Kurt's Blog: Conversations Around the Fire
In this blog, join Kurt in a weekly “conversation around the campfire,” sharing stories of courage and inspiration for the bold work of restoration that we are now called to embrace.
Bike Friendly Whidbey
Last weekend was sunny and warm, and I’ve never seen so many bicyclists plying the back roads of Whidbey Island. Of course, recreational bikers do come out of hiding with the first waves of warm, sunny weather. And I have no data to pull from. But on our “Tour de Caffeine” ride to Langley last Sunday, sponsored by OccupYourBike South Whidbey, there was a steady flow of cyclists coming through. It was quite a show of pedal power.
The latest issue of the Whidbey Examiner ran this great cover piece on our OYB movement. I don’t know how much credit we can take for this upswing in the number of cyclists showing up on our roads lately, but our goal of building a more robust bike culture on Whidbey seems to be gaining some traction. And it’s definitely bringing people together in the celebratory spirit that bicycles seem to engender.
Mind you, South Whidbey is still as car-dependent a place as any you’re likely to find. The typically large distances between home, work, shops and recreation have kept cycling mostly in the domain of entertainment during the warm summer months. But we’re challenging this sacred notion that cars are the only reasonable way to go. And we aren’t alone. Andrew Zaleski’s May 14 piece in Grist is entitled Here Comes Everybody: Number of Bicycle-Friends Cities Soars. He writes, “Once was that American cities competed to look more like Detroit, with gleaming lanes of highway stretching as far as the eye could see. Any more, it’s a race to imitate Copenhagen, the Danish capital where 36 percent of residents commute to work via bicycle.” Granted, the average American city has fewer than 1% of residents who commute by bicycle. And granted too that this movement toward bike-friendly cities has become that much more fodder in the culture wars, with plenty of push-back from those who consider high carbon lifestyles a core part of the American Dream. But bicycles are making a fresh statement of intent. I feel a lot less lonely these days when I’m using my bike as working transportation. And partly because of the companionship factor, I find myself riding that much more often, and enjoying it that much more.
“Consult the genius of the place in all.”
Wendell Berry likes to quote Alexander Pope. “Consult the genius of the place in all.” This runs hard against our contemporary enthusiasm for “no place in particular” articulated by Bruce Sterling; “As long as I’ve got broadband, I’m perfectly at ease with the fact that my position on the planet’s surface is arbitrary.” Berry would contend that this very ethic of geographical arbitrariness, fostered by the computer and social network technologies that he assiduously refuses to participate in, is what has driven our culture and ecology to the brink. There is a fierceness in Berry, tempered by ”a kind of calm despite full awareness of the storm.” (Mark Bittman). His family has lived around Port Royal, KY, for two hundred years, and he has become the patron saint of local living economies in America. David Skinner has said, ”Instead of being at odds with his conscience, he is at odds with his times. . . Government, he believes, should take its sense of reality from the ground beneath our feet and from our connections with our fellow human beings. And it should have a better sense of proportion: Its solutions should be equal to its problems and should not beget other problems.”
“You can describe the predicament that we’re in as an emergency,” Berry says, “and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.” How do we do that? It seems to come down to a willingness not only to be thwarted, but to remain capable of joy and curiosity in the midst of being thwarted. In a pronouncement that rings especially true to me, Berry has said, “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
There is something supremely un-American about a “baffled mind”. With our technological prowess, we Americans believe we can fix any problem. Which is turning out to be a really big problem in itself. One cause of the fix we’re in, in other words, is our refusal to acknowledge legitimate befuddlement. (Who can stand down climate change, for instance, and not feel befuddled and shaky in the knees?) There is a kind of joyous defiance that emanates from Berry’s proclamation that “You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”
When I feel myself stuck in an impeded stream, it is sometimes the smallest things that set the inner waters flowing again. For me it usually involves re-establishing contact with my physical body in an act of getting out into physical nature (on foot, by bicycle or kayak). There the two grand streams of Self and Cosmos find their confluence again, and the illusion of stuckness unsnarls itself naturally, at a place beyond thought.
Last weekend, for example, after years of meaning to, I finally did paddle the Snohomish River estuary – the great river of the central Cascades that was the reason local Salish tribes chose this particular place to live. All I’ve known of it until now is the industrialized slurry of the I-5 corridor heading north out of Everett. Blasting across the Snohomish delta on giant concrete legs, there is almost nothing within the near terrain of the freeway corridor that suggests wildness, or even the possibility of wildness. But that is what I found as I headed a few miles up Ebby Slough out of Marysville, then back out Steamboat Slough, two of the main channels off the Snohomish that snake through the delta to tidewater in Possession Sound.
Four years ago, during my year of car-free local exploration, I walked this narrow concrete pathway through industrial yards that barely hint at something grander beyond the margins, and I have wanted to venture beyond those margins ever since. I was amazed by how quickly nature reasserts itself in the uninhabited floodplain of the lower river channels. Heron rookeries and large schools of coho smolt filled the upper channels – rich rearing habitat for salmon – while rows of cormorant nests crowned the rotting rows of pilings along the lower channel.
