My barista this morn dawns a sweet apron. It looks like pin-striped denim, up and down, with a prominent leather pocket stitched on the front. He might use this most often repairing bikes, or working a drill press, but right now, actually, to serve coffee. I ask for the Columbian. There is something sweet about the taste of good coffee on a Saturday morning. Left to explore are the origins of this particular coffee, the hands that tended the soil and the plants, the land, the finca, from which it came, the bean itself, their roasting and their slow, pleasant effect on my demeanor.
The history of Wolverine Farm Publishing has been sketched a few times. I came along and jumped on the bandwagon, mostly in the form of a volunteer stint a few times a month, with sabbaticals in between to devote time to family, home, work. It is a nonprofit that continues to evolve and make waves, and I have been fortunate enough to ride and grow along with it. I would describe it as a forum, a collective of activist voices and network of crafters and DIYers wise to the need for such a community. I can only imagine what it would look like given enough land – a farm and a homestead on which families build, create, and thrive. As it is, WFP is nestled in the back of The Bean Cycle Coffee House in Old Town Fort Collins, where it has slowly been transforming, inside its chrysalis, soon to emerge and alight with newly brandished colors. I can see a whole Quarter being established, with Wolverine Farm playing a prominent role, in this part of town, close to the old Camp Collins, now poised for a renaissance. A Gaslamp District of sorts, it might have connectivity to the Poudre, to a large community garden, a youth hostel, to open space – perhaps The River District.
My volunteer slot today runs 8-10 am. All is quiet, likely due to the Tour de Fat. This year is calling me to be available to a friend who might want to avoid the High Folly, more appropriate for another time perhaps, or in another way. One man’s elixir is another’s poison. I spy a book, a photojournal called Made in:? by Mauricio Moreno, which seems to juxtapose the haves with the have-nots, with captions in Spanish and inglés. Images were captured in Columbia, China, Thailand, and Paris. The other book I note is The Heart of Racial Justice: How Soul Change Leads to Social Change, by Brenda Salter McNeil and Rick Richardson. Both books enhance my melancholy mood, and Tour de Fat day becomes a little more introspective. What if rides could be formed based on reading certain texts? You ride, stop, read, share thoughts, and repeat. You might visit certain households or businesses to sample food and drink tea and coffee. The unfolding landscape itself is a text of sorts to be interpreted in individual ways. It is not predicated upon spectacle and charade, but on the inner, on unnoticed handholds we might need to climb, sometimes precariously, upward. A slower way to travel, and perhaps better for noticing the landscape, is walking. I seem to read closer when I walk, stop with my book, find that spot, and read. An even more purist way might be to read the landscape by imbibing it – smell, feel, and taste your landscape. That might require a good guidebook for wild edibles, else an actual guide, and a journal to record your perceptions.
My shift ends, and riding back northward I encounter the late-comers to the bike parade. I resolve to build a costume for next year, and perhaps a bike to go with the costume. I may have to craft my own amazing apron, and purchase a whip. Or make a whip, however that is done, from the leather. And create a sort of chariot to be pulled by the bike, and set my wife in the chariot with the apron and the whip, and me and possibly a friend in horse costumes to be prodded along.
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
C.S. Lewis in the Milieu: A First Reading of Mere Christianity
We stray when we do not return to those original forms, spoken or written, or simply daydreamed in cycles. We intuit that something is awry. We are in wartime now, but it seems to be one of our own design. We maneuver to gain political or economic advantage, or else control the damage we’ve done. If we ever had any good intentions, something went bad; many, many people have been killed or hurt, and will be so, going back and forward in time along an axis, and we wonder how it will ever be assuaged.
There is a war in our homeland. There is an onslaught against our liberty right here, not just to those abroad. The strength of Lewis’ book lies in its philosophical simplicity, and whether I agree with him or not, it has been my pleasure to find respite in this book. I have sought and found this before, in other writers, and I add C. S. Lewis to that list of thinkers who courageously outline a philosophy they know will cut against the grain of what is popular here, now, and in the future. I know that this is a direct appeal to our sensibility, not in his narrative forms which can be found elsewhere, but in the way of posing difficult questions. And this is part of the progression – the refining of questions – and to this Lewis goes a long way towards helping us, like it or not.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small.
