Tag: Buckminster Fuller

Categories
Uncategorized

Centered Gull

gull capture

Gull Capture photo by Todd

In the novel I’m writing, one of my characters says, “I don’t believe in luck.” She doesn’t explain why she doesn’t believe in luck, but by the time I wrote those words down, I was several hundred hours into writing the novel and I understood why she didn’t believe in luck. Or why she didn’t think she believed in luck.

But the thing about luck is similar to the thing about love. Is there an indisputable definition of luck? By that I mean, what exactly is luck? Are we talking about fate? Karma? Random chance? My character doesn’t believe in luck, but she does believe in karma, or her definition of karma, which may be different than your definition of karma or the Dalai Lama’s definition of karma.

The difference between karma and luck is tricky because the two ideas can be easily conflated, as in “we make our own luck,” which might be a definition of karma.

Maybe what my character meant by luck was dumb luck, which would be luck we haven’t made ourselves, but luck that simply befalls us. Pure chance. But if there is no such thing as luck, then what seems to simply befall us may actually be the result of karma or something else.

I had an experience recently that was captured in the photo I posted at the beginning of this article. If the photo of which I speak is not attached to the version of this article you’re reading, I will tell you it is a photo of a rock outcropping on the coast a couple miles south of Mendocino, an outcropping that becomes a little island at high tide. The day is sunny, the water deeply blue, and in the sky above the iconic outcropping, perfectly centered, is a sea gull winging swiftly by.

Now here’s the thing. When I stopped to photograph the outcropping and the ocean and the sky, I was in no hurry. Yet something made me hurriedly fumble my little camera out of my pocket. And I distinctly remember thinking, “Why am I hurriedly fumbling my camera out of my pocket? This is weird. What’s going on?” I remember not having a solid grip on the camera as my hand swung up and framed the outcropping and my finger grazed the shutter button before I was consciously ready to take the picture, which is something I never do because I prefer sharply-focused pictures to blurry pictures and I like being conscious of what I’m aiming at when I depress the shutter button.

But this time, everything I never do was done, seemingly involuntarily, as if I was being used by the unseen forces of the universe as a kind of robot Mars Rover to take the picture, only I wasn’t on Mars; I was on earth a couple miles south of Mendocino.

When I got home and downloaded the day’s photos from my camera onto my computer, here was the picture of the outcropping and the ocean and the sky, the only photo of the outcropping I took that day, and in the center of the photo was a gull winging swiftly by. I did not crop the photo. The gull centered himself at the moment the shutter clicked, and he was going mighty fast, the gull. I know he was going mighty fast because when he winged by during that spastic picture-taking moment, I was barely aware of something flying by. Only when I saw the picture on my computer screen did I learn of the perfectly centered gull.

Was that luck? Karma? Fate? The hand of God? The tentacle of a minor deity? And why me? Why that picture?

One answer might be that this frantic fumbling picture-taking resulted in this portrait of a gull and the outcropping and the ocean and the sky so I would be sufficiently moved by both the photo and the experience of taking the photo that I would write about what happened and share my writing so that you or someone else would read about this unusual moment and be moved to do something that causes ripples in the time space continuum and accomplishes something or many things the Universe wants accomplished.

Another answer might be: life is a series of random experiences signifying nothing but what some humans (me) egoistically want to imbue with a deeper meaning that isn’t really there.

Buckminster Fuller wrote extensively about precession, which he defined as the right-angled unintentional effects of a direct action. He has two favorite examples of precession, one involving dropping a stone into a still pond, the other a bee probing a flower to get nectar.

The direct action of dropping the stone into a still pond results in the expected result of a concussive splash. The precessional unintentional effects of dropping the stone into a pond are ripples caused by the initial impact of the stone. Bucky assumed the dropper of the stone was after the splash and not the ripples, or maybe Bucky wasn’t concerned about the dropper’s intentions because this is such a neato illustration of the right-angled effects of an intended action.

The direct action of the bee probing the flower to get nectar results in the bee getting nectar, and the precessional effect of the bee probing the flower is that the flower gets pollinated. Bucky assumed the bee didn’t know or care about pollination and just wanted that nectar. Not being a bee, I don’t know if that’s true. In any case, the action of going after nectar does result in pollination, which ultimately results in more flowers, fruit, and life as we know it on earth.

Precession, however, doesn’t obviously explain why I acted so uncharacteristically when I snapped the picture of the centered gull, but it might explain the effects of my sharing this article, though I will never know what most of those effects are, if there are any.

Even if you, for instance, were moved by this article to take a picture of the view out your window and snapped the shutter just as a rabbit hopped by, a species of rabbit thought to be extinct, and you not only became famous for the picture and thus your life was changed forever, but proof of the existence of this incredibly rare rabbit resulted in a huge swath of land being saved from rapacious developers, and you told me about this, I still would never know about the thousands of other events that might spring, directly or indirectly, from people reading this article and seeing the photo of the centered gull.

Or maybe there won’t be any precessional effects from this article. Maybe this is but fleeting evidence of one human’s attempt to communicate thoughts and feelings that sprang from his experience of taking a picture of a gull centered in the sky above a coastal outcropping.

Only time will tell; and when time does tell, who knows if anyone will be listening; and if someone is listening, will they understand what time is saying?

Categories
Uncategorized

Opening Words

Big River Meteor

Big River Meteor photo by Todd

“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” Carl Jung

I like to write letters to friends and to artists and writers and movie directors I admire. Sometimes my friends will send me letters, but the artists and writers and movie directors I write to very rarely answer my letters, though until twenty years ago if the admired person was British, Australian, or from New Zealand, no matter how famous, he or she always wrote back—but not anymore.

For many years, before there was email and texting and tweeting, I sent off several letters every week; and almost every day in those halcyon days of postal abundance, the postal service agent would bring me letters from friends. On my computer I have a file entitled Letter Head Quotes. In this file are pages topped with a quote I especially like, and I will either type a letter to someone on one of those pages, or print out the page and use the empty space below the quote to write a letter by hand.

Here are some of my favorite letterhead quotes and a few thoughts about them.

“I would suspect that the hardest thing for you to accept is your own beauty. Your own worth. Your own dignity. Your own royal pedigree. Your priestly identity as one who blesses and is blessed in return. Your own calling to learn to love and allow yourself to be loved to the utmost.”  Alan Jones

Alan Jones is an Episcopal priest who was the Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco from 1985 until 2009. When I lived in Berkeley from 1995 to 2006, I would attend Evensong on Thursday evening at Grace Cathedral twice a month. I’d take BART from the North Berkeley station, get off at Montgomery Street, hike up the hill to the cathedral, walk the labyrinth adjacent to the cathedral, enter the cavernous church, listen to the Boy’s and Men’s choirs sing gorgeous unintelligible hymns accompanied by a genius organist, and open my heart and mind to Alan’s spontaneous prayer, which always concluded Evensong.