My friend Bruce Davis and I never saw another boat or person until the river gave back out into the Salish Sea. On a busy Saturday afternoon in late spring, it was just us, the herons, cohos and cormorants.
What does this have to do with Wendell Berry? This is my Port Royal. Sinking back into the land that I inhabit expands the boundaries of the near at hand. I came out of this day on the river with a feeling of elation and gratitude that so much wildness still waits just beyond (and within!) the margins of our human-dominated world. I can’t wait to explore the other river channels now. One more good reason to stick around, and to open my eyes and senses to what I have been for too long blind.
Seeking An Etiquette of Freedom In The Digital Storm
My local email server hit a major snag in updating its equipment this week. A small technical glitch cascaded into a multi-day outage of email service. For me it was a nuisance, for sure, since I work from home and am tied to the same ethic of quick response that everyone else now expects and demands. For my server I’m sure it was an unmitigated disaster, and will cost them a lot of business. Our culture of time-acceleration is a ruthless overlord. Isn’t it interesting how quickly this ethic of instantaneous response has colonized our hearts and minds. You would think the Titanic was going down for how much agitation this event has unleashed within our local community.
What gives? Was it really so long ago that three days between messages was considered a fast turnaround? Now three minutes is an unacceptable delay? Five seconds to download a document leaves our foot tapping impatiently. Who is really benefitting from this? My mindfulness-based stress reduction classes are filling up with working professionals who are simply shorting out at the ever-escalating demands and time constraints of their working lives. Moore’s Law stipulated that the speed of our computer technologies would double every eighteen months, while halving in cost, and that march toward mach speed continues unabated. As I pointed out in an earlier post, our human nervous system is not similarly doubling in speed every eighteen months. And unlike our computer devices, which keep getting cheaper and more ubiquitous, the cost to our bodies and emotional well-being is steadily rising.
The poet Gary Snyder, now 82, was asked in a recent interview if he felt complete with the work he had done in the world. His answer: “I don’t have time to think about that.” In his case, this answer did not signify a lack of time, but a fullness of time, a level of engagement that is rooted in an eternal NOW, and in alignment with what his life is currently dishing up. Snyder went on to say, “Ultimately it’s not success or failure in the human realm that matters, it’s that you’re at peace with what the work is and who the people are and what you’re doing. . . A certain modesty is created by our recognition that we are impermanent and that we do not understand everything perfectly. Impermanence inspires us to do good work, to make things well. . . Etiquette is acknowledging impermanence and bringing dignity to everything in the process.” (Inquiring Mind, Spring 2012). My experience these days is that few people are at peace with the work they are doing, or feel in control of their time. There is little dignity, and much stress, in feeling that we don’t have time to do anything well.
This can sound like sour grapes, but that’s not my intent. I’m just allowing myself to feel the force of the gathering digital storm, and to wonder about its human implications? My primary sense of vocation circles around various efforts to keep the “long wave” of human experience alive in the midst of a “short wave” culture. Most of my work involves keeping that long wave of time off the endangered experience list.
Yet my world is changing too, and I don’t want to set myself against unstoppable tides of change either. Gary Snyder’s “etiquette of freedom” demands a fierce vigilance about where that threshold lies, between using our digital tools in the service of abiding human purposes, and being swept into their undertow of speed for its own sake. If three days off line is a disaster, as some of my friends have been suggesting, then we are forgeting to consult the long wave for its opinion on the matter.
I think I’ll go for a walk now.
Everyone Has a Body
It’s not that far to the wilderness when you’re on the water. Get a little beyond the distance you can easily swim to shore, and you’re there. Last weekend I set out with Rick Jackson to paddle around Bainbridge Island. We did the first half of the 25 mile circumnavigation, paddling from Manzanita Bay to Eagle Harbor. We had neep tides for this paddle – halfway between the full and new moons when the tidal currents are modest. And the weather was terrific. Light winds and one of the first really warm, sunny days of spring.
It was a great reminder that I don’t do enough paddling when I’m in Puget Sound. I spend so much time in my kayak when I’m leading summer trips in Alaska, that I can let months go by during the winter without feeding the inner aquifers of physical well being and emotional resilience that come so naturally on the paddle. I get caught up in my work, and before I know it, the winter has slipped away. This year I vowed not to let that happen. If there is one thing I’ve learned as an activist, it is that regular time in the body and in nature are essential to keeping my balance. I’ve been on my bike a lot more this winter too, for the same reasons. When I’m fully engaged in a physical activity, immersed in the rhythms of the natural world, I find refuge from the temptations of overwhelm and despair. I experience an immediate aliveness, both inside and outside my body, that is always there waiting for me. And I experience the satisfaction – endlessly renewable – of doing something that leans in the direction of my core values.
