixer of Killian's Red--I know that it's just Coors dressed up, but it does taste better than Bud Lite. Anyway, product of Louisiana--Slap Ya Mama Cajun Seasoning. I don't make this stuff up. Try to say Slap Ya Mama Cajun Seasoning without affecting a southern accent. I bet you can't do it.

Frog Legs, Mold, and Skeeters...

2005-10-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

I'm in Louisiana! Yes, I flew the red eye, got through Red Cross processing, and got sent with a tiny cadre of folks out to far western Louisiana (Lake Charles now, Sulphur tomorrow, if you wanna look it up). It has been an adventure, but then, with enough sleep deprivation, anything is. We have seen a lot of downed trees, blown down buildings, etc. It is amazing that only one fatality has been attributed to Rita. I've seen many buildings that people could have died in, but didn't.

We will be setting up shelters today and openning them tomorrow. We will be providing the first aid that this locality has seen from the Red Cross in terms of money. They have had ERVs (Emergency Response Vehicles) serving food, and the Baptist Kitchens have been feeding the phone and power guys. The area has been evacuated, however, and folks weren't encouraged to return until yesterday, so theoretically, there wasn't anyone around to provide aid to.

The unbelievably cumbersome process that I was trained in for Emergency Family Services in my Western Nevada County Chapter has been streamlined on both ends. The big form, called a 'flimsy' for reasons I forget, has been shortened down to essentials--a two sided paper that's not too dense. The supplying of the resources has gone from vouchers--one for Wal Mart, one for the grocery, one for hardware, etc., with a form about each referral (!) to ATM type cards that wouldn't allow people to get cash, to the current plan, which is for a check to be sent. This will allow people total freedom to dispense their own fundage--buy a tarp, buy food, give money to a neighbor to reroof, pay relatives for groceries after staying with them for two weeks, buy a fifth of whiskey and some ciragettes, or whatever will contribute to well being.

There is some nervousness about how wound up our 'clients' may be. The Red Cross is fair game for criticism at this point, and certainly somewhat deserved. However, we who have travelled far and put up with mild hardships to be here don't want to be treated as the faceless minions of a monolithic bureaucratic entity.

We will stay in a shelter. I will have to try to keep track of the laptop. Currently using a desktop in Lake Charles Red Cross Chapter. The building itself has sustained damamge and is running on a huge diesel generator.

It is an opportunity for a "too many chiefs, not enough Indians" situation. I have resolved to be a plain Indian. Call me 'Stands With a Magic Elixer of Bean Juice in Syrofoam Cup In His Hand." One of the jokes about my references was that I asked my employer (since resigned) and my stepmother (also resigned) to vouch for me. I specifically instructed them that they might be asked if I was a person who did not question authority or think that I knew better than everyone else what ought to be done. They either weren't asked, or dodged, I guess, because I'm here...

We went to Sheldon's Fish Place last night. Ate stuff like chicken fried steak, frog legs, crawfish, catfish, and oysters. There was a small galvanized bucket on every table with peanuts roasted on site. The floor was strewn with peanut shells and the red 'paper' that covers the meats. A sign said, "Please throw peanut shells on the floor." I thought of my friend Jen who is studying to be a lawyer. I could just hear her going off about, "They put up a sign encouraging people to create an unsafe condition and when the little old lady with the walker goes down on a peanut shell and breaks her hip, they are going to lose it all!" Great ambiance, though.

Our little group did a whole lot of planning. I was mostly dead and not helpful. Also, my suspicion was that we would make a big old plan that would then be shown to be obsolete as soon as we showed up. Sure enough...

Meanwhile, I have my eye out for a bicycle. I have a feeling that some riding will provide opportunities to meet folks, see some sights, take some photos, and get some exercise. Louisiana is flatter than a flat thing, so a one speed or English three speed will suffice for miles of travel. (Planetary gears are so elegant!) Of course, we work twelve hours a day six days a week...

The Red Cross 800 number is busy. Folks calling me for help who have gone to Texas or somewhere aren't going to be able to come to our centers. They need to apply by phone. Can't apply on the Web. I hate to send them to a phone number that is busy.

Orientation meeting! Gotta go. Really need real cream. Coffee is decent, but cream is powdered...

-

Where The Hell Is Carmen San Diego?

2005-10-01T08:48:00.000-07:00

So, whatever happened to Carl, anyway? He seems to be having some sort of personal meltdown. Do you think that he has become unstable?

Well, I can't answer that for sure, but I can say that becoming unstable is not the end of the world... Did you know that Martin Luther King attmepted suicide as a teenager?

I am merely sojourning in the desert. I have a Red Cross flight booked AND TICKETED for October 5th out of SFO, and I will be on that puppy bound for Baton Rouge, without a doubt. Don't worry, be happy!

Why Disaster Relief?

