Desperate Pleas For Help

 After several trips through the most lily white rural communities, my quarantine partner said, I don't want to live around a bunch of people who think Deceitful Traitor is a viable option. I have begun to think of him as Dodger to the fourth power, meaning he's a tax, draft, truth and responsibility dodger. It helps to understand who thinks what. To morph "being smart enough to not pay taxes" into we should elect this clown is a heinous crime against humanity. He's a criminal and he is the head of a criminal enterprise, his fabricated "wealth", just an elaborate shell game meant to con the casual rube. Under investigation, the veneer cracks and peels and The Donald shows his hand.

His only weapons are to lie or point the finger at someone else, most often when he is guilty of whatever the transgression is, himself. The point is, we desperately need to find ways to help people across the gap, between accepting a racist liar and seeing the real facts about the boss in charge. People often cling to their hate, as James Baldwin wrote, because on some level, they know that as soon as they abandon it, they will have to experience pain.

When I see evidence of  support for this terrorist-coddling Gong Show Reject, I see it as a call for help, another reason that mental healthcare needs to be covered under the same, single payer healthcare system as our teeth, our hearing and our eyes. Folks, it is globally, time to put on our proverbial adult pants and get down to work. We can blame our parents forever for leaving us a steaming pile of shit, but it wastes time we need to be spending doing the things that work. When we broaden our perspective, it helps understand the depths to which our very communities have been hollowed out. Their only value now exists on paper and shifts dollars far, far away.

Blessings.

RBG

 My industry, the now defunct entertainment industry has known RGB since the advent of color tee vee. Sadly, we lost a Supreme Court Justice who has become known as just three letters, RBG. The most cutting insult, FDR, JFK and MLK are just a few more to refresh your memory. I have never heard of RMN as a replacement for Richard Millhouse Nixon, or either Bush distilled down to just three letters. A lifetime of challenges met and to be reduced to three letters, it is almost laughable if it were not so sad. The fascist regime that has always existed just below the surface in our nation. Interestingly, the Kluxes were reduced to three letters, bu tin their supposed "anonymity" they thought themselves absolved of their transgressions. Heck, come to think of it, they didn't even see themselves as transgressors, oppressors never do. One thing that remains very strong in our culture is the concept of, don't speak ill of the dead. In Ruth Bader Ginsburg's case that surely makes sense. She served as a beacon to hundreds of millions of womyn, letting them know that their educated and compassionate opinions actually counted as much as their male counterparts. Instead of using three colors that blend in our eyes, she shined the bright light of prudent truth on more decisions of substance than many of us confront in a lifetime. Her contribution to our nation cannot be overstated.

It is insane to allow a new Justice to be seated when Senator "Moscow" Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on President Obama's nomination. Our racist and fascist power brokers are in the desperate death throes and are grasping at anything they can to prop up their decrepit lies. The majority understand that "All men are created equal" meant something completely different nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. The oligarchs are only using the racist network that exists, the institutionalized racism to continue their fight against the impoverished.

When we look to the future, we don't need more people who like beer and throw fits sitting on our august bodies in halls of justice. We need more people who behave respectably and whose credentials and ethics are beyond reproach. The fact is, any valuable traits to have as a judge, the current Administration hates. They want opinionated idiots who bought their way through law school and have, for the most part avoided prosecution for deceitful fraud and tax or draft dodging. We have a current President who pardons war criminals, accuses the innocent and defends the guilty. We need a full Court system of honest Judges, people who believe in our nation and the Constitutional Rights that so many have fought and died for, not conspiracy theorists, gun fetishists or religious zealots. If we let the current idiot-in-charge pick the next Justice, it will be like inviting homegrown terrorists to inflict their demented holy war on all of us. 293 days Obama's Supreme Court Justice Nominee sat on Moscow Mitch's desk. Racist did all he could to stop the Black man from doing good for our nation, but now that we have a dyed in the wool, genocidal racist doing the nominating? Let 'er roll!

The early reports have four Republican Senators saying that they will not vote for a replacement until the new President is sworn in. At least a portion of our leaders exhibit some level of morality and ethics.

The fire will burn tonight in honor of RBG!

Good Trouble

 As far back as I can remember, People called me many things, a handful, outspoken, rambunctious, inquisitive. All of these names had some affect on my future behavior. Many people who become stagehands (ie theatrical technicians) have spent their life trying to bend the limits of various rules and social "norms". Not necessarily because we want to, but because creatives almost always test limits, check out what is going on in the bowels as well as center stage. Monitoring and taking delight in the subtle contributions we can make to the whole performance. Because we literally hide giant things in plain sight, we also learn a lot about perception. When I was a younger man, there was a "groundbreaking" study that found eye-witness testimony is often unreliable and extremely subjective. It seems the often, we see what we want to see. Looking at each moment as a challenge, every rule as an opportunity to express a creative sidling up to limits, makes life more bearable for those who are often made to follow regimented protocols each night, day after day, often for years on end.

Good Trouble lets you stand out amongst your peers. Quick wit, paired with deft hands on the levers and knobs of the industry's tools can make or break whether you get called back or not. When you help express an emotion, or are the cue for the audiences response, it is extremely heady. My first pro-peace action was handing out literature about the Vietnam War and talking to Green Bay citizens Downtown, by Prange's about how important it was to bring the soldiers home. I got in some Good trouble when I announced to the children of my neighborhood, at age four or five, that calling Fat Mary, Fat Mary was mean and that they needed to call her by her real name. I didn't realize how good the trouble was for many, many years. I knew that part of that girl was hurting, but I wasn't sure what it was, but her name could have been it. Sadly when she said, "What's wrong with that? It's what my Mom and Dad call me." my blood ran cold and I remember running home almost as if I was outside my body, hovering over myself.

Other times I got in good trouble, my voice quaked with emotion, when I spoke. I have held many a protest sign and walked many miles to call attention to crucial issues that have been put on hold for decades. When we lost the fight against the Rocky Flats nuclear reprocessing facility, whose radioactive plume can be seen here:

Even though we organized and gave dozens of presentations about what the potential risks were, we never really took our work to the Good Trouble level.

This top image shows the radioactive plume that left the site and continues to spread, nearly fifty years later. Just a reminder, these images are post seven-billion dollar Superfund clean up. The bottom map is from 2005 but, not to worry, the half life of plutonium is only 24,000 years. This second map was created from soil sampling, so the surface is contaminated and some decision-makers are pushing to develop even closer to the site than has already been done, moving more people into closer proximity to an invisible threat to their health.  

I have long felt the need to share more about my experiences, if anyone has questions about my experiences in Denver, or what I knew about Rocky Flats in the mid-Seventies, I would be happy to share more. If you are one of the people who saw the presentation, or are continuing to protest for healthier and more efficient technologies than the nuclear fallacy of fossil free energy, let me know, I would love to continue to have open discussions. Getting in Good Trouble requires that we continue to do what we can to spread truth instead of lies!

Beginning 90-day Challenge

 As we continue past second harvest and into winter's grasp, I am striking out, anew working to spread the knowledge our ancient ancestors taught one another before the advent of written language. I recently made a campaign device that helps spread the inner philosophy behind my campaign for Congress. This may not have happened without joining many others in their commitment to projects of their own. In my tradition of using as much obtanium, as possible, cast off items that were corporate throughput or made to eventually garbage that results from planned obsolescence. This is but a wrinkle in the fabric of the net that captures larger fish. Upon a Popsicle stick, perhaps the ultimate obtanium, (you can't have a Popsicle without it, but from the start it is doomed to be waste, just like the packaging.) I made a saddle, like a tent sign of paper and I made a re-useable business card for my campaign. People can pass them on, and on, and on. Since my platform has been the same since age seven, many truths have come to light. A large number of my posts are speaking to those issues, but upon this tiny note reads:Saladino 4 District 8 True Security Debt-free Education and Healthcare End Corporate Welfare!
The back side reads:the URL for this page and my phone number. I have stood on the front porches of several hundred thousand people across Northeast Wisconsin, talking about Environmental issues mostly but also, working on get out the vote campaigns or campaigns of local interest. Using an item that would normally be trash, but that has been wrought by human effort begins the process of catching those bigger fish. Instantly, the recipient can be informed of the source. You don't do that typically with business cards. I have made thousands by hand, but each one is a one off and it shows. All share the same messages. If they could each fit my platform, they would be at least the size of a postcard, but rather small print, but to understand it, you must read and understand the Earth Charter. 

