the story of bobby iao

a catalogue of events:::

6:00 am:  wake up in the Banana Bungalow Hostel, head reeling from last night's pursuit.  brandi and i set out from the farm to find the greenest beer on maui.  she's part irish.  i'd never had a green beer.  we found some and through a series of delightful events and quaint bus rides, we made it to Wailuku just as it was getting dark and rainy.  hostels are the most wonderful places in the world to observe people.  bar none.  these international loci of ragtag transients.  

6:30: get up feeling like i need to puke or poop or find a new head or something.  go to the bathroom and give awkwardly boisterous good mornings to the people brushing their teeth.  walk across the street and buy a bottle of water.  return to the room.  brandi's up.  we decide to go find some breakfast.  

breakfast:  eat a bran muffin.

8:00: check out of the hostel. decide to walk the three miles to Iao Valley Park.  Wailuku is a strange little town.  it reminds me a lot of Zanesville, which is kind of strange because i've only been in Zanesville once or twice, but Wailuku had a lot of three-story, white buildings lining the roads that either seemed to be completely deserted or some kind of strange office buildings.  Wailuku is the county seat.  so as you get closer to the central crossroads, the office buildings get whiter and there's more flags flying.  it's a strange feeling town.  brandi and i get along in such a way that we laugh almost constantly, and strange feeling towns are particularly well suited for this. 

walking along the road: the West Maui Mountains are strikingly sheer and sharp, so that they look like you could just walk right up to them, stand on flat ground and stare straight up the clean green faces of the peaks.  we walk about a mile before this guy in an old white truck stops to see if we need a ride.  he says his name is bobby and that the valley is a very spiritual place.

at the park:  bobby says he'll show us the good hike.  says we'll get wet.  brandi and i are wearing the same clothes as the night before.  tennis shoes.  sandals.  this park is another drive up and look around type.  tourists everywhere.  they all walk up a flight of stairs to look at the needle (the peak in the picture).  we do too.  then we head down and into the woods.  we reach the point where bobby says, "that's the paved trail but this is the real hike over here."  and we set off into the woods following the river, tall green peaks and the morning sun shining overhead.  

to be continued...

i need to hit the road to moloka'i and i'm leaving my computer here.  i would have liked to have gotten all this typed out nice but i'll have to finish it quick here.

...so we swam in this river with this guy we'd never met.  and i was slightly wary because of my previous encounter with local guys and the way they'd kicked me in the face.  but we followed bobby into the middle of the woods and all jumped in the river and screamed and hooted and had a good time.  he drove us to his house afterwards and gave us a hearty breakfast of cheerios and sunchips and peanut butter sandwiches.  he's a recovered crackhead.  we had wonderful conversations.  he is very happy to be alive.  he works at a verizon kiosk at the mall and positively loves it.  after hanging out at his house and talking about everything from god to charlie kaufman movies, bobby drove us to the mall.  he's a professional mallrat and thrilled to be so.  he was also, the whole day, always picking up bits of trash.  he said that his purpose is to help people.  but he wasn't preachy or pious in any way.  one of the most refreshing and hopeful people i've ever met.  i wish i had more time to type about him but i need to eat lunch and get on the road.  

to moloka'i!

cool documentary

"holden what did you get your ideas from?"

"i got my ideas from words and from groundhogs and and from rockets and from robots?"

"what about from scissors?"

"and from scissors."

....

this is a quote from the movie We Are Wizards.  its about harry potter fan culture.  you can watch it on hulu and i recommend it.  the quote is of a four year old.  with prompting from his seven year old brother.

narrate your own life

yes!  everyone just posted on their blogs.  jake, phil, rachel.  i haven't read them yet.  because i was so excited to see them there that i felt like writing something.  i can't tell you how wonderful it's been for me to read the stuff that you guys post.  and that goes to all of the blogs that i read, but its particularly delightful with the people i know.  

ok so here's some commentary on something:

one time, sitting around a campfire with some friends who were not close friends someone brought up what i have since come to think of as "jesus christ syndrome."

i read this article once about this sociological phenomenon where people think that they are christ.  and they become obsessed with writing down all of their thoughts.  and so they write obsessively and believe that their thoughts are vitally important and will be remembered by history.  they think that they are going to save humanity.

something to that effect.  it was years ago so i'm no doubt exaggerating the details that made the strongest impression on me, but thats the gist.  i remember sitting there, looking at the fire, thinking 

"that's kind of how i think about myself.  don't say anything or they'll think you're crazy."