2005-10-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

Of course, I can trot all sorts of heroic sounding altruistic nonsense in response to the question, but recent events have got me asking this question at a deeper level. How does disaster relief fit into my spiritual development? When questions become queries. You get to be privy to some of my discernment process…

I have often been derisive about do-gooder, bleeding-heart Americans, especially Quakers, haring off all over the world to help the plight of various poor little brown people. Most of these poor little brown people are in trouble because of a history of European colonization and exploitation which continues to this day as American imperialism. Meanwhile, the United States has 5% of the world’s population and uses 25% of world resources while we wonder why we seem not to be held in warmest regard by denizens of the two-thirds world. I mean to say that we live in the belly of the beast here, and don’t need to go anywhere else in the world to do remedial charity work, let alone preventative justice work. As Pogo said, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Besides, the “third world” is alive and well and living in every city in America. There is just a lot more romance to Zapatistas and Palestinians than there is to the crack whore who lives across town from you. (I am not strictly saying that we shouldn’t travel around the world to be with folks who are struggling—only that I have felt a stop to it in myself.)

During my training with the Red Cross, the instructor kept saying, “Nobody predicted this disaster, so we are having to make up our relief efforts as we go along.” The third time that she said it I interrupted her and said that the disaster had been predicted, not as an “if,” but as a “when,” and very precisely, too. In his book on global warming, The Heat is On, Ross Gelbspan reports in the Introduction that insurance companies had their best minds working on how to keep from losing their shirts when a global-warming enhanced category 5 hurricane smacked into New Orleans. I think that the book was published in 1997, but I’m in a train stop without wireless, so I can’t confirm on that. [Confirmed later: 1997 is the date.] So somewhere in the middle 90’s, the insurance companies had prophesied climate-change enhanced storms costing them money-and they began to take appropriate action to prevent this disaster from effecting them—namely finding huge loopholes that would keep them from paying out when the hurricanes came in.

Now, Ross Gelbspan is a rabid greenie, (pot talkin’ trash about the kettle!) and I’m pretty sure that he would blame male pattern baldness and the decline of modern jazz on global warming, but he was referencing insurance company studies. Insurance companies have no conscience, couldn’t care less about the natural world, don’t give a hang about social justice or human rights, and aren’t susceptible to public influence or popular trends—they care only about maximization of profits. They are embedded in an economic system and a corporate culture that makes other considerations virtually impossible. When they calculate that they could lose billions, and have already lost millions, due to global climate change exacerbated weather events, it constitutes a major wake up call to us all—one that FEMA, the Red Cross, and American society in general hit the snooze button on and slumbered right through.

There is nothing much to predicting the future. No crystal balls or supernatural powers are needed. A Gaian perspective gives one an ability to holistically understand the interconnectedness of things, sometimes on an intuitive more than a cognitive level. Not only are systems of causality more apparent, even simple governing principles of how the Universe works can begin to be understood. Patterns can be perceived. The trick is that you have to actually look at things as they are. You have to be able to say in some instances, “No really, the glass is half empty and the water’s got arsenic in it, and the person who sold you the water new it was in there, but they were more interested in getting your money than protecting your health.” To the greatest extent possible, accurately understanding patterns is what enables one to guess at the missing or obscured parts of the whole picture—like the future, for instance, but also things that are obscured in the present and past. As a spiritual discipline, I believe that being willing to look at reality in the eye is part of what it means to be a “Friend of the Truth,” as early Quakers were sometimes called. Of course, there are massive industries—gambling, alcohol, entertainment television, pornography, consumerism, and corporate media which are there to help you not to do this. Deep spiritual commitment and community are necessary to actually wrestle with these issues. Joanna Macy’s work is brilliant for helping people to grapple with truth, express any feelings that come up, and also galvanize these feelings into action. (www.joannamacy.net) Lloyd Lee Wilson’s “classical Quakerism” has all the potential to do the same thing. More on these things in subsequent posts.

Prophecy is often misinterpreted as the ability to tell the future. Really, prophecy is just telling the truth. However, predicting the future is not nearly the mysterious magic trick that people sometimes think that it is. It is very easily done by looking at the truth of the current situation. You can easily predict that a train hurtling towards a collapsed bridge will crash horribly. You can then take appropriate preventative action. However, if you are in denial about the bridge being out, you will be surprised and dismayed when the train crashes. A prophet is someone who has gone out, looked at the fallen bridge, and then comes back and foretells the future: “We are soon going to have a fiery crash, based on my interpretation of the pattern of events and conditions.” The passengers on the train, who are warm, fat, and happy are in utter denial that there could even be anything as disastrous as a bridge failure. “Well, the media would have told us. Our leaders wouldn’t let that happen. Even if it is out, we will discover newer better technology for spanning that chasm before we get there. By no means should we interrupt all this good momentum by stopping the train!” After the fiery crash, there is wonderment at the prophet’s ability to predict the outcome when nobody else could. Unfortunately, the satisfaction of saying “I told you so,” is completely lost in witnessing the suffering that could otherwise have been prevented.