There is a simple truth in learning to love, and Lewis might argue that God propels us towards that, but he gets at why. That is important, regardless of whether or not we write, or care about writers and their body of work, or, truly, whether or not we are Christians.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Quadriplegic
My other vehicle is powered by tostadas fried in coconut oil. That's the bumper the sticker I need on the Veggie Bus. Peddling south from the Fort Collins northern city limits, where my family and I have lived since 2001, I nearly decide to skip gathering signatures for the 5-year fracking moratorium. One right turn onto the dirt road would place me within a few minutes in front of that beauteous tree swing arcing over the Poudre at Legacy Park. One can drop about 15 feet if you let go right at the apex. But I am on a mission. A gentleman, a long greyhair, standing against the bridge railing over the river, calls out to me as I cruise by, "Sir I'm a quadriplegic I don't have a cell phone Do you have a cell phone I can use?" he calls out furtively, a gravelly crescendo plea. "No, sorry," I call out, riding past, noting his arm braces. Sometimes I just don't want to deal with people. I do not have a golden heart, only sometimes. The last time I gave it was a pie and $5 to a homeless man at the corner of Hwy 1 and N College, last winter. Now they have a little camp under a tree near that intersection. I've seen him and his buddies, blasted at the end of the day, probably after spending their day's loot. I felt burned when I saw that. Homeless, anything helps, said the sign. Anything will help ease the pain, I think. I have needed such numbing.
I arrive at Old Town and consider catching the early Foodie Walk crowd. I had decided to ride out to Harmony Library, where I've never been, to try my luck. Emails suggested it to be an untapped location for signatures. At Laporte and Whedbee I spy some free boxes with rain-soaked clothes. I pick out a patched-up black jacket, a pair of canvas flats, and a child's-sized pair of snow pants, and throw them on my rack.
On southbound Shields leading up to campus, one has the option of guerrilla biking without a lane, or taking some of the scenic side streets. I like to check out the work going on in frontyards. I see new porches and walking paths going in. A woman reclined beneath a massive arbor of grapes. Is that a Long Island Ice Tea she's sipping? Some of these yards are suitable for getting gussied up and playing croquet to the tune of gypsy jazz. Back on Shields, it feels like the weekend has begun in earnest, and there is that hustle-and-flow feel of Friday. I ride a long, unhurried line south, noting the handiwork on the new Spring Creek bridge, the manicured playing fields of Rocky Mt. HS, the quietude of my old neighborhood, when our girls were small and frolicking, and life was a hazy dream. From Horsetooth on, someone is building a pipeline. More infrastructure to bring tar sands gas down from Alberta? I think of those National Geographic spreads of inky black landscapes where tundra forest once stood, around the Edmonton play - huge swaths of land and its people in the midst of an apocalypse of our own accord.
And finally, Harmony Library. I sit on a bench outside the back entrance, writing. After a while a woman calls out to me from the door, "Is your name Danny?" Yes, I say. "Your wife is on the phone. She says you left your phone, and you took the car keys." She seems upset. Can I use your phone? I ask. "Yeah, hurry, we close in 3 minutes." I make my apologies, saying I'll head home. I check my backpack after hanging up, discover I don't have the keys, then cantor back to call again. The librarian is incredulous that I want to use the phone. "None of us get paid to be here past 6:00." She stares about, wide eyed, looking for some understanding. It will only take 30 seconds, I offer. "I could get in trouble. I wasn't even supposed to let you use the phone in the first place."
On the ride back, it occurs to me that this was justice for not stopping for the Quadriplegic. It didn't matter that I really didn't have my phone. It only mattered that I stop and look. There are people, like the librarian, like me, that will go a mile, but not the extra mile. And yet that's what people need in order to be helped sometimes - that 2nd mile. It is a long ride home, but the overall ride is worth the lesson. The more I put myself out there, the more I will learn. And so I think an overnight sojourn approaches.
I arrive at Old Town and consider catching the early Foodie Walk crowd. I had decided to ride out to Harmony Library, where I've never been, to try my luck. Emails suggested it to be an untapped location for signatures. At Laporte and Whedbee I spy some free boxes with rain-soaked clothes. I pick out a patched-up black jacket, a pair of canvas flats, and a child's-sized pair of snow pants, and throw them on my rack.
On southbound Shields leading up to campus, one has the option of guerrilla biking without a lane, or taking some of the scenic side streets. I like to check out the work going on in frontyards. I see new porches and walking paths going in. A woman reclined beneath a massive arbor of grapes. Is that a Long Island Ice Tea she's sipping? Some of these yards are suitable for getting gussied up and playing croquet to the tune of gypsy jazz. Back on Shields, it feels like the weekend has begun in earnest, and there is that hustle-and-flow feel of Friday. I ride a long, unhurried line south, noting the handiwork on the new Spring Creek bridge, the manicured playing fields of Rocky Mt. HS, the quietude of my old neighborhood, when our girls were small and frolicking, and life was a hazy dream. From Horsetooth on, someone is building a pipeline. More infrastructure to bring tar sands gas down from Alberta? I think of those National Geographic spreads of inky black landscapes where tundra forest once stood, around the Edmonton play - huge swaths of land and its people in the midst of an apocalypse of our own accord.