beyond my own identification with this archetype, it seems that every bit of useful knowledge that has been preserved into the present was produced and recorded by someone who could fall into this profile.  it's a sloppy connection of symbols to lived experience.  

in all fairness this was only a passing comment in a conversation and maybe its unfit to hold it up and comment on it.  but, i've thought about it several times and so now that it has become my own mental object, i feel it's fair game.

the bothersome question:  why does the desire to record one's thoughts get connected to a notion of a delusional, arrogant, bloated sense of self?

it seems that one of the main traits that makes humans distinct from all other life is the capacity to record and transmit the accumulation of knowledge.  we communicate with a lexicon of concepts that is ever expanding, and the articulation of which can be stunningly complex and beautiful.  but what's more shocking than our ability to make sense out of the vast symbolic systems that we encounter in bunches and with every second of our live, we can become aware of it.  

so if we came into this world members of a species that trained us to articulate the world around us in reference to a historically preserved lexicon of concepts, then we ought to take our powers of articulation seriously.  and if we are going to become more aware, or more fully functioning human beings, then we ought to articulate the structure of power that provides us with the particular ways that we think about the world.  

the full articulation of hegemony is a collective effort.  think of it like constructing some kind of massive monument by individual people adding one thing on top of whatever the last person brought.  it would be a myriad collage of things.  toothbrushes and computers and matchbox cars.  but if the intent was to build a monument and people kept adding things then eventually you would have some kind of structure that everyone could stand back and look at and try to figure out what it is.  is it beautiful?  ugly?  how does it work? what is it made out of?

and so i believe this is a profound instinct/gift of being human.  we can articulate and reflect.  it's a shame that our ability to does not usually translate into our compulsion to.  and i don't mean it's a shame like not being able to make it to a friend's birthday party.  i mean it's shameful.  it ought to haunt us that all human beings do not have equal access and do not feel equally empowered to represent their minds, to articulate their own humanness.  how sad that we (i) so often abuse the miraculous relationship between the way we feel and the way we feel about the way we feel.  

as far as we know, we are the only life form that can think, i want to eat ice cream.  then feel ashamed.  be emotionally, chemically, physiologically altered by nothing more than momentum of a thought.  then think, shame on me for thinking that.  and then we feel ashamed about feeling ashamed.  we could also feel spiteful about being ashamed or vindictive or self-loathsome.  the point is, when we consciously transcribe our thoughts into the objective world (write, draw, sing, garden, orate, or otherwise articulate our minds into an objective form), this allows us to take control of the way that we feel.  it gives us the space to view it.  and in this space we can question why we feel certain ways about certain feelings.  so in this it seems there is hope of gaining some perspective on the symbolic systems that we are suspended in. 

now, if we, a people, a species are to discover a way to transcend the destructive tendency of human history, we first need to articulate human history in an unprecedentedly holistic and vigorous collectivity.  we need every voice to join the din of collective consciousness.  we need everyone to drop something on the monument.  the sacred reality of information technology is that we now have the highest potential of accomplishing this than we have had at any previous point in our history.  

and know one knows what will happen, no more than you could know what it would look like if a hundred people brought a hundred random things and piled them in a field.  but one thing is for certain, it will give us something to look at.  when every human being has the means to articulate the history of their own thoughts, we will finally have a conceptual lexicon powerful enough to understand the structure of the power that keeps us locked in the cycle of fear and suffering and unkindness.  

this is how we trump the hegemonic oppression that would have us to be timid, to be less than we feel we want to be.  

its a big group effort but its starts feeling good right away.  

the bridge between poetry and ethnography

the common struggle or pursuit to find the finest moments of life and transcribe them.  how do you distill life into a pattern on a page?  

poetry, ethnography, different answers to the same question.

and there's just a bunch of room to discuss what's fine and the x's and o's of writing it all down.

short things / dylan lyrics

walking sideways along the highway

just outside town, i 

stick my thumb out at a broken old ford

and it slows down without a word.

...

farewell angelina, the bells of the crown

are being stolen by bandits, i must follow the sound

the triangle tingles, the music plays slow

but farewell angelina, the sky is on fire and i must go.

...

it would be better to turn into sea foam than a jar of mayonaise.  

...

the jacks and the queens have forsook the courtyard

and 52 gypsies file past the guard

in the space where the deuce and the ace once ran wild

farewell angelina, the sky it is folding, and i'll see you in a while

...

i do not enjoy cake, so you can have mine.

yes, yes, of course you can eat it.

