ethnography and i

i grew up in ohio.  kind of in the country and near the lake.  i went to college for four years and studied myself.  that's really the most literal way to put it.  i took the classes that allowed me to most directly study my intellectual place within the historical context of those who studied themselves before me.  perhaps, to some extent the study of any subject lies in the discovery of one's self, in the aquisition of perspective on one's own existence.  but so very often a subject gets transformed into nothing but a string of connected objects and accessible only through rote memorization and textual consumption, like a mouse being led through a maze by a string of cheese.  

i studied ethnography as a subject.  and so now i call myself an ethnographer although i have very little idea what ethnography is by way of experiencing it or implementing it as a day to day ethic.  so i've decided the best course of action is to self identify as an ethnographer and then once again set to studying myself.  in the same fashion, one might discover what it means to be a musician and thereby what music is in the experience of its creation.

it also seems to be useful and proper to adopt different personas for different purposes.  for instance, it helps me make intellectual observations if i speak or think with the voice and pace of an olderly allen ginsberg.  specifically the allen ginsberg that was interviewed for "no direction home."  on occasion it also helps me to embrace the persona of my father.  when i'm meeting new people especially and also when i'm goofing around.  as a pet persona for this tricky business of ethnography, or to say, how to act when i am an ethnographer, my most powerful and accessible reference is margaret mills.  i've had plenty of other professors and in-the-flesh examples of ethnographers but for some reason dr. mills is the most resonant. 

all of this may sound like hibber-jibbery hogwash, but it is very practical and comes into play on a constant basis.  especially when you have the privilege of not having predicated purpose.  much of my time is spent in waiting to find what i should do next or explore next or work with next.  the waiting time is full of possible courses of action flashing and flying around in my head until one of them pairs up with a pre-practiced and familiar mode of behavior.  for example, in a matter of minutes i may think of say three possible course of action in my head.  

i should fall in love

i should smoke a cigarette

i should get a personal narrative from the neighbor.

the grand percentage of the time i will opt for the cigarette because the course of behavior that translates that thought into reality is much more familiar and engrained as rewarding and accessible.  this is where the borrowing of personas comes in handy.  if i pretend to be margaret mills, the possibility of talking to the neighbor becomes a closer reality.  and as for the falling in love business, it seems to occur most deeply when people are brought together through some work of breaking away from one's most common, ingrained behavior.  straying from the work required to stay on the path beyond what we're used to turns love into addiction and passion into jealousy.  for me to accomplish this work with consistency requires an ability to shape-shift.  to perform certain personas through the power of believing in their utility and authenticity.  this is how we become socialized of course.  the assumption of certain ways of acting based on hedonistic predisposition.  but it can also empower the individual when we awake to find that we can toy with the whole system and enact different parts, play different roles, whenever we want to.

but for now i'll just have a cigarette.  later i'll walk to the store to buy more tobacco.  

chickens and ducks

ducks walk

like fiery old ladies,

on thin yellow ankles.

like doris.

and slightly

    like hockey goalies 

on unfrozen surfaces,

their ice skates clacking and stick-

ing.

chickens clatter, wet gravel 

under their forked feet.

the chickens we will eat,

because

they should be laying eggs

and aren't.

they should be working for us

but aren't.  the ducks,

free and walking awkardly, 

need not fear harm

as long as they are ducks and keep

eating and doing very little. 

and this is all to just to answer 

jake's question.

i'm not a poet but i think things 

are poetic.  i don't quite know how 

to tell people.  so sometimes i try.

my fingers

i haven't cut the fingernails on my right hand since i arrived in maui.

at first by no choice of my own, as my nail clippers were stolen.  now with access to borrowed clippers i chose to keep my right nails and cut my left.  this is all part of my aspirations to dylanhood i suppose.  it does make for good guitar playing though.  much slapping and clicking.  its like i have a hand full of picks.

i just cut the tip of my left middle finger while knifing the husks off macadamia nuts.  i'd shucked a bucketful, efficiently and with acute satisfaction.  push the knife in till it hits the nut then twist. and if you do it right, if you hit the sweet spot, it cracks perfectly in half and falls right out.  nut in one bucket.  husk in the other.  must have done a hundred or so before deciding to crack the shell off one of the more voluptuous specimen.  and the knife slipped and sliced.  

i don't like having lame fingers but it reminds me of something.

 tich nhat hanh talking about toothaches:

when we have a toothache, we think that we will be happy if our toothache goes away.  but our dissatisfaction is not dependent on the toothache but rather the desire to not have a toothache.  when we do not have a toothache we are not automatically content.  and when we have a toothache rarely do we find the occasion to celebrate not having an aching back or head.  so it is not what ails us that ails us but desire to be free of ailment. 

that is a paraphrase of a memory.

