Scattered Sprigs of Wheat by K.L.Kivi

”Listening to the heart - following the heart is not the same as following the emotions, wishes or ideals.” So writes Reverend Master Koten in response to my question about the role of discernment in the Buddhist philosophy of letting go of judgement.

Like Luanne Armstrong, in her blog entry “Beat,” I’ve been listening to my heart as well. But it isn’t the physical heart that I’m trying to tune into, it’s that metaphorical heart, the one Reverend Master Koten alludes to, the one that supposed to let me know how to make the appropriate decisions in life. After seven months in Ontario, caring for my ailing elderly parents, I returned home to these Columbia mountains that shelter my kind, and collapsed. I felt like a sheaf of wheat that had had its string cut; the pieces of me have been strewn about ever since, pell mell, in the sun and in the rain. I putter around the land, stopping to catch my breath, wondering at my exhaustion and then remembering: we’re at elevation here and everywhere the paths are steep. Seven months: was that all it took for my body to forget what it takes to live in these mountains? And though my body is out of practice, it’s really my mind that’s given way, relaxed the tight string of the daily demands on a caregiver.

And mostly, it’s okay. This piece of Earth has always received me well. But sometimes
I pause and think: I should start picking up those sprigs of wheat soon, make up the sheaf again. It was in one of those moments that I wrote the Reverend Master. Ten days of wandering from land partner’s house to land partner’s house mewing to be fed started feeling uncomfortable. The least I could do is make meals for myself again. I picked up that sprig of wheat but continued to look at the rest of them with bewilderment. What do I want to pick up? What of my old life feels appropriate? I feel paralysed to make decisions. How does one tell the difference between the desire of the heart and those of “emotions, wishes or ideals” anyway?

And so I listen, not quite sure what I’m listening for. My heart feels naked and lost, bobbing out in the sea with no land or ships in sight. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Lostness is a place of fertile possibility if one can avoid panic. Knowing why I’m lost is helpful. There’s nothing quite as disorienting, as heartbreaking, as watching a parent lose their mind and turn into a kind of child before one’s very eyes. Dementia calls for very concrete action in terms of care, but subconsciously, another process is taking place, re-ordering the known world of my psyche.

Rebecca Solnit writes in her “Field Guide to Getting Lost” that “to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery…And one does not get lost but loses oneself… a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.” So, basically, I’ve come home to the piece of the Earth I know the most intimately in order to get lost. Here, I realize, it feels safe to be lost. Each tree seems like an old, kindly friend. There were very nice trees – oaks, maples, hemlocks, ash, pines - in Ontario; why does this particular forest possess such nurturing benevolence for me?

And so, I give myself over to lostness. Simply. And try to pacify my mind that wants to command this situation – well, to be perfectly honest, every situation. I practice listening, waiting for the metaphorical thumps that make up the beat.