The Earth Charter is a document that lays out the basic strategy to which we must all lean to create hope for the future being tenable for our species. I do not like gloom and doomers preaching so I won't either, but when we know the score, but refuse to admit time is running out on the clock, I scream FOUL! It is a crime against humanity to either throw up our hands and say, "We're fucked, it's gonna happen no matter what." especially when we know what works. We need to do everything we can to make the best of what we've got and in our world. We've got more of virtually everything than anyone who ever existed for most of human history had before. What we have today, all the world's knowledge at our fingertips, running water, fossil fueled slave machines, these are all new to humanity. Stretching back over nine thousand years ago, there were guys teaching others to grow twice as much produce from their soil, sequestering carbon and improving soil quality for millennea. Before the advent of written language, human beings taught one another how to do this. I teach the old ways, using modern technology.

                                                                    Campaign patches!

My three months, which two weeks has passed already, is turning into a bigger deal than I ever imagined. Not only did I commit to making ten kilos of char, but recording the process of all the steps required to make top quality biochar. With the intent to make a video series of short steps to take to get the best results. My motivation is that I have watched dozens of online biochar videos, spent dozens of hours watching the ways people try to teach about it, and in each one there were several things that were not covered, incompletely expliained or just glossed over. Potentially fatal flaws if someone has not yet understood the goal. My videos will showcase the need for understanding the idea of strength through diversity and that the best biochar fulfills the needs of the greatest number and more importantly the greatest variety, types and kinds of microbes. This in turn boosts the CEC of the soil, making nutrients and minerals available to plants, but also mediates and moderates extremes, which is essential in destabilized climates. This has implications depending on how many local sources of nutrients you can find, or produce onsite. Locally available technologies, feedstocks and nutrients are literally money in the bank. I want to get across the importance of emulating soil in as many ways as possible. 

A am putting together a team for getting the film done and my book is nearly ready to publish!

MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment)

Some of us heard that Deceitful Traitor was bragging about taking this test. It is a single page, and can be administered in about ten minutes. The purpose of the test is to determine whether someone should be able to take the city bus alone, or to be otherwise left unattended. It can help determine whether someone has had a stroke or other lapse of consciousness. The results of his test are not being released. This test is freely available over the internet and how the scores are allocated, are clearly defined for anyone who wants them. Sadly, the person  with their finger on the button  can't be bothered understanding the test or why it is given, he just answered the questions "and some of them were hard..." Yes, there is a new book out about what sort of heinous creature inhabits the White House, but anyone who had been paying attention has known for decades that this guy is like King Midas, but with shit. He bankrupted not one, but two casinos. Perhaps this explains his abject misunderstanding of money, his penchant for filling Administrative positions with incompetent people who are hell-bent on destroying the institutions they are in charge of. The level of contempt that this Administration has for the rule of law, civil society, education and basic humanity has never before been seen in such vibrant, sweeping technicolor. Under this traitor, teargas was used against peaceful protesters for a photo-op, in front of a church that did not want him there. Flagrant bombast aside, these are crimes according to the Geneva Convention, too heinous for war. Does it make it better if it is moms and dads? Children and elders? Mayors or Governors? Fascists always accuse others of that which they are guilty. Thuggish, terrorists in riot gear need to step off! They need to understand, we are petitioning for redress of grievances, something guaranteed by the Constitution.  The federally prosecuted arsonists from Minneapolis have all been privileged, white nationalists with allegiance to proud boys and/or boogaloo ideologies. What they are charged with need to be subject to hate crime enhancement because their activities were perpetrated specifically to reflect badly on the people who were peacefully in the street to work for qualitative change. Destroying their neighborhood will surely affect the neighborhoods negatively for generations. Crimes are being committed under the guise of "protests" that have nothing to do with the actual protesters. Seriously, even the Federales admit that the peaceful protests are not even on their radar, they are protecting the Federal Building from the arsonists who come out between three and five am. All dressed in their own riot gear, masks and paramilitary garb, all matching, all black. No peaceful loving person would waste money on that sort of gear.

If there is a test to determine if someone has a shred of humanity left, that is the one Deceitful Traitor needs to be given.

White Ghosts

The uberwealthy are invisible to themselves. Living the same sorts of lives as their neighbors, or the contacts they surround themselves with, they look just like everyone else. The confident supporters of their lifestyle look just like they do. It is perhaps not politically correct to use the term today, but WASP is what they called it when I was young. White Anglo Saxon, Protestant. Part of what allows one to see is contrast. Inhabitants of the wealthiest of class, never mingle with commoners. "Traffic" is something interesting to look at if you take a helicopter to the office, or perhaps the name of a PBS series that taught you more than you wanted to know about heroin, but it made you feel like a better person to have learned about it. Traffic is something a guy you pay deals with if it must be dealt with at all. We called their predominantly female offspring Debs, short for debutantes. This was long before the Karen epidemic. The boys stayed home to become investment bankers or day traders like Dad. We never really had a name for those guys, they were not of our world. The privileged have always been rather invisible to themselves.
When recent pandemic relief funds were authorized, of course most of the money would go to companies that had long-established relationships with banks, because you could call up the folks you knew and set up an appointment, or perhaps even do the deal over the phone, we can e-sign documents now-a-days! Jeesh, I wasn't even thinkin' and I'm trying to talk about it! This is how sneaky wealth can be. In my state, Wisconsin, 58 of the states 72 counties are below average per capita income and the vast majority of per capita wealth is concentrated in just eight counties. Vast swaths of territory poor, and just a few concentrations of wealth. Sadly, per capita figures do not raise the floor for the impoverished, it just busts the immense wealth bubble that keeps the impoverished "in their place", for a few, allowing elite status and power for a tiny segment of the population. The top five percent own more wealth than at any time in history. On the last day of January, 2020, it was reported that Jeff Bezos made $13.5 billion in just 15 minutes the previous Thursday. Using per capita income, that is as much as more than 507,061 people would make working for an entire year! Until we begin to attach real life understanding of how vacuous the wallet of a fat cat actually is, we will never get impetus toward sensible and fair taxation. 
Imagine if you will, that in the fifteen minutes we just spoke of, the invisible hand of the state was skimming off 70% of everything over a certain amount and for the sake of perspective, we will say that earlier in the month, his income had already surpassed the amount that would kick his earnings into the highest bracket. He would still have four billion, fifty million to call his own, as much as more than 152,118 people working in Wisconsin would make ALL YEAR! That is more people than live in the entire city of Green Bay, I'm sure that he has no understanding of his vast wealth. No perspective to fit it into, no rational support for the unfairness inherent in his blatant robbery of all of us.

Trash in the foreground picked up by conscientious citizens. Trash pile in the background has been providing toxic blight to our city for generations. Billionaires benefit, the poor, who live, breathe and die in this neighborhood develop black lung.

We go on allowing the ultrawealthy to exploit what is left as if they will one day develop a conscience. If not now, when? If not us, who? The Koch empire owns interest in over a mile of riverfront property in my city. This is just one of the ways they choose to spend their money. My guess is that some of the companies they own have relationships with banks. I can be pretty sure they get subsidies and tax breaks as well, for making my city a slum. We humans are perverse creatures when whole portions of our culture can be in a status of out of sight out of mind. My eyes are attuned to the White Ghosts of the billionaire class who own the rest of us. We are allowed to search for crumbs that fall from the edges of their gilded tables.