emily read it to me one day while driving home from the farm.  i'd taken ben's book to work to read from as an invocation before a staff meeting.

and now i'm a thousand miles away.

and now i'm thankful

to have a healthy head of teeth

and nine fine fingers.

again and again

raining again
won't be going anywhere

listen to joni mitchell and eat pesto

wet again

can't keep the floor clean

change socks and hang shirts to dry

read poetry again

read memoirs again

read biographies again

ethnography again

dreaming again

can't remember where

it happened but it stoned me

change again

won't need the bucket brigade

sit and listen to windy music

"imagine it as if"

a catalogue of events::::

afternoon: i sit on the porch. a lazy saturday afternoon.  new wwoofers are to arrive at some point during the day.  play guitar.  whittle bamboo.  then decide to take a walk across the road, down into the valley of mystic trees.  grab my poetry anthology from inside put it in my bag and set off.

after crossing the road:  realize the oversight of not bringing my notebook along with me.  just in case. 

3:30:  hop out of the grasses onto the little-used gravel road as a white subaru hatch-back approaches.  i wave and it slows down. 

3:32:  formally meet veronika (this isn't here real name but for some reason i could never remember it).  she had the ageless shine. her white hair is white.  she was looking for a friend who she thought lived on this street somewhere.  she had the squeaky, enchanted curiosity of a child or a gypsy or maybe just a crazy person.

after touring through the gardens:  we sit on the porch munching tat soi and speaking of manifesting reality through our expectations.  veronika is on a deliberately undeliberated,  step to step journey, with no thought to where shes going.  just meeting people and turning down roads on intuitional whims.  she'd read the celestine prophecy.  when she smiled, as she did easily and enthusiastically and often, her face stretched into radiant benevolence.  never have i met such explicit benevolence.

4:00: after speaking of energy, love and the wild kindness through which all wonder and beauty are interwoven, veronika says that she's never seen a deer on maui.  i say that where i was going, the deer run in herds.  slender and spotted.  she says she loves to hike.  we hop the fence and i say 

"welcome to wonderland"

and how i always feel like a hobbit when i'm on this side of the road.  the grass has grown higher since the last time i was here, which makes me feel even shorter.  all the grass is in flower and the dott patches of wild yellow blossoms are dotted here and there.  when we talk its of things cosmic and wonderful.  she says that the gnarly yellow trees are very spiritual trees.  they are endangered.  we walk through the meadow on two parallel lanes of grown over tire tracks.  we start speaking of deer and look to our right to find five of them looking curiously towards us from the next knoll over.  continuing down the path we find beautiful red beans lying in the dirt and start collecting them.  

after this:  we hop out of the grass back over the fence.  justin from the flower farm/meditation center down the street calls hello from the driveway.  veronika hugs him and instantly sucks him into her magnetic bliss.  we walk down the road to take a look at the place where he lives and works. 

4:45: a field of flower trees.  rolling manicured lawns.  fruit trees and a garden that are getting settled in.  a place that feels very much like what it is intended to feel like. 

then: invite veronika and justin to stay for dinner.  we walk back down the road and the new wwoofers have arrived and are touring through the gardens with john.  everyone hugs then fixes dinner together. 

sundown:  dinner is served.  a salad with a delightful avocado mousse dressing that lily cooked up and some rice and quinoa that veronika had in her car.  we eat easy and comfortable, as if we had all eaten together before.  veronika asks if she can keep her car parked in the driveway and sleep there.  i say that we have a couch that is much better and is used to having someone sleeping on it. 

when the dishes are done:  veronika and i talk of grand visions and new ages.  we have conversations we needed to have.  i am able to talk about the farthest out spiritual musings that have been festering in my soul during these weeks in paradise.  we speak without having to explain the background theory of it.  we speak as i speak with my closest friends and family.  the way i speak with phil about liminality.  and ben about the fifth.  and jim about the truth.  and my dad about depression.

9:30:  i say goodnight and thank everyone for being here.  

that night:  i sleep nearly dreamless except for one friendly dream just before waking.  

sunrise:  awake and out of my sleeping bag early wondering about how reality of the haze of the previous day's events.  wondering if this prophetic women was some charlatan who i would discover had robbed my boots and stolen the silverware while we slept.  but she was sleeping when i went into the living room and i as i was making my oatmeal she awoke with the same vibrance of the day before.

8:30-9:30:  veronika gives me some mantras that she has written in her little notebook.

abba abbadah hymanuta allaha

(let me be of service)

gate gate paragate parasumgate bodisvaha

(beyond, beyond, beyond the beyond)

nam mio ho renge kio

(awaken the buddha nature and fulfill divine purpose

we decide that mantras might help me with my trouble in just sitting still and quiet. 