Beat...by Luanne Armstrong

Beat:
Luanne Armstrong

It shouldn’t keep me awake but it does. Thump, thump, thump, ka-thump. Regular, still regular. I check it. I have spent the last year and a half with a heartbeat that went ka-thump, rrr, ka-ka-ka, thump,thump, ka-thump and other variations. If I walked up a hill, even a tiny one, I stopped, waited for my racing heart to catch up to itself.
It’s called atrial fibrillation; it’s surprisingly common, especially among older people. Some people even have it without knowing. Atrial fibrillation is also easy to fix but because I live in the country, because waiting lists for minor stuff are now lengthy in Canadian medicine, and because, the last time it happened, it looked from the outside anyway, as if I could at least still function, it took far too long to get into an emergency ward where under the supervision of a cardiologist, they could attach defibrillation paddles and shock my heart back into regularity.
And then finally they did and I could go back to having my life again.
But now I wait with some trepidation for the damn thing to unshock itself, and go back into stuttering and blipping and stumbling along.
And I listen to it. I would rather not. I lie in bed at night and I can feel my body vibrating in different places. I can hear the blood squishing through various veins and arteries. I don’t know why it bangs so hard at night or even at various times during the day. I talk to my heart; I want it to be contented and even and regular. I soothe it. Things are fine, I say. Life is good. Dear heart, I am happy. (sometimes true, sometimes a lie. I lie to my heart.) I tell my heart anyway, hoping to pacify it. Calm, I think, easy there, like soothing a horse.
The first time it happened to me, I was working at a difficult job and in the middle of a difficult separation. My life was a mess. My kids were almost grown up and leaving home, leaving me. When my heart started blipping and stuttering, I ignored it. I felt it was right I should have a broken heart. In fact, I did have a broken heart. Someone finally dragged me off to Emergency, where they stuck me in a bed, stuck electrodes all over me and forbid me to move. I slept for a while and once the electrodes were off, spent most of my time in the cafeteria, drinking coffee and noodling miserably in my journal until after four or five days, they fixed it and sent me home.
I wrote that experience off until the next time, ten years later. This time I was lying in bed, in the middle of the night, wide awake, worrying about my family, my parents, our farm, which was for sale, my children, and my complicated future. This time my heart gave a sudden lurch and began to stutter and blip like a motor that wouldn’t quite start. Resignedly, I went off to the city, wandered into the local Emergency Ward. There was far less fuss this time, they slapped the electrodes on, knocked me, and sent me home. I walked home and slept for a couple of hours, got up and went back to work for the rest of the day.
This last time, it happened as I was getting out of bed. I was feeling fine. Everything was fine except my heart wouldn’t work. It was November. I had now been at the farm, now my farm, for three years. Every morning, I got up, dizzy, waited for the dizziness to pass, went and lit the fire, fed the cows, came in, sat down, still dizzy, reluctant to move. But then it was spring and then it was summer. There were things to do, things that had to be done, no matter how down-hearted I might be.
All summer, while I stumbled up hills and tried to keep up with the garden, too tired at night sometimes to even be alive, my heart and I discussed metaphors. Weak hearted, I scolded it, half-hearted, broken hearted. It’s my heart, I thought. Why doesn’t it hear me? Why won’t it fix itself?
I wanted to have a full heart, a strong heart, a brave heart, not this foolish stuttering heart that quailed at every effort. I wanted to have my heart in my work, not avoiding it. Somehow I couldn’t keep my mind on work when my heart wasn’t inside it somewhere, chugging sturdily along. I wanted to have the heart of a lion, not the heart of a lettuce.
And then finally, the hospital in Vancouver called, and off I went, yet again, to the smiling busy nurses and the brisk cardiologist and then zap, and home I went with a high head and a heart of what? My heart leapt up—my heart was cast down, a heart made of elastic and electricity. Heart like a wheel on fire. Heart of my heart.
It’s odd to be aware of my heart, as I am, like always sitting in a silent room with a ticking clock, not only time ticking away but the endless motion of things inside me that I would rather take for granted, breath and blood and muscles and decay. In bed at night, I turn over and no matter how I arrange myself, my errant treacherous heart beats in my fingertips, my neck, my legs, swooshes in my ears, whispers, I am here, I am still here.

And so we are.

March Diary: Spring Noise by Luanne Armstrong

March Diary:

