walking along

hitchhiking is not an efficient means of travel.  maybe in terms of carbon footprints it is, but not if we're counting in raw footsteps.  went to find the way to some trails i'd like to backpack through sometime in the near future.  along the way i stuck my thumb out at probably a hundred cars, buses, trucks and scooters.  one really swell fella (it's always the finest people that stop to pick up somebody off the side of the road) gave me ride for a few miles towards my destination.  he was driving around with his mother, an ancient woman sitting in the front seat who i did not get a real good look at.  she didn't move or say anything.  he said he lived on the north shore. 

you start judging cars in the split seconds they take to zoom by.  i can distinguish a rental car from a good fifty feet.  these are no good, although their pasty passengers typically smile at the novelty of a happy idiot strolling along a magnificent road.  and i had so much time to stroll along the magnificence this afternoon, it's hard to say whether it was my happiness or my idiocy that kept me smiling all the way home.  i took to singing somewhere along the seven or eight miles i walked back.  

i started singing, "i'm walking along with my feet/ i like to sing to the sound that my feet make/ cha cha ch ch cha ch ch cha."  this and various lyrics that popped out of the countryside carried me all my rhythmic way.  before i started singing i thought back through as many things as i could think of that happened to me in this calender year.  i came to the daunting conclusion that 2008 was possibly the best calender year of my life.  

so here's the way the song was going by the time i got home and picked up the guitar:

i like to think that i can fall in love 

like everybody else

i'd like to think that i can fall in love again

i'd like to think

i like to think while i walk along alone

i like to think that it won't be long

til i get home

i like to sing to the sound 

that my feet make

i'd like to give a little more 

than i can take

i'd like to think that i can do with a little less

but i always think there's gotta be more than this

i'd like to think

that i can fall in love with anybody else.

well i've been to the mountain

and i've been to the sea

i've seen a thousand stars

i've seen a thousand stars

i keep writing songs about love.  but johnny cash said that that is what music is about, so i'd like to think it's alright. 

(that last part isn't really part of the song)

at the collision of heavens and earth

i woke up this morning hoping to go on an adventure of some sort today.  now the day is still quite young, but it seems my adventures will be hemmed in by another bout of rain.  this should be the last of them.  its been raining off and on everyday since christmas.  it's still wonderful beautiful but everything has been wet for almost a week now.  i'd hoped to go up and stay a night or two in the crater this past weekend but it looked like it would rain and did, almost four inches, so it was a wise decision not to.  i'm hoping in the next day or two to get to do some backpacking on some trails that are kind of right in between the farm and the crater, if my map-reading skills and speculations serve correct.  it'll be about a 7 mile hitch to the switchback road that winds 7 more miles up to the Poli Poli Springs trails.  a very nice campground lies nestled back in these trails probably about 5 miles.  looks like there are two loops that branch of to the north, up the mountain, going up near the rim to about 7,000 feet.  the longer of these loops is ten miles and probably not in the plans for this trip unless the skies look really clear.  seems like a safe bet to suppose that whatever the weather is doing at the farm, it's several notches worse as you head up the mountain.  

last night we witnessed the greatest sunset yet.  granted i've said this for nearly every sunset, but it continues to be true.  we didn't see the sun all day yesterday, worked outside in a drizzle all morning, the porch chairs stayed wet all day.  we cooked up a storm yesterday afternoon (this phrase confused shiz), rolling out and frying up a quadruple (also new for shiz) batch of tortillas.  i made hummus for the first time, we cooked up some green papaya (which acts about like squash) and some yacon too.  we spent close to three hours cooking dinner last night and now have the reward of leftovers, but last night i was positively starving and a bit grumpy by the time we got done fixin' and were ready to eat.  but then the sky show started.  i watched it while eating some hummus, rice and greens rolled up in a warm tortilla.  perhaps it doesn't even need to be said that it's impossible to stay grumpy at times like that.  