10:00:  i feed the chickens and walk around the farm with billy, one of the new comers.  i leave the door to the chicken coop open, absent-mindedly.  the place that i had gotten so comfortable and settle in over the past six weeks had been transformed by the influx of new faces.  i see john talking with veronika and shortly thereafter she says that she is going to head on down the road.  she hugs everyone, hops into the subaru and is gone. 

10:15:  john and i have a talk about how i shouldn't just let people stay at the place without talking to him first.  what the hell was i thinking?  it makes me feel like a humble puppy but he says he knows my heart is in the right place.  

all day:  lazy sunday.

in the late afternoon:  butcher a chicken.  

5:30:  finally get the intestines out of the dead bird after much cutting and crying and ceremonies.  hang her from the porch and start plucking her feathers.  she's still warm and the fuzzy flesh below her feathers is startling.  

6:00: start preparing dinner.

7:30:  john comes down to hang out and partake of the sacrificed chicken.  the kitchen is madness.  complete pandemonium.  lily and bobby take a break to clean the bathroom while we're fixing dinner.  i couldn't really understand this but it gave me a chance to get things straight on the counter and settle my mind.  i start making tortillas and bobby and lilly take over the chicken soup.  we had decided that boiling the chicken would be the best method.

8:00:  sit down to a dinner of overcooked rubbery chicken in a delicious soup with cheesy garlic tortillas.  it is the manifestation of the most complicated dinner cooked here to date.  being vegetarian is so much easier.  i live in a wonderful corner of the world where it's easier to be a vegetarian than otherwise.  

10:48:  hard to know what else to say.   i am constantly delighted by spontaneous wonders of this quirky world.  

the more we open we become, the more openly the world receives us.  

the more we give, the more that is given.   

the more we seek, the more we find.

and we can have anything we want if we imagine it as if.  

that's what the gypsy prophetess told me.  

and she she seemed really content.

and so the world swirls on in funnels of fortuitous mystery.  

a farewell to friends

not much to say here, because there's too much to say. 

i will dearly miss shiz and val.  my friends, sisters and mothers over the past weeks here.  val is off to ask answers from the goddess of the volcano, one island over.  shiz is off to a hostel for a few days before heading back to japan.  

i ate my first dinner alone last night but still took pictures and bowed per our established evening ritual.  

i wish you both the best of all things.  thank you for helping me feel at home here.  its wonderful to know that strong affinities can be formed in a few short weeks. 

and now i await the arrival of tomorrow's wwoofers with an open heart and a sense of serenity in this our pristine cottage and the kind impetus of communal life here.  now the ambassador for our form of kindness, i turn to offer hearty thanks to the co-founders of my maui peace. 

thank you. 

hana the second: in her own words

Questions of Travel

--Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams

hurry too rapidly down to the sea,

and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops

makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,

turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.

--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny tearstains

aren't waterfalls yet,

in a quick age or so, as ages go here,

they probably will be.

But if the streams and clouds keep traveling, traveling,

the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,

slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and though of here?

Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play

in this strangest of theatres?

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life

in our bodies, we are determined to rush

to see the sun the other way around?

The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,

inexplicable and inpenetrable,

at any view,

instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh, must we dream our dreams

and have them too?

And have we room

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would be a pity

not to have seen the trees along this road,

really exaggerated in their beauty,

not to have seen them gesturing

like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.

--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard

the sad, two-noted, wooden tune

of disparate wooden clogs

carelessly clacking over

a grease-stained filling-station floor.  

(In another country the clogs would all be tested.

Each pair there would have identical pitch.)

--A pity not to have heard

the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird

who sings above the broken gasoline pump

in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:

three towers, five silver crosses.

--Yes a pity not to have pondered,

blurr'dly and inconclusively,

on what connection can exist for centuries

between the crudest wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittle fantasies of wooden cages.

--Never to have studied history in 

the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.

--And never to have had to listen to rain

so much like politician's speeches:

two hours of unrelenting oratory

and then a sudden golden silence

in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there...No.  should we have stayed at home

wherever that may be?"

hana the first: a nonsensical synopsis

looking through the keyhole

///

it's hard to say how this was beautiful or why

////

thorn jump

,,,,

sit.  stare.

....

you can really see the sky from down here

//

like cartoons of heaven, hills with rainbows on top 

...

a long long time ago, the rocks broke on the water

;;;;

this is where you have to sleep to wake up with the sun at your feet

...

......

no over here

!!!

A place ruled by chickens and cats

,,,,,

and here i met a mermaid named lazarus

...

we three, on the road to the edge of everything

and here are those that found it first. 

spider fight

"I'm going to fight it.  But I'll let it live."