Dancing Storms

I have always watched the skies, learned their ways and been excited to know as much as I could learn about all the parameters of climate. This probably got a huge push to a more scientific understanding because of Mr. Paul Hayes, my science teacher for the brief time I was at Fort Howard School. He got the help of the janitor to mount a weather station on the roof of the school, along with a pair of mirrors so we could observe the station from the classroom. It was pretty ingenious. We would take measurements with the sling psychrometer and got to know the feeling of moist and dry air at a range of temperatures. As far back as the late Sixties, I began to get a clear picture of how different storm fronts would move and what winds from different directions typically brought with them. Even the cloud formations, in my mind could help show what to expect in the coming hours or days. One of the most important things I learned, so important in fact, that it was taught all the way through college, is that high and low pressure cells were RELATIVE pressure. Highs did not mean, necessarily a numerically high number, just that compared to the surrounding atmosphere, it is relatively high pressure. You could have low pressure, surrounded for the most part by very low pressure, and it would still be designated a high pressure "cell".

By the time I learned the science of this, there was also great focus on the fact that these cells typically follow patterns, rarely would pressure cells stall for great lengths of time, nor would they ever gain enough strength to cross the Equator. Much of what we thought we knew about our planet has changed to the point of being wrong now-a-days. The old weather maps showed a series of highs and lows that would be, for lack of better words, slow, relatively steady and somewhat predictable, because the cells would alternate, high, low, high, low. Today, there can be a three lobed cell of ultra low pressure that covers the country from the Continental Divide at the Rocky Mountains, all the way through the Piedmont and into the Northeast. Three super low pressure areas, combined into one huge "relatively" low pressure cell. This would have been incomprehensible in previous centuries. We have already had more than twenty years to begin grappling with the "new normal" and so little was made of the first cohesive pressure cell crossing the Equator, a few years ago, it seems that most meteorologists were not paying attention in class or asleep on the job. I get it, now some conspiracy theorists might say, "Or, they were told not to talk about it." I'm nearly positive that this is not it. Think about it, if your job is to come into everyone's home every day and tell them what to expect, reporting on what may prove to be climatically catastrophic might not be the best way to remain on good terms with them. Not everyone has to be told not to bite the hand that feeds them either, so even if there was some sort of conspiracy to keep it quiet, it was ineffectual. Science documents this sort of thing and there is not a cover up, just lack of attention being paid to the planet and her processes.

This brings me to the title of this post, the weather observation I made this morning, looking at nearby radar, 09-07-2020 between Sheboygan and Manitowoc. Storms had been traveling from Northwest to Southeast overnight and just before sun up, they were tapering out, near Lake Michigan. Just North of Sheboygan, they seemed to hit a wall, stack up and intensify greatly. At that point, the entire storm front stopped (from a speed of about 30 MPH)  and remained stationary for about an hour, then began to very slowly drift back to the Northeast. What had been slowly moving, spotty  cells overnight not only got stronger just before the heating of the day began, but also, grew in size and intensity, poured down heavy rain as it did this little stutter step before heading back up the coast. This back and forth movement is peculiar. We have seen more and more of what is being called "training" storms (ones that, like a freight train develop over a location and continue develop and "run" over it for hours. We have also seen extremely intense storms stall and create record downpours, but this combination of forward, stationary and then, nearly opposite direction movement  is something I have not seen. The first time I saw a massive thunderstorm remain stationary overnight, it was eerie, as if the end of all I had learned had come and All I could do is blink, like a deer in headlights. A week later I got to see first-hand the damage that was done to Wyalusing State Park by that massive downpour that parked over the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers. That night, in July of 2007 I had a clear view to the horizon upstream of Portage and could see the top of that thunderhead stationary all night long. It truly felt like the end of meteorology as I had come to know it.

All of these new oddities we are seeing are due to climate destabilization, nothing more. The atmosphere is like a giant rubber band, or gelatin surrounding the planet. Long, long ago, the largest source of energy was the Sun. Now we routinely burn fossil energy to power our machine slaves. All this energy has to go somewhere, there is no away. The majority flows into this weather producing atmosphere. What dance step that energy fuels next is anyone's guess.
 

Hello Its Me

Todd Rundgren said it so well, so long ago. I think they called him Runt back then. Now, he's old, like me. When one bursts on the scene, or attempts to command their image, as opposed to letting others make their own images up about them, it may seem pretentious. In saying this, I am, on the one hand throwing a bone to those who will shout "narcissist", but also trying to peel back some of the layers of problems we have developed by simply making our minds up about what the world is, without getting to know it. Finding that "me" inside us is fraught with challenges. Who has not, at some point, heard Thomas Hobbes' theory that "Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."? Nearly four hundred year old ideas, survive in our culture, whether they are adaptive or not. My point is that each of us has more to offer the world than any privileged white guy who has been dead for hundreds of years! We can distract ourselves with history, or we can use it to help open our minds. Just as Hobbes could not fathom the supreme privilege that he was provided, or how it shaped his thinking, Charles Darwin could not either. If he had, perhaps the popular saying about his theory would be "survival of the luckiest".  I touch on this misconception periodically only because it is so important to remember.
The net of words we get to use for conceptualizing the world is only possible because we more or less agree on the meanings of those words and accept them as adequate labels and parameters for observable fact as well as the occasional thought experiment for those who may be particularly ingenious. What I am trying to represent is beyond words, but so much a part of who we are, it almost defies our ability to define it. Another popular cultural concept is described by the German word schadenfreude. It is the joy and sense of  delight experienced at the bad luck, failure or injury of another. In describing "me", there would need to be a word for the opposition of that and as far as I know, my language can't convey that concept. All good teachers can tell you the feeling is real, although it might be difficult finding even a dozen words to pull out the concept. When a child learns, there is a pulling back of the curtain moment and they are in awe at the grand design. Teachers get a thrill from seeing that opening, the integration of new mental territory and knowing that by just that one person being turned on to learning in that one moment there is hope for all of us. Everyone could be better off if there were more of this. My utter delight and supreme joy arise from making the world better for everyone.

WI-08

To find myself, I went back as far as I could in my own life, piecing together, putting things in their place; their order and progression, like how and why I turned out left-handed. I remember the afternoon and the way the light fell where I sat, across form my father who was bound and determined to teach me to tie my own shoes. I looked at hundreds of old photos, thought back to the day they were taken, where we were, who went with, what I learned. I took the time to revisit my memories of the colorful art on my nursery wall, how the light fell across that room in the early afternoon, the music that accompanied different events in my life. I took the time to re-live my feelings of excitement when I got my first hammer, how proud I how I felt when my sister came home from the hospital making me a big brother and how I learned what I knew of the black sheep in our family and other often overlooked experiences that, in total shaped me, informed my "reality" and guided my actions and beliefs.

Understanding who we are, eventually requires us to take a long look into humanity and the collective traces those who came before us have left behind. Much of what we are taught, or know about exist outside ourselves, but seeing ourselves in relation to that larger world also helps define what we can know about who we are. The history of us, the strange race called homo sapiens is in large part who I am. Ontogeny repeats phylogeny. I have spoken of a concept before, in an earlier post, that was shared with me by a trained spy. Imagine this image: Two pairs of cones, one larger diameter and one smaller, nested into one another. The other pair the same, and the apexes of all four, touching at a single point. That point is now. The small cones represent limited knowledge of history on the one side of "now" and limited possibilities (opportunities) on the other. Limited choices caused your blind spot that developed because of limited knowledge and awareness. The larger cones represent a more full knowledge of history, on one side that opens to more, diverse and greater possibilities (opportunities) in the future, more possible correct paths, more choices, perhaps far better options than one would have with a limited or truncated scope and world view. I reflect on this often, especially when in my studies feel boring. It helps inspire me to keep learning and growing so that more and better choices will be possible.