And finally, Harmony Library. I sit on a bench outside the back entrance, writing. After a while a woman calls out to me from the door, "Is your name Danny?" Yes, I say. "Your wife is on the phone. She says you left your phone, and you took the car keys." She seems upset. Can I use your phone? I ask. "Yeah, hurry, we close in 3 minutes." I make my apologies, saying I'll head home. I check my backpack after hanging up, discover I don't have the keys, then cantor back to call again. The librarian is incredulous that I want to use the phone. "None of us get paid to be here past 6:00." She stares about, wide eyed, looking for some understanding. It will only take 30 seconds, I offer. "I could get in trouble. I wasn't even supposed to let you use the phone in the first place."
On the ride back, it occurs to me that this was justice for not stopping for the Quadriplegic. It didn't matter that I really didn't have my phone. It only mattered that I stop and look. There are people, like the librarian, like me, that will go a mile, but not the extra mile. And yet that's what people need in order to be helped sometimes - that 2nd mile. It is a long ride home, but the overall ride is worth the lesson. The more I put myself out there, the more I will learn. And so I think an overnight sojourn approaches.
Thursday, July 18, 2013
WVO Spiritual Intake
Transcribed from notes taken this Spring, with afterthought inspired on the front porch of the Crown Pub...
Riding home from campus, I spy a car stopped up ahead at Mulberry and Howes. Deciding not to wait - traffic backed up from the train - they drive on through the red light. One block later, I come to a stop, and watch the car behind me cruise on through the red, nonchalantly, not hurriedly.
What is wrong with these people?
The same thing that is wrong with me. Impatience. It is a material thing, like the world around me, ubiquitous and coursing through veins, now hindering, now motivating, now hindering. Not having ridden my bike this week, I opt again for the veggie bus. I think the fuel filter or the veggie oil filter needs changing. When attempting to run on Waste Veggie Oil, the engine begins to conk out like a fat crawdad in its boiling pot after about 5 minutes. The pressure gage on the internal oil filter is nowhere near red/yellow, but I've heard they are notorious for lying. We are driving in the infancy of the greasel engine years, of veggie and diesel hybridization, so this is forgivable. So the Veggie Bus, or as Mike the Mechanic calls it, the Danny Bus, is currently just a Diesel Bus. 10 mi/gal of either WVO or diesel petrol, weighing in at 3 tons. 1984 manufacture with a 2002 engine transplant, and it is often the interface between old and new, or veggie and diesel components, where breakdown occurs. It has required time with a true grease monkey every year, usually in binges. I have burned incense in her in an attempt to bless-a-da-bus, but her irritability goes unassuaged. Real, earnest prayer has not been answered, or else it has. Impatience is a virtue that has indeed taken me so far, but I have found myself going down the wrong path time enough. There's that feeling of being tired after hiking back from the summit, legs tired enough that they fall effortlessly into a barely controlled cantor, hop-skipping over some of the rocks, and falling when I apparently needed to fall.
The bus is a going concern whose internal maintenance is indeed as foggy as that which I myself may require. I waylay those needs for a better day, which brings consequences. No time like the present, so clearly foretold in the past. I want to drive up the canyon a bit, peddle the road's edge, dip my heals in the Holy Poudre, then glide back down and start her up again. There were plenty of times when the engine ran like butter, and I never question what makes it so.
It finally occurred to me that the problem lies within, where, according to Cat Stevens, the answer also lies. I merely needed to adjust my attitude to see what may well be fate. The bus is for sale, but I will continue to admire and be vexed by her, fix what I can and be cajoled by her, all, this time, with patience. Tremulous wisps of impatience simply reflect an impatience about something larger, something uncontrollable, I remind myself. I need perhaps a simpler machine to bring about a simpler mindset, else the other way around. I need the free form of peddling to prune the excess offshoots, unproductive and self-serving. I will take in the impatience of others mindfully, and find new paths, or use the frustration productively. I will learn to weld. If I can't ever sell her, if she is not meant to be passed on to the next, then maybe I can weld a VW bus to the top of her, away on some mountain plot, then slowly, slowly build my home around her. She will occupy my earthen living room space, a nice conversation piece, and privately I can look upon her and continue to ponder the inner trappings. I will bring her flowers, paste novel beer labels to her walls after carefully steaming them off the bottles, and perhaps even brew beer on one of her propane burners, her 55 gallon veggie tank now a fine fermenter. In the winter I will kill the heat, save for her diesel-drip marine heater. I'll make fajitas by candelabra - REAL fajitas - drink a bottle of tart Chilean red to her marvelous complexity and temperament, and read William Blake, aloud, or else Wendell Berry.
