Lost Connections

I've been thinking about modern life and how as an unintentional result of modernconvenience we lose our vital connections with the earth and its cycles.

I've been reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, which reveals
how thoroughly we've lost touch with the source of our food as a culture. We have little or no understanding of the places, processes, and full price of the sources of our food. Pollan particularly dwells upon the denial that is required for the current system of industrial processing of animals to be acceptable in our culture. He essential says that if we knew where our meat came from, we wouldn't eat it.

On another front, the political front, I've increasingly come across the dilemma that many local governments are facing. They are running out of revenues to perform the services their constituents demand, but there is increasing resistance to any type of tax increase. It seems we have lost ourselves in our own political rhetoric - we no longer connect the benefits we receive from federal, state, and local governments with the taxes we pay. The services we get are just there, just taken for granted background, while the taxes we pay have become in many minds theft, an unnatural taking by a corrupt few from the hapless many. We've lost the connection between the common wealth we create and build together and the dues that make that common wealth happen.

On a third front, I've been increasingly stymied by the concept of where all of our waste goes. We talk of throwing trash away, but there is no 'away' that I am aware of on this earth. What we mean by 'throw something away' is that someone else carts off our trash, someone else worries about where it goes and what kinds of problems it causes. If I've paid someone to haul my trash away, it's not my problem any longer. And this has resulted in a disposable society, where we buy new things rather than fix old, where it's easier to throw away a container than to clean a plate, where most people don't think twice about using something just once and then tossing it. We're truly disconnected with our physical impacts on the planet, oblivious to all the places and habitats downstream.

I don't have answers to any of these dilemmas. But it strikes me how all the virtues of the modern world - convenience, speed, mass production - serve to disconnect us from the consequences of our actions, and serve to make us less cognizant of our many interdependent relationships with the world around us. And it seems to me there is a relationship between our disconnection with the world around us and our dissatisfaction, our modern ennui. When we become primarily or exclusively consumers, optimizers, an audience, a target market, we lose much of what makes life gratifying and grounded. Ultimately, life is not a product and happiness is not found in maximizing comfort or convenience. Life is found in balance and in connection, and my suspicion is that it may be nearly impossible to enjoy life while plugged into the machine of the modern American economy.

I spend a lot of time I'm trying to figure out how to unplug. I strive for moderation in my consumption, but even so I'm overwhelmed with choices and even more overwhelmed with information. It seems to me part of the answer is to re-establish these connections - to know where our food comes from, to know what our taxes pay for and what our local government does, to know where our trash goes and take some accountability for these things. This would start to bring us around to where we can really see ourselves for what we are, to where we can really be in relationship to the world around us.

Celebrating Memories

Sometimes I wonder if our forward-looking culture does not underestimate the value of making and cultivating memories. We have so many catch phrases for focusing on the future. What's past is past. We need to focus on the task at hand. We need a plan for going forward. Just do it.

But life at any stage is composed at least as much by memories as by opportunities, by the path we have followed as much as the path we have ahead. In fact, we are much more likely to discover ourselves by looking backwards than by looking forward. Life has a way of revealing through experience things that would never occur to our imaginations alone.

What rituals, what practices, what customs do we have to cherish memories? Our holidays commemorate our civic history, but what about our personal history? Do we use birthdays to reflect backwards? Anniversaries? Graduations? Are we afraid that if we look backwards we will see opportunities missed, rather than life lived?

If life is worth living, then it is also worth remembering, and worth telling. Our stories should not just come from entertainment professionals, they should also come from ourselves, from our own lives rich with experience.

Recession of 2008

With the nation embroiled in talk of recession - the media, investors, politicians - Americans seem desperate to avoid entering this dreaded state. Congress and the President rushed to pass a $100 billion + stimulus package. Pundits spin every day about whether or not we are in a recession, and what it would mean if we are. It is my sense that the obsession with recession reveals the dark side of the infamously optimistic American character. What is this desperate state that is so awful that we must try anything to avoid it, and that is so horrific that even if we are in it we had better not go about and acknowledge it?

It reminds me very much of someone in the early stages of a depression, when there is still opportunity for denial and distraction. It's like a depressed person who thinks he can put off depression if he can just go on enough ski vacations consecutively. All kinds of denial and avoidance are preferrable to looking the depression squarely in the face.

Perhaps, on the other hand, there is something ameliorative, or even healthy, about an occasional recession. I mean no disrespect to those who are truly hurting - losing their jobs or their homes. These people need our help and we as a country should assist them. But the hub-bub and paranoia seems to go far beyond these few.

Perhaps a recession is a good time to re-evaulate what we have done in the last frenzy of growth that did not work out so well. Perhaps a recession is a good time to re-evaluate our needs, our values, our priorities, perhaps to think about those non-material or less material rewards of life. Perhaps a recession is a good time to become more realistic about our capacity for production and consumption, to make a good hard accounting of how things stand. Perhaps a recession is a good time to re-evaluate our more speculative investments, and re-direct those investments towards opportunities that are sustainable and long-term.

The only thing in nature that grows and never prunes is a cancer. Healthy beings grow, mature, prune, retrench, and grow again. It would seem to me that what is good for nature might be good for our economy and our natures as well.

Hippocrates Lays Down the Law

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.

-Hippocrates

... or in modern terms...

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

-John Lennon

Growing Self Esteem

Self esteem cannot be created through praise. It cannot be created through achievement, awards, and success.

Self esteem can only be grown from within. Like a seed that grows into a flower, self esteem cannot be forced into bloom. The right conditions can be cultivated, but a flower must grow and bloom of its own accord.

What are some of the conditions that can help to grow self esteem? Acknowledging and meeting the needs of a person, facilitating their development and capacity, and reflecting back to them their own unique identity and personality.

Everyone has the light within them, and when we reflect back their light, we help them see it more clearly. This is the greatest challenge in helping another - not to make them into your idea of good or shape them into your ideal, but rather to help them to cultivate their own voice and come into their own understanding of the true and the good.

And ultimately, you must give them the space to bloom of their own accord. The growth and fruition of natural things cannot be coerced or accelerated; and so each person must eventually be the source of their own impetus upwards and outwards.

St. Francis And The Sow

Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
             the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
             and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.