In Loving Memory of a Tree

In Loving Memory of a Tree

The visions begin to appear in the early 1990s: A green hill, standing alone in the blue sky. 

I sketch it, draw it, weave it. By the end of the decade, I have moved to this place, a clearing in the rainforest with a view of this hill out my window.

Called Cham-oh-Tee by the local native peoples, the “butte” is currently forested and surrounded by valleys. This butte is rocky, not forested, on the top, unlike most of the basalt buttes in the area. You can see all around for at least a hundred miles from up there. 

So it was sacred to native peoples, and later special to the European settlers, who got the town together to buy the land in the 1920s and preserve it from logging and save it as a city park. When the hippies arrived, shaman wimmin rededicated it to sacred status with crystals, ceremonies, and songs. The song, “Mother I Feel You Under My Feet; Mother I Hear Your Heartbeat” was received there.

But it was not always forested. Before the European invasion, Cham-oh-Tee was surrounded by open meadows. The natives managed the area for hundreds of years by burning the surrounding forests every couple of years to keep it open for hunting and gathering. The tradition may have gone on longer than that before fire suppression in all cases became the only policy: One old timer, Arnie, confessed to me that, as a boy, back in the 1920s, he and his brother had set fire to the butte to “burn out the rattlesnakes”. (Not that that would have worked, since snakes like hot rocks.)

Recently the city added chiseled steps to the trail to make the most difficult part of the hike near the top easier for more people. Helicopters lifted in the specially cut stone steps. It is part of a campaign to encourage everyone to stay on the trail and not trample the vegetation by taking short cuts. It is a well loved hike.

Every day I look out my window and check out the many moods of the butte. Sometimes it is capped with a downy comforter of cloud fluff, other days its rocky top is all I can see above the misty fog of morning.

So it is indeed a shock when I wake up one day to see something very different.

The little tree grew from a crevice toward the top, nestled eight or ten feet below the flat rocky perch at the tip top where climbers like to sit when they hike the butte. It was a cute little sapling, maybe three feet tall, when I first noticed it around the turn of the century. 

But I noted that in the year 2006, it had grown taller than the rocky summit. I noted the symbolic auspiciousness of this slight shift: for the first time in who knows how long, the tallest thing in town was not rocks, but a tree!

I kept quiet about my observation, telling only a few trusted friends. The tree was still small and vulnerable. But as the years passed, the tree grew tall and strong. People began to hike up to it at Christmas time and hang a few ornaments on it. It was something pointy and alive instead of flat and dead that I could see from my window every morning. It was, by now a good two stories high.

Then, one morning this year, around Valentine’s Day, 2021, I looked out, and it was gone! I was not the only one, apparently, who cared about the tree, for social media lit up with the chatter at once. Some speculated that it was done by selfish photographers who missed that 360 degree panoramic photo opportunity from that spot. Tree experts pointed out that someone had to have hauled a chainsaw up there, and criticized the bad cutting job they did.

But no one could miss the symbolism. In these tense days following the failed coup attempt in Washington DC, that had just taken place, and the history of forest mismanagement here, it could also be seen as an act of ecosabotage, political violence.

Police opened an investigation, but closed it a few months later, saying they had no leads. City leaders looked into planting a replacement tree, but were told it was a rather unique and irreplaceable circumstance that led to its survival and thrival, and probably that would not work. This was a very special tree, they said, that can make it in the harsh conditions in which it arose. Some proposed that a bench be built out of its wood and put up there in its memory.

History lurches back and forth. We had fifteen years of the tallest thing in town being a tree, then, back to the stone age. 2006-2021. 

But we love our trees, and only our love will survive. Change is a constant, and this forest is slated to burn. The changing climate will be too hot for the type of trees that grow here now. Fire will naturally come and clear the way for a type that will thrive in the hotter, dryer, conditions we are moving into now.

“All our wisdom is stored in the trees.” -Santosh Kalwar

Health is the Only True Wealth

Health is the Only True Wealth

I guess my immune system is out of practice after this last year of isolation. When I am fully vaccinated against the Covid 19 plague, I sashay joyfully out into the world and boom! I get dropped unceremoniously into my bed, laid low by who knows what. But not covid. An unrelenting fever for weeks. A myriad of lab tests. Never had such an experience before.

I have heard stories of creatives who put out masterpieces while confined to their sickbed. This is not me. I never lose my desire to do all the projects I have going, but the energy to actually do anything is just not in the building.

At such a moment, you weigh how important these projects even are, really. You start to think about telling those around you what to do with your stuff if you drop the body and have no need of it. You realize that this stuff will outlive your body.