March is full of spring markers; one of my most cherished is the first swallows arriving, always so excited, dive-bombing each other, playing in aerial acrobatics. These swallows have already moved on north, the next wave will stay, build nests all over the porch, raise many babies and in the early mornings, as I drink my coffee on the deck, they will sit on the log over my head and gabble swallow talk.The frogs started early as well; now they are a brilliant chorus, not music exactly, but sound that punctuates and swells and billows through the cold spring nights.
We are early with everything this year; it was a dry warm winter and will undoubtedly be a dry and fiery summer. Already the gardens at the farm are dug and ready to be planted. Several people are gardening here this summer, which takes the burden off me and makes the work so much easier. It’s one of the paradoxes of small farming; the more people who are involved, the more work gets done, the more food can be grown, the more people can be fed. There’s a limit of course, but even a few acres of intensely cultivated land can produce an astounding amount of food.
March is always a mixed up month; storms and squalls barrel across the lake, huff and puff, blow away, the sun comes out, it’s hot, oh no, it’s cold again, it’s impossible to put on the right amount of clothes, I don’t need a fire and then I do. It’s too early to plant the garden and then, maybe it isn’t. Maybe the onions can go out—or the broccoli. Or maybe wait.
There is lots of noise in the neighbourhood this month; not just frogs, unfortunately. Last week, I went for dinner to my friends nearby who have now lived here for thirty-four years. They came in 1974, built a house in the woods up on the side of the moutain, and lived there in utter peace until a few weeks ago when the land next door to their house was bought by a man who proceeded to cut down every tree, dig up the ground so it will erode in the rain, park a whole series of ancient travel trailers on it, then he bought a generator and hooked it up to a bank of enormous arc lights that buzz and spark all night. What this man thinks he is doing; what the story is that he is telling himself about his relationship to this place is incomprehensible to the rest of us. He has announced loudly in the community that he is making an RV park with 450 sites. Well, we’ll see.
Neighbours in the country have so much more impact on each other than neighbours in the city. Each noise has a meaning, has a story, and the stories clash, compete with, and contradict each other.
So March has been noisy in many ways. April is here, Easter is next week. I have two hens setting so perhaps baby chicks will appear if the eagles, weasels, skunks, or coyotes don’t get them first.
It always amuses me somewhat that baby chickens and rabbits are symbols of Easter. Apart from their traditional meaning, in previous agriculturally-dependent times, March and April would have been the hungriest times of the year. No food in the garden yet, no fruit on the trees and most of the last year’s storage exhausted, what would there have been to eat? Unlike the abundance of Christmas, Easter is about staving-off-starvation foods, eggs, and rabbits, and perhaps, if you were really lucky, a lamb. Just as the earth is resilient under its burden of noisy human needs, so our once-upon-a-time culture as people of the earth remains resilient in our traditions and our foods.
***
Speaking of culture, my very favourite book this month was called “Intelligence in Nature”, by Jeremy Narby. What became really obvious to me after reading this book is that most of what people believe about the nonhuman world are ideological beliefs, based on very little knowledge or actual experience. Various fragmented parts of the science world are now re-defining what is meant by such words as intelligence, or culture, also a deeply contradictory and biased words. Do animals have culture? Do the swallows above my head in the morning, ‘talking’, what else can I call it, have culture? Do humpback whales, singing, changing their songs, changing the patterns, communicating all around the ocean have culture? Why or why not? The answer is, we don’t know. The answer is, the human meanings of such words are by definition, exclusionary and therefore only applicable to humans. We have no language for what animals do or what we see them do. We have no way to interpret or describe what they do or feel. When I say the swallows sound happy or excited, I am describing my human interpretation of what they sound like.
My friend Kuya tells me that the Buddha said the greatest human illusion is that our bodies end at our skins. I have never felt that way because my body is part of the farm, an extension of it, and every sound that happens has a meaning, not a human meaning, but a meaning that is part of the whole gestalt of existence here. Even the human neighbours tearing up their small part of the world and cutting down all the trees are part of this existence. A frustrating and occasionally, to me at least, maddening part, for sure. From my view on the deck, I get to watch not only the swallows, the eagle on the pine tree every morning, the slow emergence of buds and seeds, but the strange and often incomprehensible panoply of human ‘culture’, whatever that means, whatever it is.

Security by K.L. Kivi

What is the difference between having security and feeling secure? Or is any security nothing more than a feeling? And who do we become, how do we behave, in the face of this presence or lack of security or a feeling of security?

I was recently talking with my brother and sister-in-law about anthropologist Barry Hewlett’s work on hunter-gatherer childhoods (Hewlett et al, 200, Internal Working Models, Current Anthropology, 41:287-297), about Hewlett’s findings that forager peoples tend to have very secure sense of themselves within their environment. Unlike traditional agriculturalists, people from industrialized cultures and everyone in between, hunter-gatherers are much more likely to view their environment as a giving place, trusting that it will provide them with the essentials of living.

Hewlett calls this sense of self an “internal working model” and posits that these models are formed in early infancy based on the responsiveness of caregivers. Since forager peoples tend to hold their infants more than any other human cultural groups, he argues that their sense of security is rooted in the child rearing practices of their community. Among people like the Ake of the African rainforest, infants are held, both while awake and while sleeping, upward of 90% of the time. They are passed from hands to hands, the community taking collective responsibility for the holding of babies. Among the nearby agriculturalists he studied as well as North American families, babies were held far, far less, especially when asleep. And they were held by fewer people. Correspondingly, people from those communities had a less benign notion of the natural world. Overall, they were more fearful of the environment and other people.

My brother was challenged by the notion that security was a feeling and not an objective fact. That foragers, who do not store food but eat only what they find on a day to day basis, should feel secure. And, correspondingly, that those of us who live in abundance and the security of stored food, stored wealth and luxuries, should feel so insecure. “No, no, this is backwards,” he argued. “The foragers don’t have any security. They are not secure.”

“Why then,” I asked, “do they feel so secure and we, who have so much, do not?” And still he struggled to understand everyone’s wrong thinking.