so more clouds make better sunsets.  of course too many spoils the whole show but the most you can pack in without filling up the entire sky, the better.  last night the entire sky was full of clouds, puffy-fat angry ones, except for a splendid gap right above the water.  as the sun descended towards the gap, the light started bouncing golden off the water.   glowing.  when we sat down to eat, i thought that we had missed the sunset, because the sky had the subtle light it gets when the sun has just sunk below the horizon.  but the glow grew as we ate and i was feeling quite fuzzy and warm by the time we split a final tortilla, realizing that the sun was about to break below the cloud.  at this point the clouds swirling around the peak of the West Maui Mountains began to light up in most fantastic pinks and blues.  the wispy fluff that floated off the mountain, right to left from the view of our porch, and towards the sun, very rapidly lit up bright orange-yellow on their sunward side, their backs a cotton-candy pink.  the sun, now fully descended into the gap, shines all the way across onto the thick wet clouds on the other side of our heavenly half globe.  standing facing the master of the ceremony, i turn my back to the sun to see a full rainbow, a complete half circle of split light set against a sky of deep orange, its right side jumping out of the crater, its left landing on a cloud floating just above the green surface of the mountain about eye-level with my view.  

ha, there's another rainbow outside right now.  

so its been wet since christmas but we've seen rainbows every day.  

the vine

just got in from hacking the vine back from around the nursery and off various trees around the property.  for some reason, i identify very favorably with this activity.  small little serrated sickle blade that you hold in your hands.  and then kind of squat down and cut and pull.  you can get it going in pretty big sheets or rolls sometimes because it grows like a net, just a bunch of little vines all on top of one another.  and you find what must be the mother strands, bigger and more woody than the others.  the vine can do amazing things when left to its own devices.  it continues to grow back on top of itself when it dies, so when it gets really thick, you'll have inches of dead and to various stages decaying plant material underneath the green surface.  it can also hang down in thick curtains from the trees.  it must climb the tree then drop back down and then climb back up on top of itself.  i've seen a swath of it maybe eight feet by thirty feet hanging down so thick you cant see through it.  this struck me as particularly amazing.  

the vine i'm referring to is, of course, our least favorite plant. 

its strange, i had to come all the way to maui to find an appropriate occasion to use the phrase "least favorite".  i think too often we use it synonymously with "the worst".  its good to have enough favorites that you have a meaningful least among them.  "most favorite" seems to be a phrase that we leave for children to use, coaxing it out of our system and trading it for "the best" as we grow older.  somehow our "least favorites" stick around though.  for instance, i bet we all have a least favorite flavor of ice cream.  mine's pistachio, just off the top of my head right now.  

this is not a significant discovery in any way, shape or form.  it may not even be true.  but i am going to start saying "most favorite" more often just to see what happens.  

sustainability save us

talked to john about Sustainability this morning.  john studied under Bill Mollison, the god-father of permaculture, back in the 70s when Mollison was in Maui certifying followers.  the concept of permaculture is to create an ecosystem in which humans function and sustain themselves.  it seems sustainability is one of those finicky words that have been translated into a concept.  now conceptualized, the once meaningful action, to sustain, has been bloated into a marketable fantasy-ship that becomes more difficult to connect with the living world each time someone evokes its name.  it is hard enough (thus far impossible for me) to understand sustainability as a practical reality while living on a farm eating almost entirely from the garden.  to translate, from function to concept, back into achievable function, how people on a mass scale should change their behavior in order to realize sustainability at the level of a national economics, seems an asinine proposition.  so i don't have a whole lot of hope for the myth of sustainability becoming any more than a myth.  

this, though,  is no denouncement of sustainability. only a reasonable shift of perspective.  in the best interest of preserving our national way of life as we know it, it is not the accomplishment of sustainability as a holistic reality that will save the day, but rather the proliferation of its myth.  so, sustainability will save us, not when its concept is made manifest in a global economy, but when its myth is placed at the head of every household.  Sustainable, must be coaxed to the same pedestal heights as Godly, Democratic and Cool when children are sat down and their aspirations placed before them.  and just as being godly does not save a people by turning them into gods or acting cool does not turn the masses into movie stars, by shifting sustainability to the forefront of why we do the things that we do (even though it will never be the concrete what) society may well boost itself into a new paradigm, facilitating a shift in social reality as profound as the instigations of monotheism, democracy and rock n' roll combined.  