One thing I can do is be grateful for what a supportive web I have around me. You find out who loves you. You don’t regret any of the love you have given, made, and shared.

I get weird and phobic, not knowing which thing I did might have caused this awful disruption in my body’s ability to do its miraculous day to day balancing act. If I ever get better, I will never do (whatever) again!

It helps to cast out a line of hope into the future. I see myself, many years from now, doing this or that thing to which I aspire. Then I anchor to that place and let it reel me in.

Sometimes, says my friend, it is nothing you did. There is group karma, the hazards of living on a sick, disrupted planet. It is not lost on me that while I am suffering the longest fever of my life, my side of the continent hits the highest temperatures ever recorded. Completely off the charts. With hundreds dropping dead all around with heat stroke, it seems trivial to note that this is also the moment our home energy efficient heat pump air conditioning breaks down.

Everything is connected. We have to fix the whole system. This means personal day to day choices, and group decisions to create shared systems of life support that are healthy.

We can do this. It is simple: All we have do is want to, decide to, and insist.

Some Actually Do Not See Color

My friend Saturn reared two daughters and now has grandchildren. But long ago she lived in San Francisco as a teen, and in various other places all over California, such as Santa Cruz. It was there she met Cosmic Lady.

Right away she saw they had a lot in common. They were both confirmed cosmic hippies. They shared long conversations about space aliens and their help and intervention in our world in these times of crisis. They shared a joint when one would come around the circle. Neither cared much about gender definitions and acted and dressed as they pleased. In many ways they noticed they shared a deep soul connection.

And, they both had beards. Yes, scraggly little goatees like some wimmin have, but most assiduously remove, one way or another. But both Saturn and Cosmic Lady always wore their beards proudly. 

For Saturn, it was a way of showing solidarity with oppressed people. Male hippies could grow their hair long and thus be ushered into the ranks of discriminated-against people, but young hippy wimmin were more likely to find themselves the object of interest by men in power, for the better or worse. So wearing the beard was Saturn’s way of showing she too stood with oppressed people. In all of her years as an ovulator, she never, not once, trimmed it or cut it off. Once in a while someone would walk up to her out of the blue, and thank her for wearing that freak flag.

And also the beard was a statement that appearance was not important. (Years later, she asked her grown daughters what it was like to have gone through their teen years with both a father and a mother who had never-cut long hair and beards. “Oh you raised us to be proud to be weird,” they replied. “And we collected friends who were also proud to be weird.”)

Saturn did notice some differences, though. Cosmic Lady was twice her age. That was unusual for such a kindred soul and friend. And though Saturn lived on a rainbow hippy bus, she was relatively more grounded in the material world than Cosmic Lady, a wandering astrologer, mystic, and seer who seemed to have no home address, and carried only a small satchel filled with her writings and prophecies, that she shared with pretty much anyone who would listen. And she smoked cigarettes; so it was not a huge surprise when twenty years later, Saturn got word her friend had left the planet due to lung cancer. She had never seemed all that attached to being here anyway, except to warn everyone by sharing her special knowledge of things to come.

Also, Saturn regarded her friend as a sort older version of herself. But she was vaguely aware that Cosmic Lady was attracted to her in a different way. She realized only later, that Cosmic Lady was either lesbian or bisexual. That was never obvious to Saturn at the time.

And there was one other difference, one that Saturn only noticed, for the first time, much later, forty years later, in fact, when she found an old glossy color photo that Cosmic Lady had sent to her. At the time, Saturn had noticed the very cool outfit Cosmic Lady wore in the photo. She was dressed in head to toe rainbow tie dye, standing next to some rainbow art.

Suddenly, in the middle of the night, Saturn had a realization. Never had they talked about the subject. It was not avoided, they could talk about anything. It had just never come up. Seems odd now, in this identity obsessed culture of today; but this was forty years ago, late seventies, early eighties. She knew nearly nothing about where Cosmic Lady came from. Her accent, or lack thereof, implied she was from California. That subject also never came up, as they were living in the here/now, and the future.

But it all added up. The dark brown skin. The big salt and pepper Afro, that of course, just grew like that, with no help from beauty parlors. They were, naturally, hippies. 

Cosmic Lady...was black! Saturn, a blond haired person of Scandinavian descent, had literally never noticed this, no, not ever.

She had at the time, black and brown friends, with whom she talked at length about rights, discrimination, and oppression, sexism, racism, and so on. They identified as black or brown, so Saturn saw that. She grew up in an activist family. Her mother, in fact, was a political science professor who taught, among other things, courses called “women and politics” and “black politics.” 