This "Me" that I would like to display has changed little since I was age seven. I think I was fully aware of these things before that, but was not yet self aware. The person I would like to display to the world was the field dependent child who sucked up information like it was going out of style. This becomes more interesting when you understand that in many ways, it actually was. While I was growing up, I moved more often than I had birthdays and my best friend through all of it was the Colliers Encyclopedia. Now, with more information in the palm of most of our hands, than there was at the libraries at Alexandria, we seem to make our decisions based on the whale song of social media and clamoring hearsay. I was the child who as soon as I got permission to play at the other end of the block, where "Fat Mary" lived, I went down there and got the attention of all the kids on the block, yelling to get their attention, I said, calling Mary fat is mean. She was mean and I had a strong feeling that she was mean because she was abused and neglected. As a small child, I'm not sure I would have had the words to say all that, but I definitely felt it. Mary's response chilled me to my core. It confused me, it angered me and I actually felt pathetic for thinking that I could improve the world for others. She said, "Why shouldn't they call me Fat Mary? My Mom and Dad do!" Then, everyone went back to playing as if nothing had happened and I went home. I cried a little bit along the way. I think I told my mom that I didn't want to play down there any more. I remember having a mother that understood that it was important for me to process that sort of thing. She talked to me for a while about the experience. That is when I began to learn that we don't all share the same reality. I may have been four. I ended up going back, at Mom's urging and trying to make friends several more times, but nothing ever went well at that end of the block. One kid I thought was my friend drank gasoline. If I had not run to his mother, they said he could have died. Even as a very young child, it seemed like the rest of the world was set for self-destruct.

Little things never seemed to bother me, perhaps I was too busy struggling with bigger issues.
That is a large part of why I have paid particular attention to the history of biochar.
Going back nine thousand years, understanding that what language we shared had not been written down yet, knowing that people were teaching one another this valuable skill, a mixture of art and science, a six step process that took at least six weeks, really makes one appreciate who we all are as a species. Knowing that human beings, much like us were cooperating to change the quality of soil, so they could all enjoy a better life amazes me as much as the benefits of using it. Biochar sequesters carbon and doubles crop production. It protected both ground and surface water quality back then, just as it does today. I'm also positive that even today, making soil healthier and better gives meaning to the entire human species. We have had this as our common human heritage for 360 generations. Building soil may be the most significant human activity we can participate in. I know that it puts me in a state of meditative and sublime bliss bordering on ecstasy. All six steps require a prayerful emptying of our selves of expectation and it allows you to touch geologic time when you do it well, so that's pretty exciting too!

At Least Fourteen Fewer Wisconsinites Will Enjoy Summer

Please forgive me for not writing much about the covid-19 pandemic until today. I could not really grasp the enormity of what has been going on until I saw the data. Something clicked in my head on the Summer Solstice. I watch the statistics being put out by Wisconsin's Department of Health both the "new" (identified or some prefer the term "confirmed" cases) in the realm of science, it is important to note that thirty percent of "negative" tests are people who are actually infected and contagious. That is why testing alone is not any sort of remedy or silver bullet.
I have considered becoming a contact tracer, that is a huge need right now. If people want to work, this is going to be steady for a while! At least until we get a vaccine because in the U.S. of A. our population has proved that "we" Amerikkkans, can't get together for anything. If and when I get sick, my contacts have averaged less than six people per two week interval and at this point, most of the same people are in a group half that size. Remember Eighth Grade Sex-Ed?  In case you were not listening, they said that if you had unprotected sex, it was as if you had sex with all of that other person's partners. This, is just like that, but instead of having to "do the nasty" or even be intimate, you just have to breathe the same air or touch the same object. The most amazing thing is that I learned all of this from hippies, decades ago. Don't touch the thing to the thing is easy. You can teach anyone who has reached the concrete operational stage of growth what that is, but our breath is invisible, so it takes a higher level of cognition to "get it".

Best Fireworks Ever!

It really hit me hard when Summer Solstice rolled around this year and the deaths from covid-19 in Wisconsin that day just happened to be fourteen, it began this cascading wave of emotions highlighted with realization. It was as if there were a large volume of water that was super chilled and ready to freeze, and that as each ice crystal formed, it sparked another photons worth of understanding. More than 750 people have died from covid-19 in my state alone. That number is lower than reality because some people never get tested and as two of my friends experienced, stroke after covid-19 becomes more common, you still are said to have died from stroke, but the stroke was caused by their bodies trying to heal from covid-19, so IMHO they are covid-19 deaths.

If you know anything about Wisconsin, you may know that we have effectively about three months to swim. We may have liquid water for more than half the year, but most of that time, just the coldness of most of that water will kill you if you are in it too long. We relish the Summers around here and the more than a dozen folks who will not get to have the joy of summer really started to help this virus "appear" in my mind's eye. That does not even include the loved-ones who, when family reunions are allowed again won't see their relative there, will not have had a chance to grieve their loss. We have had two deaths in our family since stay-at-home orders were imposed, it feels like there are holes in my soul where those loved-ones were, those human activities that we are missing out on, the not being allowed to hold the hand of a loved-one as they pass, not being able to comfort or ease the passing in any way is perhaps what I fear most. I could get sick, die or recover and it would not be as important as the fourteen people who passed on that day. Here I was, trying to pull up the first-ever world-wide streaming of sunset at Stonehenge and more than a dozen citizens of my state were lost due to shameful ignorance about this virus. For many, our families are like boats. They support and protect us when times are stormy or rough. When you can't be closer than six feet to them, it feels as if there are gaping holes in the hull of that family. The turbulence that it once protected us from is being allowed to seep and squirt, gush and flow in, swamping what used to keep us afloat.

Feeling the weight of just one reality, one day of the death toll, multiplied the nearly one thousand times was bad enough, then I had to realize that Wisconsin is just one of fifty states, ours is one of nearly two hundred countries on the planet and we are less than six months into our experience of global pandemic. The fastest a new vaccine has ever been produced was for mumps, that took four years. Please, stay home, wash your hands! Glove up! Wear a mask in public and consider eye protection as well. I truly love every single one of you and want you to be able to enjoy as many summers as you can! One thing that helps me greatly is to think through different events and contact points you may have with the outside world.  Think about them before they happen. When you go to the drive through, you could glove up and have a sanitizing wipe at the ready to wipe down the outside of the container. I always wipe my card with sanitizer when it comes out of the reader. I often touch only the gas pump with my left hand for instance, that way I only have to wear one glove. My own car I am willing to touch with the un-gloved hand. In fact, I only touch it with un-gloved hands, that way it helps me to make a distinction between what I have and have not touched from elsewhere. If I make a mistake and touch it with a gloved hand, I go back and wipe those surfaces down with the sanitizing wipes. These sorts of brain teasers gain value because when you think critically about certain things, it helps one to see more clearly at other scales and to develop broader perspective on a variety of issues.

Finally, we can always create a new economic system that serves us better. We can't bring back the dead.

Covid-19 Dreams

Humans from around the planet are in their second month of quarantine. Many parts of the world are subjected to near constant stress and adrenaline flow, with nowhere to "run". Half of our fight or flight options have been removed because, where would we run if we could? The entire world is on lock down. Stories of people in resort towns asking their summer resident tourist populations to stay home, because they do not have the hospital facilities to deal with sick people who might bring the contagion to their bucolic communities are just part of the crisis. Small towns are often stuck between fear of visitors (foreign to their lands) and the need for their money, especially in resort areas, but they always value their health and safety and tend to err on the side of those things over cash. We hear of locals fearing anyone Chinese in towns, villages and cities around the nation. Vandals feel the need to attack the property of many who have lived among them peacefully for decades. Here in the Western Great Lakes Region, in my town, there is only one Asian restaurant open, for take out only. The seem to be following strict protocols for maintaining public health and safety. It is one of twenty or so that were in business before the Covid-19 pandemic. The next closest place to get Asian food during the pandemic is in a city with slightly better educated, slightly more wealthy and slightly more conservative people on average, a town forty minutes away. Reports of open hostility and racist attacks toward and against people who "look Asian" have become common in the Trumpworld that America has turned into. However, it seems, some people are waking up to the fact that his lies only lead to dissolution and death.