-Steve Zissou

two rounds into trying to capture a big spider in the bathroom.  val saw it last night and swears it gets bigger in the moonlight.  right now it is about five inches across, but fierce and fast.  its been a lot of ducking and jiving so far but the proverbial gloves are about to come off.  

i killed a relative of this spider last week.  the vengeful cousin locked in the bathroom looks very much like the spider pictured above.  the blood and guts of killing the last one coupled with my 'live and let live' mentality (an espoused theory if you will) deem the removal of the were-spider presently in question be done non-violently if possible.  

my method:  trap the spider in an empty yogurt container then transport it outside.

my arsenal:  said yogurt container.  a brochure for a botanical garden (for to slide behind and seal the yogurt container upon capture).  a six-inch sickle blade.  

recap of the match:

round 1: locate the target inside the cabinet under the sink.  i tap about with my sickle blade.  the spider scuttles out into the open, on the wall.  i go in for my first trap, taking it real slow and easy.  as i'm about to close the gap, she sidesteps, only about an inch but faster than anything i've ever seen.  i hop up and out of the bathroom with a delicate shriek.  it only takes that little move to get my blood up into full heebie-jeebie mode.  i go back in and she's still reclining on the wall.  i go in for a much faster trap.  she scuttles away easily.  i reperform my hop-shriek but with a kind of laughing curse this time.  i try another trap and another, but both times she scoots this way or that and then finally returns to the cabinet.  adrenalin pumping, i decide to take a break.

round 2: she's tucked up in the back corner of the cabinet.  i can tell she's wiser now.  the cabinet is her turf.  so many nooks and crannies.  the crannies especially.  i manage to chase her to the outside wall of the cabinet, but can't get the line to trap her.  she retreats to the thin nook between the sink and the wall.  with my sickle, i get her to move, but she's not coming out into the open anymore, and she becomes increasingly less skittish about my sickle.  on my hands and knees, and constantly checking my hat and behind me to make sure i don't get ambushed, i try to drive her from the cabinet.  i have no idea of her exact location right now but still feel pretty good about round two.  i kept my composure.  i need a change of strategy.

...

round 3:  i hit her.  lightly just enough to knock her down.  i don't know if she's hurt.  val said this one had super-spider strength so i don't count on her being injured.  i finally found her again. but she was up in the corner.  right where i can't get the cup to cover.  so i brushed her off with the sickle and she fell down in amongst the things in the bottom of the cabinet.  my heart is racing.  i'm pretty sure she's freaked out too.

[the clouds are racing outside.  emotions run high]

round 4:  there she was, up in the left corner.  my first move got her out of the cabinet and behind the sink.  i trolled through with my sickle.  at this point, madame spider completely lost her cool.  she starts scurrying madly all over the place.  down into the cabinet and across it then up and out and onto the wall underneath the shelves that fit into the corner of the room.  this flurry of activity leaves me dazed and weak-legged but in a desperate attempt to finish the fight right then and there i go in for an improbable three-corner trap.  almost as if she had resigned her soul to the fates she doesn't move as the cup goes over her and i slide her securely over the flat plane of the wall.  

we are in a somewhat awkward position at the point of capture, me bending sideways and down over the sink.  i slide the cup over to the other side of the sink, half thinking that she had gotten by me somehow and was about to spring her vengeance at any second.  i slide the brochure between the wall and the cup taking the utmost care not to give her any chance to slip out.  clamping my hand over the top, i carry spider and cup outside with the care of a laboratory scientist.  when we are safely out in the wild, i set the cup down, remove the brochure, expecting her to spring at me with bared fangs.  but she just sits there benevolently in her white plastic cell.  she waits patiently while i run inside and get my camera, smiles and then scoots off to find a new home in the flower bed.  

men with broken hearts

i listened to a man speak in poetry tonight.  he was brokenhearted.  bad, like the hank williams song.  this fella hadn't slept in three days.  its beautiful to listen to people talk when they feel so low they don't care what they say or to whom.  there is a brilliant transparency.  straight to the quick.  to the soul.  

i don't quite feel fit to tell the whole story.  

to make it all short, he came to our cottage to request shiz's services as a translator.  he is a friend of john's, an old musician (turns out he's the best wash-tub bassist on the island, but i would not find this out until much later).  he stopped right about suppertime yesterday.   he and shiz talked for a while on the porch while we were fixing.  a couple guys from the yoga center down the road had come over for dinner, so they were there and there was much bustle in the kitchen.  

shiz comes inside and says she's going to go with this fella so that he can call japan and see if his fiance is there.  a bit confused by the whole situation we ask shiz if she feels comfortable with this and she nods profusely that she does.  as i go out and start talking with the guy i remember meeting him the other day.  he'd stopped with a beautiful young japanese woman whom he'd called, 'baby'.  we talk about chocolate mousse for a while.  all big words and hands.  then we see a string of funnel clouds forming and touching down way out over the ocean.  three waterspouts, writhing and twisting in the setting sun.