Speaking truth with love really helps when it comes to having dire predictions heeded. The whole watchword is, “Love without truth is sentimentality; truth without love is brutality.” A beloved Quaker matriarch said this to me the one time we met before she died. It has been a watchword (because I have so not mastered it) in my life ever since. Unfortunately, some truths are so horrific that no amount of love can make them easy to hear. In point of fact, the prophet is always motivated by compassion (“Love is the first motion,” in the words of John Woolman), but her message may be so dire that it meets with real resistance. “Global warming is just an unproven theory,” “we can only feed a global population of 9 billion with genetically modified organisms,” “nuclear waste is good for you,” are all examples of not grappling with deeper patterns and reality. When this happens, the inclination to turn up the volume on the part of the prophetess is almost irresistible, though amping up will have the bitterly ironic effect of making the message even more unpalatable to the hearer.

So, I’m done with all that for the nonce. I have done it in my very personal relationships, at my place of work, and in the wider public sphere. With very few exceptions, the moral fortitude, political will, creative problem solving, and ego sublimation necessary for right action have proven elusive, and disaster has not been staved off. I want to note here that I myself have fallen short in all of these ways. It is my personal deficiencies that in most instances fuel my dire foretelling. These pronouncements are really pleas for group discernment and corporate creative problem solving, since I lack adequate response capability by myself.

A quick prophetic example, just to illustrate how the thing works: Many folks are super excited about Peak Oil. First of all, Peak Oil could not be talked about several years ago. Folks, even eco-groovy progressive folks, just looked at you like you had two heads when you brought it up. I had quite a bit of experience with this. Classic instance of our not being able to look truth in the face until it is really undeniable, at which point we have wasted a lot of time. A broad willingness to deal with Peak Oil, possibly creating some political will during the Clinton administration, would have given us options which are now much more difficult to realize.

[Did I already say that there is no such thing as a digression? One thing that Quakers say is that things will happen in God’s time. God’s time is called Kairos, and our linear time is called Chronos. In my experience we say this meaning, “go slow, wait, settle into the seed, young impetuous ministers mustn’t go off without seasoning.” I just want to point out here that sometimes God’s time is MUCH FASTER than Chronos. When Jesus came to the fishermen, he said, “Come go with me-fishers of men, etc.” They didn’t say, “We must consult with the elders. We must fast and pray. We need five days to reach consensus about it. Can we give you an answer next week?” or anything of that sort. They put down their nets and went with him, leaving their dad to do the fishing, if I recall rightly. The German soldier ordered to execute some folks during WWII who refused was given an ultimatum: Shoot the civilian prisoners, or join them. He stripped off his uniform and lined up to be shot instantly. It is true that even in these instances Spirit has been working all along to prepare the faithful, but the moment of decision may be sudden, and require instant response. Kairos.]

So, back to petroleum. There is a prevailing attitude among greenies that Peak Oil will provide the mighty wake up call that the Industrial Growth Society has been so sorely needing. In point of fact, this is a dangerously naïve assumption. Common sense has very little to do with human behaviour, after all. In addition, there is a kind of hand rubbing glee on the part of said greenies that the ubiquitous “They” will get “Their” comeuppance, and will have to recognize that “We” were right all along. Don’t forget that in the midst of war, famine, economic collapse, and virulent disease, “I told you so” isn’t nearly as much fun as you hope that it will be. My suspicion is that the John Wayne with a ponytail nonsense of the modern back to the land to raise my organic taters movement isn’t going to be that much fun either, though the exercise in just trying not to live a typical American lifestyle may prove a useful one when really atypical modalities of living start to be needed. The real sapper of “I told you so” glee in this instance is that Peak Oil is a human inconvenience which we bought fair and square by developing our society along lines that defy natural laws and patterns. The much larger tragedy is global climate change, and Peak Oil will not address this, but may well exacerbate it. Read on:

The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy is neither created nor destroyed, but changes form. Consider how a coal-fired power plant works. Starting with ancient sunlight in the form of coal, we burn it to create heat, use the heat to create steam, direct the steam through a turbine for mechanical energy which spins a generator to form electrical energy which is then transmitted at considerable loss of efficiency to your house where you plug in your mixer which turns the electrical current into mechanical energy again to mix your chocolate chip cookie dough. The energy changes form multiple times! The second law of thermodynamics means that you “lose” some energy with each of these conversions, usually as heat, but “loss” really just denotes loss of energy for easy human use—the energy is not lost, really.