But contrary to what you may have heard, it is true, she realized. You actually can be colorblind, not see color, and not ever categorize people by so called race. 

What To Do About All This Noise

What to do When Noise Bothers You

“Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no trouble, noise, or hard work. 

It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart”-Lady Gaga

Dogs Barking:

   Time to get up, do a different thing, do the next part, break the pattern, take care of chores

Lawn Mowing, Noisy Yard Machines, Loud Trucks and other Vehicles, Airplanes:

   Remember the planet is on fire. Ask yourself what you can do to help stop climate catastrophe.

Explosions; Gunfire (if you live in a rural area; if in a city, call police):

   It is the sound of Shiva, destroying illusions. Throw your illusions on the fire and be grateful to be free of them.

Unwanted Phone Spam Calls:

   This is your mindfulness alarm. Set your phone to a pleasant chime sound for calls not on your contact list, and regard the sound as a reminder to pause from whatever you are doing and spend a few moments meditating.

Cat Mewing to be Fed, or Baby Crying:

   Feed cat. Pick up baby.

People Talking on their Cell Phones in a Public Place:

  This is a call for love. Send out love, to them, to your loved ones, to the world. The world always needs more love.

Loud Parties at the Neighbors Place:

   Time to play your favorite music or watch a video

Sudden Internal Tinnitus Tones:

  This is a signal to center yourself in all space and time. Feel your consciousness expand out in all directions to infinity and into eternal time. Know that you are forever at home, and you are located in the precise center of the universe. 

There is no such thing as silence. There is only inner peace.

Why NOT to Go All Vegan

“Know that one day your pain will become your cure” -Rumi

For starters, it is because you cannot. Most people today are not capable of merely willing themselves to be healthy on any diet they decide in their mind is best. Maybe there are a few highly advanced yogis like that. Eventually, your body will complain if you impose your beliefs on it without considering its needs. Some people can, and indeed do, have such powerful beliefs and will power that they literally kill themselves by depriving their body of the nutrients it needs. More often, this kind of ignorance leads to disease.

People evolved with the ability to respond to changing conditions and food availability. But it took generations, and the mechanism was that you died if your body was not getting what it needed, so you did not end up passing on your traits to the next generation. The people who coincidentally had genetic traits or spontaneous genetic innovations called mutations that could adapt to the new diets and available food sources did survive to reproduce, so here we are. 

Would a person try to be vegan and then go back to animal foods out of mean spiritedness? No!  People go in with loving high minded intentions, but things go wrong. Their bodies tell them to go back to animal food. Some people thrive on more animal sourced food, others have genetic traits that enable us to thrive on plant food. Some must have sea food, other body types can process the fats they eat into the nutrients they need.  

These facts have led people to believe, with great devotion, in the world view that supports the diet they are best suited for. People who have tried the vegan diet only to persist in it far beyond their body’s ability to thrive on it, evangelize ferociously to warn others against the mistake they consider their vegan diet to have been. They contemptuously scorn the clueless kale eaters who unknowingly kill the field mice in the wheat farms from which their vegan pancakes are grown. Newly minted vegans walk around with a superior attitude, bludgeon you with shame, and seem to think they have all of the answers. And we old vegans can hardly stand the smell of cooking animal food.

Some of us do fine without animal food. And it is understandable that whatever genetic variations one has, you know viscerally, you feel it in your body, that the food you live and thrive on is good and healthy, and that other stuff is surely out to kill you. You just want to warn everyone! 

And you find a way to rationalize whatever you are doing. I remember so clearly from my meat eating childhood how easy it was to completely separate my awareness of killing the cow from the yummy steak on the plate. And eventually it does dawn on vegans that our food does not grow in natural food stores; our plant food, like any other food on the planet, is connected to many other systems. And it is complicated.

Whether you eat plant food or animal food, you are participating in systems that cause harm to beings. Is is much more important to consider the how of it all than the what.

The fact is we could have a society today where no one would have to eat animal food. Because we now know how.

But does it make sense? The answer is a resounding no! Not at this time, not quite yet. At least until more general environmental healing and repair happens. The reason is climate change. We need animals, in ethical farms, to save us all right now. Cows and livestock are not inherently bad for the planet at this transitional moment. Not if regenerative soil practices are used. They don’t have to be water hogs, they can actually restore the rains, heal the drought, and bring back the trees and streams, and halt global climate catastrophe! (Check out the documentary film, Kiss the Ground.)

Now, I would personally not want to eat meat or dairy, and obviously we would not want to encourage anyone to eat meat at all. But for those who want to stay with some kind of animal food, it is actually needed at this time, but ONLY if done by regenerative farm methods.