“It doesn’t matter what they feel,” he argued, “what matters is if they are secure.”

But is does matter. If you look around us here in North America, you can see that the feeling matters as much or more than sums in the bankbook or the food in the fridge or the size of the house. In fact, this vast accumulation of stuff beyond what can be used by the possessors might be precisely the outcome of a sense of insecurity. It’s always amazed me how some of the richest people of Earth can feel so fearful of lack, whole industries forming around retirement, insurance, investment and other hoarding behaviours. As Hewlett notes, “internal working models and consequent styles of social relations can generate a diversity of cultural institutions, kinship structures, social roles and sharing patterns.”

Where am I going with this? What does this have to do with sense of place and the environment? Those are my questions precisely. How do these insecure working models of our culture play out? Is greed an outgrowth of the quest for security? If so, our desperate insecurity has a huge impact on the environment. We often wonder how we can halt, change, redirect all the ecologically damaging activities of our fellow humans. If Hewlett is right, that it’s all rooted in the simple act of being held as infants, then we should start, right now, by holding our children all the time and finding others to hold them when we cannot.

But it can’t be so simple. Holding a child. Perhaps the complexity comes into the equation when we start thinking about finding others to hold our children when we cannot. The rich are the only ones who can pay for such a service and often do, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. Could it be more about the quality with which we hold our children and that quality is something that must be cultivated instead of bought. And in the cultivation of a community of child rearing, what else do we cultivate amongst ourselves? Trust, obviously. A community of trust. And does that trust extend out, once established, beyond the cluster of people? Or is the place an integral part of that community of child rearing?

Perhaps this is the point that Hewlett misses in his research: that for foragers, the specific land where they live, is part of their known and loved world. To use a word of Luanne Armstrong’s, they have “agency” within it, ie. the ability to interact with it in a very profound way that it based on skills and knowledge that are generations deep. So the trust is not just from your own lifetime of being held and cared for but from generations of being held and being in relationship to the land. Their trust is not random, but specific, based on the community of land and people they know, and know well. And once you trust someone or some place, how do you treat it?

Hewlett’s premise turns environmental destruction and healing into a psychological issue, with a psychological answer, along the lines of “love is the answer,” and “it takes a village to raise a (healthy) child.” But does that get us anywhere even if we believe it’s true? You can’t make anyone love something. Can you even teach people to love things that they fear? Or make love more important than fear? And even if you could, how would you go about unravelling the insecurity that binds our culture to its collective fears about the natural world?

I’ve long believed that knowledge and agency are key to this question, that we must re-establish our dependent relationship to the land in order to find our way back into the community of land and people which, in turn, will foster the sense of security we so desperately yearn for. And if the process of passing our sense of community onto future generations is better grounded by holding children more, why not begin now? Given our current ecological crises, it’s an experiment worth trying.

Writing about Interbeing: Human/nonhuman Part One

Writing After Nature:
Luanne Armstrong


It would begin with the dogs howling.
“Here he comes, “ my mom would say. “It’s Wally Johnson, the dogs are howling because he smells like death.”
And sure enough, when Wally’s old green Austin pickup rattled into our yard, we would run out to meet him because the back would always have several dead animals in it. We kids would gather around, fascinated as he explained what they were and where he had caught them. Wally was a trapper and his life and his livelihood was animals, their lives and their deaths. In order to track, trap and kill animals, he had gathered a broad and expert knowledge of place, wilderness, animal habitats, animal behaviour and his own survival throughout the winter, snowshoeing from small trapper’s cabin to cabin, living on animals he trapped or shot. Wally was a man of his time and understanding; he loved birds, fish and deer. Everything else, especially predator animals, he believed should be exterminated. Even at the age of seven or eight, I knew he was wrong and I argued with him about it. And Wally, to his credit, listened carefully and gravely to my arguments and then argued back. In Grade Four, I wrote an essay titled “The Balance of Nature,” to encapsulate my arguments. So in an odd way, reaction to Wally was the beginning of my environmental understanding.
Because I grew up on a farm on the edge of wilderness, because my father was a subsistence farmer always fighting with weeds, weather, coyotes, bears, ravens hawks and owls, because my mother loved all animals, I grew up with a contradictory and conflicted view of human-nature relationships. My brothers and my sister and I spent out time when we were not in school, either working on the farm or exploring the wood and lakeshore around the farm. And because as a child I lived far more intensely in my relationships with animals than I did with people, I was never quite sure where my loyalties should, or did lie.