Now, given how much turning energy into different forms we routinely do, it is incredibly naïve to believe that the simple reduction in available liquid ancient sunlight is going to cause a wake up call that remotely resembles, “Hey, listen America! We need to stop using such a grossly disproportionate amount of global resources, turn our energy economy over to renewable sources after shrinking it by at least two thirds, form meaningful international alliances, promote humane and egalitarian population controls worldwide, stop imprisoning people for being poor, allow doctor-assisted suicide, and ban GMO’s!” What will really happen is that after a slight paroxysm during which skillions of tax dollars will be used to make some infrastructural changes that will benefit the usual evil bastards of the military industrial complex, we will just run the whole Industrial Growth Society on coal and nuclear. The most cynical energy ‘solution’ is hydrogen which could be used to store solar energy, but is primarily being developed as a way to use huge amounts of unsustainable energy to create a ‘fuel’ that will be clean at the point of use—total boondoggle. The rich will get richer, civil liberties will become a distant memory, and the planet will continue evolving into something that does not support mammalian life, at least. I’m not saying that it must be so, simply that the pattern points to a strong possibility for this outcome.
When you see an obese person smoking a cigarette, or a religious extremist strapping a bomb to himself, you are seeing a person whose story about the world and themselves has become more important than basic survival. It is not such an unusual thing. We are a nation with a story about infinite growth, greed is good, the natural world has no intrinsic value, the market will create the greatest good for the greatest number, scarcity is a basic fact of life on earth, and when it all turns to poo, we can go up in the Rapture and play harps with Jesus on streets of gold. All of these are deeply flawed assumptions about the universe. Suicidally flawed, in fact. Our story is several caty’s out of wampus.

(I have seen Adam Smith’s “invisible hand in the marketplace,” by the way, and it was giving us all the Finger…)

You may think that I have wandered far from my original query, “Why disaster relief?” Well, don’t be dismayed; your perception is totally correct. I have really wandered. Back tracked, actually. As one friend says, “Nothing is irrelevant; I’m just an eclectic thinker.” There are no digressions!

Perhaps this will help. There is a difference between remedial charity and preventative justice. I read this in Sojourner’s magazine a year or so ago while taking a crap at my dad’s house. It really sums up for me the quandary about where to put one’s shoulder to the wheel. If there is a stretch of road where folks frequently lose control and go over the cliff to their deaths, some well-intentioned folks will get together, form an ambulance corps, and get some rapid response happening for the many recurring accident victims at the bottom of the hill. Others will spend way less money putting up a railing and warning signs that encourage safer driving, in an effort to prevent accidents from happening in the first place. Superficially, this is the difference between preventative action, and remedial. It is good to feed the hungry, since the poor may always be with us, but it is also essential to ask why some go hungry and others drive Hummers. In the above scenario, I am the guy who would build a light rail system that replaced the highway and had built-in human, mechanical, and electronic fail safes to prevent excessive speed that might result in an accident. Capiche?

I am naturally drawn to this systemic perspective. Human beings are not going to evolve our way out of our current mess. Market forces and technology will not save us. Individual spiritual transformation is nice, I love it, and it is not enough. Social evolution is our big chance. It is true that our political systems are incapable of electing enough competent, moral, innovative people to get us out of our predicament. Such people are virtually unelectable, but even if they get in there, they usually aren’t able to effect change without a constituency of moral suasion, and there isn’t one yet. (If you start to get a real revolution going on, of course, then you may experience resistance in the form that Martin, Malcolm, and Mohandas K. did in the previous century—that is to say, hot lead.) My point here is that I have been banging the systems gong for a long time, and I have neglected the second tool of the Shambala warrior: compassion.

True story: When my sweetheart called and woke me up on the morning of the Twin Towers disaster back in ’01, the first thing that I said through my sleep-addled haze was, “And so it begins…” I had been watching patterns, so I wasn’t surprised by the events of 9-11, (though could not have predicted them with any precision.) When you think about U.S. foreign policy, what is truly amazing is that nothing like 9-11 had ever happened before. To me it just represented the start of an accelerated phase of what systems thinkers call “positive disintegration.” There’s nothing positive about it of course, it just means that feedback loops have been cut and the system is on runaway. My point here, though, is this: you are supposed to respond with compassion when you hear disastrous news. You are supposed to say something like, “How horrible! Thousands will be killed!” Instead, I reacted with a kind of glee that there was a shift in the pattern that might provide the opening for societal paradigm shift. Out of balance, personally. We could go into aspects of my personal life where compassion has sometimes been a bit deficient as well, but that would be tedious in the extreme. Callousness is a survival mechanism. Thank it and let it go…

So, I have isolated myself from feeling the pain of the world because my perception of the patterns is such that I see that pain everywhere, and have real hopelessness about what can be done to alleviate suffering. I see that as AIDS attacks not the body itself, but the body’s ability to fend off illness, the Industrial Growth Society has not only created an unsustainable horror, but attacked our very capacity to respond adequately. This is what the breakdown of community, phony spirituality, corporate media, consumerism, over-busyness, separateness from simple life processes like nursing the sick and dying or growing our own food, and even apathy itself do to the human organism.