It’s a remarkable thing. Nothing has changed in the grand scheme of things. The world is still burdened with the same problems and vexing challenges. But in these moments of physical refuge, my body remembers what it was put here for, and my mind follows the body’s lead into a direct experience of well being that is no longer hostage to the usual intellectual contentions with reality. I emerge with a renewed capacity for hope that is not tied to any specific results.
And in the process, I see, hear and feels things that I would otherwise have completely missed – in this case, the braying of sea lions hauled out on the channel markers in the Sound, the mesmerizing interplay of light and waves on the water that calm nerves and delight the senses, brightly colored star fish and sand dollars in the inter-tidal shallows, the cold salt wind that quickens my heart as I come around into open water. Each sensation anchors me in the aliveness of the moment at hand, because our senses are always only alive in the present moment – this breath, this play of wind on the face, this bark of seal, or call of kingfisher. It is only the human mind that wanders aimlessly off in the dark alleys of past and future imaginings.
When Rick and I pulled into Eagle Harbor we were both bone tired, and completely satisfied. It was the first paddle of significance for me on Puget Sound since I ended my year in circumference. What a great feeling. Even the stiffness in the body that lingered for several days was a reminder of how much had been revealed to me. We will finish our circumnavigation of Bainbridge in a few weeks, and in the meantime I have plans to paddle the estuary sloughs of the Snohomish River with friends next weekend. The path to wildness is everywhere, if we remember to deploy our senses, right where we are.
“Whining is anger through a small opening”
In last week’s blog entry I gave myself over to whining about the social costs of being a climate activist. Like why don’t my friends want to hear, again and again, that it’s the end of the world as we know it? A lot of climatologists are scratching their heads too, wondering where all their friends went. It takes a huge amount of energy to confront the truth of our situation, and at the same time try to carry on as if nothing has actually changed. That’s a magic trick that many activists, myself included, refuse to give up trying to master. It leads to a lot of friction in the form of anger at self and others. And that leads to a lot of whining, because all that anger has to go somewhere. And its more polite to whine than to scream. It just takes a lot more of it to get the job done. As Al Franken has said, “Whining is anger through a small opening.”
The alternative to whining is much harder. Show, don’t tell. And once you’ve made your best effort, accept what comes. Then continue making your best effort anyway, regardless of results. That’s the alternative to whining that makes the most sense to me, but it doesn’t have a lot of proponents, because we want things to go our way. We want reality to conform to our desires, and it just refuses to do so. Climate change is reality saying in REALLY BIG BOLD LETTERS that the game of humans dominating everything is over. So is the illusion that we can get out of this one with just a few minor adjustments to our lifestyle. No wonder climate change gets such a chilly reception at most cocktail parties.
So what if we just changed the nature of our party invitations? I just got wind, through my daughter Kristin, of a movement that has been wafting across the Atlantic from Britain. It’s called the Dark Mountain Project. The basic premise is that when the darkness is deep, we must learn to party in the dark, and quit screaming for a false light to save us. Learning to live in the present darkness means abandoning the false hopes of a technological or political fix, and returning to what is most basic in our human / nature collaboration. The project is the brainchild of fellow Brits Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, who write in their Dark Mountain Manifesto, ”For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of history in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that ‘must’. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative.”
The manifesto lays out eight principles that are worth serious consideration:
- We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
- We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.
- We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
- We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
- Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.
- We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.
- We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
- The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.
The Manifesto also celebrates the famous lines from Robinson Jeffers’ 1937 poem The Answer, that helped launch the environmental movement in the first place:
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.
I agree with George Monbiot’s critique of the Dark Mountain movement, that this impulse toward withdrawal must not be used as a license to abandon our commitment to saving the human future from a wildly unsustainable industrial trance. As he has said, “There are no easy answers to the fix we’re in, but there are no easy non-answers either.”
I doubt that I will ever abandonment my hope for an enduring human future. I am as passionate as ever in my commitment to the possibility that we can meet our challenges without losing our humanity in the process. But I am also drawn, increasingly, to that “hope beyond hope” that is not tied to any specific outcome. Change has always resided at the heart of life. Our own death, and the eventual death of our species, are inseparable from that reality. Our human prospects can never be nailed down in any specific form. Learning to flow with this inevitability of change, even as we seek to bring forward what is most precious about our human experiment – is the good fight, the cause that I will never stop fighting for.
Welcome
These blog reflections explore multiple layers of meaning in the words “Inside Passages. They are grounded in Kurt’s geography of home, the Northwest Coast that has so deeply shaped his lifelong sense of place and vocation; his work as a fisherman, wilderness guide, activist, writer and teacher. These posts are both an invitation and a call to action. The invitation is to embark on a different kind of inside passage, one that explores the vastness of the wilderness within, even as we seek to act with the boldness our times demand.
How do we sustain our inner habitat of heart and mind while working to restore a world in turmoil? How can we nurture an identity that is large and robust enough to meet the staggering ecological and social challenges we face with an inner presence and resilience to match our outer clarity and resolve?
Please join Kurt on this journey, and add your voice to the conversation.