I am still not sure although I am sure that I am not a fan of Western Civilization or the false idea of ‘progress.’ I do think change and resilience are both factors that continue to profoundly affect human nonhuman relationships as well as writing about such relationships.
In my own Kootenay Columbia region of the world, new residents and visitors often perceive this place as a somewhat peaceful near-wilderness. But in fact much of the fish population in Kootenay Lake is artificially maintained, the main rivers all have multiple dams on them, the forests have all been logged and least once and sometimes twice, many of the animal populations are at risk, and environmentalists fight to keep giant ski resorts off the glaciers, methane drilling out of the last few undisturbed areas, private power projects off the smaller creeks. In my own wandering around, in my relationships with the dwellers that live there with me, including wasps, mosquitoes, bears, birds, frogs, dogs, pigs, horses, cows, and one demanding cat, I watch as parts of it change and parts of it stay the same.
These days, I am a part time farmer, a full time writer, and a sort of academic. I write stories and poems and I go for walks and write a lot about the thoughts and ideas that emerge while I am walking around. I also read pretty constantly books about place, or nature or animals. And if I start from walking around, from looking at what is going on with the people around me, as well as animals, both domestic and wild, birds, insects, plants, trees and the interrelationships among them, then the questions that arise connect me both to the local and the global; how we live, ethically, here and elsewhere, I am always both leaving and coming home, always both in a place of discovery and a place of familiarity. I live in a place where there is constant interaction with the non-human world and the contradictions between how both myself and other people interact with this world continue to puzzle, fascinate and confound me. And these contradictions are constantly being made sharper and more poignant both by the growing environmental crisis in the world, the resulting growth of environmental awareness, particularly in the sciences and some other sectors of humanity, and the changing nature of our relationship with the non human world. In fact, as warnings of environmental problems continue from many quarters, the stakes get higher and higher. The environmental problems, if you are paying attention, will scare you into the heebie jeebies, global warming, water scarcity, oil shortages, polluted oceans with giant floating islands of plastic…and even if many of these effects will be mitigated by environmental efforts, there is still enough there to give any conscious person, especially those of us with grandchildren, at least pause for thought.
And some consideration of the irony of it all. After all, what will be the vaunted philosophy of humanity, the loftiness of the human story and the illusion of our superiority if life on earth as we know is undone by something so powerful and mundane as the weather?
Or, as Kate Rigby, an Australian writer who has done of lot of thoughtful writing on this subject puts it:

“…the incredibly complex and diverse matrix of life into which scientists now believe modern humans evolved some forty thousand years ago currently appears to be changing in ways that cannot but seem privative. Pollution, habit loss, global warming: none of this might spell the end of life on Earth; but the tidal wave of extinction that such anthropogenic factors is now engendering surely threatens the particular oikos, the planetary community of living beings into which humanity was born, and to which we owe our evolutionary emergence. Are we then in the midst of our own endgame?” (Issue 39 - 40, September 2006 Australia Humanities Review)

Such warnings continue almost nonstop these days and in the meantime, very little changes, or seems to change, in the modern way of life. So what then is the role, or should be the role, or could be the role of writers in general, and nonfiction writers in particular, who want or choose to write about the nonhuman world?

As Rigby continues:

We are going to need the very best science and the greatest technical ingenuity that we can muster both in moving towards a post-fossil-fuel economy and in preparing ourselves for the potentially catastrophic climate change impacts that are now already inevitable. However, climate change is not just a technical problem requiring a technical ‘fix’. Both in its causes and effects it is also a socio-economic, political, cultural, and ethical problem."

And that is where the writers must, and I hope will, start to weigh in, in bigger andstronger numbers than they have done so far.

walking the lines in February

February: 2010

This has been a strange month full of complex odd contrasts. Today, Sunday, the end of February, although the major earthquake in Chile has been the second item on the news, the first item all day has been – a hockey game. Yes, THE Olympic hockey game between the US and Canada. All month, the radio has been blaring the Olympics, day after day – I tried turning the radio off but I have been sitting and typing with CBC in the background for so many years, it is hard to work into the silence. So it goes back on but at a low buzzy level where I can barely hear it. It isn’t the Olympics that really bothers me, not the athletes, not the events even, or people having fun; somehow it’s an odd sneaky tone of triumphalism that creeps into the media; that says, see, naysayers and doommongers and liberal bleeding hearts do-gooders, the world really does belong to Coke and corporatism, so all you negative people can just shut up. And the thing that made me rejoice about the Olympics is that in some odd way, the people and the athletes took it back from the corporate spin, if only very briefly.