i say, "see, i told you things would turn around.  you just never know how."

he says, "man, i slept for two hours yesterday and it was complete bliss.  cus i forgot about everything.  then i woke up and a minute later i was like..."

he sags his head.  

today he and shiz return to the farm just as we are finishing supper.  seems like he hasn't slept yet.  they have called japan five times.  talked with the fiance's father.  no word on where she is, she hasn't called home.  their wedding was supposed to be this past sunday.  he sits and tells us the whole story.  it has been an excessively windy day.  

he took shiz out to lunch today and bought groceries for us.  much needed flour and oats.  and a preposterous amount of chocolate.  also some delicious fruit.  but back to the poetry part of it...

so i was sitting on the porch, the wind whipping, the stars blazing above and the heartbroken on the phone with a concerned friend.  the friend was seemingly worried that the guy was going to kill himself, although it wasn't as serious seeming at the time as it sounds when i type it out now.  

"nah man.  my mother killed herself.

i grew up always trying to keep her from it.

i'd take guns from her, knives from her, rifles from her.

one time had to  i walk out in the woods to find her in the middle of the night.

body limp.  overdosed.  had to carry her all the way home.

then when i was 17, i watched her light herself on fire.

she lived for two more months.  after they amputated her legs.

so i tell the devil he's not gonna get me.  every morning

i wake up and i say 

'fuck you motherfucker'

[flicks off an imaginary devil]

'eat my fuckin hemorrhoids.'"

...

listening to this man was one of the single most fascinating events of my life, the beauty of which i am incapable of writing.  

"there's no out there out there"

a catalogue of events:::

night:  storms outside and dreams about old things

later in the night:  get up and go pee

8:00: wake up for good

8:30: get up, eat oats with cherry-banana jam and sunflower-seed butter.  look at outside at the windy world. 

9:35: clouds break near the ocean.  the floating island appears very crisp in the distance.  the water is as dark as i've ever seen it.  purple.  get the chickens back in the coop.  close the gate that had blown open in the storm.  

after that:  walk around lower gardens pulling weeds and cutting glycine to feed chickens. 

11:00: show val around the grounds up by john's house.  the avocado trees we check under for fruit every morning.  a race against the rats.  the macadamia nut trees.  the nursery in which all of the trees had blown over during the night.  

noonish:  eat lunch of leftover noodles and salad.

1:30: set off on the road to makawao in search of a natural food store.

1:35: meet a woman whose dog i had returned a couple days ago.  she gives us a ride to makawao.  takes us all the way to the store.

at the store:  buy flour, chickpeas, kinoa, palenta, noodles, curry powder, garahm marsala, cajun spices and a cookie.

2:30-3:00: kick around makawao.  stop in at a medicinal herb store.  talk about kava kava with the woman working there.  look at the buddha statues and crystals.

then:  start walking back towards the kula highway to hitch a ride back.  walk for maybe an hour to get to the highway and up it a ways before getting ride.

around 4:00:  talk with our driver, ben, about far out things.  he quotes "what the bleep do we know" and i call him on it.  he gives us business cards.  his profession is "math dude".  he tells us about the website he's starting to teach kids math.  he is also a landscaper.  tells us about his mom coming here in the sixties from iowa.  his mother was black and his father was white.  he's going up to the park in keokea to play ultimate frisbee.  keokea is about 2 miles from the farm.

4:30:  start playing ultimate frisbee with a group of twenty odd, really great people.  the park is cut right into the mountain.  a terrace of lush green lawn, lying sublime beneath the slope up to the crater rim.  i play in my bare feet and everyone plays hard but kind.  

5:00:  val and i take inventory of our tired legs and the setting sun and decide we better start making the miles home.   the score is 3-2 us and one of our teammates did her best to convince us to play at least one full game.  games play to 10.

5:15:  halfway to the farm, we come across a pair of father and sons sitting in the back of their pickup, pulled over on the scenic shoulder of kula highway.  they laugh and say we are walking fast.  we'd seen them drive past just outside keokea.  they are joyful.  give us a beer for the road and open them up for us.  the boys are maybe 14.  the one knows what i'm talking about when i mention the big lion/dragon statues in sun yat sen park.