chickens and ducks

so, the one eyed chicken that i call Smarty-Britches is the only chicken that roams free outside the coop.  chickens, as with most every domesticated animal (maybe even every animal period), live to eat.  a chicken's singular purpose all day everyday:  to eat the best possible, as much as possible.  then there are, of course, the ducks with whom i do not see eye to eye on most issues.  

the duck is a rather brutish pest in comparison to the chicken and far less useful.  the chickens produce both eggs and poop, though they've been on strike with the former as of late.  the holidays, i don't know.  

now, both ducks and chickens can be imagined quite easily as dinosaurs or otherwise ancient creatures when you stand and watch how they move.  sometime and place, in a contemporary american childhood, i learned to associate strong feelings towards dinosaurs, those fierce and hulking monsters of the impossibly distant past.  i've seen at no more than two-years-old, a children being introduced to colorful, gummy-rubber replicas of these para-biblical beasts.  and i still recall, as a Christian-reared youth in the possession of dinosaur toys, the fuzzy haze, my mind trying to cope with the eons between the two references i had for distant, ancient time.  the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth versus the time when god made everything.  quite frankly i think we need a better system of relaying antiquity besides big numbers.  how is a child supposed to comprehend the significance between a thousand and a million.  'oh no, now we're talking about millions this is like a thousand thousands.  this is way, way back.'  how is anyone to comprehend significance in the immensity of what we can statistically track and quantitatively measure these days.  but back to point, chickens and ducks can easily be imagined as feathery little dinosaurs, and chickens have the jittery, precise ferocity i always so admired in the dinosaurs of my youth.

the ducks are rolly-polly punks, waddling about with their long, soft faces.  they go throwing their girth around, constantly giving Smarty-Britches the proverbial business, often pecking her for no reason.  and whenever there is food to be had, a papaya peel sends the back yard into quite a state, power dynamics blossom.  the ducks come flapping in with a wobbly synchronicity. at times like these, if the back yard were a Pixar movie starring anthropomorphized, adolescent dinosaurs, the ducks would have nasally accents and say stuff like yous guys as they jaunt through the cafeteria flipping over lunch trays and guffawing to one another.  and so i play the overwhelmingly partial administrator, keeping the ducks at bay until Smarty-Britches has eaten her fill.  

and she'll eat right out of my hand.  

its christmas time in the city

you shouldn't talk about jesus that way on his birthday.  when i was in elementary school, the gym teacher, mr. denner, once said "don't forget the reason for the season," as we left the sweaty gym on our way to christmas break.  it upset my elementary self.  i'd never heard someone thrust the suggestion of jesus so unsanctimoniously around a gymnasium.  i think mr. denner was a creeper.  anybody that is so shameless a mouthpiece for their religious thoughts must have some kind of perversion to compensate for.  that's the way it struck me at the time anyhow.  his daughter was a pretty well know s-word by the time we hit high school.  i bet the denners do it up big on christmas.  

we were sitting in the sun peeling coffee beans for a while this morning, listening to neil young.  before that i took a walk up to Sun Yat-sen memorial park.  its about a mile of hilly side road before you get out to the main road, the park is.  first i wondered what Sun Yat-sen would think of the place.  concrete picnic tables donated by the International Rotary Club, which they so brazenly advertise by fastening a plaque in the middle of the table.  not knowing anything about Sun i tried to imagine him imagining a small, not very well attended to park dedicated in his name, with its massive concrete lions holding down their orbs at the corners.  

so assuming Sun can imagine this park when he dreams of how history will remember him, what could he think of it.  i'd imagine he isn't so thrilled about the Rotary Club seal on the tables.  next i tried to imagine the christmases of the past.  this i could not do with much success.  so i sat awhile, then took some pictures of the statues and left.  the walk downhill to the farm gives you a constant view of the ocean twisting and stretching out in different directions.  

time for my christmas nap.  then we're going to watch Christmas Vacation.  Shiz, how can you study american culture and not meet the Griswolds!

maui christmas to all (thanks jimbo) 

and to all a swell evening.

