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.  

the recession

i have no way to relate to the recession.  i believe that when things are talked about enough, they become real, they gain substance in the collective consciousness.  but for me, its hard to find something in my material life, some object or sign through which to relate to the recession.  i have no totemic piece of the crisis.  

someone picked me up a few weeks ago and said that many psychics say maui will be a good place to be when the world goes crazy.  someone else told me the other day that hawaii is the most isolated land mass in the world.  so, i don't know if it's spiritual or geographical but i'm very grateful for my isolated place of peace.

my only portal to the depressed reality of the hegemonic world is through my computer.  i've started reading the new york times and sometimes i watch day-old episodes of the daily show.  i also get day-old cobbler from the coffee shop sometimes, but that's a different and more delicious story.  last night (that is, my last night, your two nights ago), brian williams was the guest on the daily show.  in a nice twist of fate, brian williams was also the commencement speaker at my college graduation.  so, here was the icon of my beginning, my entrance into the real, political world and the guy was completely freaked out.  it disturbed me.  he seemed like he was all jacked up on something, but the more i watched him, the more i realized that the guy had been born again in the panic of what he reports every night on the news.  

at my graduation, brian williams said that we were the generation that was going to change the world.  that the world needed us and was ready for us.  but last night (your two nights ago) he said on national television, that the latest reports show that 125 banks are going to close in the next year.  that means, 125 bank chains, the names that are on people's debit cards, are going to go belly up and the cards won't do anything.  to this john stewart quipped, 

"so let me get this straight, because it seems like you just said, on national television, that people should take their money out of the banks and put it in shoe boxes."

then they just kind of stared at each other.  and brian williams didn't say anything.  and john stewart didn't say anything.  

it freaked me out.  

but then the sun rose over the ocean this morning.  

our divine frustration

Every morning, you open your eyes to find

the divine frustration,

curling the lineation of my window shades

    into shapes

    of a crucifix,

but the light's all straight and the kid, well

he's alright.

Pray to Allen Ginsberg. Pray to the names of people you don't know.

Pray for the faith that saves us.

Pray

Pray 

Pray

On the stage of fascination: an empty page drains 

the years of libation through a full-suit circus

that just claps and claps with its bowl-cut, its legs

and enough words to say anything.

You can write it all away or 

put it in a box with all of your favorite things

like letters 

and string 

and really important string.

Collages of love:

Our colleges, our too full, our president, our don't know what to do, our don't know where to live, our too real, our pitiful, our million, our missing, our too many, our five-star, our opening, our beginning, our returning.

Might as well add the why and call it what it is,

its yours, its yours, its yours, its yours.

The physics of the soul is a book on the wall,

wedged between many

things and thoughts and leftover beans.

Box tops educate the sub-space mind to reside in vagaries,

respect the grammar and check your spelling.

Grow up.  Then, years later, only when turning 

around, whirling dervish-like through the air

did you find your desperation.

Our desperation.  Our divine frustration.

Soul singers sing about searching for their answers.  My answers

Your answers

are waiting for your questions, 

your mind

and the time to sit and have a cup of tea with you.

How strange to sit and wait?

While white cloud wraiths

dance down air

currents, events

are really happening

on the other side of the world and

you will learn about them through telephones.

If I could change my name, then I 

would have harnessed the power of being 

fully human.  If I could trade my name for another one, I would

choose to be known as mr. Jones, but then, I fear

I might be mistaken for a baseball player.

On the stage of grand libation:  power lines clack and shake

shuddering at the weight, the substance of fascination.  

Our homes.  Our entertainment.  Our whistled 

livings.  Our credit statements.  Our thread-bare

old jacket of a nation.  Our intensity.  Our necessity.  Our divine frustration.

On the backside of nowhere, sitting 

on a mountain floating on an ocean,

I read the poetry of my soul from a book full of dead poets.

And I knew then and I knew there.  And I laughed there and then

I cried for all the times I never knew and all the places I'd never been.

If its all emptiness inside,

then where does pain come from?

If its all openness out there, then when

does hate find its footing in the fertile, hurt-broken hearts

of mothers,

sons,

daughters

and fathers?

If I could plot our entirety in a stack of white paper,

using nothing but a black pen and my good nature,

then I would draw a picture, a friendly face with hair and whiskers.

Then I would draw the picture a thousand times, until

with a flipping through the sheets, I could make the face smile.

And it would be more of my desire, more of my dissatisfaction

than any fleeting, grasping, self-bound instant.

And once this papery creation can come to life 

for any set of fingers,

any fleshy friend or foe,

then on and on and so it goes,

the thing will need to be named, and we

will all get together and play with our own image.

We will writhe and curse its sublime animation

and we will call it

our divine frustration.