Becoming Veganish

That is why we need a new word, coined by me, “veganish”. Veganish concedes it is impossible, on this gross level of this physical world to never harm other beings, so it focuses on doing the best we can with where we are and moving forward to do better. If you drive cars, live in a house, even ride a bike, you are using animal exploitation products and harming habitat. If you even breathe, you are killing small beings!  

Regenerative farming, forming ethical relationships of partnership with animals are a way of moving forward. Farming algae oil instead of fish. Ahimsa leather. Mushroom leather. Sustainable systems of energy and infrastructure. Learning from nature and natural systems. Veganish is a direction, a process, an aspiration, a deliberate intention. The rules are not absolute, but instead the goal is to move toward harmlessness, even if perfection is impossible at this level of this world. It is a philosophy, a way of life, and a political movement.

And no matter what kind of natural traits you were born with, you can become veganish. To be veganish is to consider how to live in ways that help systems of support for your body, and seek to avoid harm to your fellow beings, your environment, and your planet. 

If you are eating a meal of plant food, how and where is it grown? Is it from a mega farm with row crops that have destroyed the habitat of the creatures who once lived there? Or a small farm that shares the space with them? Is it from an agribusiness that destroys topsoil, creates erosion, uses fossil fuels and releases more climate catastrophe gasses into the atmosphere than cow farts? Or a small scale diversified nearby organic farm that builds soil, partners with animals and bugs and adds to the local well being of everyone around?

If you are eating milk or cheese or eggs, do they come from a source that looks like a factory and tortures, enslaves and murders your fellow beings in a toxic chemical hell? Or that small scale diversified organic farm where the needs of the animal is considered and met?

And what about the male offspring of those chickens or goats or cows? Are they turned into veal, fertilizer, or even feed for other animals? This is an uncomfortable question! In the past, there was no satisfactory answer. It was just a grim fact of farming. You had to just accept that you would have to kill those unwanted males, grit your teeth, rationalize it somehow, and then chop their heads off. Death is just a part of life, you would mutter, shaking your head.

“If you think eating meat is just a personal choice, you are forgetting someone”  (-unknown)

The Lab Test for Earth Repair

But today, in this age in which we accept all kinds of laboratory interventions, there is an answer. Most farm cattle today are conceived by means of artificial insemination to produce predictable gene lines. Sex selection is already in standard practice. Sex selection is also now possible with chicken eggs, before they hatch, so an excess of roosters need not happen. All that is lacking is the willingness of farmers, and those of us they feed, to demand it be done like that.

For those people who must have seafood to be healthy, and that is a lot of the population, we already have figured out how to make those essential fatty acids ourselves, in laboratory conditions, by growing selected algae. Instead of killing fish, raking the ocean floor like a clearcut, and imbibing mercury contaminated creatures, you can now get the food that fish eat to make those nutrients directly. You can buy this algae oil at your natural food store.

Soon, there may also be a way to get those actual literal animal tissues and fats, cloned, and grown in a lab, indistinguishable from a murdered meat product, without harming any animals, at your local food store. Before you dismiss this as just being another form of factory food and therefore, bad, consider those big brown eyes of that beautiful peaceful cow, looking at you with trusting love. I dunno. I would probably try it if I still had craving for meat, which I do not.

In a further step, a laboratory test today can reveal to you which genes you have, and save you the trouble of imposing your beliefs and concepts on the “soft animal that is your body” to quote Mary Oliver. You can now find out ahead of time, before you get health problems, which foods you would do best eating, and which ones you ought to minimize.

“When diet is wrong, medicine is of no use. When diet is correct, medicine is of no need” -Ayurvedic proverb

Or you can listen very carefully to your body. And your mind. And your heart.

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves”

Mary Oliver

Rainbow Viral Fiber Art

The Omniart Notebook

The Rainbow Viral Geometry Fiber Art Project

When I started this project a year ago, the whole world was in the beginning stage of the first truly global pandemic in modern times. Never before had an event affected almost everyone in the world before, (although certainly a good case could be made for the advent of the almost universally available cell phone.)  Many did not realize how long things would be quite different at the time. Some thought we would all hunker down for a couple of weeks. But as weeks turned into months, people realized that not only would things not go back to “normal” soon, that indeed, they would be changed forever in some ways, some even for the better. 

Families realized that they enjoyed hanging out together with their children.

 Couples either found out how compatible they were, or not. 

Working from home was proven to be workable in many cases, and may never again be seen as an unusual option.