Riding home from campus, I spy a car stopped up ahead at Mulberry and Howes. Deciding not to wait - traffic backed up from the train - they drive on through the red light. One block later, I come to a stop, and watch the car behind me cruise on through the red, nonchalantly, not hurriedly.
What is wrong with these people?
The same thing that is wrong with me. Impatience. It is a material thing, like the world around me, ubiquitous and coursing through veins, now hindering, now motivating, now hindering. Not having ridden my bike this week, I opt again for the veggie bus. I think the fuel filter or the veggie oil filter needs changing. When attempting to run on Waste Veggie Oil, the engine begins to conk out like a fat crawdad in its boiling pot after about 5 minutes. The pressure gage on the internal oil filter is nowhere near red/yellow, but I've heard they are notorious for lying. We are driving in the infancy of the greasel engine years, of veggie and diesel hybridization, so this is forgivable. So the Veggie Bus, or as Mike the Mechanic calls it, the Danny Bus, is currently just a Diesel Bus. 10 mi/gal of either WVO or diesel petrol, weighing in at 3 tons. 1984 manufacture with a 2002 engine transplant, and it is often the interface between old and new, or veggie and diesel components, where breakdown occurs. It has required time with a true grease monkey every year, usually in binges. I have burned incense in her in an attempt to bless-a-da-bus, but her irritability goes unassuaged. Real, earnest prayer has not been answered, or else it has. Impatience is a virtue that has indeed taken me so far, but I have found myself going down the wrong path time enough. There's that feeling of being tired after hiking back from the summit, legs tired enough that they fall effortlessly into a barely controlled cantor, hop-skipping over some of the rocks, and falling when I apparently needed to fall.
The bus is a going concern whose internal maintenance is indeed as foggy as that which I myself may require. I waylay those needs for a better day, which brings consequences. No time like the present, so clearly foretold in the past. I want to drive up the canyon a bit, peddle the road's edge, dip my heals in the Holy Poudre, then glide back down and start her up again. There were plenty of times when the engine ran like butter, and I never question what makes it so.
It finally occurred to me that the problem lies within, where, according to Cat Stevens, the answer also lies. I merely needed to adjust my attitude to see what may well be fate. The bus is for sale, but I will continue to admire and be vexed by her, fix what I can and be cajoled by her, all, this time, with patience. Tremulous wisps of impatience simply reflect an impatience about something larger, something uncontrollable, I remind myself. I need perhaps a simpler machine to bring about a simpler mindset, else the other way around. I need the free form of peddling to prune the excess offshoots, unproductive and self-serving. I will take in the impatience of others mindfully, and find new paths, or use the frustration productively. I will learn to weld. If I can't ever sell her, if she is not meant to be passed on to the next, then maybe I can weld a VW bus to the top of her, away on some mountain plot, then slowly, slowly build my home around her. She will occupy my earthen living room space, a nice conversation piece, and privately I can look upon her and continue to ponder the inner trappings. I will bring her flowers, paste novel beer labels to her walls after carefully steaming them off the bottles, and perhaps even brew beer on one of her propane burners, her 55 gallon veggie tank now a fine fermenter. In the winter I will kill the heat, save for her diesel-drip marine heater. I'll make fajitas by candelabra - REAL fajitas - drink a bottle of tart Chilean red to her marvelous complexity and temperament, and read William Blake, aloud, or else Wendell Berry.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Fracking Wind
Wed 3/20
Monday brought a tempestuous wind, albeit sunny, unlike today. Today I have a chill. Today feels vacant, yet hopeful, as I repose once more in the vast space of Loveland public library. Last night's 2nd reading of the oil and gas regulatory ordinance within their city limits was made a closed meeting at the last minute, preventing what would have amounted to a public outcry. But you cannot prevent an outcry, as you cannot prevent the wind, and what it brings. You can hope to modulate, and you may choose to ride the wind to safer ground, or stand and fight, exposing yourself to what may come, hoping that it makes you stronger without permanently weakening your carriage.
But Monday saw me back in the saddle, and I was barely from home when the wind blew me out of my lane and into mainline traffic. It blew my rolled trousers down such that the chainguard caught them and ripped a hole. On North College I set my bike against a sign to roll my pantlegs up tighter, and the wind took my bike down, emptying my mug of tea. Swirling brown and white turned to mud. Nothing to do but brace against the wind and take it on the legs. A runner with a gorgeous German Sheppard greeted me at the bridge on the Poudre, and I was surprised to see water flowing, or else being blown. Last time through here it was a sheet of placid ice, no sign of life beneath. Up past the museum, Daz Bog, and then the long, slow stretch to campus via Howes.