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.

This quote from Winnie the Pooh is especially dear to me, literally dear, because when I was creating a book of my writing exercises The Writer’s Path with Mindy Toomay, I really wanted to use this quote in the book, and our publisher, 10-Speed before they were eaten by Random House, informed us that Disney, who now owns all things Pooh, was demanding five hundred dollars for the use of those few lines. 10-Speed was not about to cough up five hundred cents for our book, let alone five hundred dollars, so I coughed up the money, which amounted to ten per cent of my advance for the book; and I have never regretted the expenditure.

“If I be not in a state of Grace, I pray God place me in it;

If I be in a state of Grace, I pray God keep me so.” Jean D’Arc

I first read this quote in Mark Twain’s novel Joan of Arc. I’ve read everything Twain wrote, and though I consider The Prince and the Pauper his finest novel, Twain considered Joan of Arc his greatest work. He spent two years in France meticulously researching his book, and he studied French for several years so he could read the transcripts of Joan’s trial in the original French with the aid of able translators. Despite Twain’s immense fame, no publisher would publish the book, so Twain published the fascinating work himself.

This quote, which comes from the transcript of Joan’s trial, speaks of a desire to be in a state of grace without needing to know whether one is in such a state. In that sense, the sentiment, when separated from the context of Joan’s trial, echoes the Buddha extolling the virtue of Not Knowing, of Beginner’s Mind—an innocent acceptance and appreciation of whatever we are experiencing.

In the context of Joan’s trial, these words are a testament to her astonishing genius, for this simple reply effectively defeated her brutal prosecutor and proved the most brilliant minds in the Catholic Church incapable of convicting her of heresy. Thus stymied, those hideous men tortured her until they imagined her anguished cries to be an admission of heresy—after which they quickly burned her at the stake.

But before they tortured her and killed her, they laid a pernicious intellectual trap for her. There was an arcane law of the Catholic Church stating that anyone claiming to be in a state of grace, or claiming not to be in a state of grace, was a heretic. So if Joan could be tricked into saying, or even implying, she believed she was or was not in a state of grace, she would be proved a heretic. Having been deprived of sleep and sufficient food for several weeks, having stood through weeks of trial in the face of legions of ghoulish priests intent on killing her, Joan, nineteen, illiterate, and knowing nothing of the complicated laws of the church was asked by the prosecutor, “Do you believe you are in a state of grace?”

As Twain describes the scene, the devious prosecutor asks this question almost as an afterthought at the end of a grueling day of interrogation. Joan gathers herself, awaits guidance from her angelic allies, and replies with quiet eloquence, “If I be not in a state of Grace, I pray God place me in it. If I be in a state of Grace, I pray God keep me so.”

In a more modern context, but in a similarly metaphysical vein, the following quote from Buckminster Fuller is a succinct description of how I believe the universe operates. I assumed that nature would “evaluate” my work as I went along. If I was doing what nature wanted done, and if I was doing it in promising ways, permitted by nature’s principles, I would find my work being economically sustained. 

Having shared this quote with many people, I can report that artists and poets and people who have lived unusual lives universally agree that this is how the universe operates, while everybody else says Bucky’s idea is hokum.

Here is one of my favorite Philip Whalen poems.

HOW MANY IS REAL

Whether we intended it or liked it or wanted it

We are part of a circle that stands beyond life and death

Happening whether we will or no

We can’t break it, we are seldom aware of it

And it looks clearest to people beyond its edge.

They are included in it

Whether or not they know

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Moronic Individualism

newrealityM

“We are in crises where we are finding that the old systems don’t work. But that sort of disillusionment is only discovering that what you thought was so, isn’t. It’s the first step in learning. So I celebrate disillusionment.” Buckminster Fuller

The United States spends a trillion dollars a year on war.

We are told that several of the terrible fires raging in northern California this October were started by downed power lines sparking dry brush. How is it that in the year 2017, the richest nation on earth still has most of its power lines above ground? Part of the answer is that this nation spends a trillion dollars every year on war. Another part of the answer is that the state of California has a tax structure favoring wealthy people and corporations who do not feel they need to contribute to the greater good, so the state government lacks the muscle to compel the owners of those power lines to bury them.

We live in Mendocino, and every winter, often several times per winter, we are without power because of downed power lines that should not be suspended above the earth so they can be downed by annual winds and falling trees, but should be safely buried below ground. But because our utilities are not publicly owned, this endemic idiocy continues year in and year out. Why are our utilities not publicly owned? Because wealthy corporations control our government.

We wonder when the electorate will wake up to the inadequacy of our system of governance and taxation? Judging from the responses to the catastrophes that have befallen Puerto Rico and Texas and Florida and California, the answer is Never. We have evolved into a society of shortsighted self-serving stupid people, capable of bravery and bursts of generosity, but mostly we fend for ourselves in the face of a social system that punishes us for cooperating with each other.

That we do not have Single Payer healthcare, free healthcare for all our citizens, is conclusive proof of our collective myopia and disregard for the wellbeing of others. People may rant about how horrible our current President and Congress and Supreme Court, but our deplorable representatives did not come to power through a violent insurrection. They rose to power through the will of a society composed of profoundly self-serving people. Not bad people, but people trained from birth, and from generation to generation, to prize the individual, the self, above all else.

I recall when I was involved with a group of people in the 1970s planning to buy land and create a rural commune. At the initial meetings, I and a few others made the case that our first orders of business should be the establishment of a dependable water supply, a good road, an excellent septic system, and a reliable source of electricity for the entire community, to be followed by the construction of a community center with a kitchen adequate for the needs of the entire commune. Thereafter, we would turn our energies to building our separate dwellings.

No, said the majority of those involved. First we build our separate houses; then we’ll do that collective stuff.

I could not understand why these seemingly intelligent people thought this way, but I have since come to understand that they were simply being Americans. In America the needs of the individual, however absurd, always come first. And this is why we don’t have Single Payer Healthcare and why Donald Trump is our President and why we spend a trillion dollars every year on war and why we don’t have trains going everywhere instead of roads that are constantly deteriorating and why power lines are still above ground and why everything that has made our country the giant mess it is today continues to hold sway over our lives.

We know several people who barely escaped with their lives in the Santa Rosa and Redwood Valley fires, people who lost virtually everything they owned. Their losses are tragic, but such losses can also present us with opportunities to make changes in our lives we might not otherwise make that can ultimately benefit us.

I say this because I read a fascinating study done of people who lost everything in the great Oakland firestorm of 1991, and the gist of the study was that many of those people came to feel the loss of their material possessions was the beginning of much improved lives. And more personally, in 1980, shortly after moving to Sacramento, my house was broken into and thieves took virtually everything I owned including the food from the refrigerator, art from the walls, records, books, camera, typewriter, manuscripts, vacuum cleaner, clothes, bed sheets—only my piano and mattress remaining.