 People came to value simple things they could not do, like hugging loved ones. Cooking at home got better. 

And I started a commemorative art project. 

It does not attempt to address the suffering, trauma, and death of the pandemic, only the appearance and geometric form of the virus.

 But it is only loosely inspired by the pictures of the structure of the virus itself.

I added the rainbow aspect. 

I knew I would be at home in the art studio for a long haul when I started this covid art project. So it is a big, ambitious piece. 

It has continued to grow over this past year. 

Like the virus itself, it has continued to mutate. At first, all of the “spikes”were uniform in size and shape, but as time went on, I added new forms, shapes, and sizes. And this diversification continues.

Like the pandemic, it is not finished yet!

Regenerative Farming to Save the Climate

Regenerative Farming to Save the Climate from Catastrophe 

I have been studying about regenerative farming for the past few years and lately the science has been quite conclusive. 

This is the synopsis of what I have learned from a multitude of sources:

Regenerative farming can heal the planet from climate change, according to scientific proof available today. 

Dead soil, caused by chemical industrial agriculture, is releasing stored carbon in soil. This is a major contributor to climate catastrophe. Up to forty percent of our heritage atmospheric carbon is there because these toxic agricultural processes have released it in the past few decades. These slash and burn type practices, as farming has often been done in years and centuries past, farming a spot of land for a few years, exhausting it and moving on, has greatly depleted the soil as well. But healing is possible.

This first was addressed on a large scale in the dust bowl years in America, when the landmark soil conservation act was passed in congress. They were debating the act when its sponsor pointed out the window of the capitol and dramatically said, “here it comes now”. Indeed, at that exact moment, as the lawmakers looked out, the sky darkened with a huge brown cloud of dust. It was composed of the soil particles blown all the way from the dust storms in the western states, arriving just in time to make his point. That persuaded them to pass the bill. The bill rewarded farmers for planting cover crops, and other soil conservation techniques. We may be able to build on that start.

Later short sighted profit hungry chemical based industrial scale agribusiness came along and poisoned the air, water, and earth. Part of the damage was to sterilize the microbial community living in the soil. These actions released lots of carbon into the atmosphere. To repeat, up to forty percent of the carbon out there now came from this kind of destructive agriculture. 

But the really great news is that by reversing these practices we can revivify the soil, prevent desertification, even create up to two centimeters of new soil per year. The old dogma was that it takes two hundred years to build up that much soil. But ceasing to poison the soil microbiota, and instead, protecting and nurturing them, and planting green manure, (which is like a “cover crop”not animal poop, btw) we can reverse the loss of productive soil on Earth, feed all of the people, and reverse global climate catastrophe!

 Even desert sands can become productive using these methods. Scientists now estimate that up to ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the excess carbon in the atmosphere today can be sequestered in this simple way. Plus, it is no more expensive for the farmers to use these methods. It simply requires shifting to different ways of doing it. 

Moving grazing to fields in timed rotations instead of feedlots, composting, multi plant “cocktail” ground cover planting, mulching, and reducing or eliminating tilling are the methods that are demonstrated to restore the beneficial soil microbiota, retain moisture, mitigate temperature extremes, protect pollinators, fortify crops from storm damage, produce abundant harvests, and yes, pull the excess carbon out of the atmosphere in huge quantities. And, in so doing, by the way, we can stop poisoning the air and water too.

It turns out that those biodynamic and organic practices of small scale and traditional old time farming are now the proven key to saving the world! We hippies were on the right track when we went back to the land to dig the soil, man. The scientists are starting to take notice and it is time for policy makers to act on this timely issue.

We don’t need energy intensive nuclear powered high tech factories to suck carbon out of the air, we don’t need to block out the sun to slow warming and sabotage our needed transition to solar power. If you are banging your head on the wall over and over again, the first thing to do for your headaches is to stop doing that, not take ever stronger and more toxic painkillers.

In addition to the very important need to advocate for policy change, just eat a plant based diet that supports your local organic farmers. How you eat, what you eat, and how it is grown, is perhaps the most important daily contribution you can make to healing the climate. An official United Nations report says that only small scale diversified organic farming can feed all of the people.

If they need something constructive to do, let the apparatus of industrial chemistry be turned into a solar power manufacturing industry. It is currently just a byproduct offshoot of the dying fossil fuel industry anyway, and needs to be repurposed.

“Plants removing carbon from the air is, in fact, how the earth’s vast coal deposits were formed.” 

- Mark Shepard

There is a new documentary movie about this subject, where you can find out much more, and also there are links to get involved. Check out Kiss the Ground.