...

king kong little elves on the rooftops they dance

valentino-type tangos while the heros wash hands

close the eyes of the dead, not to embarrass anyone

but farewell angelina, the sky it is changing and i must be gone

...

it's very hard to write quick whimsy like i did a few weeks ago.  i miss it.  it seems this getting my life figured out really cuts into my whimsical word count.  so i'll just supplement my own whimsy with some dylan.  that's what i've been doing for years.  when my own sardonic charm starts wearing thin i try to tap into his.   long periods of my life have consisted of disguising dylan lyrics as conversation.  

now, emerson said that books are to be used by the scholar during the times when she cannot be inspired directly by nature.  the record of inspiration past can be used to fill such voids.

so substitute dylan for books and me for her and thats how i get by.  

and if you've never heard farewell angelina,  google it forthwith.  it seems joan baez probably used to perform in more than dylan.  it's delightful.  when we were hiking through the crater i could not get the line 

king kong little elves, on the rooftops they dance

out of my head.

for what it's worth

john ran my astrological chart tonight:

sun sign: gemini (of course)

moon sign: scorpio (oooh)

rising sign: scorpio (whoa)

(and there was a lot more but i couldn't retain it.)

...

i am surrounded by all of these systems for inferring meaning into my life.  i've been reading the physics of the soul, its smart but hardly ground breaking.  connecting quantum physics to vague, overly-simplistic and orientalist notions of monism.  and then there's this ethical system of manifesting, and its fun because it seems to work.  at least it's fun to pretend it does when you're hitching along the highway and it's getting dark.  then there is buddhism, which gets infuriatingly flaunted by the manifesto new-agers who, in between talking about the power of consciousness and the one and this and that metaphysical postulation, will indubitably throw in a good word for zen and say that its all the same and all part of a new awakening.  well they're not all the same.  buddhism is not monistic.  it does not suggest that everything is one.  in fact, it does not suggest anything because it is so fragmented and alternately popularized (in the west) or institutionalized (japan)  that to speak about a buddhist perspective is as impractical as suggesting some kind of universal christian ethic.  

either trust every book you read or trust none of them because there is nothing pure that can be named and what's real to me, is real to me, and the truth is sad when we believe in the name.  believe in the experience of truth without believing in truth itself.  

moloka'i and many things

i've known that i needed to come to hawaii for quite some time now.  its strange because it is my longest, currently living intention or aspiration.  well now that might be a ridiculous thing to say, but i decided a year and a half ago that i needed to come to hawaii after hearing a really inspiring guest lecture.  it was october of 2007.  i was pretty far out there, probably not sleeping much, drawing overlapping circles all the time, reading wendell berry.  but this guy who gave the lecture was friends with kasulis, an East-West Center guy, and he was talking about the proliferation of perceived difference and talking about ideas that launch perpendicular to the engrained notions of progress.  very much in line with the paradigms of intimacy and integrity that were structuring my thoughts at the time.  afterwards i walked out of the building and into the rain with this buzzing certainty in my head that i would go to hawaii.  i thought i would come in a much different capacity, but it was the dawning of the thought of hawaii.

then i fell in love.  then i fell in love with farming.  and a way of living.  and then my hawaiian intentions shifted, they drifted to japan and i imagined zen temples for a month or two before settling on the prospect of wwoofing in hawaii.  and this was many months ago.  and there was a lot that happened in those months.  but i had this shortcut, this easy path come to hawaii.  and then out of all of the places i could have gone i ended up in this particular place.  i contacted ten or fifteen farms before emailing john, and he turns people away every day.  so looking back its nice to see the gaps that open and allow the present to develop.  

i've been appreciating the present pretty intensely for the past three months and its the best way to contextualize the past.   i'm not giving myself the credit here, its an imperative of how beautiful the world is, you can't help it.  but with all of this fond reflection on the past through the joy of the present, it's still hard for me to believe in the benevolence or openness of the future.  that's not quite right, it's just that i get antsy when i don't have an idea of where i'll be in the immediate future.  

now, just this evening, i have the general plan for the rest of my time here.  i was really needing this to come together.  and i didn't know how it was going to work until just a couple days ago.  i finally got to talk to the woman who owns the yoga center on moloka'i.  all of my important  correspondence with her had happened through john and it has left me feeling like i still needed some confirmation.  they are good friends and for some reason she would just call him instead of me.  so i've had about a month of this hanging intention to go to moloka'i.  but tonight we finally talked and had a wonderful conversation and they'll meet me at the dock at nine in the morning on friday and it feels fantastic to have that certainty.  i'll stay there for ten days.  it's reputedly the most beautiful place on the planet.  