For some days after the robbery I was in a state of shock, but eventually the shock gave way to myriad realizations, one of which was that there were people in my life who were emotional thieves and robbing me blind. In my new state of awareness, I was able to eliminate those emotional burglars from my life.

This is not to suggest that catastrophic disasters are good, but that sometimes we can, individually and collectively, learn from experiences of loss and make changes—such as burying power lines—that will benefit us in the future.

And in the midst of the terrible political and economic wildfire that is the Trump presidency and the Congress of Selfish Monsters and the many state houses controlled by sexist racist gun fanatics, I hope previously asleep people will wake up to realize that the old way of the Demopublicans and Republicrats is moribund and always leads to psychopathic presidents serving the corporate overlords.

The meaningful alternative to our corporate totalitarianism is to build a system with housing for everyone and healthcare for everyone and safety and food and meaningful work for everyone, with a small efficient defensive military, and a system of taxation that does away with a small percentage of the population having most of the goodies and everybody else living on the verge of losing what little they have.

Categories
Uncategorized

Heat

190moon

190 Moon diptych by Max Greenstreet

I do not do well when the temperature goes much above eighty degrees. I lived in Sacramento for fifteen years in a house without air conditioning, and though my last year there was 1995, over twenty years ago, I still cringe when I think of the summers I spent there. One of those summers we had a hundred days when the temperature surpassed a hundred degrees.

Now I live in Mendocino, a mile from the coast, and the days here are usually cool or cold, rarely warm, and almost never hot.

Today I decided to read a little news of the outside world. I learned that the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is dying incredibly fast due to the fast-warming oceans. I also learned that temperatures in Las Vegas have surpassed one hundred and five degrees for several days, and such blazing hot days are expected to continue unabated in the Southwest for several more weeks. And I learned that wildfires are rampaging in California and throughout the western United States and Canada, the ferocity of these fires due to historically high temperatures and a lack of rain.

I also learned that a single medium-sized tree in good health has the cooling power of ten large air conditioners running twenty hours a day.

Buckminster Fuller suggested in his book Critical Path, published in 1981, two years before Fuller died, that the only way human society might survive the coming ecological apocalypse was through a computer-organized and computer-facilitated global government dedicated to enhancing the lives of all living things on earth. In his imagining of this future, the dying Great Barrier Reef, out-of-control wildfires, and soaring global temperatures would trigger responses by the global community that would immediately identify and take action to eliminate the causes of these disasters.

Reading the latest articles about the dying Great Barrier Reef and how helpless people feel they are to eliminate the causes of the swiftly warming oceans, I am reminded that Fuller was keenly aware that a global government dedicated to enhancing the lives of all living things on earth might never come to be.

In related news, the Mendocino Music Festival is underway once more, and my wife Marcia is playing cello in the festival orchestra as she has every year since the festival began thirty-one years ago. We are housing another of the orchestra’s cellists, Abigail Summers, and I am helping Sally Fletcher, the boss of food and drink for the festival events, when she has something easy for me to do.

On Saturday afternoon I walked to town and listened to the Calder Quartet perform Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Opus 13 in the big tent on the headlands. I love Mendelssohn, and this performance of his quartet was, as we used to say in the 60s, astral. I did not stay for the Beethoven, wanting to steep in the after tones of Mendelssohn as I walked home. Wow. What marvelous things humans are capable of creating.

Last night I attended the first orchestra concert of the festival, and as I watched the superb orchestra perform Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, I was reminded that humanity could dedicate our collective energies to enhancing the lives of all living things on earth, and we would succeed magnificently in doing so. We have the genius, the creativity, and the ability to work together to accomplish incredibly complicated and difficult tasks. Why don’t we?

And why, I wondered aloud to Marcia as we were celebrating after the concert, do we allow small groups of highly unimaginative, greedy, non-geniuses to run our governments and destroy the planet? If we can send humans to the moon and bring them home safely, and we can compose and perform Rimsky-Korsakov’s astounding Scheherazade, why don’t we elect brilliant and creative leaders to do what needs to be done to save the biosphere?

The answer seems to be that humans, collectively, are no longer cognizant of the impact of what they do today on the state of things in the future. In Critical Path, Fuller tells of a great hall built at a university in England in the 1500s. The builders were aware that the massive oak beams used to construct the hall would need replacing four hundred years in the future, and to that end they planted a large oak grove on the campus that they accurately calculated would provide the requisite replacement lumber four centuries in the future.

He also tells of the fabulous seaworthy sailing boats, junks, built in Thailand for thousands of years, and how the teak used in the construction of these junks is first aged for twenty-five years in fresh water, then twenty-five years in brackish water, and finally for fifty years in salt water, before being milled for the building of the junks. Thus the sellers of this seaworthy wood to the builders of the boats were the great great grandchildren of those who originally harvested the trees and began their aging processes, which meant that those waterproof teak providers were economically dependent on the actions of their ancestors.

Therefore when people argue that our collective inability to do anything about the dying reefs and rising temperatures and our moronic governments is the result of human nature, I say, “No, I don’t think our inability is the result of human nature. I think our inability comes from a learned unwillingness to share, combined with a relatively new phenomenon: a lack of connection to the past and to the future.”

The good news is that the Mendocino Music Festival will continue for another week, with more glorious music for us to hear—the collective genius of humans on display to inspire us.

Categories
Uncategorized

Ego & Muse

Independent:Dependent Lily Cai Dance Company © 2015 David Jouris : Motion Pictures

Independent/Dependent (Lily Cai Dance Company) copyright 2015 David Jouris/Motion Pictures

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser November 2015)

“When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything.” Shunryu Suzuki

As I was sitting by the woodstove last night—this November much colder than last—scribbling away on my latest something, I was struck by how little connection I feel to the books and stories and plays I’ve written over the last forty years, or even to the book I finished writing earlier this year.

How does it happen that something I thought about constantly and worked on for several hours every day for months on end is now but a vague memory? How can something that meant so much to me, mean so little now? Can the creative heart really be so fickle?

Then this morning our neighbor came by with a dozen beautiful blue and brown and white eggs just laid by his prolific chickens, and I thought I’m a hen, and the egg I’m laying right now is the most important egg in the world to me, but a few eggs hence I won’t remember this egg at all.

That put me in mind of when I was a young writer and would spend a year or two furiously working on a novel, my work fueled by a palpable visceral erotic majestic sense of how staggeringly great the story was. When at last the first draft was finished, I would let it cool for a few weeks before reading the entirety; and more often than not, I found the story and writing less great than I had sensed they were while in the throes of creation. And often that was the end of the process, the novel stillborn. But sometimes there was enough mojo in that first draft to inspire a rewrite, and once engaged in remaking the story, I would again be filled with certainty I was birthing a masterwork.