I do not want to belabor the waking lives of racist attackers, their overt ignorance or the stupid knuckleheads that cultivate their misunderstanding, lies and hate, that is for other posts.

They fear us because we have no fear

I had a dream...
Last night, Earthday night, which I have celebrated for fifty years as the highest of holidays, right up there with Mayday and Sowen. I dreamed of a social event where people gathered to watch the screening of an inspirational movie about ways we can help the planet to heal. It was not a high budget fluff piece made by a Pollyanna Director and big money corporate backers to placate people into a more submissive attitude, but a true guide to living more lightly on the Earth. There was no dismal sub-plot based on conceited derision or callous and jaded cynicism, no. The movie was an artfully expressed field guide to exemplary behaviors that transform culture as well as honor community. It was about making decisions that respect humans as well as the planet, exploring how much enough really is and helping to re-define investment and profitability in new ways that are sustainable rather than chic and faddish.

The movie was being shown in a large room, the capacity of which may have been several hundred. Typically when I have gone to events like this, IRL (In Real Life) a smattering of people come and they sit in knots of perhaps a half dozen in each. A concentration of perhaps two dozen individuals move to the "best seats", ten to twenty rows back, near the center and a few couples or single people sit apart from the groups as well, most of them along the aisles, in preparation for beating a hasty retreat when the showing has finished or so they can leave if the information portrayed is too horrifying. Fifty years on, the environmental movement has been whittled down to the precious few who deeply honor the healing properties of unmolested nature, those who are committed to environmental awareness, ecological sanity, human rights to a cleaner world and environmental justice. In the dream, it was pouring rain outside and when I arrived, it was early so I staked out a place where I would be out of the way, able to maintain social distance and where I could bail out if the "crowd" got too "close".

As the theater filled up, I noticed everyone trying to maintain about ten feet between each of them but for a few couples who I assumed were sheltering in place together and I took heart in the fact that not only had a reasonable number of people come out, but that they were maintaining at least their attempt to keep the space safe for everyone. Even with these spacial relationships, there were several times during the film that I felt compelled to get out of the space. I would quietly get up and move to the door, exiting and breathing deeply in the warm, moist, night air. I could feel the stress of being near so many people, perhaps as few as fifty in a space designed for several hundred. Breaking the plane of the doorway felt like renewal and relief, even though what I really wanted, the information in the film, was to me, like nectar to a honeybee; the fear of the audience was also overwhelming. On one such trip out, I reached for the exit door handle and looked up to see that I was arm's length from our  Mayor, Eric Genrich. He was also leaning in toward the crash bar on the exit door and we nearly collided. He was leaving too but he seemed to be leaving for good. I really like this guy in my waking life and have seen him at many, many informational gatherings in the days, weeks and months before he became Mayor. He seems to be open-minded and responsive to many of the same issues that motivate me, so I feel in league with him on many levels.

Often in dreams, our vocal cords are paralyzed. This was the case at this "moment" in my dream. I wanted to say something, anything to him but could not. As we walked out, I held the door for him and stood mute as he walked into the steely and steady rain.  

Timeless Treasures

As many of my long-term readers know, rather than trying to speak only about topical issues that seem important in this moment, I try to record messages and information that will remain important for all time. That is why I have gone back into human history, further back than the development of written language, to recapture and rediscover the art and science of biochar. It is why I felt compelled to share it with my readers. My six posts from over two years ago, each one indicated by a one word title beginning with the letter "M", have taught many people the nearly lost technology that we call biochar today. If all that we are familiar with passes, there is, perhaps, one thing that could be the most important to understand, it is how to make and use this ancient material. Human ancestors thought it was important enough to share over seven thousand years ago and there are few things humans can do that make as much difference to our quality of life and health as improving the quality of our soils. Even though the majority of life on our planet is microscopic, that does not mean that it is any less important than the creatures we can see. Learning to revere that which we cannot see though, that presents a challenge for some.

I guess I never thought about it but there does seem to be a sizeable contingent that places their faith in an unseen force, but there is still no science that can prove the existence of "god". Soil microbes on the other hand can bee seen with the right equipment. We can also document such changes as biochar can make. At the application rate of just one tonne per hectare, a little less than (900 pounds per acre) we know that it doubles crop production, reduces the need for both fertilizer and irrigation by 1/3 to 1/2, protects both surface and groundwater quality and greatly expands habitat for the soil microbes that are responsible for feeding plants and ameliorating the effects of global climate destabilization. An interesting side benefit for our unusual times is that it sequesters carbon in soil, for geologic time, not just in the form of pyrolized carbon itself, but the myriad of organisms who coat the surfaces of the material which has fourteen acres of surface area in each and every handful. There are many things that have been around forever that are not just serviceable, but either reflect enduring qualities that we consider human or essential to understanding who we are and those that can give us hints about our "purpose" here on Earth. Although we often gloss over some of them, I try to tease out the salient parts for today or intricately weave them into the more topical discussions that inform the avant garde. I also try to tease out those aspects which may have value hundreds of lifetimes hence. Under our current covid-19 crisis, there are things in our past that we can remember or call to mind that can help us deal with the situation we find ourselves in now. There are also things that I come across in day-to-day life that may be of service thousands of years from now and I do not want to claim to know the difference. In a perfect world, I would be an equal opportunity chronicler. Knowing not just that history repeats, but that the human species has come up against other, similarly challenging times can often give us strength and confidence that there will be light at the end of these dark times. Just as when walking, putting one foot in front of the other is typically necessary, laying out these ideas not only allows us to get a sense of where we are, but how all of our parts are cooperating (or not) to achieve efficient locomotion. With a bit of luck, when I find things that are out of place or not working at all, it will give readers impetus to make changes necessary for confronting our issues, meeting new challenges and facing who we, sometimes unwittingly, have become. If my words help us to determine who we want to be, all the better.

Rest assured, there were people claiming the end was near since we were still lived in caves and there were people who warned against the use of fire because it was seen as a new, dangerous and seductive force among us. Today, we have the same sorts of reactions to 5G and microchipping individuals to constantly monitor their location or physical attributes. It is well to remember that as we stand on the threshold of this brave new world, there are great applications for even the scariest technologies. A friend, compelled by love and wracked with compassion, is worried to death about his wife and her health issues, so she wears a continuous blood glucose monitor that sends real time updates and alerts to his phone if she gets either too much or too little sugar in her blood. Without ever having to prick her finger, this technology aids the two of them to plan and adjust to changing conditions, just like we bring everything up from our basement every time the flood warnings sound. From one perspective, it all makes sense but from another perspective, it is very scary also. Just knowing that the closeness to a situation can change your perspective is something that I consider to be a timeless treasure.

Creating Our Refuge

Many years ago, when I was a young man, I went door-to-door with an environmental group. I always asked to be put in the most remote areas where I could have plenty of time between doors to appreciate nature, get some exercise hustling between visits with people, to clear my mind and drink deeply of the fresher country air. Frequently I would take my bicycle and race up and down long driveways, bringing news of salient ecological issues, recent work our organization had been doing and important steps that people could take to protect themselves and their neighbors from toxic chemicals in the environment. I especially liked traveling through the country because these dispersed folks were typically living right on top of their only source of fresh water and helping them to protect the groundwater beneath their feet has always been a compelling reason for me to be involved in both ecological education and environmental stewardship. One particular event still stands out in my mind and when I think back on the experience, it still has the profound immediacy and sublime power that it did the day I experienced it.