I have had profound openings in my capacity for compassion in the last year. Not surprisingly, they started with compassion for myself. (I may have failed to acknowledge that the capacity to read patterns and take appropriate action is a farsighted kind of gift. It doesn’t work for me at close range, like in my personal life…) I feel intuitively that the way that I will become an effective Shambala warrior is to develop the weapon (“tool,” if you’d rather) of compassion to the same degree that I have developed my skill with perceiving the interconnectedness of things. (You will have to grok some Joanna Macy for the whole Shambala warrior story, but take heart; peaceful warriors are springing up all around you and you yourself may be one of these soul-diers in the Lamb’s War.)

Hurricane Katrina is right for me: it is in America, involving Americans. I have said for years that the third world is alive and well and living in America. Many of the Americans hardest hit by the storm are persons of limited financial resources, and are black, like me. Katrina was a global-climate-change enhanced weather event. Scientists will blah blah about how you can’t say this for sure, but then again, theirs is a discipline that atomizes to comprehend, and is only now beginning to understand what mystics have always said: it is all one. In the dance of relationship we discover not only knowledge, but wisdom, Grasshoppah!

The inseparability of social justice and earthcare issues is undeniable here. It has seemed to me that this has been my ministry since 1997. How many years of effective action did we squander as Friends by taking Marshall Massey’s prophetic 1985 message of our spiritual and moral imperative for earthcare and ghettoizing it in the Unity With Nature Committees, instead of making it the foundation of our Peace and Social Concerns tradition? After all, as one Friend says, “It is not the straw that broke the camel’s back; it is the ground the camel is standing on.” When the Nobel Peace Prize went to a woman for planting trees last year, we saw the positive side of this growing understanding of human justice as a much smaller and dependent function of Earthjustice. Katrina is the hammer that drives the point home.

My assignment with the Red Cross is to do admits. I will be a paper-pusher for the Lord! I had an all-day training on this, so I am qualified, ready, and willing. I even have a Red Cross card that says, “This certifies that Carl Magruder has completed Emergency Assistance to Families Disaster Services Course held at Western Nevada County Chapter.” The first thing you do when you get a family is to ask them to tell what their disaster story is. “Put down your pen, turn your body to the client, and really listen,” we were told. That is to say, listen for real; listen with compassion; listen with an open heart.

My hope is that if I can come through this crucible of compassion, I will know something more about how to wed the two weapons of the Shambala warrior, insight and compassion. I will know how to speak truth with love, how to influence the system, and where to put my shoulder to the wheel. I will clearly be a late bloomer in terms of my personal work, but that’s all right with me. My work is to be willing, like Abraham with Isaac, like Isaiah, like Jon Randall—“I’ve been warped by the rain, driven by the snow, I’m drunk and dirty but don’t you know, I’m still Willing.”

Pedal On For Miles....

2005-09-26T15:58:00.000-07:00

It is not my intention to make a bunch of tiny blogs, but for various reasons the place where I was writing previously stopped being conducive. Having no way to save, I had to post. So…where was I?

I got up with the sun on Saturday morning—you don’t need an alarm clock when you are sleeping out. I went in search of the porta-potties because there were way to many folks camped everywhere for a more natural approach to leakin’ the lizard. I encountered a lycra-clad, clippy-shoe’d cyclist standing in line and inquired when the century riders were leaving. "Right about now, I’m pretty sure," she said. It was 6:15 in the a.m. I got a little unnerved—had my "to century or not to century?" decision already been made for me? I had expected to choose whether to ride the 75 or 100 mile course at the 48 mile mark during lunch. Somewhat panicked, I suited up, hit the albuterol inhaler, threw stuff in the truck and locked the door, ate a quick bagel and orange juice and coffee and a banana and a muffin and a boiled egg, then pinned my number to my saddle bag, inflated my tires to 120 psi, and rolled out at 7 o’clock.
It was cold! I was really glad that I had bought warm full finger gloves at REI, and that I had taken a pair of used knee warmers from Connie at my local shop, Tour of Nevada City. (I owe Connie ten bucks!) My toes went totally numb pretty quickly, but I was otherwise o.k. Spinning easy and light, I checked in with myself: Wrists hurt? Check. Back stiff? Check. Left knee hurts in the knee pit? Check. Cold air making bronchial rasp? Check. I was good to roll, or as good as I get, anyway. It wasn’t until I was trying to signal turns that I realized that my left deltoid had been totaled by Thurday’s hepatitis vaccinations—Oowwww! The Center for Disease Control recommends Hep A and B as well as tetanus for disaster relief workers. I hope that I made the right decision by getting them. County Health is waiving the cost of the vaccines for Red Cross volunteers--decent of them, for sure!
At first, the twenty-five milers, fifties, seventy-fivers and centurions are all riding together. Later in the day I could distinguish some of the riders with more common sense from the centurions. With few exceptions, anyone riding a bike that didn’t have drop bars wasn’t a century rider. Anyone with a rack on their bike, not a centurion. Anyone spinning less than an 80 rpm cadence, except on crazy steep hills was probably riding the 25 or 50 mile course, and while I think that men and women were relatively evenly represented in the ride as a whole, the century riders were definitely more men than women, since poor sense is clearly a strong prerequisite.
The first miles were easy and fun. Riding in the foothills of the Sierra as I do, I joke that I am either going downhill at 40mph, or uphill at 5. It was fun to tank along on the flat and rolling terrain somewhere in between those two speeds. Uncle Dale’s sage advice was with me—it is good to get a muscle burn on a workout ride, but on a century,if your legs are burning, you need to downshift and take it easy. Hal from the bike shop also had some wisdom for doing century rides—"Ride fast. Get it over with." I was balancing between these two bits of advice.
Either grapes or apples are rotting in Sonoma County at this time of year. There was a wonderful funk of rotting compost in the crisp air. The day was perfectly clear. Several times ravens croaked and clucked me on during the day, seemingly amused by the antics of the humans. Roads were mostly smooth, with shoulders, courteous traffic, and a clearly marked route. Rest stops were pretty frequent—some had food, some food and a mechanic, some just water. I skipped all water stops, having my two liter Camelbak on me, and a water bottle on the frame full of Accelerade, which tasted awful, but may have helped.