As I got to know more artists and writers, I learned that they, too, were often taken over by a sense of the importance and brilliance of the things they were creating, and when the things were done, the veils of grandiosity would be lifted, and they would see their creations in a wholly different light. So I came to think of this recurring self-delusion as a necessary trick of the mind enabling artists to complete creations requiring hundreds or thousands of hours of work. If the inner critic became engaged too early in the process, the flow might stop.

But what is that trick of the mind? How do we fool our egos again and again into thinking something is great when it isn’t yet great, and may never be great?

“What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naïve, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.” Jonathan Ive

I have spent the last three years writing a quartet of connected novels called Ida’s Place, and when I completed Book Four in August, it never occurred to me the saga was at end. I was so much in the habit of writing these books, so emotionally enmeshed with the large cast of characters, and so enamored of the ongoing drama, I couldn’t imagine there wouldn’t be another book or two or seven.

Indeed, the first chapter of Book Five poured forth from my pen as effortlessly as the previous four volumes. But then the flow ceased, the Ida muse done with me. However, my ego was not yet ready to let go of this large self-defining undertaking, and for several weeks more I labored away and cranked out five more chapters, though the process was no longer about harnessing an artesian flow but wringing water from stones.

Then on one of my walks to town, I was finally able to admit I was done with the Ida saga, or the saga was done with me, and the moment I admitted this to my conscious self, I realized that the last line of Book Four was a fine place to stop. And now, some weeks later, when I pick up one of the Ida books and read for a page or nine, the story and the writing are new to me. I’m happy to say I find the tale deeply engaging, but who wrote these volumes? Was Buckminster Fuller correct in saying we are verbs, not nouns?

So now what do I do? Now how will I be conjugated? Now who am I if not the person writing a series of novels set in a bakery café on the far north coast of California, a mythic version of Here?

“When we forget ourselves, we actually are the true activity of the big existence, or reality itself. When we realize this fact, there is no problem whatsoever in this world, and we can enjoy our life without feeling any difficulties. The purpose of our practice is to be aware of this fact.” Shunryu Suzuki

There is no rushing a muse, and no telling when or how she will come to you. I once asked a painter I admire if he painted every day. He replied, “I go to my studio every day, except Sunday, and some days I’ll paint for fifteen minutes, some days for five hours, some days not at all. I made myself paint every day when I was a neophyte because I wanted painting to become a deep habit. And now that it is, showing up every day is the important thing.”

My favorite Sufi stories are those in which a person is at an emotional and spiritual impasse, and one of two things happens. Either a visitor arrives and does something or says something that liberates the stuck person, or the stuck person goes out into the world and has an experience that opens his mind and breaks down the wall around his heart.

Categories
Uncategorized

Cherry Tree Myth


BUT SHE HAD WINGS

But She Had Wings painting by Nolan Winkler

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser July 2015)

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Charles Spurgeon

The Fourth of July has always been a mixed bag for me. As a boy, I loved the barbecue and fireworks party in our neighbors’ backyard. My friends and I ran around in the dark with sparklers, ate potato salad and burgers and corn and watermelon, and a man smoking a cigarette and drinking a martini set off spectacular fireworks smuggled into California from Montana.

But my father always got especially drunk at the Fourth of July barbecue because he imbibed much more hard liquor when he drank in the company of other alcoholics, and he would become vicious, so the fun of running around with sparklers was dampened, and the hours after we got home from the barbecue were about hiding in my room.

One year after the Fourth of July party, my mean-drunk father found a sickly bat clinging to a low-hanging branch of a pine tree, and he broke the branch off and brought the bat home to torture my mother by bringing the frightened creature into the kitchen. My mother screamed at my father to take the bat out of the house, and when he refused, she got a broom and drove my father into the garage where we could hear him crashing around, shouting and cursing, and then he started hammering on the wall. A few minutes later he came into the kitchen, got a bottle of wine, and returned to the garage.

I followed my mother as she ventured into the garage armed with her broom—I was nine—and we discovered my father had nailed the branch to the wall just a few feet from the doorway into the kitchen—the sickly little animal still clinging to the bough.

“Get it out of here,” said my mother, her eyes slits of fury. “It might have rabies. You’re endangering the children. Get rid of it. Now!”

My father took a long drink from the bottle and slurred, “My new pet. Bats are very intelligent.”

And my mother said, “If you don’t get rid of it right this minute, I’m divorcing you. Don’t think I won’t.”

Then she shepherded me back into the house, closed the door to the garage, and locked it. I got up early the next day and went into the garage and the bat was gone, though the branch was still nailed to the wall and would remain there for decades, an armature for thick tapestries of cobwebs.

When I was in my late twenties and visiting my parents at Christmas, I asked my father if he remembered the incident with the bat, and I was only mildly surprised when he accused me of making up the story to fulfill my chronic need to vilify him. So I brought him into the garage and pointed out the pine branch nailed to the wall and asked him how it got there.

“I’ve often wondered about that,” he said, frowning at the branch. “I assumed you did it to spite me.”

“The truth is more important than the facts.” Frank Lloyd Wright

As you probably know, the young George Washington never chopped down his father’s cherry tree, was never confronted by his father about the destruction of the tree, and did not say, “I cannot tell a lie, Dad. I did it. I’ll take my punishment. You may beat me cruelly now. Please do.”

The story was entirely made up by an unscrupulous biographer some years after George Washington died, and this balderdash immediately became the one so-called fact every American could recite about George Washington, the mythic Father of America, with Betsy Ross the purported Mother of America because she was said to have sewn the first American flag at George Washington’s request, though there is no proof she ever did any such thing.

The subtext of the cherry tree lie is that our political leaders are profoundly honest and willing to suffer grievously for what they believe in. And it is this honesty and courage of their convictions that make them so special and worthy of our support. Indeed, so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche is this fundamental falsity that tens of millions of people who should know better, I among them, have voted for and elected heinous criminals to control our government and make our laws, many of those laws designed to rob us of our wealth and our freedoms.

And the Fourth of July always reminds me of this sad truth about our species: we are as gullible as yellow jackets flying into a death trap, the sweet smell of raw meat irresistible to our hardwired brains. We cloak the needless deaths of millions of innocent people and the ongoing ruination of the world in red, white and blue flags Betsy Ross never sewed, red the color of the cherries that never grew on the tree George Washington never chopped down and never told the truth about.

“Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except it ain’t so.” Mark Twain

This Fourth of July 2015 we made an East Indian potato salad to take to the barbecue at our neighbors’ house two doors down, a vegetarian feast, the earthlings there a mix of people born all over the globe, the gathering a celebration of our independence from the stultifying concept of competitive nations, what Buckminster Fuller called blood clots in the body of humanity. The current Anglo-German strangulation of Greece is a perfect example of the destructive power of the asinine notion that one nation is more important than another.