after that, the plan is to attend a two week workshop in permaculture design.  this is the piece that just fell into my lap the other night.  and it fits perfectly right in the transition space between life here on paradise and my intention for the next nine months in ohio.  there was this hole, that was leaving me unconvinced of making a reality out of the big idea.  namely, how to immediately transition between the easy enthusiasm of my life here and the more dynamic engagement of going back to ohio and keeping the good intention alive.  and that's where this piece came falling in to fit. 

it means the investment of some reserve cash but its an investment in the theory to compliment the practical reality of my life on the farm here.  i've learned from living here, in very concrete ways, in the food i eat every night and the location of the paths i walk on every day and with every bucket of duck-fertilized water and with the blood and the texture of the chickens we slaughtered and with the growth of every lettuce leaf and the time and space to reflect on it all.  but this education is place-specific, and though that's what i celebrate most about it, the transition of this knowledge to a new place, and even more so the application of  knowledge of an established system to the establishment of a new one was a leap that i wasn't convinced i could make through my own unguided research.  there's just too many things to initiate.  that is the startling good fortune of finding this course, it will initiate me.  and though i will have only scratched the surface after a two-week course, the experience of matching concepts to what i've been living and doing for the past three months, should help bridge the gap between my maui-inspired intentions and the ohio-world where they will need to be realized.  

its what i need in order to know where to start. 

...

i wish i might have said all of this more concisely.  

...

it also seems like i could have described the joy of getting solid plans made by saying something really flashy about liminality and communitas, but luckily that bag of jargon is getting dusty in some corner of my mind.   

haleakala

i have no way to write about the crater.  even trying to put up some pictures just now felt like a defilement.  it was a most magnificent hike.  beauty so strange it makes your eyes hurt.  

tomorrow...

we go into the crater.

.

next: and the idea

in answer to a question and the more general looming uncertainty, today there came to me an interesting idea.  a something to do.  i still think its no good to think too far into what's next but its nice to address the issue when it arises.  the immediate next is to go to a yoga center on molokai.  this seems almost finalized now.  things work differently in hawaii a bit.  and with working on farms.  its not so business like.  there are no business hours and so forth and thank goodness for that.  so i'll be here at my dear rancho for another two weeks or so and then will hit the roads for about a week or so.  camp in the national parks and hitch around the island.  

now then to the bigger next.  the mainland one.  i need to make some money.  but more critically i need to be engaged in a lifestyle as vibrant as the one i'm in right now.  i need to be at the edge of what i know.  this is where i am the happiest.  so how to do this in the state i've lived in my whole life?  here's the idea, and i'm hesitant to put it up here because its pretty significant to the next few years of my life.  but i'm going to put it here because i need feedback and also because i'm excited about it.  

the idea:::

i am convicted of the imperative sensibility in producing significant amounts of your own food.  i won't restate the case for pursuing a sustainable lifestyle.  luckily i think it makes pretty blatant sense in the context of the contemporary affairs of the world.  there are a few directions i could go in with this conviction.  

i could go to grad school and study spiritual ecology and be in an anthropology department in a city, and i would write about the relationship between organic farming and spirituality.  the various ways that the deep appreciation of the earth lends to certain practices of cultivation which lend back into certain spiritual discourses.  

all that business doesn't really appeal to me.  i'd rather live it than write about it, or live it and write about it.  i don't know what i'll have on the other side of grad school that i need and can really use and could not go and get a few years down the road anyway.  so the work i need to do right now, the work that constantly keeps me at the edge of what i know, is gardening.  particularly permaculture.  

i was reading a book on permaculture thats been sitting on a shelf in the cottage for months.  all of a sudden i was really excited and inspired.  it all makes very practical sense...  so here's the idea:

my grandparents live on 40 acres of land in southeast ohio.  its beautiful rolling hayfields mostly and some wooded hills and valleys.  i am considering the possibility of getting a permaculture system started there.  it would mean living with them and planting trees all summer, expanding the garden, getting some major composting going, perhaps build a chicken coop and a greenhouse.  i have  a lot to learn about the system.  a lot.  but it makes sense to me, i've lived in a well developed permaculture system for nigh on three months now.  

here's a few of the general concepts or ethics of permaculture:  

+Cultivate the smallest possible land area.  Plan for small-scale, energy efficient intensive systems rather than large extensive ones. 

+Be diverse, polyculture.  It provides stability and helps to be read for change.