5:30:  walk in the backdoor of the cottage.  it's filled with the warm aroma of soup on the stove.  we excitedly unload our groceries as shiz makes toast to go with the soup.  i cut up a cucumber i bought yesterday.   we eat just as the sun slips below the horizon. 

that evening:  play guitar, flip through val's vegan cookbook, watch the lights of a cruise ship creep through the thick darkness.  

then: blog about it.

porch musing again

i had an imaginary conversation with a chair.  i can't remember what it was about now, but it struck me, right as i was making a really suave point, that i could have made that point to a real human being.  but now that i've already made it to a chair, i am most certain that i will never be able to fein the authenticity to make it to a human being without skipping a beat in my head when i realize that i've already imagined this point and feel obliged to recontextualize part-way through the performance.  i almost always think in complete verbalized sentences, spoken conversationally in my head, as if i'm talking to someone.  i hope this doesn't mean i'm neurotic or something but i think as long as i'm doing the talking its fine.  i wonder about the texture of other peoples thoughts.   do some people really think in pictures?  or in numbers?  i don't really have any way to relate to that.  

in one kind of cop out of a sense you could say that you can see how people think through art.  well i don't know about that.  i suppose some people can more accurately transcribe the texture of their thoughts but we can never directly convey them.  this strikes up biblical in my head.  things about removing the veil and gazing directly at god.  taboo.  burn your eyes out and singe your clothes kind of stuff.   the original texture of a thought not your own is the most divine apparition.  the texture of our own thoughts is so profane that we often ignore it, let it grow stagnant and tangled, only noticing when on occasion it flourishes in response to some artful representation.  some articulation so purely distilled, so close to its original texture, makes us think "yeah that's what i'm trying to say."  that seems to be a marker of quality.  for me at least.  do i react to something as if it could have come from my own mind?

after realizing my chair conversation, i looked out off the porch and thought that it should have its picture taken and put in a book about nice porches.  then i went inside and got my little notebook thinking how i needed to try keeping it on me at all times because some of the stuff i was thinking at the chair was pretty good.  then i sat down and tried to relax and sit as i was sitting before i'd had the ideas that i was explaining to the chair.  remembering to remind myself to write something about the whole chair incident, i picked up my notebook and wrote.

"i had an imaginary conversation

with a chair that i will never have

with a human being.

A remarkably calm day.

Things that fly 

like calm days.

Mosquitos by day and now

the birds.

Shiz sings lightly

to herself in her room.

I'm wondering what kind of journal 

Thomas Merton wrote in.

How big was it?

What was it made of?

What were it's colors?

The sun crowns behind a cloud

then melts,

dropping red behind the ocean.

One can get a sense of the earth's rotation

by staring at the sun

as it nears the uprushing horizon,

knowing that it is still and we

are moving."

 

...

i don't mean to imply, by any means, that this is a poem, because it isn't.  what it is is the transcription of an experiment in transcribing my thoughts as they come and go while i sit on the porch.  i'm going to have to run a lot more of these.  you think edison only ran one experiment before he put light into a bulb?

i will close with a true anecdote about thomas edison:

he once said,

"If you hustle while you wait you will succeed."

a monk later said,

"If you are forced to stand in one place for a few minutes, at least to not stand still.  Turn somersaults, cartwheels and handsprings... While waiting for that big appointment, ceaselessly climb up and down all over the furniture of the outer office... They will never forget you."

work and food

eating dinner is the main event of our farming lives.  while we were eating tonight, reveling in the sunset and the wonder of having made twenty delicious meals in a row, it occurred to me that when your days are centered around what you eat, it makes for very happy days.  maybe this is the virtue behind the family dinner, the nightly meal, smelt for hours and enjoyed with the ritual consistency rivaled by few other daily behaviors.  maybe bowel movements.  but these become much more religious with the regularity of the daily meals.  

this is the most profound privilege of living and working here.  quite directly we are working for food.  food and a place to eat it.  there seems to be a simple happy equation that pops out of this.  my particular arrangement right now is unique in its simplification of the whole thing.

work==>food + a place to eat it.  

when you can actually see how these processes are related to each other there is a profound happiness.  i don't have that many words for describing happiness.  its that transparent eye kind of thing.  all of my time is spent in this wonderful little equation.  

...

now that i pause and look at it.  the equation doesn't seems make much sense.  i'm going to smoke a cigarette and think about it.

...

ok so maybe it makes more sense with overlapping circles.  if one circle is food and another is place, the overlap between them, the activity that allows them to co-arise is work.  now work is a fairly arbitrary choice hear but i've like to idealize the term.  think of it in a capital "w", Work sense.  the enactment of sustainability.  Work.  

when your work is growing food, there aren't a whole lot of other overlapping circles in the equation.  of course everything overlaps out to the infinite, so that this place and this food is connected to the millions of places that provide the seeds of its existence.  but the more direct you make the relationship, the less capital that needs to be exchanged, the more sustaining and sustainable it is.  

well things get kind of complicated when you try to tease them out into diagrams and equations.  let me try again.

eating the food that i work to sustain makes me feel really good.