And we celebrated the harvest of the first wave of vegetables planted in early spring, our potato salad made with just-dug potatoes, the lemon juice from the first lemons grown on our young trees planted two years ago, the cilantro leaves from volunteers springing up among our lettuce—the coconut milk linking us to our fellow earthlings in more tropical climes.

Categories
Uncategorized

Waiting For Disaster

water tank

(This article appeared in the drought October 2014)

“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.” Henry Kissinger

As the drought continues and a weakening El Niño lessens the chance of a good wet winter in California, we are having a second water tank installed to give us five thousand gallons of storage capacity. So far, knock on redwood, our well continues to provide us with sufficient water for our basic needs. Sadly, more and more of our neighbors are experiencing water shortages, and if we have another dry winter or two or three, even the most draconian conservation measures won’t keep our well from running dry for at least part of the year.

Thus we want that greater storage capacity for several reasons.

First, the water delivery companies in the Mendocino-Fort Bragg area deliver with trucks carrying 3500 gallons, and if you have less than a 3500-gallon storage capacity they still charge you for the entire 3500 gallons. Should we need to buy water, we want to be able to receive the full load.

Second, five thousand gallons provides us with two months of water for our minimalist needs, and those two months might carry us through the driest months of the year to a resurgence of our well.

Third, we will be more emboldened to plant a larger vegetable garden and water the orchard more generously if we know we have sufficient water for our basic needs and plenty more for our vegetables and fruit trees. We can monitor our supply, and when the well gives signs of waning, we can curtail water to the plants. This year, not having that extra capacity, we reigned in the size of our garden and were perhaps too sparing in watering the fruit trees we inherited and the five new apple trees we’ve planted since moving onto this property two years ago.

“


Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Alan Lakein

When our new storage tank arrived (it has yet to be coupled with our old tank) several neighbors inquired about what we were doing. Lively discussions ensued, and every single neighbor I spoke to said either, “We should get another tank, too,” or “We don’t even have a storage tank and really should get one.”

When I encouraged them to do so as soon as possible, they all acted somewhat sheepish (ashamed?) because they probably aren’t going to get a storage tank or a second tank until their wells run completely dry and they are forced by dire necessity to get those tanks—their body language saying, “Why spend the money when we might have a wet winter?”

Buckminster Fuller wrote that human evolution and human history are essentially records of people reacting to crises. His hope was that the vast stores of information made available to everyone on earth via computers would usher in an era of humans taking actions to avert disasters before such disasters engulfed them. Alas, his hope has not been realized. Humans, it turns out, are hard-wired creatures of crisis and rarely take sufficient pre-emptive actions to avoid disasters.

 “Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.” George Washington Carver

Speaking of thinking ahead, higher education in Germany is once again absolutely free throughout that socialist country, and that goes for international students, too. “We got rid of tuition fees because we do not want a higher education system dependent on the wealth of the parents,” said Gabrielle Heinen-Kjajic, the minister for science and culture in Lower Saxony.

“Tuition fees are unjust,” said Hamburg’s senator for science Dorothee Stapelfeldt. “They discourage young people who do not have a traditional academic family background from taking up study. It is a core task of politics to ensure that young women and men can study with a high quality standard free of charge in Germany.”

Wow. Imagine if ensuring free higher education and excellent lower education were core tasks of politics in America, along with ensuring excellent free healthcare for all? For a fraction of the annual military budget we could have all three. But that is not going to happen because the American people are now thoroughly entrained to believe we are not a collective of people working for the greater good, but a vast list of individuals, each with the inalienable right to have piles of stuff we never have to share with anyone else if we don’t want to. And we don’t want to share our stuff because sharing is…yucky.

However, deep in our genetic memories is the fundamental truth of our evolution, which is that we would never have survived as a species had we not developed the ability to form and maintain highly cooperative groups of individuals living and working for the good of the entire group. This is why during crises, large populations of theretofore selfish, separate, disconnected individuals often become highly cooperative in order to enhance everyone’s chances of survival.

One of our neighbors came to take a look at our new water tank and said with a twinkle in her eye, “I know where I’m coming when I run out of water.”

And it occurs to me that we ought not only be outfitting our separate homes with more water tanks, we should be looking into creating a community water storage capacity, and a community solar electric system, and a community ride sharing system, and…hold that thought, my favorite television show is about to start and we’ve got enough water and food and stuff for at least another week, so I’ll talk to you later.

Categories
Uncategorized

Celebrity Saviors

magician

Mr. Magician painting by Todd

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser December 2013)

“Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin of the influential Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in England say many of the solutions proposed by world leaders to prevent “runaway global warming” will not be enough to address the scale of the crisis. They have called for “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the United States, EU and other wealthy nations.” Democracy Now

You may have heard that Russell Brand, the British comedian and movie star and ex-husband of pop diva Katy Perry, has made quite a splash of late talking about bringing down the current earth-killing systems of government and finance and replacing them with truly democratic socialist systems that serve all the people and stop killing the earth instead of only serving the bloody hell psychotic super rich. Russell isn’t saying anything new, but he speaks well, debates well, and has a lovable fearlessness and charisma that attracts the attention of thousands of previously disinterested people.

Also recently, Angelina Jolie, the mega-famous movie star and wife of mega-famous movie star Brad Pitt, received a humanitarian award from the same folks who hand out Oscars, and she made an eloquent acceptance speech in which she said that there but for fortune she might have been trapped in a refugee camp with little hope of having a good life, and she was determined to continue to work as hard as she can to help those less fortunate than she.

Simultaneously with Russell and Angelina broaching these subjects so rarely broached by super-famous celebrities, I happened to read the transcript of the show on Democracy Now from which I took this article’s opening quote, and I thought, “What if Amy Goodman interviewed Oprah Winfrey and Tom Hanks and they spoke the identical words spoken by these two scientists no one has ever heard of? What kind of an impact would that have on the world?” These scientists are talking about living lives of what many people in America and Europe would consider extreme material simplicity: no more traveling by air, minimal use of automobiles, getting around by bicycling, walking and using public transportation, radically reducing energy consumption in the home, not buying imported food, shopping locally, and so forth.

Then I had an epiphany that goes something like this: since hundreds of millions (and possibly billions) of people around the world care more about what celebrities do and think than they care about anyone or anything else, what if Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and Justin Beiber and Madonna and Justin Timberlake and Jennifer Lawrence and Lady Gaga and all the world’s most famous celebrities could be convinced to live lives of material simplicity in order to slow and eventually reverse the destruction of the biosphere?