+Think about long term.  Plan for sustainability. 

its a really beautiful system that blends an ideology with a daily ethic very seamlessly.  the simplest element of permaculture design, is to plant in zones with the highest intensity of use closest to the house and then systems that need less or little energy in the zones further out.  so zone one, the zone closest to the house has vegetable and herb gardens.  zone two would have some kind of animal pen (probably chickens in our case) near enough to the garden that you can use it to mulch and fertilize easily.  might also have a green house in zone 2.  and a significant fruit and nut orchard.  very potentially corn in ohio.  in hawaii, its papayas, mangos, macadamia nuts and avacados.  could also do oats or beans.  blackberries perhaps.  then beyond that in zone three, would be the place for apple trees and such. 

i have so much to learn before i can consider this a legitimate venture.  but, i can learn it.  and i can do this kind of work.  farms make a lot of sense to me.  and they also make me very happy and content.  

heres some other issues that need to be kept in mind.  sorry, i guess i'm kind of hooked on this blogging ritual and it gives me some space to think through things.  

first issue:  its a really huge flipping deal to get a farm started!  huge. and i will run into a million things i've never even thought of let alone experienced or learned about.  but it will none of it be more than i can handle.  and i know many wonderful people in columbus that can give me advice and practical connections.  eric, the manager of the last farm i worked at is an invaluable resource in this fashion.  

second issue:  i have no real idea what the condition of the soil is like down there.  i don't think its too bad, probably a lot of clay and its been planted in hay for years and years.  i don't know that much about how things grow there.  i know grandma fertilized with manure in her garden and grew some pretty fantastic stuff.  a manure connection shouldn't be too hard to find in caldwell, ohio.   i would hopefully be able to plow and put manure down in the late spring and get a cover crop planted in zone two.  then be able to get that tilled and another cover planted before winter. that would be all that could be done in zone 2 before winter.  significant number of trees could be planted in zone three.  its just a matter of figuring out what would produce best and be best to have around.  all of this means studying and learning intensely at each stage.  

third issue: money.

fourth issue:  i don't want to create a situation that stresses my grandparents.  this will be done as a joyful investment in the land that they have already invested in and i want them to be able to celebrate it as such.  i don't want them to feel like that have to be working on things all the time.  but this is the beauty of permaculture.  there is not extensive manual labor involved.  the design is very deliberate and intentional and getting it put in place will be good work but it doesn't take a lot of hours out in the field to keep up with it.  the most care is in the garden, but gramma loves to work in the garden anyways.  and i will be there all summer.  we could have a very substantial garden.  working in the gardens here makes me realize how much i could get done working with my gramma.  she's a machine in the garden.  and grandad loves to do work on the tractor.  i think it would be a delight for them to have an even more deliberate setup.  so grandad could disk the fields in zone 2 instead of mowing the lawn around the house.  but they are both getting older and this only works if i know that i can dedicate a few years to this.  during the growing season, i will be in ohio, working on the farm then getting things ready for winter.  then i can travel and do whatever i want, probably come back to hawaii and keep doing what i'm doing.  and things will weather the winter and i'll come back in time to take starts out of the greenhouse and into the ground.  (i don't know who will plant the starts.  maybe aunt debbie).  so ultimately this issue is taken care of if i can accept that this will be my lifestyle for the next four years.  i think i can do that and plus it'd be a good thing to do up until 2012.  just in case.  

fifth issue:  living with my grandparents.  would this drive me mad?  first of all they are getting older and its a bit hard for me to be around them lately because is see them as not quite as sharp as they used to be.  and this bothers me and breaks my heart.  but it would be completely different if i were staying with them for five months.  it would not be the typical, concentrated attention of a three day visit.  and, i would have a car that could get me to columbus in 2 hours.  this is hardly being cut off from the world.  its taken me two hours just to hitchhike to the store and buy granola here in maui.  i find that i thrive with some measure of solitude.  but this would hardly be solitude. the social reality of caldwell ohio has always fascinated me.  its what got me in to folklore.  the most important paper of my academic career was about my gramma telling stories about becoming a part of the community there.  

that's about all the issues there are with it.  or as many as i can think to name here.  this has been helpful for me.  if you made it all the way to here then thank you and please let me know what you think of this.  it strikes me as a really wonderful idea and a very fortunate that i want to and can do this and that my grandparents have the land.  and all of this.  ok.

your thoughts please.  everyone.  columbus friends, mother, brother, former lover, blogger buddies.  from what you each and all know about me, how does this proposed venture strike you?  i suppose maybe this is a decision big enough to be kept to myself and mulled over.  but i have an idea like this everyday that just gets buried away underneath other thoughts.  so i'm going to grab this one and make it public so that i have to think it all the way through.

thanks.  to everyone who reads my blog.  it presents a space for doing this.  a space for articulating stuff that i would otherwise just bounce around in my head and never let enter reality.