Getting going past Mulberry, I hear a hoarse voice call out, "Got two....in my tires." The wind carries his voice away. I stop - What's that? "I got goatheads. Two of 'em. Make that three. Look at that, why don't 'ya," pointing to the front tire now. "They don't have these up in North Dakota!" I give him one of my two patch kits. He has a story. This man came down from the Dakotas eight days ago. He'd been lured there from an ad promising to double or triple his salary by employing him in the oil fields. What they don't tell you, said he, was that the cost of living in that land has grown astronomically, like in Alberta, Canada, where the tarsands money continues to flow. The rock-bottom price for a small studio apartment in the town he was in was $3500 per month. You could get a job flipping burgers for 40K, but it wouldn't be enough to pay the rent, let alone to have food and other necessities. And there certainly wasn't a value meal at McDonald's.
I dwell on this meeting most of the day. On the way home, behind Lee Martinez Park, a gentleman walking the other way hails me, asks if I have any water. I stop, hand him my bottle, and he guzzles the rest, half of it running down his beard. "I got a thirst that won't quit," he says. "Sorry I drank all your water." I tell him he can likely get some free water at Daz Bog, and I try to give him directions, but he doesn't seem too keen on the idea. It serves as a reminder that we all need water - good, untainted water, and that those in rural areas depending on well water will be threatened if fracking comes to their area. Spills and well blowouts, such as the one which occurred recently in Windsor, point to the haphazard nature of this specific method of gas extraction and its wide ecological and health effects. Sandra Steingraber writes eloquently and speaks fervently on this issue. Theo Colborn publishes on the effect reagents in fracking fluid have on our endocrine system, and they are insidious, acute, and chronic.
The next night, City Council gives the go-ahead for an operator's agreement with our single oil and gas entity, Prospect Energy. Their hidden agenda was the Underdeveloped Area surrounding the Anheiser-Bush plant that would be available to frack, as it lies outside the city limits, inside the Growth Management Area. We also learn that stricter, "good practice" regulations will not apply to their wells inside city limits, enabling them to begin fracking them to boost gas production. The earnest and constant petitioning of our city council since last fall - and some have engaged city leaders for much longer - led to a ban on fracking. Without stringent environmental requirements, and the state regulatory commission appears to attenuate such standards, we've inadvertently enabled this single operator to frack...within our city. That is what is coming on this wind. Sun and clear sky slowly build the proper conditions for the next storm. The agreement which once appeared so clear, mindful of a city's right to advocate for its own environmental and public health when the state or federal government will not, has perhaps been tainted from the start, and full disclosure appears to have been given in such a way that it could pass in slipshod fashion, under the public radar. Expediting the contract with Prospect Energy to avoid a lawsuit, perhaps even to appease our governor, seems to be the order of the day.
So a chill pervades the air on this first day of Spring. I thought the winter would be difficult. It was, but there was also growth. And there are the children, who are also growing and learning alongside us. I must meditate on Camus, through the fickle Spring and surreal political climate. I must read Conrad, whose ideas of how the actions of government and the elite, principally through greed, lead to cultural, environmental and personal ruination. I will return to Rilke, who teaches us that most people shoot for the things that are easy, and we appease ourselves often enough. We even go for the easy side of easy. He writes to a young poet he hopes to encourage that we must trust in what is difficult. That is where we will be tested and refined to spread our ridiculous notions of liberty - for the air we breath, the water which gives life to all plants and animals, and the soil which gives us sustenance.
I spent time today participating in our children's class, one a cultures class, where my son is exploring the martial arts of Japan, and one a mock trial class, where I portray a witness to a murder for the prosecution team. While children are learning, in many a town around our country, just like Loveland, the oil barons and wannabe gas barons plot their strategy to extract what lies under and around our communities, and safety regulations appear to be a minor hurdle. One of the girls for the prosecution is asking a question - What does disallow mean? "It means dis-allowed. As in, not allowed," says the teacher. I would like to disallow fracking until every aspect of it can be shown to be safe within agreeable parameters. If you (Oil Company X) cut corners and pour an inefficient well casing, you should be liable for the rest of your life for the remediation of your toxic spill or emission, including remediating the aquifer beneath you (most shale lies below aquifers), even though the science on that is in its infancy, and alleviating the health effects caused by your lack of vision. If you were actually accountable for such costs, which you externalize beyond the calculus of your operations, you wouldn't be able to afford your method of extraction. Also, you couldn't operate if you were beholden to regulations actually designed to protect the twin liberties of human and environmental health, each of which depends upon and bolsters the other. So much for the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act - fracking enjoys exemptions from all of these, thanks to the EPA, which more and more looks like a lap dog for the oil and gas industry.