And today, my dear friend Mair Smith is in a hospital in Edmonton dying of thyroid cancer. She and I worked in the Alberta Status of Women together and did other feminist work ; we had long conversations about all kinds of ideas but our relationship changed somewhat after she went to Findhorn and became ‘spiritual.’ And today I sat on the porch with dear friends and had a conversation about how thin are the lines between spirituality, religion and superstition. Mair walked those lines with elegance and, yes, occasionally drove me crazy with her enthusiasm.

Yesterday, I read on some news site online about a woman who is running for governor of Texas who declared that all the government anyone needed was the right to private property, and the right to own a gun. Yes, I can occasionally see the temptation of such simplistic bizarre thinking in which you never again had to think about or consider anyone else.
And all month, I have been dealing with our beloved farm as a piece of real estate, a dichotomy that drives me really, really crazy.

But at least today was sunny. The heavy grey sky lid day after day, that sits over the lake and screens off the mountains, that seals in damp and despair, burned off by noon and I went outside, pulled my baby maple trees out the sawdust and watered them, planted some sprouting apricot pits and went for a walk.
We made a number of decisions about the farm this month, most notably, to invite a couple of our close friends to put RV’s on sites near the beach – a break with our traditional family culture of proud solitariness– but we did it because of money, because a farm endlessly needs money, needs infrastructure, needs fences, barns, pens, tractors, seeds, mowers, and so on. Needs to pay its taxes.
We also contacted a lawyer and real-estate agent and met with both of them in order to finish our subdivision, and put conditions on the sale of the lake shore lot that we must sell in order to buy out our sublings.
We met with the bank loan officer and I drafted a ‘business plan’.

This will all be an ongoing process for a while. And I hate it, loathe it, loathe the concept of land as real-estate. Want to hide from it all. My druthers would always be to leave the farm untouched and intact; to even let it go back to wilderness as much as possible. Instead, inch by inch, we are surrendering to civilization. To roads. To people. To buildings.
Everything we are doing makes sense and it’s all for the best of reasons. The people with RV’s are people who would be visiting and sharing the beach anyway. Our friends. The lot sale has to go ahead in order to save the rest of the farm. The lawyer is a good guy as is the real estate woman.
And it all makes me crazy. This land is not real-estate. It’s my home, a place I only want to protect and care for, a place that protects and cares for me. Not as real-estate, Not as private property. Not as a place that gives me rights or that I would shoot other people to defend.

Nor am I a person who should have to deal with money, real-estate, wills, taxes, contracts, or any kind of paper work,…I am a writer. Right now, I steal time to write; I steal time to work on my presentation on the new nature writing for the Banff nonfiction conference, the presentation I didn’t give last year but that is good because I have actually done a whole lot of work and research on it. I have a new YA book jumping at me, but not begun, a sequel to the last one. I am going to the coast in March to do research on the ethics of nonfiction book. I am almost done a series of essays on land issues. It all creeps along far too slowly, in among meetings and teaching and anxiety.
At night I huddle over the computer, watching BBC Mysteries, falling into them as if falling into a pool of deep water, wanting only distraction and escape.
This is a world which makes it endlessly hard to walk in balance, where contradiction lurks in every corner, where values shift and change, where the future lurks like a menacing shadow, and even a two week Olympic binge, however distracting it was, only staves off that shadow for a brief period.
How thin are the lines we balance upon. How deep and wide the contradictions.

Thinking our own thoughts by K.Linda Kivi

The Olympics, the Olympics – everywhere I turn, it’s all about the Olympics these days. And every time I hear the word, see the marketing gadgets and junk, am confronted by the media madness over this sporting event, I do my best to turn away. Not to react, but simply to refocus my attention elsewhere.

I have no gripe with competitive sporting events per se. The Olympics were designed, after all, as an alternative to war, so that humanity could work out their aggression and desire to dominate in a peaceful forum. The concept is good but, unfortunately, not highly effective considering the current state of armed conflict in the world. As for what the Olympics have become, that’s a discussion I’ll leave to other commentators.