the rocks

the relationship between shiz and i is on the rocky side here lately.  she doesn't seem to be very happy.  news is now she's planning to leave the farm a week earlier than she had originally planned, is going to stay somewhere else on maui she said, although she doesn't know where.  the only time we really spend together or talk to one another is when we are eating.  we still make and eat dinner together every night but the thrill is gone i guess you'd say.  we don't take pictures of the event anymore.  

she's in her room a lot, which the rooms are great and all, but my room is about the last desirable place for me, the relative splendor of everything that surrounds the room is too great.  this rule applies to the kitchen and living room too, with these two places one rung up from my room.  she shuts her door all the time now too.  it really irks me.  closed doors make me feel unwanted or a nuisance or something.  she's always listening to pop music too.  always.  she is right now, in fact, as she walks about the farm weeding and this and that.  she wears her headphones around her neck, the old school ones with thin foam pads covering the covering the ear-sized speakers, and then plays the music loud enough so that she can here it from a foot away.  wherever she is, this tinny, background radio noise accompanies her.  she really likes fergi apparently.  

she seems to think i'm wrong most of the time, and even when she doesn't have any other information, she will call my views into question.  it's the worst.  i am constantly fending the vibe like all of this is not living up to her expectations, but i don't know what those might be.  and i know even less about her intentions.  i esteem myself compassionate but we can't communicate.  she is speaking her second language all the time, and i begin to wonder if the way she reacts to everything i say with a hesitant uncertainty is a product of this reality.  i think it has a lot to do with the way i talk though too.  i tend to speak in quick half sentences and aphorisms most of the time.  it must be hard to keep up with.  all this being said, she is still decidedly frosty.

she'll be leaving in a couple of weeks though and this will all be archived away in the annuls of fading memory.  i'll do my best to remember her fondly but the music.  

that damned mind-numbing music.

on the up and up, i just finished digging the last of the holes for six little trees  we're planting.  diggin holes is hard on a mountain.  you dig with a spud bar mostly.  then sift through all the rocks, pile them up on the low side then spud bar again.  had a bunch of young mango trees die out in the youngest of the orchards.  we are replacing them.  seems to be the water that killed them, chemicals in it.  and specifically with the little mangos.  we aren't putting mangos in the open spots.  well maybe one mango, but mostly avocados, a lychee and a guava.  there are two duck ponds (little tarp based constructions that hold water well enough for the ducks to poop in) out by these trees.  i'm going to just water from those so as not to run the risk of the poison water.  this is the nice thing about working a place.  after a while you get invested in each part of it because you've done something to make it that way.  all the actions you take become a part of the place.  and so the more you do, the more you care about what needs to be done, or the more this recognition becomes a natural, internal process.  john has a saying:

seeing is doing, 

doing is understanding, 

understanding is seeing

sun yat sen revisited

yesterday i went down to do some laundry in Pukalanai, about 10 miles down the mountain and the closest town with a supermarket and laundromat.  on my way back i hitched a ride with a mother and her two sons.  i stopped for a while to try to catch a ride in front of a church because it seemed like a good place to pull of the road.  this is one of the most fundamental rules of catching a ride, i'm finding.  you have to be somewhere that is easy and encouraging for someone to slow down and pull over.  i'd kind of forgotten it was sunday, or more accurately had forgotten the church-going significance of sundays, but needless to say, in front of a church on sunday is a great place to catch a ride.  

the boys were in their early adolescence, that awkward, pasty, strange-toothed age that has moved beyond childhood and is creeping tentatively up to the door marked-the mysteries of manhood.  with the shy pomposity of any true believer, she told me i was welcome to join them any sunday.  i asked her what kind of church it was, said i hadn't looked too close.  she said they were fundamentalist,  paused a moment, Pentecostal, pause

 

"we believe in the bible."  

the son in the front seat added "christian" to the mix during one of his mother's pauses.  i said that my mother had gotten me two things before she sent me on my way.  new underwear and a little bible.  (this is not entirely true but i thought it sounded cool at the time)  so i assured this transient mother figure that i cycled the good/god book into my nightly reading list, implying that i might happen to find something there one night that would bring me to their church some sunday morning.  they dropped me off about halfway up the mountain.  i gave them my best conan o'brien bow, feeling that i'd helped them fulfill their christian duty just by my being there for them to help.  it was a nice transaction.

just a little ways up the road, me still radiant from the ride before, another vehicle slowed down.  this one an old toyota or nissan SUV, the kind with the backdoor handles up next to the windows.  she said she was going to mile mark 16, which was plenty far for me.  she asked me if i was going to Paul's place.  i didn't really have any way to relate to that, so i said she could just drop me off at Sun Yat Sen Park.  

"oh.  right on.  there's a lot of good energy there."

i agreed for lack of a better response.  she said she'd worked on some farms when she first got to maui and we both agreed that it was a wonderful way to get settled in.  we got back to the topic of the park by some round about way that included the japanese. 