Since I had broken a spoke the previous day, I was a little nervous about the wheels on the "Arby," as I call my Bridgestone RB-1. (My Bridgestone MB-3 is called the "Imby.") Hal had given me the wheels two weeks before from his parts pile. The front one needed bearings and cones, so I rebuilt the hub and mounted up some 700X23 Vredestein tires that I groundscored from a sidewalk pile of stuff in my dad's neighborhood. I have never had such light wheels. My previous hoops for the Arby were 36 spoke Mavic rims laced to chunky Shimano Tiagra hubs running 700X28 wire bead Panaracer Paselas with Tourguard--not exactly high-performance, but definitely stout. I usually go this way--BMW touring motorcycle instead of Honda sport bike, Wesco boots instead of Merrel moccasins, Filson waxed cotton instead of North Face breathable "shell," etc. Of course, as light and fast and beautiful as I think the Arby is, with a triple crank, Brooks saddle, bell, Carradice saddle bag, full size frame pump, and all lugged steel construction, she's an antique pig at 24 pounds, compared to the 17 pound carbon fibre wonders she rode with all day. "Steel is Real" I called out to the other riders on lugged steel bikes, who were few and far between. One woman had a hand-brazed trek with cantilevers, another a beautiful Motobecane. One of the century riders was a burly man on an old Peugeot PX-10 with no front brake--his carbon fibre bike had broken at the bottom bracket the week before, so he'd lubed up the chain on the old PX--and finished just fine, thank you. The bicycle is such a marvelously efficient machine, that even a classic ride like mine is a miracle in motion.

