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?"