This day, I was walking, so to reduce the distance between doors, I had forsaken the long driveways. My goal was to talk to between eighty and a hundred people during the course of the evening and without my bike I didn't want to waste time going up and down the long driveways. Everything seemed to be woods, so I didn't have to worry about people getting uptight about me running across their lawns. The community I was in was on a lake, so the homes were clustered along the waterfront and they were several hundred feet back from a paved road that ran roughly parallel to the lakefront.

Between two of the properties something changed. It was hard to put my finger on it, but in the woods, sometimes ecotones develop that change temperature, humidity, light or soils in such a way that you can see, smell or feel it. This was, simply put, a different energetic state. I felt like everything suddenly came alive, as if there was a change in the spirit of the woods. Often, in these out of the way places, there would be either of two conditions, the owners would sometimes rake and mow, plant and cut the woods to within an inch of their lives, changing nature in ways that I felt were over the top. I mean, if you want to make nature like a manicured public space, you could live in town and just go to the nearest park. Even more people would have a small area, often around the house or down by their dock where they would do this, but the rest would be ignored, sometimes with what seemed to me at the time, a vengeance. Trash would blow out into the more remote portions of these natural yards, they would create a trash heap out by the old outhouse or leave human-made objects lying around in the woods until they simply forgot that they were out there at all.

This place was different. It was beyond what nature intended. The variety of plants was much greater than anywhere else around the lake that I had been. There were sprays and clusters of  native plants that one rarely sees in proximity, as if the entire woods had been landscaped with native plants with compassionate sensitivity and specific intention. A few dozen steps further, I saw that there was a trail. This area is entirely on a giant outcrop of limestone and the trail, which was narrow, was lined on both sides with the bright white limestone that had a mellow patina that develops over decades, the result of algae and moss. There were a wide variety of ferns and orchids, Trees, bushes and flowering plants, ephemeral plants that might only show themselves for a few weeks each year and along this path, on the way to the house I found, places to sit, not to rest necessarily, but to just appreciate the composition of the plantings or perhaps watch wildlife in particularly stunning settings. Seriously, the whole place looked like the perfect picture postcard or  something out of a tourist brochure. Every single thing seemed to exude comfort, like it was placed in perfect proximity to everything it needed to thrive.

The people who inhabited this idyllic space were equally at home in their environment and I had to spend some extra time with them because I could feel that I was in an unusually harmonious location and I knew that I had something to learn form them as well. after telling them about what I was doing there and how they could help, we dispensed with my "work" and they seamlessly began to talk about what brought them to this place and how they related to the location. They had, years ago lived in Chicago, several hours away by car and they had a cottage even further north along this giant limestone outcrop. They shared with me that often, when they returned home after a long weekend or vacation at their cottage, they would think to themselves, why are we leaving the place we want to be, to return "home to a place we don't want to be? It was then that they hatched a plan. Several years passed before they could change their situation, but they decided to find jobs that allowed them to telecommute, or work from home most of the time. they also began looking in earnest fo ra property that was not quite so removed from civilization and they agreed that they wanted to live on a lake, so they sold two places and downsized to one property that was even more idyllic. That took place about twenty years before I was seeing the result and over the intervening years, they had put thousands of hours into each tableau, lining the paths and designing ways for nature to come alive around them. The wife said, "One day we realized that mowing the grass, shoveling the snow at two places and doing the maintenance on two places was running us in circles, taking us away from what we really loved about this place. As soon as we realized it, we knew that we had to make a change."

This has been alive in my mind ever since. I have done the same thing, as much as I can wherever I have been ever since. The brief time that I had a place in the country, it was my goal and life's ambition to transform it as well, turning it into my temple, my playground, my hide away, my estate, my sustenance. One place, providing for all of my needs, even a place to entertain friends. In my most recent location, I have all of that. At last count there were more than three dozen edible perennials that return to greet me each year. My only obligation to them is to eat some and give some away when they need a bit of thinning. I have rooms to let so that I can welcome guests and travelers. I can go weeks on end without having to drive anywhere and I am granted amazing vistas and nature exists all around me inviting me into its sublime family of life. I know where the fox lives, where the geese like to raise their hatchlings and the places the squirrels like to hang out on the coldest sunny winter days. I have become so intimate with my "place" that I know where I can plant new cuttings if they like warmer and drier spots and where the ground stays cold and wet even into mid April, sometimes early May. I still mow a bit, so I have a place to teach my biochar classes and not have to worry when I kindle a fire in my fire pit, but this place fits me and it fits me quite well.

However, the time has come to be moving on. Having become adept at finding this harmony, I know I can recreate it somewhere else. It is actually more a state of mind than an actual place for me. Now that I have found the formula, it exists in my blood, me sweat, my toil. Even when I am called away, there is a part of this flow that resides in me as well as me living in and amongst the flow itself. I have seen and lived the depth of commitment that is required to transform the world and carry that with me at all times. That is part of the joy I feel even when struggling the happiness I feel when problem solving for others. That feeling I had, alone in the woods, decades ago that mystic beings were welcomed to the space, or had a place for them prepared at the table now follows me everywhere. Even when I travel beyond the boundary of my refuge, the feeling of it remains alive within me, assuring me that my needs are being met and the ones I love will be cared for even if I have to go away for a while.

First Legal Weed Store 07/03/2020

I waited to go to an actual factual, legal weed store until, just like my first intentional trip to a head shop, friends were going that way and I tagged along for a ride. I have always felt that carpooling to such places can be an important social time. The store in question was The Fire Station a locally operated provisioning center in Negaunee, Michigan. Situated fifteen minutes west of Marquette, this place is much too far away for me to justify taking a leisurely drive up there (just over three hours away) to buy legal weed, but it is an indication of what may be coming to our state in the very near future. You see, my city and our state, just fifty miles south of the U.P. does not seem to see the massive tax revenue that can be raised using pot as a good thing. Some very powerful people still must believe the early film Reefer Madness, that claimed folks would become depraved when they smoke the heathen devil's weed, or that young, chaste, White womyn would develop uncontrollable and hedonistic desire to bed Black men if cannabis was freely available to them. some people have actually gone as far as to say that pot is addictive or deadly. All of these things are lies, but that does not mean that they are not reasons that are frequently used to justify making pot illegal or keeping it that way.

Our legislators and those who fund their campaigns, also seem to be immune from salient facts about legal weed, not just retreating into ancient propaganda, they also flee from demonstrated facts playing out in the here and now. Colorado, which has had legal weed for the longest has not only witnessed the lowest rate of self-reported pot use amongst High School Seniors since they began keeping records in 1970. Add to this, the lowest teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. and the lowest rates of opioid addiction and IV drug use and you can see some startling trends toward strengthening the social fabric. I didn't see any of these sorts of effects in the U.P. of Michigan, but perhaps it will take a bit of time.

The facility was a tiny building with a waiting room for about a dozen people and a small counter as well as displays of merchandising items and their non-weed sales displays. They allowed people to not have to wait in line by taking online orders to be picked up when you stop in. The reason there is a waiting room is that access to the room with weed in it is highly controlled. Individuals are only allowed in the room that has pot in it in small groups. It reminded my a bit of a clinic or dentist's office in that there was a definite reception vibe going on in the waiting room and it was very different than any sort of pot sales place I have ever been before in that there were no scales or packaging facilities of any kind. Everything seemed to be pre-packaged and prepared elsewhere for sale only in this location. My mind saw a bunch of gallon jars on a wall, like a large spice rack and packaging taking place before the very eyes of the customers, but that must seem too messy for regulators.

Everyone was exceedingly friendly and the entire facility seemed clean and tidy. There was plenty of parking and although we arrived at night, the area was bright enough to feel welcoming and well thought out. It was slightly unnerving being addressed by name, but it also felt uniquely kind and safe. It was hard to tell if this was by design or simply a side benefit of having such a highly regulated space. It definitely felt like an adult candy store and the variety of flavors and types of smoke were astonishing. My guess is that there were at least thirty different strains. We sampled four or five types and they were each distinctly different and all had interesting flavor profiles. Ultimately, they all had the effect of putting me in an enjoyable head space as well. Perhaps the next time I get up that way, I will bring some money and purchase a chunk of what they have on offer.