Now, I live in a rural county. I ride in a rural county. And I see road kill. You see way more road kill on a bicycle than in a car because you are going slower and not in a box looking out the windows. Also, you really need to be aware of roadkill, because a big old slimy racoon on the shoulder in a fast decent can ruin your whole ride. In fact, I have become so vigilant that I often smell the sickly sweet scent of rotting flesh before I see the hapless critter that had its life obliterated by a hurtling juggernaut of steel, glass and plastic. Despite previouse experience, I was amazed at how much road kill I saw on Saturday. Sonoma County is hard on wildlife--fox, deer, 'possum, raccoon, squirrel, snake, lizard, cats, dogs, and birds all done to death by the ruthless automobile. Next year, I am bringing one of those hand held counters that they use at rock concerts to see how many folks came. I will affix it to my handlbar, and press the plunger everytime I see a road kill. My bet is that there is easily twice as many dead animals on that route as there are miles in it. The best roadkill was a snake that had eaten a large rodent of some sort. The whole thing had broken open, and told a story of a slow moving reptile full of gopher that couldn't get out of the way of the Hummer...
The rules of the ride suggested that you should announce yourself when passing. I have a bicycle bell on my Bridgestone which rings every time I hit good bump, and I wheeze pretty audibly despite my asthma medication, so I didn’t expect that I would sneak up on too many people, but I would say "on your left" when I approached a slower moving rider, so as not to startle anyone. Many riders passed me throughout the day without extending this courtesy, and it was disconcerting to suddenly have someone alongside--what if I suddenly swerved to avoid a dead ostritch in the road? Bombing along on Highway One, I reeled in a small rider in lavender, and was passing her on a hill overlooking the ocean. Instead of the customary "Left!" I said, "Some people do not live in California. What must they be thinking?" My fellow rider said, "It sure is beautiful, isn’t it?" As I pulled around, I said, "Couldn’t have a better day for a bicycle ride." I stood up to crest the hill, and kept on riding.
At the next stop, mile 35.5, as I sat eating hot vegetable soup and wondering if I would ever feel my toes again, I met Sue, the rider I had passed. We watched the Pacific play with rocks and sand. We talked a little. She also had numb toes, was riding solo, had never done the multiple sclerosis ride before, had never tried a century, and was going to decide whether to attempt it or not over lunch at mile 48.2. I took off my wool zip neck (but not the knee warmers!), ate a couple of Aussie Bites, and rolled out. (Aussie Bites, by the way, are food of the Gods for athletic endeavors. I found out from a seven-year-old on Sunday that they can be had in huge quantities from Costco. I have no idea about the ingredients.)
At lunch, I was still feeling fine. My toes were back, the air was warmer and less rasp-producing, my hands and wrists hadn’t gotten any worse, and my only worry was that except for my wake up pee, and a kind of puny pee at the lunch rest stop, I didn’t seem to be overly hydrated, despite having emptied my two-litre Camelbak. I had just gotten my plate of I-won’t-bore-you-with-the-list but John Helding would be proud, when Sue sat down next to me. We chatted, along with some other folks who were riding the seventy-five. Sue is an occupational therapist, lives in Berkeley, doesn’t wear lycra from head to toe, but more normal looking athletic togs, except for shoes and helmet—even fashion sunglasses, rather than Spacemann Spiff thermonuclear protection glasses. I was polishing of my banana when she asked casually, "So, have you decided which way you are going?" She gestured with a bagel towards the blue seventy-five mile sign which had an arrow pointing left towards Santa Rosa and ride’s end, and then towards the orange century sign, which pointed right, towards points unknown.
"I figured out about five miles ago that you can’t decide rationally whether to do a seventy-five or one-hundred mile ride," I said. "It is like a lot of other great things that people do that common sense would keep them from doing if they thought too much about it—having children, for instance, or getting married. Pursuing a career in the arts comes to mind, as does volunteering to do disaster relief. I’m going down that century road, and if I SAG out, so be it."
"That’s what I decided too," Sue said.
We munched contemplatively.
"You want to ride together?" I asked.
"That would be great," she said.
We finished eating, mounted up, and headed out.
My legs felt like lead. Really rubbery, dead, heavy, slow. I was instantly doubting my judgement on choosing the century road. Would they pump out and feel better? I have sometimes joked that my bicycle is "toothpick" powered because my legs are so skinny, but usually they feel like pretty lively toothpicks. Now they were just dead wood.

We rolled past a road sign showing a picture of a cow. If your olfactory system is working, you don't need no sign! We saw some cute little jersey cows, and went past the Strauss Family Dairy. Sue said, "Looking at these cows I can believe those milk ads about happy California cows. What's not to be happy about?"

"Well..." I said.

"O.K., O.K., A cow's life isn't all clover,"she acknowledged. "Still, it's a lot better than those feed lots on I5."

No argument there.

No improvement in my thighs, either. And then, THE HILL. Century riders being century riders, they had asked for more challenge on their route from previous years. The answer to this on the part of the event organizers was THE HILL. We hit this incline just a few miles after lunch. Sue asked me why I was riding for multiple sclerosis. I told her the whole story:

"When I was still in graduate school, a childhood Quaker friend of mine got in touch with me after we hadn't seen much of each other in quite a while. She and her woman partner were looking for a sperm donor who could help them to realize their dream of having a child. Because bothe women are people of color, they didn't want a white donor, which shortened thier list of potentials a bit. I was surprised and flattered to be asked--it is really something when a woman who isn't in love with you wants to have your baby!"

I was getting out of breath on the hill, but still on the middle chain ring, spinning a decent cadence, and feeling somewhat optimistic. Legs still felt like they were stuffed full of teddy bear cotton instead of muscle and blood, though. Other centurions were going past us.

"Don't let me hold you up on this hill," I told Sue. "I'm a terrible climber."

"You're not holding me up at all," Sue said graciously. She didn't seem to be breathing hard, or sweating perceptibly, however.

"Slow and steady wins the race," I said, sweat dripping off my beard onto the dusty tops of my shoes. Sue reached out and we touched palms in a solidarity high-five.

"So, I told them that I would think about the whole donor thing," I continued. "I didn't think about it with the front of my brain at first. I just let it percolate in my subconscious. When Andrea got hold of me a while later, what I knew was that I didn't have any stop to it, as Quakers say, but I wasn't clear to proceed really either. We agreed to get together and have a meal."

"That is so great that you considered it," Sue said.

"Well, I was adopted myself, and I think that the experience gives one a somewhat malleable sense of family. You know, family is who you decide it is..."

"So...?" Sue prompted. I was running out of breath, and still couldn't see the top of the hill. Lycra-clad riders on carbon-fiber bikes were passing us regularly now. With only double cranks, they couldn't get a low enough gear to sit and spin up the hill--they had to stand and 'honk' up, at a much greater pace.

"So, we ate together, I asked every question I could think of, and it just seemed so clear after that. I have an eighteen month old biological daughter named Imani Joy, and her grandmother had multiple sclerosis, and the family does this event every year, the People in Purple team, and so this is my first year, and I'm not sure that I'm going to make it up this hill. You'd better go on ahead." I finished the story ubruptly, gasping.

