Living the Good Life

Russet tending our garden

Living the Good Life

“What a wonderful life” a time traveler unfamiliar with our world might exclaim, seeing me tilling my garden on a sunny spring day, as robins peck for worms. But we all know it isn’t.

Like the rest of us, I’m sequestered at home, sheltering in place, because of the Coronavirus pandemic – which has already killed in 9 weeks, almost as many Americans as the entire Vietnam war. I’m sheltering here alone because my partner in crime, Russet, has been in California for the last two months and will be there for the foreseeable future, caring for her son who has developed a life-threatening condition.

I feel like one of the characters in Nevil Shute’s novel, On the Beach, who might appear, at first glance, to be blissfully happy, taking an evening stroll down a breathtaking beach in Australia. But, once again, things aren’t always as they appear.

The protagonists in Shute’s book aren’t thrilled vacationers, but scared souls looking inward, mulling their mortality, as they await the arrival of a deadly radiation cloud circling toward them from a nuclear war on the other side of the world.

Like them, I mull my mortality. And, in the process, find myself reviewing my past.

The soil I am tilling today, I know intimately.  I built my house here on this 21 acres in the 1970s, part of the Sixties back-to-the-land movement. That was a time, like now, with intense polarization brought about by the endlessly festering Vietnam War, coupled with an explosive cultural war between establishment figures and the counterculture about what we should believe and how we should live. 

The back-to-the-land movement wanted to escape that political turmoil and the cookie-cutter, suburban malaise of the 1950s. Personally, I was worn out for being both a participant and protester in the Vietnam war. Parts of the country were an environmental disaster zone with major cities made toxic by thick smog and rivers so polluted they caught fire. 

I was a disenchanted graduate sociology student, chafing at a department that valued statistics more than people. I was sick of ingesting abstract theories in my cubicle and craved the here-and-now reality of the real, physical world. 

Following counterculture guru and farmer Gene Logsdon, I saw success in terms of the independence that comes from “how much food, clothing, shelter, and contentment I could produce for myself rather than how much I could buy.”

I was a perfect recruit for the back-to-the-land movement, inspired by “Living the Good Life,” by Scott and Helen Nearing;  they had quit their professional jobs in NYC and moved to Vermont to live a sustainable life, building a simple house from rocks found on their property and growing their own food.

My mentor in the garden was J. I. Rodale, a major advocate of organic gardening in the sixties and rightfully considered to be the godfather of the locavore movement. He despised industrial agriculture with its reliance on mono-crops and pesticides.  His motto was, “we must go back to nature, if we wish to live long.”

And, I can’t leave out Steward Brand, visionary and creator of “The Whole Earth Catalog.,” a counterculture magazine and product catalog, that covered topics like self-sufficiency, ecology, and learning how to do things yourself. But, his primary focus was on “access to tools,” for which he had a broad definition, including clothing, books, tools, machines, seeds…anything that promoted independence.

Brand was intent on building a more ethical and sustainable world. He did not sell any of the products he listed, only simply listing the vendor’s information, along with a review of the product. 

But that altruistic 1960s ethic, as with other positive aspects of the 1960s,  soon went the way of the passenger pigeon. By the 1980s, a new mantra ruled the day, attributed to Malcolm Forbes: “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

This new transactional model soon spawned Amazon. In a very distorted sense, this internet supplier resembles the Whole Earth Catalog. But rather than promoting sustainability and empowering local businesses, Amazon encourages over-consumption and creates value by pitting one supplier against another in a race to the bottom. The ultimate winner is the owner, Jeff Bezos, who is now the richest man in the world – undeniably the guy with the most toys.

Pondering the state of the world, waiting for my peas to come up, I have to question society’s judgment that our sixties generation were  self-indulgent and self-absorbed losers. 

Just imagine, if our values had triumphed over materialism and corporate greed, there would be no climate crisis today – and possibly no pandemic. We would all be having fun together. What a wonderful life!