Giving Up or Giving In? Read This First

I have run up on so many sandbars and shorelines in my life that they disappear into a generalized swooshing noise, with little to no specificity. The sound of a canoe bottom on sand, or gravel, silt or rocky shoreline is the end of just one leg of our trip. Occasionally we make these stops on purpose, occasionally they take us away from our perceived plans, we hit a submerged rock or log by mistake. It currently feels like our entire culture has been reset, a sort of hard stop to progress. There are dangerous eddy currents all around and we are hopelessly stranded upon a hidden impediment in the river of life. The reason I use the analogy of a canoe trip is quite possibly because we are all buoyed by our hopes, our dreams, our desires upon an amalgam of fears and anxieties, difficulties and problems that are frequently of our own making. As we look around we also see and hear about very real and existential threats to the very existence of our species. Rather than being only the domain of philosophers and Malthusians, even our children are learning of the sixth mass extinction and it is only a small step from understanding of this to utter nihilism. We must always remember that to stay afloat, we need to keep the weight of our burden under the displacement potential of our vessel.

If and when nothing matters, we are prone to surrender in the face of even the slightest impediment. I often wonder at the seemingly endless hours people will spend, literally twiddling their thumbs, "working" on their phones to play games, create digital landscapes, experience life vicariously through social media and "win" imaginary wars that result from billions of micro processing switches flip flopping between their two states, on and off. Yes, or no. In very real ways, I'm doing that now although I am also encoding a clear message about actual events, I do post these messages in the digital realm. The digital electron flux that allows me to reach around the world into your consciousness is the same one that some people escape to when they do crossword puzzles, create dynamic landscapes upon which to build imaginary kingdoms or "win" at Tetris. We can choose to either escape into the digi-realm, letting it use us or use it to further civilization or honor the humanity of other participants in this new landscape. I have chosen to honor you.

The canoe analogy was probably bolstered this week by a funny joke I heard during a conversation between Stephen Clobert during a digitally recorded conversation with Elizabeth Warren. You see, there is a now legendary concept here in the good old U.S. of A. that people want to vote for someone they would "like to have a beer with." This very idea is curious when you also want to keep alive the fiction that we are a prudish and Puritan nation. Puritans abhorred alcohol, realizing that it interfered with articulate thought and expression. But that is a discussion I will delve into later. It an effort to humanize Elizabeth Warren, one of the Democratic candidates for President, Stephen Colbert had a couple drinks with her. His preferred spirit and then a beer of her choosing. When she selected Michelob Ultra, Stephen was compelled to ask if she knew how making love in a canoe was like her beer of choice. The answer, "They are both fucking near water.", brought up some very nice, although slightly uncomfortable, memories. Processing all of this reminded me of all the canoe trips I have taken and they all were better than the alternative, staying on dry land.

When we run up on the inevitable stopping points in our journey, in a canoe, there are several tried and true ways to remedy the situation. If we are going to stay on land a while, we can immediately begin planning for our next trip. If we are not ready to do that yet, we can bask in the afterglow of our most recent one. If we have gotten soaking wet because of rapids or an un-planned for downpour while we were out, we can set about changing into dry clothes or drying the ones we had on. We can even prepare a list for our next excursion so that the things we might need in the future can be put into our travel pack. In extremely rare cases, we might even resolve to not do that again, but again, I digress. The long and short of the canoe trip analogy is that it is a mode of operation and a metaphor for life in general. What keeps us afloat upon the swirling and mysterious flow of life is the canoe. We must always displace as much water by weight as our vessel and it's contents weigh or we will swamp the boat and possibly drown as surely as nightfall follows sunset. We know that if we are in a river or lake and we hit that occasional submerged log or sandbar we have a limited set of options, just like when we encounter an obstacle in life. We can back-paddle, shift our weight or the weight of our cargo, jettison some of our baggage or as a last resort, we can bail out ourselves so that the vessel rises above the obstruction. The last thing you want to do is give in or give up. In fact, timely action is often the only way to keep from getting tipped out into the rushing waters and have the canoe swamp or capsize.

Some people give up on the whole canoe trip, or even learning the basic strokes needed to feel comfortable in water because they may be "afraid of water". Others may rationalize that they don't have time to do something as frivolous as float across water or brave the whitewater. They give up before starting but as we all know, when we get set out on the dark and dangerous waters of life, as babies, we must learn to master a few techniques and become brave enough to understand and read the roiling waters of life if we are to survive. This metaphor holds value in that we can also determine to "go with the flow", or fight the current. Planning our forays into the world strategically can often lead to better outcomes, just like when we canoe. Paddling upstream on our first few days out might lead to tired arms, but on the way back we can mostly float and not have to worry about being ferried back to where we left the car for instance, or planning to portage in a few places might result in a way to do a giant circuit that leads back to where we left our terrestrial transportation. we might even bring a bike along, leaving it where we intend to take out so that after a long, downriver stretch, we can retrieve the bike and ride it back to where we had left the car. Heck, I have even been on trips where someone who wasn't even on the adventure waited downstream to ferry us and our vehicle back to "civilization". Meticulous planning and attention to detail is often key to a successful trip on water. The same is true in life. There are many ways to do the same trip, racing through the rapids or finding resting spots behind boulders along the way. We can portage our gear around particularly dangerous rapids or even enlist the aid of kayaks or other decked vessels if we are uncertain about whether or nor we will be able to see potential problems before we can act to protect ourselves from them. Life does not always afford us as many options as we have when we elect to strike out on a watery adventure, but sometimes there are even more.

In any case, we always have the option of giving up. We can go home before we even launch the boat. We can turn back at the first challenge or avoid uncharted water altogether, sticking to the routes we have traversed a million times before. However, we must also be willing to accept the fact that we have chosen not doing something over a chance to learn, grow and adapt to changing conditions. In life, when we choose to follow others, stay safe and fit in, it may result in being somewhat successful, but by definition we may never explore new territory or solve problems in creative or novel ways. We may never have a stand out experience or make waves. Our veritable thought patterns will adapt to the landscape, which is finite and beaten down by the trails established by others who came before. I once tried to navigate an entire week in a giant flowage, created behind a dam that had gone through a draw-down of the water level. Hundreds of acres that had been flooded were just a tangle of sand bars and stumps, dry land and muck. Sticking to the deeper channels didn't even help. Often, when conditions change, the individuals most likely to give in or give up do it because they have not attempted to solve the "new" problems that crop up as the territory becomes "different". These people are referred to by psychologists as functionally fixed. If everything they have learned, or tried in the past does not work, they are desperately out of options. We see that in very real ways when investment bankers start jumping out of windows when markets crash. To give up is to say, "All I knew is gone." or "What I valued has become worthless." To give in is to say, "I am defined by my net worth." or "People only cared about me because I had money." In all likelihood, these assessments are not true, but we find ourselves believing what we have always believed and then we are out of options. These assessments about the way things "are" may seem silly when we look at them from a distance, but when they are happening to us, they seem very serious and often more real than fact or the things we can scientifically prove.

In the moment it may be difficult to understand, but humans are adept at trying new things, exploring options and learning from their mistakes. There are times when cultivating the adventurous spirit is just what we need to fins a new way out of a predicament or to find a new solution to a seemingly insurmountable challenge. This post is but a hint intended to spur readers toward a new direction, perhaps a new dimension. I offer these words with love, not just for you, but for all of humanity, including future generations who I hope will have an opportunity to cast themselves out into the rivers, streams, lakes and oceans of life.