Impossible? I don’t think so, especially if we, the people, can convince a few key super stars to make the change, and in so doing make material simplicity seem exciting and sexy, which it is, for then other celebrities will follow suit in order to, you know, be among the coolest of the cool.

“There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won’t.” Annie Lennox

While watching sports highlights on my computer, I saw a thirty-second advertisement for shoes or shaving cream, I can’t remember which, that features a mega-famous basketball player going to exclusive parties and driving a million-dollar car and being swamped by fans and living in a mansion and buying diamonds and consorting with gorgeous women. As we watch the footage of the superstar’s high life, we hear the voice of the mega-famous player we’re watching say, “If they took away the parties, the hot cars, the fans, the money, the high life, what would be left?” Now we see this superstar jumping incredibly high and making a fantastic shot as he answers his own question with, “Everything.”

And I took this to mean that this superstar, worshipped by millions of young men and women, cares more about basketball than he cares about all those glitzy, greenhouse gas spewing, meaningless wastes of life and time, which means he is the perfect candidate for assuming a life of material simplicity and modeling earth-saving ways of living for his followers. Okay!

“90 companies on the list of top emitters produced 63% of the cumulative global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane, and all but seven of the 90 were energy companies producing oil, gas and coal. The remaining seven were cement manufacturers.” Jon Queally

That’s right. Two-third of all the greenhouse gases emitted on earth in the last two hundred and fifty years were emitted by ninety companies producing oil, gas, coal, and cement, and most of the remaining greenhouse gas emissions came from people using that oil, gas, coal, and cement. Thus the solution is clear: we have to stop using so much oil, gas, coal and cement.

According to Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin of Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the average American is responsible for producing approximately eight (8) tons of greenhouse gas per year. Furthermore, 1.5 billion people in China are catching up to Americans with a per-person average of five (5) tons per year, with 1.5 billion folks in India gaining fast on the people of China in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Kevin and Alice estimate that we must quickly reduce the global per-person yearly average to two (2) tons of greenhouse gas emissions to have any hope of the planet being habitable a few decades hence. They also remind us that the average per-person tonnage is brought way up by the wealthiest people on earth who do lots of flying around in jets, living in huge energy-gobbling homes, driving too many gas-guzzling cars, and buying lots of things they don’t need brought to them from many thousands of miles away.

“On personal integrity hangs humanity’s fate.” Buckminster Fuller

So…you check your email. A friend sent you a link. You click on the link and are taken to a headline JUSTIN BEIBER JOINS CO-HOUSING COMMUNITY. The accompanying article reports: “Following a celebratory tweet to his eight hundred million devoted followers, the Beibster rode his bicycle towing the small trailer holding all his worldly possessions to his one-bedroom apartment in the zero emissions and totally self-sustaining co-housing community of High Hopes in Townsend, New Jersey, his ultra-groovy pad to be shared with the Beibster’s awesomely cute wife Gretchen, also known as She (Accordion).

“I’m totally digging working in our big organic garden and teaching guitar at the local community school,” said the Beibster who will be traveling by tramp steamer with Gretchen to Europe next month for their acoustic bicycle tour touting his new album Light As A Feather, featuring his global hit Cleaning Up My Act. “When we get home from Europe, we’ll hang here at High Hopes for a few months and then go gigging by train.”

In the afternoon, you turn on the radio to catch your favorite Eco-Revolution show Get Natural with hosts Tina Fey and Russell Brand, coming to you live from the straw bale solar community center of Quail Run Cooperative Farm a few miles from downtown San Luis Obispo. Tina and Russell, co-founders of Quail Run, have as their special guest today the famous director James Cameron talking about his latest 3-D comedy thriller Turning Down The Heat starring Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington, Hugh Jackman, Beyonce, and Adam Sandler as improvisational ecological innovators sent into the way-too-hot center of North America to befriend the desperate people living there and implement zany innovative ways to speed up the reversal of global warming.

What makes Get Natural such a great show is the way Tina and Russell mix movie talk and celebrity gossip with tips on canning, fermentation, compost, communal living, and the new Slow Travel movement. Jennifer Lawrence calls midway through the show to talk about some new tricks she learned while making her latest batch of goat cheese and how much she enjoyed her three-week walk to Florida from her upstate New York intentional simplicity commune to shoot the seventh and final movie in the Hunger Games series, Hungry No More.

“I was exhausted after four weeks of filming,” said Jennifer, “so I took the quantum gravity zero-emissions train home. We had a stop in Raleigh, North Carolina, so the trip took almost an hour instead of the usual thirty minutes, but we produced far more energy than we consumed en route.”

There are still a few celebrities and a few dimwitted fans who have not yet made the shift, but that can’t last now that all the corporations are making such huge profits from their clever de-growth de-hedge fund strategies, and with the fines for profligate energy use so exorbitant. Yes, we’re faced with the problem of what to do with so much wealth and freedom and opportunity to be shared by everyone, but we’ll have to tackle that challenge with the same strength and conviction we brought to convincing our beloved celebrities to change their ways.

How did we do that? How quickly we forget. Let’s see, I know thousands of us barraged our favorite celebrities with persuasive informative heartfelt letters, instead of wasting our time writing to our pea-brained congressional representatives, but I can’t quite recall how we got those celebrities to realize that lip service and driving electric cars wasn’t enough.

Oh, yes, now I remember the turning point, when Brad and Angelina walked from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and hundreds of thousands of people and dozens of super-famous people joined them along the way, and how they gathered in the Super Dome to announce to the world that henceforth they would get around without flying and without the use of automobiles, and they would be assuming lives of material minimalism. Yeah, that was huge, that was when the tide began to turn.

Categories
Uncategorized

Nationalism

Watermelon Dreams On A Starry, Starry Night, Nolan WInkler

Watermelon Dreams On A Starry Starry Night by Nolan Winkler

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser September 2013)

“He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” George Bernard Shaw

Let me get this straight. The United States government blithely oversees the killing and maiming of women and children and unarmed civilians with missiles fired from drones and helicopters and jets and battleships, invades other countries in the service of multinational corporations and uses artillery shells made with so-called depleted uranium spreading cancerous dust wherever they explode, and incarcerates and tortures people without charge for years and decades, but that same government says we have a moral obligation to bomb Syria and kill untold numbers of Syrians because the Syrian government has killed people using weaponry we don’t like them using, though we did nothing in response to the Syrian government killing tens of thousands of people over the last two years using weapons we do approve of?

John Kerry, who must have had some sort of lobotomy, moral or actual, said of our need to bomb Syria, “It is also profoundly about who we are. We are the United States of America. We are the country that has tried, not always successfully, but always tried to honor a set of universal values around which we have organized our lives and our aspirations.” Huh? Which universal values are those? Slaughtering people who cannot defend themselves against our overwhelming military might? Allowing the huge out-of-control banks to steal trillions of dollars and ruin our economy? Jailing the few people brave enough to blow the whistle on the egregious misuse of power by our government? I’m confused. Which set of values are we talking about here?