"yeah, the japanese have been here for millions of years.  well, not millions but..."

i nodded like i got the point, though i'm not real sure what it was.  she mentioned something about how they had lost their land following WWI then switched back to a more comfortable topic.

"sun yat sen.  yeah he was a really powerful emperor or something.  and he came over here about that time and bought the land that you're living on now."

really?

"from the mountain all the way to the sea.  that's how they bought up the land back then."

well, i said that i couldn't believe it, though this somehow communicated the contrary impression.  she nodded with the serenity of a tenured historian and smiled.  i said i figured it was kind of like MLK memorial parks throughout the midwest.  just some arbitrarily selected monument meant to make the community look cultured or compassionate.  i was really just thinking of the one i'd seen in a blindingly white college town called oxford, but i made it seem like i'd rambled all through the midwest.  taking notes on parks.  

after commenting, with an air of finality, on Sun's good taste, i mentioned a starkly well-kept little red cottage as we drove past it.  

"yeah, it's Oprah's."

i laughed.  i'd already heard that Oprah was buying up most of the island. 

"and that's her house way up there.  well, you can't see it now...it's a big white ranch house."

her sunglasses were striking, this woman.  perhaps it was the contrast between her sunglasses and the human part of her head, but i couldn't keep my eyes off them.  they were of a faux designer type, the kind of really big ones that connect cheeks to forehead.  glued-on, diamondesque jewels swirled an incoherent pattern along the sides of the black glasses, which bear in mind, sat against a head of friendly, greasy hair pulled back into a sadistically tight pony-tail.  all of this, the glasses and hair, combined with her tall, flat but shiny forehead and a rather sharp nose stretching above her thin mouth and chin, to produce the cartoonish impression of some kind of benevolent nocturnal bird.  

i believed her when she said she had ridden horses for Oprah's horse corral.  apparently a job necessitated by Oprah's not riding them for herself.  supposedly it was Stedman's ranch, but i didn't really have any way to relate to that so i made a coy remark about how close she and Oprah must be.  

"nah, man.  i've never even seen her.  she's never up here.  maybe like once a year.  and she might be the richest woman in the world but she only pays her employees 8 bucks an hour."

with this we were pulling onto the embankment overlooking Sun's park.  i hopped out and got my backpack full of fresh laundry from the backseat and gave her a gracious thank you and peace sign through the back window.  she returned with an aloha and drove away. 

laughing as i started walking down the mountain, past the park and toward the farm, visions of japanese people roaming with the dinosaurs danced in my head.  i looked over at the statue of Sun and wondered what he would make of these hippie birds.  

the way to wailea

so we live on a mountain and we look at the sea.  and one day shiz says to me, "why don't we just walk right down there to the beach."  we look at a map and its about the same distance as we walk to the store, granted that's on a road and this is through grassy wilderness.  i was wanting to go for a hike anyways so yesterday we set off down the mountain, heading the way the crow flies if the crow were to go to the beach from here.

we hiked through some of the most serene, surreal country i've ever seen.  it's all these mystical, twisted trees with dusty yellow bark.  now mystical is a strange word to use to describe a tree, but these have the gnarly shape i imagine when i think of powerful trees that lead to other worlds.  there are of course rocks everywhere.  little chunks of old volcano.  i half expected to get down the hill to see that i'd worn the soles of my shoes clean off on the sharp stuff.  we saw a few deer.  one majestic buck all by himself and another small heard running along, maybe six or eight.  the deer are different here.  they stay spotted into adulthood and their antlers stay straight and furry.  

anyhow we hiked for about an hour and a half through three or four miles of this pristine beauty before butting into the back of a housing development.  we'd been on other people's property the whole time but suddenly you become very aware of yourself when you are on private property and you can see the person's backdoor.  so we had to skirt around the back of the house for a while before we found a spot scarce enough to jump over a little gate.   the sign on the gate said, "Private Property.  Keep out,"  but on the back side it didn't say nothin.  (to quote a forgotten verse from a well known Woody Guthrie song)

it took us another hour just to get out of this melee of houses, me writing down the name of all the streets we turned left, right, left on.  we'd planned to walk back up the mountain that afternoon.  we finally make it out to the main road, shiz and i have some dispute about rather to hike down the road or head towards the water.  we headed towards the water.  i had a feeling the kind of beach it would be as we walked past the condo resort type places reminiscent of those i went to with my family growing up.  when we finally reached the beach it was a crammed little cesspool of a place.  (ok so it's still in maui and looks out at a beautiful ocean, but it must rank up among maui's worst).  rather than an "ah we made it" it was more of a "look at the bloated-white tourist flesh."  the place had all the charm of a K-mart.  still a wonderful adventure of a day.  we hitched our way back across the island and up the mountain.  got home just before it got dark and started raining.