Just imagine.

xxx

We Are Small, Wet Miracles

Reflections 2011

Note: You can see the reflection of me, the observer, 

at the back, as I snapped the shutter

Defining Who We Are on Earth Day – and Beyond

“We are survivors of immeasurable events,

Flung upon some reach of land,

Small, wet miracles without instructions,

Only the imperative of change.”

Astronomer and poet, Rebecca Elson wrote this poem while contending with cancer that killed her at age 39. Just as Rebecca was confronted with her mortality by a life-threatening situation, so are we now forced to face our own impermanence in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. 

From her vantage point, spanning the worlds of science and art, she brings a unique perspective on what it means to be alive on Earth Day.

Although we humans may imagine that we are in control of our destiny and rule the Earth, when the moment of truth arrives – like the coronavirus – the blinders come off and we see ourselves as we really are: small, wet miracles without defenses or instructions. 

While the old gods have been largely consigned to the dustbin of history, new gods continue to mutate into existence through science. At each stage, humans as spiritual, flesh-and-blood creatures have been pushed further to the periphery.

Galileo robbed us of the illusion that Earth was the center of the universe.  Newton replaced God with the concept of universal laws that control the planets in an orderly process, like a giant, mechanical clock. Next, Darwin came along to show that, rather than being created in God’s image, we climbed out of the mud to become the crown jewel of evolution in an epic battle of survival between ourselves and all other species. 

Then along comes quantum theory which defines existence in terms of sub-atomic quarks and neutrinos whose nature is a matter of probability. At each paradigm shift, science has pushed spirituality, community, and what it means to be living, breathing person further off center stage.

As an antidote to this, I was gratified to read Kate Brown’s recent piece in The New Yorker presenting a scientific model, which, at first glance, appears the most radical of them all. The crucial difference is that this biological model celebrates community along with the squishy, realness of us humans in all our glory: sweat, snot, amniotic fluid and all. 

Brown presents a wealth of scientific evidence, demonstrating that the human body is not the self-contained vessel we think it is – just as a chair from the standpoint of quantum physics, is not a solid seat. Instead, a human being is more like a porous cloud: A microbial ecosystem swept “along in atmospheric currents, harvesting gases, bacteria, phages, final spores, and airborne toxins in its nets.”^⁠1

Rather than being a distinct, separate entity, we are more an assembly of species. In other words, each of us is a community! This notion has added relevancy in the age of Coronavirus.

Throughout evolution, the fact that each of us is a community within a community promoted health. In indigenous cultures, sharing microbes with other people, along with all other forms of life, was a good thing: the more we shared the healthier we got, the better adapted to our environments and more fit as a social unit.

But that all changed with the industrial revolution and the resultant explosion in the human population. Pandemics become more frequent when living things are forced together in denser proximity, allowing novel microbes to jump to new species. 

Perhaps most crucial, pandemics like the coronavirus are striking more often because of climate change. Warming and changing weather patterns shift the vectors and spread diseases. Heavily polluting industries also contribute to disease transmission. 

Studies have linked factory farming — one of the largest sources of methane emissions — to faster-mutating, more deadly pathogens. “The same corporations that exacerbated the climate crisis are literally helping to create deadlier diseases, more quickly, in a world that keeps changing how they spread.”^⁠2

So, under the cloud of the coronavirus, how do we celebrate Earth Day? First, buy local and support local farms. And, at the policy level, push Congress to generously fund climate and environmental justice in upcoming economic stimulus packages. 

For ethical and moral guidance, perhaps it’s time to “go back to the future” and meditate on the wisdom of Indra’s Jewel Net, a revered metaphor in Buddhism, illustrating the interconnection of all things. The metaphor is as follows.

Indra’s realm is a vast net that stretches infinitely in all directions. In each "eye" of the net is a single brilliant, perfect jewel. Each jewel also reflects every other jewel, infinite in number, and each of the reflected images of the jewels bears the image of all the other jewels — infinity to infinity. Whatever affects one jewel effects them all.