porch musings

Wrote a song today.  Goes like this:  

i'm staring out at a floating mountain in a sky of hazy blue, and i don't know where i'm going but i sure know what i'll do.  i'll run away from the next big city.  i'll write a song for you.  i can't believe i'm here at all i can't believe i'm not with you.  dolores.  my sweet dolores.  

if i could be a little cloud, i'd float right next to you.  and we could blow away, blow away, blow away.  i don' know who i'll see but i know what i'll say.  i once loved a woman, but i gave her away.  dolores.  my sweet dolores.

so i played the song while watching the clouds float across the porch. things that strike us as beautiful inspire the desire to represent them.  i suppose maybe that's the human peculiarity.  we appreciate and represent beauty through the most elaborate cultural systems in the known universe.  it could also be called a thirst for permanence... humanity's fundamental delusion.  but how, really how can something in the pursuit of conveying beauty to one's fellows result in one's own dissatisfaction.  dukkha. someone once told me that shame is the most memorable of all the feelings.  it crawls into the guts and turns cold.  so this is how then.  we often mistake the skillful act of conveying beauty for the convenient and cumbersome act of reconveying.  this is the difference with someone who is good at telling jokes or stories or singing songs.  reconstructing the past has to be done as its own constructive act, to be admired not just for its telescoped view of the beauty that was, but for its own dazzling intricacies and momentary dynamism.  

and then there are the real poets.  who don't stop to parse all of this out.  but just write it as it comes.  write to find out what's on the mind.  nabokov.  

i climbed over the fence across the road today.  got over, closer to the water.  once you get out to a little ridge the view opens up down through a rough grassy valley.  like my own tolkein adventure storyground.  the scraggly trees popping up through the viney underbrush and a fence cutting a square out of the continuous meadow.  the invasive vines cover all of the fences, easily washing over them in the course of a relentless crawl.  it is one of our main chores around the farm.  to control this vine.  it was introduced to maui some years ago to help with erosion and nobody foresaw it spreading and taking over the whole island.  luckily the chickens like to eat it and then poop on it, turning it into fantastic mulch.  and also the vine grows over fences, which makes them a lot softer and more friendly.

a sliding scale

while out in the garden this morning i realized that ADD and gardening go together quite well.  this evening when getting food from the garden for dinner i was shocked to realize that after doing this for some length of time an intimate harmony would develop.  i am not close to having this with ours yet but it seems to be among the noblest of my intentions.  sustainability supports an interesting aesthetic, one that depends equally upon both the producer and the consumer.  good only so as good for both.  

i have a habit of imagining overlapping circles.

"the hillbillies were wonderful.  dylan and dead covers. some bluegrass tunes, some original stuff. during their second set and after we had eaten dinner i went walking around.  meandered over and stuck my head around a meditation center that had just finished a session of sweat your prayers out.  talked to a delightfully odd fellow sitting with a picnic table.  his form was impeccable.  i asked him if he lived around here and he said he lived between his skin.  lady in the parking lot was selling parsley and basil on a little table.  said she was also a wwoofer.  inside the young woman at the desk said that i must have been the one smoking the cigarette outside.  she could still smell it.  she looked like she wasn't anybody's favorite.  i muttered something incoherent, picked up some brochures and walked out.  the new year's dance ceremony is $108-140."  

of profundity and beauty

"i don't understand why there's something profound

about footprints in the sand.

And i can think about you and you're not around

i can try to be a man

but the tides still come and the tides still go."

"Dogs on the beach sprint up and back, past and sometimes skipping through the waves.  Off towards the mountains there are a few people on surfboards.  Down here the locals ride body boards.  Water breaking on rocks.  One dog with three legs and a great smile.  Planes fly into Kahului off to the left.  The three-legged dog makes a lot of friends.  The other dogs are still running up and back.  True words are not beautiful, beautiful words are not true.  People standing up on some kind of boards about 100ft out in the water, rowing themselves along slowly with paddles."

the above is quoted from my moleskine notebook.  i spent the day sitting on the beach trying to conjure a personal epiphany from simple beauty.  that night a group of local kids came up to our camp as i was dozing off in my sleeping bag.  they asked if i had any weed then started kicking me in the face.  it was way more profound than footprints in the sand but not as beautiful.