“History is all explained by geography.” Robert Penn Warren

Speaking of sets, while Kerry and Obama have been making their disingenuous and downright sickening nationalistic proclamations about our moral obligation to carry out immoral acts of mass destruction, the US Open tennis tournament played out in New York, with the American media anguishing over the lack of American men among those good enough to win the tournament. We did have for a few rounds the very tall white American hope John Isner who, before he was eliminated by someone with the highly suspicious last name of Kohlschreiber, played and won a match against Gael Monfils, a charismatic black man from France, and both Isner and the American media were outraged that here in America the crowd attending that match had the gall to root for the foreigner.

Heaven forbid! Shame on those people for rooting for someone from France, a socialist country with strong labor unions and excellent free healthcare. How dare they? This is America. We have a moral obligation to support all American athletes against all foreign athletes because, well, we’re better than anyone else. Aren’t we? Isn’t that one of our universal values we organize ourselves around? Hey, maybe the reason we don’t have any champion American male tennis players is that our men are being undermined and emasculated by unpatriotic traitors rooting for people from other countries, socialist countries, no less.

“The United States of America is a cross-breeding integration of humans from all nations of the planet earth.” Buckminster Fuller

Nationalism, as Buckminster Fuller points out in his grand opus Critical Path, is a ruse used by supranational corporations to trick people into fighting wars and doing stupid selfish things beneficial to those corporations and the amoral rich people who own and operate those corporations. Nations, as Bucky shows, are blood clots in what otherwise would be the wide open veins and arteries of a global community of egalitarian earthlings dedicated to the regeneration of the earth’s natural systems and the economic liberation of all people through democratic socialism. When I hear our political leaders and media pundits spouting pro-American nonsense, I think of clotting agents at work in our collective veins where we least need clotting.

“Society’s educational system’s conditioned reflexes are half a millennium out of gear with the discovered facts of cosmic operation.” Buckminster Fuller

Nationalism is a psychotic form of racism, and by psychotic I mean delusional. The delusion underpinning the psychosis of nationalism is that the people of one country are essentially different than the people of another country, though one of the discovered facts of cosmic operation is that every human being on earth is directly descended from the same mother of all mothers, a Bushman woman living in southwest Africa 172,000 years ago. We are essentially all brothers and sisters who have developed various skin and hair colors, myriad forms of dance and music and ways of preparing food, and thousands of different ways of speaking to each other. These differences should be sources of fun and fascination, not reasons to kill each other.

“Each one of us is in the midst of myriads of worlds. We are in the center of the world always, moment after moment.” Shunryu Suzuki

In my youth I worked for a woman who catered private parties, and one of those parties was a lunchtime gathering for about thirty Jewish matrons. At the height of the festivities, a gorgeous young woman named Lisa entered on the arm of a gorgeous young man named Alex who reminded me of the famous movie star heartthrob Omar Sharif, an Egyptian. Beautiful Lisa and handsome Alex made a whirlwind tour of the party, Lisa unable to keep her hands off her handsome beau and vice-versa. They watched each other with smiling eyes as they took turns speaking to their admiring listeners, Alex charming and erudite, his quips and comments eliciting gales of laughter. Then the two lovebirds made their exit and the post-visitation commentaries began.

As I plied the room with a platter of miniature romaine lettuce leaves wrapped around purple basil leaves wrapped around bamboo shoots and shrimp, I heard many of the matrons exclaiming about what a great catch Lisa had made. Then one of the matrons addressed Lisa’s mother. “Alex is so handsome. Is he Israeli? He had just the slightest accent. Very sexy.”

“Actually,” said Lisa’s mother, taking a deep breath, “he’s Mexican.”

“But the future is the future, the past is the past; now we should work on something new.” Shunryu Suzuki

So now President Obama, who I am convinced is dealing with his personal demons on a global scale through the use of violence against people he doesn’t understand even a little bit, has asked Congress to approve his bombing of Syria, though he is quick to say he doesn’t need their approval. And so the debate is raging, with poll after poll showing the majority of Americans opposed to any sort of military intervention in Syria. But such opposition may not make much of a difference to Obama. You may recall that poll after poll showed a vast majority of Americans wanted Single Payer Healthcare, and Obama gave us Big Pharma Mucho Insurance Healthcare instead.

My biggest fear, that which gives me nightmares and wakes me in the middle of the night, is that if the United States attacks Syria, Syria will fight back, at which point anything might happen, including Israel using one or more of its nuclear weapons.

“They made us many promises, more than I can remember—they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.” Red Cloud

When I was a little boy I played Cowboys & Indians with my brother and friends, imitating the movie scenarios of white men armed with guns doing battle with brown men armed with bows and arrows. Then when I was eight, simultaneous with getting my first real bow and arrows, I was given a little book entitled American Indians, a wide-ranging and sympathetic view of the societies existent in North America prior to and during the European invasion of the so-called New World. I read that wondrous tome dozens of times, studying every detail of every picture, and was inspired to drop the Cowboy part of my game and just play Indian, which entailed spending many a summer’s day and many an afternoon after school roaming barefoot in the woods, tracking imaginary game and communing with nature.

In my early twenties, living as a vagabond, I spent a month in a transient camp on the banks of the Athabasaca River in the Canadian Rockies just outside the town of Jasper. One evening, as I sat with my comrades around the campfire, a very drunk man with long black hair stumbled into our camp, joined our circle and said, “You know where my people come from? Come from those white men long time ago came up here looking for beaver and mink you know and they fuck those Inuit people up here you know. Trappers, you know, come up here and fuck those Inuit girls, you know, and make my people.” He looked around the fire. “Anybody got some hooch?”

Somebody passed him a bottle, he took a swig, and then he handed the bottle to the man sitting next to him. “What you all doing out here?” he asked, the firelight dancing on his beautiful face. “Why you don’t get a fucking motel room? Ground hard here, you know.”

“We love sleeping by the river,” said a young woman. “Love sleeping out under the stars.”

Categories
Uncategorized

Dancing With Destiny

Fred & Ginger

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser July 2013)

“Do not blame others for things that you have brought upon yourself.” Alexander McCall Smith

Do we, indeed, bring things upon ourselves? Are we the masters of our own destinies or are we pawns of forces we have no control over? These are questions I entertain myself with while walking to town today.

Having learned from my trusty tide chart that there is a negative tide attaining negative zenith at 9:30 in the AM today, and being a lover of negative tides, I decide to begin my daily trek to the village by walking down to Big River Beach, communing with the oceanic sprits, and then accessing the village by climbing the seventy stairs from the beach up to the headlands and from there meandering along the little trail through blackberry bushes and wild roses to the Presbyterian church.