This Earth Day, let’s remember each of us, and all beings, is a jewel in her net.

xxx

^{1 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-pandemic-is-not-a-natural-disaster}

² https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/opinion/climate-change-covid-economy.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_200416&instance_id=17680&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=30753738&segment_id=25284&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

Cry of the Earth

Cry of the Earth
CC Jean Stimmell

Last year, under the sway^, of spring, I wrote in these pages about building a small pond and waterfall in my back yard and what pleasure it gave me: calming my rushing thoughts, easing me back into nature and into the here-and-now.

Quite unexpectedly, two big, green frogs found themselves to my landlocked pool and liked it so much, they took up residence. They hung out, usually at the edge of the pond, but when I arrived, I could count on them jumping in with a splash.

They reminded me of Alan Watts translation of that famous Zen haiku, a perfect example of how to directly observe nature without intervening thought:

The old pond

A frog jumps in:

Plop!

Recently, noting spring was coming again and had already melted the ice in my little pond, I started skimming out a winter’s accumulation of leaves. When the water still smelled foul, I pumped the water out, only to uncover, sadly, the corpses of my two frogs, bleached white by their watery immersion.

I am still mourning the loss of my loyal frogs. And feeling guilt as I reflect on my hubris, thinking I could recreate Nature. Instead of being sustainable, my pond, lined with an impermeable, high-tech rubber liner and covered during the winter in thick ice, became a sealed coffin, suffocating my friends from lack of oxygen.

The way I see the world, the pond I built is a microcosm of what we are seeing today with the Corona Virus. I’m disturbed about how this pandemic is being described by our leaders and the news media as a war. And all this prattle about how we are being invaded by alien beings!

I don’t see this as a war, but humankind refusing to accept our earthly limits, imposed, since the beginning of time, by a power infinitely greater than own. That power is Mother Earth, who operates according to her own terms and timetables. Sometimes she serves up something unexpected, like the devastating Japanese tsunami for which we humans played no role. 

But more often, Mother Nature gives us fair warning when we start exceeding our puny human authority.  Certainly, that’s been the case since the beginning of the industrial revolution, when we started spewing ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.

We have long known the effects of carbon dioxide on our planet. Remember Al Gore’s best-selling book, back in 2007: An inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming? Yet we did nothing.

Time has marched on. A third of all our fellow species are in danger of extinction and billions of individuals have already died as the result of climate change from global warming. The polar bear is the poster child of those who soon will be gone. Yet still, we do nothing.

The shifting climate has resulted in droughts and food shortages, resulting in escalating conflicts over increasingly scarce resources around the world. Yet we have done nothing except send arms to the side we want to win.

Killer hurricanes, tornadoes and floods are becoming the new normal, while devastating fires are wiping out whole towns like Paradise California and are now threatening whole continents like Australia. But yet we still do nothing.

Sometimes pandemics arrive on their own like the deadly flu pandemic of 1919. Yet for years now scientists have warned that rising temperatures caused by man-made climate change are causing shifts in animal populations, putting them in closer proximity to our burgeoning human populations, making new pandemics inevitable. Yet we do nothing. Actually, less than nothing, as we see by the recent disbanding of a pandemic task force.

Last week, the New York Times revealed the existence of an October 2019 government report, proving our leaders were “aware of the potential for a respiratory virus outbreak originating in China to spread quickly to the United States and overwhelm the nation.”^[1]

Yet, once again, we did nothing. But this time, Mother Nature finally lost her patience and now Covid-19 is coming for us.