Giving up and/or giving in do not define us in the way they would if we were on a canoe trip. It would be easy to see someone hopelessly mired in the backwater slough of a giant and ancient river system as lost, simply misguided or in need of help but in life, we may not be able to understand the morass of debt that surrounds someone or the turmoil that is building because they lack adequate skills to meet the challenges they face below the surface. This post is about developing the skills needed to make it past the inevitable sandbars and sloughs or rocks and submerged logs that stop us from moving forward. It is about the process of becoming unstuck, allowing ourselves to take necessary action if we do feel stranded and to regain control and our own composure after losing our momentum or being unable to make it past the snags and shipwrecks that are part of life.

First and foremost, even the most powerful supercomputer will not be able to solve the problem of which option is best in every situation. If they could, we would already be slaves of AI. I am reminded of my mother who consulted a very good financial planner. The financial wizard, as my mom thought of her wanted to help rescue Dar from her life of long term poverty and help her to plan for a retirement some day in spite of Mom's belief that she would, "Work until the day I die." The compassionate approach eventually got run over by facts but the whole process started quite well. Mom got sent home with homework. The financial planner told her to make two lists. One was to include all the ways that Mom brought money into the household and the average amount by month that she was typically able to bring into her accounts from all sources. The other was to list all the recurring bills and the average amount per month that they represented. This orderly approach to budget development seems to make perfect sense from a mathematical perspective, but numbers were never my mother's forte. Once these two list were compiled, Mom went back for another meeting with her financial advisor and she poured over them for a time, eyes widening at the disparity between the numbers. As she ran her calculator using the figures my mom presented to her, she worked faster and faster. In the end, I think Mom was running about negative eighty dollars per month, but some of that was attributable to a very slight overestimation of her monthly bills. After what Mom called "the longest time" spent calculating and recalculating the numbers several times, it was as if a fuse blew in the mind of this well-meaning lady. She had intended to provide financial counseling for Mom at no charge to help her out of what she had assumed were some bad choices or poor investment strategies. In fact, what she found when she looked at the results of all of that hard work and effort is that mom only had one choice, "Generate more capital." Neither my mother nor I could understand fully what this womyn was saying, because our "reality" was so much different than hers. but this turn of events goes a long way toward understanding why it is important to be flexible. My Mom had no way of fitting those words into a context. Her life experiences divorced her from the meaning of the word capital. My perception was slightly more well-rounded and I could capture the essence of what she said, but certainly not the full meaning. Asking a fifty year old woman with two children to care for to generate more capital probably meant have a rummage sale to my mother. Then, she probably got lost in the weeds trying to imagine how she would do that every month. I understood that the financial advisor probably meant get a second job, but that would be out of the question for a womyn like mom who had always been busy, filling her days with endless projects and errands to distract her from her failings. In any case, the communication between a person of one class ran up on a giant submerged log jam from which neither person on the adventure could reasonably be expected to know how to get free, so they just gave up.

Now, in the last years of her life, my mother has lost every penny of equity she had built up in her home, been robbed of any investments she ever sought to make and has become a ward of the state whose body will be used after death to train a doctor who will practice on the next generation. mom always wanted to go to med school, so as a cadaver, she may yet get the chance to do so, helping someone else to learn grow and develop beyond her own abilities and capacities. In the very end, we will all acquiesce, but while the fire of life still burns inside us, we must accept the adventures and bring all we can to bear on the challenges and snags that we find along our way. 

I have written extensively about the plight of the poor in these blogs. I grew up in poverty and it seemed that each time I would manage to boost my income above the imaginary line between how much it costs to make it out of poverty or remaining impoverished, they would raise the bar, keeping the middle class just out of reach. I have teetered right at the cut off for over fifty years now and have learned many, many strategies to "make it" without becoming swamped, capsizing or becoming hopelessly mired. On a canoe, the amount of boat that is above the water line is called freeboard. There have been times when I had but a millimeter left, but I bailed furiously and with ballerina-like grace so as not to rock the boat until the craft was again stable. There have been times when I ran aground so far and so hard that I had to give up parts of myself that defined me to lighten the load enough to get free and I have hit rocks so hard that they stove in part of the hull, but I have not once given up. I have even given in to a few things I probably should not have because I was too tired or broke to fight back, but these situations were only temporary. continuing the journey has occasionally required me to get out of the boat, give up the safety of my craft and develop completely new ways around the problems and challenges of the moment, but in the end, tenaciously clinging to this thing called life, making my way forward in complete darkness and often through uncharted waters has led to not only successful adventures but a richness that cannot be measured in dollars.

Mother Nature's Rules

We are in the depth of Winter here in Green Bay, but you would not know it. There is a smattering of snow across the fields, but mostly the ground is dark in color, not yet grey grass is still trying to capture some of the Sun's energy. I have a friend that has gone through the ice and lived to tell the story already this year and the pictures I am seeing from the brave souls who are catching fish through the ice don't give me much confidence that it will hold another month.We have been on both sides of freezing nearly every day for a month and the below zero temperatures that we are familiar with have not even come yet. I think that a recent report of our total snowfall this season was thirteen inches, but I shoveled it and I saw less than eight inches, and two of them were simply standing slush. Weather that used to find us in Southern Illinois seems to characterize winters in this Twenty-first Century. We have had a few bouts with freezing rain and mist, nothing that amounted to measurable precipitation, but it was enough to make walking treacherous. Now, don't get me wrong, the less the furnace has to work, the better I like the fossil energy bills, but this week I began to think seriously about it.

We are one species among many, it stands to reason that there is a complex relationship between each us and the whole that is unknowable due to it's vastness. We are passengers on Starship Earth. It now seems, at least to those of us in the U.S. of A. that no one is at the helm, few are able to elucidate a path toward doing a better job of stewardship and there are even agents within our own government that are beholden to foreign power (read money). The recent NRA admission that they laundered millions of Russian oligarch dollars to sway elections right here "at home" has caused many of us to wonder how we can have a democracy under the sway of our sworn enemies. Nations that have sworn to bring us down without firing a shot should not be allowed to influence our elections and they certainly should not be allowed to buy or install politicians. The more closely we look, the more people realize that is what has happened.

We are all aware that a certain percentage of our Representatives and a fair share of the Senate are cheerleaders for the Apocalypse. Spinning their webs of deceit that "god" wants humanity to fail or giving their gullible "base" that they will, one day soon, be able to use their guns at will or use up their survival rations under post apocalyptic conditions. My contention has always been, "What if the sky is not falling?" I do not say this because I am sticking my head in the sand, I say it because we have an unbroken history of the opposite to look back over which proves the opposite.

This Winter, for example. I will be saving, hold up, I have saved hundreds of dollars in fuel bills already this Winter. Every heating degree day I can avoid is putting money in my pocket and reducing my carbon footprint. Some parts of the world are actually investing in efficiency, alternative energy sources and new technology to keep carbon in the ground and in my neck of the woods, we are having our ecological impact reduced by the warming planet itself.

The reason that I mentioned political leaders is because they have been adept at doing the wrong thing, some would argue as far back as anyone can find. The idea of valuing the opinions of landowners over everyone else is not new, but when the most valuable thing changed from land to the ownership of debt instruments, a much smaller group was given political power. I am certainly not the first to say it, but our nation is at a crossroad. To help put our position in perspective, let us first think about population. If we were to imagine the world with only three nations, China, India and the U.S. Our precious U.S.A. would hold just ten percent of that planet. Both China and India are continuing to take major steps in the direction of sustainability.

I don't want to leave this idea of demographics alone just yet. To help get a sense of what is going on, Europe has twice as many people as the U.S. and they have been doing many of the right things regarding fossil energy for decades and Russia has about half the population of the U.S. and on the whole they have not. Now, we come to the two largest blind spots in the perception of most Americans, Africa and the rest of Asia. Africa has four times as many people as our nation, the rest of Asia, excluding China and India, has nearly three times as many people as China. If these numbers make your head swim, you are not alone. As I said decades ago, a tiny change multiplied by a huge number will also be a relatively large amount and that is how ecological sanity is creeping in, perhaps not here yet, but around most of the rest of the world, change is coming and it is changing fast! I may just need to relax. Mother Earth knows what she is doing.