Sue pedalled on, the way other bicyclists do on hills, in a lower gear, but still going. I shifted to the tiny ring, biggest cog on the rear cassette, vowed not to walk, and hoped not to throw up. It was a long hill, with guys with legs like boulders passing me the whole way. Sue's lavender jersey disappeared in the distance, which I really appreciated--I didn't want to slow her down, and I didn't want her pity either. After two false summits, I coasted down the other side, catching my breath, drinking water, appreciating the cool breeze made by speed. At least my legs didn't feel like lead anymore--they were on fire!

I caught up with Sue, we talked about her life, a cat, a beau, a trip to Singapore coming up. We had miles of stiff headwind, two more hills, but not as bad as THE HILL, Sue's knee started to hurt. At the 89 mile rest stop we both ate some ibuprofen and some more Aussie Bites, rested for longer than usual and got back on the bikes for the last 11 miles, which were fast, no wind, easy. Sue's knee didn't slow her down so's you'd notice. We rejoined the fifties and the twenty-five milers, and somewhat enjoyed calling "Left side!" as we tanked past slower riders on our century quest. As we rolled onto the event grounds, we were cheered in, and felt pretty grand. One Hundred miles by bicycle! No need to fear lesser mileages ever again! We hadn't SAGGED out. The moral support was critical, we agreed--all along the route we had encouraged one another. We had a Fat Tire ale ("Bicycle Beer," I called it). We found the Hartsough clan: Chester, Tala, Lena, Carter, Andrea, and the beautiful Imani Joy in the shade picnicing on the lawn, and I introduced Sue to everyone, and the ride was over. It was glorious. I ate and ate and ate and went to bed at eight at the same time as Imani. Slept like the dead. Would I be able to ride the next day?

Waves, Wine, Steel, and Sue...

2005-09-26T13:07:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in a cafe in Berkeley writing this post on my Airport enabled antique iBook. I thought that I could increase the frequency and reliability of posting to this blog if I had Airport capability, so I bought the no longer available original Airport card from one of the few places that still carries it. When my dad opened the computer to install it, there was an Airport card already there! I don't mind being a Luddite, but Luddite and idiot aren't supposed to be synonymous. Anyhoodle, it works.

Why am I not hunkered under a Red Cross cot in Baton Rouge? Well, part of the screening for the Red Cross that they don't tell you about (some would call it hazing), is that in order to test your flexibility and capacity for dealing with stress and changed plans, they make your flight reservations, but do not actually purchase the tickets, so that when you call the airline to confirm they say, "Yes, we have your name, we have that reservation number, but the tickets were never purchased so we sold them to someone else,and there is no room on that flight." Then there is the call to the Red Cross travel line, a 30 minute wait on hold (read some fascinating stuff in the National Geographic), and the net result is that I'm flying out on Wednesday morning, "and God is willing," as the old time Quakers used to say.

So, some of you are wondering how the Waves to Wine ride went? I got to REI Santa Rosa a little after eight, checked in, bought a bicycle tube and some warm gloves, then up to the Luther Burbank Center to camp out with other riders. As I exited the freeway, I put the dashboard switch on the Isuzu from "Paradise" to "Purgatory," indicating that I was burning biodiesel and not straight vegetable oil. However, I didn't drive far enough to really purge the fuel system of oil--but more on that later. The Hartsough clan were all coming up on Saturday morning, hoping to ride the more reasonable 25 mile course, so I was on my own for the night. Luckily, I had stopped by Trader Joe's in Roseville to get some serious snackage (Red Cross recommends that you carry tow days worth of food and water in a "hardship disaster"), so I had a good dinner of turkey jerkey, Kettle chips and Fuji apples--if you wanna run cool, you've got to run on heavy, heavy fuel!

I had busted a spoke that morning on a light training ride, and the Tour of Nevada City bike shop had restrung my wheel (Thanks guys!), but I had to put the tire back on, change saddles, put Carradice saddle bag on, and adjust headset on the old Bridgestone RB-1 with J.D. Gruppo. (J.D. stands for Junk Drawer.) Then I just flopped down the old Thermarest and sacked out around 10pm.

Morning on next post.

My Cajun Vacation

2005-09-22T20:16:00.000-07:00

I am taking an all expense paid vacation to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I did not guess how many jelly beans were in the jar, I did not put my business card in the box, and I sure as heck don't have a Sugar Mama, so how did I do it? I signed on with the American Red Cross to do disaster relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and now Hurricane Rita. I ship out on Monday from San Francisco Airport. This blog will initially be the narrative of my vacation in the bayou country. It will include my thought process, discernment (where any was applied), spiritual exercise, and almost certainly my own brand of pseudo-social scientific analysis. It'll be fun. Really. Like a Cajun Vacation ought to be.