The act of turning away from media imposed mass events, is something I have been practicing for many years. It is the manifestation of my desire to nurture human cultural diversity. On a personal level, I call this choice “intentional complexity”. I invented this term, in part, because the path of “voluntary simplicity” that I was on didn’t quite describe why I was attempting to free myself for the constraints of wage slavery and consumerism. Heading off in the direction of simplicity, I realized was more a method than a desired result. Simplicity is good, but what is it for? What am I after?

What I want is a life in which I can be fully present, of mind, heart and body.
I want to be ready for the adventures that unfold of their own volition as well as the ones I choose. I want to make choices as unfettered as possible by what is expected of me in a culture that doesn’t inspire my enthusiasm. I want, like Luanne, in her Feb. 9 blog entry, to be in service to the Earth. I want the richness of being able to listen, to hear and to respond.

Natural historian David Quammen writes:
“More and more in recent years, we are all thinking about the same things at the same time. Electromagnetic radiation is chiefly responsible; microwaves, macrowaves, dashing and dancing electrons unite us instantly and constantly with the waves of each other’s brain... Too much “conscious unity of souls” is unhealthy, probably even pernicious. It yields polarized thought… with everyone smugly in agreement that such-and-such matters are worth contemplation, and that the rest by implication are not. Such unity is a form of overall mental impoverishment.”

Quammen’s own personal “battle against homogenization of mind”, has lead him to get rid of his television set and to explore nature. He encourages people to take a day or hour every month to think about things that “nobody else deems worthy of contemplation”. Thinking and writing about sense of place and peasant culture fits the bill nicely. Who, except me and a handful of kindred spirits, cares? And what point does thinking and writing about these things have?

But the point is precisely that I care. And I care deeply. At this moment, there isn’t anything else I care about quite so deeply. This must be a luxury in our modern society; to be able to say that I spent the day thinking about the subject that is most vital to me. However, I have no illusion that my mind is entirely my own; mental ruts await the tired wheel of my brain at every turn. Nevertheless, I am on the project of trying to think my own thoughts on both mundane and more elevated matters. This, in turn, leads to the creation of my own works of art and craft, experimentation with food instead of always following recipes, even attempts to transform social interactions.

But then I think: isn’t intentional complexity just another trap to get us to focus on individuality instead of collectivity and interconnection? After all, in peasant and forager cultures, many people must have been thinking about similar things at similar times; the weather, the soil, the animals in the forest, how best to weave the fabric, how to heal the cow’s udder, whether the fisher, the farmer, the hunter, the berry picker, the child, will soon be home. However, they thought these thoughts in their own local dialects, using their own unique internal languages, based in the small, but meaningful variations of plants, animals, landforms and culture that each village represented. Their thoughts were part of an ongoing dialogue, millenia old, with the elements that formed them and the objects they formed. And they did not think only of practicalities and survival, but of innovation and philosophy, justice and spirit. They engaged with the unknown, seeking not definitive answers, but engagement. They spoke with the owl in the tree because it was there in front of them. They gathered in sacred places because it felt good and necessary to celebrate their connection to land, that specific land, with friends and neighbours. Perhaps a few hundred or a few thousand overlapped in their thoughts at any given time, not hundreds of millions, as often happens now.

How did we get from there to here? Using my own Estonian heritage as an example, the cultural awakening in the mid-19th century caused what had been a culture of engagement with neighbours and land, to evolve into a culture with a different purpose. People began to learn the same songs and eventually read the same books. Freedom from serfdom was the point. Homogenization of language began to accelerate with the widespread introduction of schools. The loss of regional Estonian dialects has happened within my generation. My aunt, who was fluent in Mulgi murrak, is now long dead, and though my cousins can understand the dialect, they do not speak it. Her grandchildren recognize a smattering of words and phrases. My father’s murrak is rusty at best. I know only a half dozen words. Worse, I had trouble understanding my aunt, even when she spoke in high Estonian, because her local intonation was so pronounced.

How pronounced is my local intonation? Can it be known from my language, my body, my thoughts, where I come from, which land I belong to? Are my thoughts a link between me and the land, between me and those I share the land with, between us and other diverse peoples in places farther away? Or are they merely manifestations of media mogul manipulations in places that are un-places? Is there room in my life for the wonder of wandering through the recesses of this oft over-glorified human brain of mine, for the pleasure of engaging with the Earth place where I belong, for the magic of giggling with friends from the bottom of my truest self? All of this serves interconnection of the truest kind, the kind that involves self-defined individuals and diverse communities coming together to share the best of themselves. Wasn't this the original point of the Olympics as well?