We will get through this, perhaps at a heavy cost. But hopefully, on the positive side, we will learn to be humble and respect our limits. Perhaps we will come to understand that we are mere mortals, not gods: Just another species, among a staggering number, all interdependent, all reliant on each other for our common survival and the health of our community.

xxx

^[1]My Blog “Finding Sanity” 6/2/19: http://jeanstimmell.blogspot.com/2019/06/finding-sanity_2.html

^[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_200320&campaign_id=2&instance_id=16925&segment_id=22412&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92&regi_id=307537380320

Root of the Universe

My good friend Cate, knowing of my love for trees, told me about a special one she had discovered, blown over by the wind, exposing an intricate tangle of roots.  It has become, in a real sense, a spiritual mentor for her:

"For the last five years when walking that trail I've looked forward to seeing the root and the changes. It seems a little smaller than the first time I spotted it and it's lightened in color.  Interesting changes. What I first think of is- we get a little smaller as we age and lighter and more interesting (hopefully)." 

I went there today to see the tree and photograph it: Like Cate, I had a deep reaction to it on many levels.

The complex message it conveyed immediately brought to mind how Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher with a poetic sensibility, felt about trees. Like Carl Jung, he believed that all humankind, whatever our color or wherever we come from, hold a common set of archetypes in our collective unconscious.

One of the most powerful archetypes, we hold in common, is the tree. What follows is a condensed version of his reverie about trees – and their roots:

“A root is always a discovery. We dream it more than we see it… Images are primary psychic realities. In experience itself, everything begins with images. The root is the mysterious tree, it is the subterranean, inverted tree. 

For me, the tree is an integrating object. It is normally a work of art. Thus, when I managed to confer upon the tree’s aerial psychology the complementary concern with roots, a new life suffused the dreamer in me…The imagination then took possession of all the powers of plant life. To live like a tree! What growth! What depth! What uprightness! What truth! 

The imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and in the wind. The imagined tree becomes imperceptibly the cosmological tree, the tree that epitomizes a universe, that makes a universe …” 

–      these quotes from: Bachelard, Gaston. On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. Spring Publications, Inc. 

Equus

My neighbor's horse, Angel:     1/11/20
CC Jean Stimmell

Two takes on Equus:

1)  A distinguishing feature of Jungian analysis is the concept of archetypes, symbols rising from the dark, deep psychic pool of the collective unconscious where humanity’s common experience is stored.

Archetypes express a complex of images and emotions that surround the defining experiences of human life.  One of the most commonly recurring archetypes is the Horse: 

“The Horse archetype throughout the ages has been closely linked with our instinctive, primal drives." –Taken from https://jeanraffa.wordpress.com/tag/dream-symbol-of-horse/

–––––––––––––––––––

2) While Linda Kohanov, in her book The Tao of Equus, makes the case that horses relate to the world from a primarily feminine, or yin perspective:

"As a result, the species is a living example of the success and effectiveness of feminine values, including cooperation over competition, responsiveness over strategy, emotion and intuition over logic, process over goal, and the creative approach to life that these qualities engender.” 

One Way to Cope with Hard Times

A version of this essay published in The ConcordMonitor, 3/13/20

 Pond Essence CC Jean Stimmell 

Last summer, fretful about our fate as the world cartwheels out of control, I found myself drawn to the simplicity of Japanese ink drawings. I spent quite a bit of time attempting to duplicate that look – to find the essence of an object – by manipulating my photographs of water lilies and reeds.

It was hit or miss but finally one came out that I liked well enough to submit to a juried exhibit where it won an award. With humility, I’m discovering that the simplicity I crave, identifying the essence of a subject  is a profound undertaking that goes under the label of “minimalism.”

Minimalism is seen by many today as just the latest fad where people obsess over decluttering their homes, while the rich revel in living in glass houses with virtually no furniture, except a high-end stereo and a limited edition, Eames Lounge Chair.

In truth, however, minimalism has a rich artistic and philosophic history that goes way back. I also discovered, it’s a reoccurring theme that rises to the surface whenever society is in upheaval.

Yoshida Kenko, a poet in Japan 800 years ago, lived and wrote during such a time of conflict and danger, the result of incessant warfare between various groups outside of the established government, all seeking to extend their control over the country.

Sound familiar?