Monday brought a tempestuous wind, albeit sunny, unlike today. Today I have a chill. Today feels vacant, yet hopeful, as I repose once more in the vast space of Loveland public library. Last night's 2nd reading of the oil and gas regulatory ordinance within their city limits was made a closed meeting at the last minute, preventing what would have amounted to a public outcry. But you cannot prevent an outcry, as you cannot prevent the wind, and what it brings. You can hope to modulate, and you may choose to ride the wind to safer ground, or stand and fight, exposing yourself to what may come, hoping that it makes you stronger without permanently weakening your carriage.
But Monday saw me back in the saddle, and I was barely from home when the wind blew me out of my lane and into mainline traffic. It blew my rolled trousers down such that the chainguard caught them and ripped a hole. On North College I set my bike against a sign to roll my pantlegs up tighter, and the wind took my bike down, emptying my mug of tea. Swirling brown and white turned to mud. Nothing to do but brace against the wind and take it on the legs. A runner with a gorgeous German Sheppard greeted me at the bridge on the Poudre, and I was surprised to see water flowing, or else being blown. Last time through here it was a sheet of placid ice, no sign of life beneath. Up past the museum, Daz Bog, and then the long, slow stretch to campus via Howes.
 |
| Dreaming of the bicycle pleasures of Jersey shore |
Getting going past Mulberry, I hear a hoarse voice call out, "Got two....in my tires." The wind carries his voice away. I stop - What's that? "I got goatheads. Two of 'em. Make that three. Look at that, why don't 'ya," pointing to the front tire now. "They don't have these up in North Dakota!" I give him one of my two patch kits. He has a story. This man came down from the Dakotas eight days ago. He'd been lured there from an ad promising to double or triple his salary by employing him in the oil fields. What they don't tell you, said he, was that the cost of living in that land has grown astronomically, like in Alberta, Canada, where the tarsands money continues to flow. The rock-bottom price for a small studio apartment in the town he was in was $3500 per month. You could get a job flipping burgers for 40K, but it wouldn't be enough to pay the rent, let alone to have food and other necessities. And there certainly wasn't a value meal at McDonald's.
I dwell on this meeting most of the day. On the way home, behind Lee Martinez Park, a gentleman walking the other way hails me, asks if I have any water. I stop, hand him my bottle, and he guzzles the rest, half of it running down his beard. "I got a thirst that won't quit," he says. "Sorry I drank all your water." I tell him he can likely get some free water at Daz Bog, and I try to give him directions, but he doesn't seem too keen on the idea. It serves as a reminder that we all need water - good, untainted water, and that those in rural areas depending on well water will be threatened if fracking comes to their area. Spills and well blowouts, such as the one which occurred recently in Windsor, point to the haphazard nature of this specific method of gas extraction and its wide ecological and health effects. Sandra Steingraber writes eloquently and speaks fervently on this issue. Theo Colborn publishes on the effect reagents in fracking fluid have on our endocrine system, and they are insidious, acute, and chronic.
| Do we want this in No Fo Co? |
The next night, City Council gives the go-ahead for an operator's agreement with our single oil and gas entity, Prospect Energy. Their hidden agenda was the Underdeveloped Area surrounding the Anheiser-Bush plant that would be available to frack, as it lies outside the city limits, inside the Growth Management Area. We also learn that stricter, "good practice" regulations will not apply to their wells inside city limits, enabling them to begin fracking them to boost gas production. The earnest and constant petitioning of our city council since last fall - and some have engaged city leaders for much longer - led to a ban on fracking. Without stringent environmental requirements, and the state regulatory commission appears to attenuate such standards, we've inadvertently enabled this single operator to frack...within our city. That is what is coming on this wind. Sun and clear sky slowly build the proper conditions for the next storm. The agreement which once appeared so clear, mindful of a city's right to advocate for its own environmental and public health when the state or federal government will not, has perhaps been tainted from the start, and full disclosure appears to have been given in such a way that it could pass in slipshod fashion, under the public radar. Expediting the contract with Prospect Energy to avoid a lawsuit, perhaps even to appease our governor, seems to be the order of the day.
| In the midst of winter I found, within me, an invincible summer. - Albert Camus |
So a chill pervades the air on this first day of Spring. I thought the winter would be difficult. It was, but there was also growth. And there are the children, who are also growing and learning alongside us. I must meditate on Camus, through the fickle Spring and surreal political climate. I must read Conrad, whose ideas of how the actions of government and the elite, principally through greed, lead to cultural, environmental and personal ruination. I will return to Rilke, who teaches us that most people shoot for the things that are easy, and we appease ourselves often enough. We even go for the easy side of easy. He writes to a young poet he hopes to encourage that we must trust in what is difficult. That is where we will be tested and refined to spread our ridiculous notions of liberty - for the air we breath, the water which gives life to all plants and animals, and the soil which gives us sustenance.