“But is this what I really want to do?” I wonder as I amble down the steepest stretch of Little Lake Road. “Or have forces I have no control over made me think this is what I want to do when, in fact, it is what they (whoever they are) want me to do?”

I make a left onto Clark Street and head south toward Big River Beach. I am excited about the prospect of exploring the mouth of Big River with the tide so low and…or is my excitement merely a trick of those forces that want me on that beach at that particular time because…

Two bearded men approach me, one holding a leash connected to a large brown dog. As they draw near I instinctively give them a wide berth, and I’m glad I do because the large dog lunges at me as they pass, and the man is barely able to keep the dog from getting to me.

“Sorry about that,” says the man. “He’s never done that before.”

“Well, I’m glad you have him on a leash,” I say, having heard that same He’s never done that before line from dozens of unconvincing dog owners.

The lunging dog behind me, I wonder what brought me to that place on Clark Street just in time to encounter a lunging dog? A few minutes earlier or a few minutes later, no lunging dog. Coincidence? Or are the unseen ones trying to tell me something? I dunno.

A hundred yards further along, I get a panoramic view of Big River Beach in the distance—not a human being in sight on the vast expanse of sand. I wonder why. Gorgeous day. Extremely low tide. Summer upon us. Where are all the people? Or where are some people?

And now for the most obviously dangerous part of my journey, a quarter-mile stretch of walking against traffic on Highway One down to Big River Road, which is the main entrance to Big River State Park. There is a wide shoulder here, but not wide enough as far as I’m concerned, as cars and trucks come hurtling toward the walker at sixty miles an hour, cars and trucks driven by people who are often oblivious to pedestrians. Having nearly been killed at least three times by people talking on cell phones while driving, I am extremely wary of putting myself in situations where such thoughtless people might kill me, but this is the most convenient way to get to the beach on foot, so I hug the inside edge of the shoulder and prepare to jump into the bushes should an oncoming vehicle appear to be making a beeline for me.

Arriving at Big River Road, I find the park entrance closed to vehicular traffic by several big white saw horses, three of which bear giant traffic signs reading EXAM UNDERWAY. I kid you not. The signs don’t say ROAD CLOSED or PARK CLOSED, but EXAM UNDERWAY. Seeing no sign saying DO NOT ENTER, I saunter down the steep drive to the beach parking lot and espy three uniformed park employees standing beside two white dump trucks. One of the employees, a muscular man wearing reflective dark glasses says to me, “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

“I’m heading for the beach,” I say. “Is that okay, or will I be disturbing the exam?”

“No, that’s fine,” he says. “We’re keeping vehicles out because we’ve got some folks undergoing heavy equipment operation tests, but we’re not using the beach.”

“Thank you,” I say, having solved the mystery of why there was nobody on the beach.

“No worries,” says the man. “Enjoy.”

Big River’s flow of fresh water is so little right now and the tide is so greatly withdrawn that I can, for the first time in my eight years of living here, wade all the way across Big River and back, which I do before wandering out onto the greater beach. A few folks have come down the stairs from the headlands, so I am not entirely alone on the vast expanse of sand, but nearly so.

As I follow the widening river to where the stream of fresh water meets the salty sea, an osprey plummets into the river and quickly rises into the air with a little fish in her talons—a breathtaking sight and reason enough to have made this trek to the beach.

I roll up my pants’ legs and wade out into the ocean up to my knees, the breakers perfectly formed for surfing, though there are no surfers in the water yet, no doubt kept at bay by the heavy equipment exam. The water is relatively warm compared to how I remember it being a week ago, and I smile at thoughts of going swimming in the ocean, one day soon if not today.

Finding a likely spot on a sandy slope some fifty yards from the water’s edge, I eat a breakfast of nuts and seeds and a juicy navel orange, and get out my notebook to write. A story grabs me and I have the feeling the hidden heart of the tale is the question of whether we are masters of our own destinies or merely pawns of forces we have no control over. And as I write, I think of Buckminster Fuller and his notion that wisdom is knowing how, after much experimentation and experience, to harmonize our efforts and actions and designs with Nature’s principles for our own good and the good of all people and things.

I fill several pages of my notebook, and when the words cease to flow I look up and see five surfers out in the water, one of them just catching a wave and having a lovely little ride. I also see several people walking on the beach, including a few who are both elderly and obese, which suggests the heavy equipment exam has ended and the parking lot is now open for business. There are mothers with children, a woman looking for rocks and shells, a man with a dog on a leash, and a woman with a dog not on a leash. Everyone is taking pictures with their phones. A woman strides by talking on her cell phone and I hear her say, “…yeah, it may go up some more, but let’s not get greedy and lose…”

Feeling nicely energized by the oceanic fumes, I traverse the warming beach and sit on a log at the bottom of the stairs to wipe the sand off my feet and put on my shoes. A ten-year-old boy wearing a Giants baseball cap comes skipping down the stairs ahead of his parents and shouts, “See? I told you! It’s perfect!”

I count the stairs as I climb, but right before I reach the top I lose count because I’m distracted by a homeless guy sitting on a log overlooking the beach saying to another homeless guy, “Seriously, man, I watched the game on my phone and LeBron was not to be denied.”

As I arrive at the Presbyterian parking lot, a dusty expanse the church generously allows the general public to use, I am met by a muscular young man with curly brown hair, his sternum adorned with a lifelike tattoo of a pink rose. “How you doin’, man?” he asks, frowning at me.

“Great,” I say. “Beautiful day.”

“Would you be interested in buying some hash?” he asks, nodding.

“No, thank you,” I reply, wondering what made him think the likes of me would want to buy hashish from him. Or maybe he asks everyone he meets if they want to buy hashish. Or maybe…I dunno.

I get a little cash from the ATM machine at my bank, Mendocino’s one and only bank, stroll to the post office and pick up the mail featuring this week’s Anderson Valley Advertiser, and transect the village to reach the hardware store where I buy three bolts to attach a vice to a table in our workshop. As I’m searching the bolt bins, two men down the aisle from me are having an animated discussion about a construction project. One of the men says, “You know, I think it might look better if we do that, but I’m afraid we’d be tempting fate. You know what I mean? I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

Home again. Gardening. Writing. Snacking. Practice the piano. Writing. Hours pass and evening approaches. Marcia has been away for two days concertizing in Santa Rosa and is due home for supper. What shall I make? I sit at my desk awaiting inspiration. I could heat up some rice and sauté some garden vegetables. That sounds good, yet I remain at my desk. I feel pleasantly ensnared, held in my chair by unseen powers. The phone rings. It’s Marcia calling from Boonville and suggesting she stop at Libby’s restaurant in Philo and pick up some superlative Mexican food. What do I think about that? I think Yes! and surrender to the beneficent spirits.