Kenko’s answer was to become a monk, embracing what Buddhists call impermanence: the idea that life is constant change. He wrote that a person was to be envied who lives in a simple, neat house, “not of the modern, garish kind” because it is “but a temporary abode, “ like life itself. He found  beauty in a room not overly furnished, “where there is room to move around.^⁠1”

He wrote that we should pay attention to everyday beauty: “Are we to look at flowers only in full bloom or the moon when it is clear.  No, we should concentrate on the simple austere aesthetic of the here-and-now: “There is much to been seen in young boughs about to flower, in gardens strewn with withered blossoms.”^⁠2

Thoreau, writing in the 19^th century, was on the same wave-length, valuing simple living and reveling in what can be observed in the moment. Like Kenko, Thoreau was living through tough times, probably the most traumatic in our country’s history: Not only our cataclysmic civil war,  but the shredding of local community by rapid industrialization and the advent of the train.

He believed, like Kenko, that is was a mistake to favor the vibrant colors of fall foliage over the simple, stark beauty of winter.

Immersing  himself in the here-and-now was an antidote to hard times:  “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”^⁠3

Based on recent history, we shouldn’t be surprised that minimalism is on the rise again because – and I don’t think anyone will disagree– we are once again living through a period of extreme polarization and cultural disconnect. Under these circumstances, it makes sense to strive for sustainability by shrinking our liabilities and adopting frugal ways. 

Rather than looking for the salvation promised us by the capitalistic gods of advertising – only to be slowly crushed under the increasing weight of shoddy and superfluous material goods – wouldn’t it be nice to escape all that and, instead, surround ourselves solely with those few items that define the essence of who we are.

In light of the above, why wouldn’t I be drawn to the simplicity and purity of Japanese Ink drawings. 

And follow Thoreau’s advice about the importance of winter walks: To take that opportunity only winter provides to withdraw inward to sharpen my focus in the present moment – temporarily tuning out the shrill. food-fight fracas, consuming society at large. 

xxx

¹ http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/at/kenko/eii03.html

² http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_1000ce_idleness.htm

³ https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/05/thoreau-excusrsions-a-winter-walk/

¹ http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/at/kenko/eii03.html

² http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_1000ce

MAX ERNST

Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale

After writing my essay on "Confronting Doomsday," we visited the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL. Included inthe exhibits were art pieces by other leading surrealistic pioneers of the time, including this collage by Max Ernst This collage struck me viscerally! To me, in my gut, it felt like a representation of the end of the world: people fleeing in terror a chaotic and disordered landscape; one person unsuccessfully trying to push a panic button bigger than he was.

It is the perfect companion for my Doomsday  piece!

  After reading up on Max Ernst, I found out it's even more appropriate than I knew at the time. First of all, his whole perception of the world as a regularly ordered, sane place was shattered by being a combat veteran of World War I.

The excerpts that follow are from: https://monoskop.org/images/a/ab/Pritzker_Pamela_Ernst_1975.pdf

"Those four years of war for Ernst were as if he "died on the 1st of August 1914" and "re- suscitated on the 11th of November 1918 as ayoung man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myth of this time”.

Young, angry, outraged and full of enormous pent up energy from the War, Ernst became involved with the one group who could possibly present an outlet for these passions: Dada.

…

His collages force the exterior real world to confront the hidden reality of the unconscious. Theycreateamultiplicityof associations by giving form to the new reality of dreams and the unconscious as presented byFreud. Ernst has forced the viewer to expand beyond the rational and logical waking world into the world of fantasy, dreams and illusion. By rearranging traditional schemata, placing the familiar image into a new and strange context, he forces the observers to retune their old definition of visual reality and to reconcile the exterior and public world with the interior and private world of the unconscious. Ernst stated that the collage is "a meeting of two distant realities on a plane foreign to both." Thus, visually Ernst attempted to reconcile the two equal parts of our existence and turn them into a new and complete reality."