I spent time today participating in our children's class, one a cultures class, where my son is exploring the martial arts of Japan, and one a mock trial class, where I portray a witness to a murder for the prosecution team. While children are learning, in many a town around our country, just like Loveland, the oil barons and wannabe gas barons plot their strategy to extract what lies under and around our communities, and safety regulations appear to be a minor hurdle. One of the girls for the prosecution is asking a question - What does disallow mean? "It means dis-allowed. As in, not allowed," says the teacher. I would like to disallow fracking until every aspect of it can be shown to be safe within agreeable parameters. If you (Oil Company X) cut corners and pour an inefficient well casing, you should be liable for the rest of your life for the remediation of your toxic spill or emission, including remediating the aquifer beneath you (most shale lies below aquifers), even though the science on that is in its infancy, and alleviating the health effects caused by your lack of vision. If you were actually accountable for such costs, which you externalize beyond the calculus of your operations, you wouldn't be able to afford your method of extraction. Also, you couldn't operate if you were beholden to regulations actually designed to protect the twin liberties of human and environmental health, each of which depends upon and bolsters the other. So much for the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act - fracking enjoys exemptions from all of these, thanks to the EPA, which more and more looks like a lap dog for the oil and gas industry.
 |
| Duino Castle near Trieste, Italy, was where Rilke began writing the Duino Elegies in 1912--recounting that he heard the famous first line as a voice in the wind while walking along the cliffs and that he wrote it quickly in his notebook. |
To Camus, Conrad, and Rilke I will add Wendell Berry, and while I'm talking about mad farmer/ poet/ philosopher archetypes, I'll throw in bell hooks, another Kentuckian. I guess while I'm at it I'll throw in Jesus. All filled a niche as cultural critics. All spoke about the onslaught of hegemonic control over our lives. All waxed lyrical and mythical in their approach, depicting the profound anxiety which sets in when there exists a lack of communion between us. Each in their own way brings their wit to describe an existential crisis, a spiritual crisis if you will, as the industrial nature of our society increases, and we become increasingly alienated from the Creation.
This whole push to educate and in the process become more educated, to speak out and against, to encourage bravery in our community leaders, began with words. It will continue to be shaped by our words, and so I will continue to seek solace and inspiration in the myriad of voices out there, both present and in text. I will trust that the synthesis will be difficult, as the problems we encounter then and now are so similar and cyclical. Our future generation and our community right here and now depends on us doing this difficult thing, of expressing our ideology of faith and forbearance, but forbearance to a degree, of what is not allowable and what we can never imagine being allowable, and so of acting to disallow, if need be, for the sake of our liberty. What does that mean?
This whole push to educate and in the process become more educated, to speak out and against, to encourage bravery in our community leaders, began with words. It will continue to be shaped by our words, and so I will continue to seek solace and inspiration in the myriad of voices out there, both present and in text. I will trust that the synthesis will be difficult, as the problems we encounter then and now are so similar and cyclical. Our future generation and our community right here and now depends on us doing this difficult thing, of expressing our ideology of faith and forbearance, but forbearance to a degree, of what is not allowable and what we can never imagine being allowable, and so of acting to disallow, if need be, for the sake of our liberty. What does that mean?
Sunday, March 3, 2013
from Rilke to a young poet
Transcription from Rilke's July 1903 letter to Franz Kappus, in Letters to a Young Poet:
My dear Mr. Kappus: I have left a letter from you unanswered for a long time; not because I had forgotten it - on the contrary: it is the kind that one reads again when one finds it among other letters, and I recognize you in it as if you were very near. It is your letter of May second, and I am sure you remember it. As I read it now, in the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, even more than I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noise that makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in the depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon.
If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that - but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don't hate anything....
But the individual can make them clear for himself and live them clearly (not the individual who is dependent, but the solitary man). He can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery - which the world is filled with, even in its smallest Things - could bear it, endure it, more solemnly, feel how terribly heavy it is, instead of taking it lightly. If only they could be more reverent toward their own fruitfulness, which is essentially one, whether it is manifested as mental or physical; for mental creation too arises from the physical, is of one nature with it and only like a softer, more enraptured and more eternal repetition of bodily delight....
Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many) lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it. And don't be puzzled by how many names there are and how complex each life seems. Perhaps above them all there is a great motherhood, in the form of a communal yearning. The beauty of the girl, a being who (as you so beautifully say) "has not yet achieved anything," is motherhood that has a presentiment of itself and begins to prepare, becomes anxious, yearns. And the mother's beauty is motherhood that serves, and in the old woman there is a great remembering. And in the man too there is motherhood, it seems to me, physical and mental; his engendering is also a kind of birthing, and it is birthing when he creates out of his innermost fullness. And perhaps the sexes are more akin than people think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in one phenomenon: that man and woman, freed from all mistaken feelings and aversions, will seek each other not as opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to bear in common, simply, earnestly, and patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them.
But everything that may someday be possible for many people, the solitary man can now, already, prepare and build with his own hands, which make fewer mistakes. Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust. Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children's strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn't comprehend. Don't ask for any advice from them and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
It is good that you will soon be entering a profession that will make you independent and will put you completely on your own, in every sense. Wait patiently to see whether your innermost life feels hemmed in by the form this profession imposes. I myself consider it a very difficult and very exacting one, since it is burdened with enormous conventions and leaves very little room for a personal interpretation of its duties. But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths. All my good wishes are ready to accompany you, and my faith is with you.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
My dear Mr. Kappus: I have left a letter from you unanswered for a long time; not because I had forgotten it - on the contrary: it is the kind that one reads again when one finds it among other letters, and I recognize you in it as if you were very near. It is your letter of May second, and I am sure you remember it. As I read it now, in the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, even more than I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noise that makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in the depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon.
If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that - but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don't hate anything....
But the individual can make them clear for himself and live them clearly (not the individual who is dependent, but the solitary man). He can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery - which the world is filled with, even in its smallest Things - could bear it, endure it, more solemnly, feel how terribly heavy it is, instead of taking it lightly. If only they could be more reverent toward their own fruitfulness, which is essentially one, whether it is manifested as mental or physical; for mental creation too arises from the physical, is of one nature with it and only like a softer, more enraptured and more eternal repetition of bodily delight....
Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many) lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it. And don't be puzzled by how many names there are and how complex each life seems. Perhaps above them all there is a great motherhood, in the form of a communal yearning. The beauty of the girl, a being who (as you so beautifully say) "has not yet achieved anything," is motherhood that has a presentiment of itself and begins to prepare, becomes anxious, yearns. And the mother's beauty is motherhood that serves, and in the old woman there is a great remembering. And in the man too there is motherhood, it seems to me, physical and mental; his engendering is also a kind of birthing, and it is birthing when he creates out of his innermost fullness. And perhaps the sexes are more akin than people think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in one phenomenon: that man and woman, freed from all mistaken feelings and aversions, will seek each other not as opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to bear in common, simply, earnestly, and patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them.
But everything that may someday be possible for many people, the solitary man can now, already, prepare and build with his own hands, which make fewer mistakes. Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust. Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children's strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn't comprehend. Don't ask for any advice from them and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
It is good that you will soon be entering a profession that will make you independent and will put you completely on your own, in every sense. Wait patiently to see whether your innermost life feels hemmed in by the form this profession imposes. I myself consider it a very difficult and very exacting one, since it is burdened with enormous conventions and leaves very little room for a personal interpretation of its duties. But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths. All my good wishes are ready to accompany you, and my faith is with you.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
Thursday, February 14, 2013
A Poem to Look Forward
‘March days return with their covert light’
March days return with their covert light,
and huge fish swim through the sky,
vague earthly vapours progress in secret,
things slip to silence one by one.
Through fortuity, at this crisis of errant skies,
you reunite the lives of the sea to that of fire,
grey lurchings of the ship of winter
to the form that love carved in the guitar.
O love, O rose soaked by mermaids and spume,
dancing flame that climbs the invisible stairway,
to waken the blood in insomnia’s labyrinth,
so that the waves can complete themselves in the sky,
the sea forgets its cargoes and rages,
and the world falls into darkness’s nets.
and huge fish swim through the sky,
vague earthly vapours progress in secret,
things slip to silence one by one.
Through fortuity, at this crisis of errant skies,
you reunite the lives of the sea to that of fire,
grey lurchings of the ship of winter
to the form that love carved in the guitar.
O love, O rose soaked by mermaids and spume,
dancing flame that climbs the invisible stairway,
to waken the blood in insomnia’s labyrinth,
so that the waves can complete themselves in the sky,
the sea forgets its cargoes and rages,
and the world falls into darkness’s nets.
Pablo Neruda
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