Onion Cap

Now here’s a choice our forefathers never faced:  to drink water from a bottle or from the tap.

It would have seemed to them an absurd choice since buying water in a bottle would have been an absurd idea.  I recall longing for and finally purchasing a military canteen.  The canteen was a metal container shaped like a saucer, covered with heavy canvass.

The legislature in Maine is set to consider whether plastic water bottles will be allowed in state offices, buildings, and schools.  Green concerns make up the most of the anti-bottle beliefs, while concession revenues, water safety, and convenience inform the pro-bottle forces.

Such a choice – to bottle or not to bottle.

To be, or not to be, that is the choice.

We wish that were true, and in some ways it is the essential existential question; but choosing isn’t what we usually do.  More often than not, we live in the comfort of not-choosing.  Small choices make us happy – do I choose the Italian roast this morning or the breakfast blend?  Do I have oatmeal or do I have toast?  Over easy or scrambled?  Do I buy a car or a truck?  Do I go for the high mileage or comfort?

Pliers or crescent wrench, your choice, $9.95!

Really?

The bigger things, who we love, where we live, what job we take, what religion we ascribe to, what health status we embark upon, what language we speak, what family we are born to, what air we breath … do we really have the choices we think we do? We like to think we have choice, but what may seem like choice may be rationalization, backfilling, and story telling.  It’s only a choice after you’ve made it, after you’ve had a chance to invent the options and measure the outcomes.  To be a choice, there must be options weighed.

What choice do we really have?

That is the question.

I am reading an astounding book right now called On the Origin of Teepees, which involves the Darwinian notion that just as genetic material is really in charge of evolution, ideas are the drivers of human evolution since we’ve become, as brains sitting atop bodies, but receptacles for ideas.  Our physical evolution has been frozen now for several tens of millennia, but as a vehicle for ideas (or rather, memes), our brains have a long ways to go.  We are idea machines, and human evolution now has more to do with ideas and “cultural” evolution rather than physical adaptations.

This is interesting, particularly in light of recent political events, when people seemed hyper-possessed by political ideology.  It turns out, Tea Party politics is a mind virus.

More on this later.

This morning we went to the eastern coast of the Big Island, where we’ve been staying this week.  More on that later.

We arrived about 5 am because we’d heard the night before that the lava flow from Kilauea had once again come close to the old, ruined highway where it could be approached on foot with a reasonable walk.  The best time for viewing is just before sunrise.

And sure enough, there it was, once again covering the already covered roadway with yet another layer of lava.  Little ferns had begun popping up in the older, cooled lava flow.  As this molten rock oozed and crackled across the previous layer, the little ferns burned quickly with tiny sparks shooting.

I didn’t poke it with a stick, but I could have.  You could get within a few feet of the lava pouring out from under the crusty layer that formed atop the fiery red earth blood, but any closer and you risk your hair bursting into flames or your flesh cooking.

The whole island is made of this stuff, maybe the whole world.  Looking at it, it made me aware that we live on a flaming ball covered with a cool crust – just cool enough for us to live here.  This is the stuff of the solar system, of space, of stars, boiling up from the not so deep.  What’s a couple miles when we are talking about planet sized ball of lava? We ourselves and all life on this planet, came from this hot earth life, and eventually, we’ll dissolve back into it.

Pele's fingers at work

We all live in a narrow shell of atmosphere squeezed between the vacuum of space and the magma just beneath the cooled crust.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes?  I think not.  Lava runs in our veins, and to lava we shall return.

Pele’s art is us.

What is it about hanging pictures that I find so consequential?

Maybe it’s choosing the pictures – evoking memories, affecting the mood of a room, creating a story with what’s on the wall, defining space with narrative and image.  Every picture or photo evokes a person, a place, a feeling, a memory.

Then there is the task of hanging something on the wall so that it looks good.  You pound the little, easily bent nail into the hard plaster wall in just the right spot for the hanger, otherwise the picture gets too high or too low;  and if you have an arrangement of pictures, the hangers have to be placed just right so that the group looks orderly.  If you get the hanger in the wrong place, even by a fraction of an inch, then you have to pull it out — now you have a hole in the wall.

It all seems so high stakes while I’m doing it.

Here’s a fantastic interview with Greg.  I am deeply thankful for Greg.  And check out those glasses!

Greg Brown’s song, “Wash My Eyes,” is one of my favorites.  It’s fitting for all times, but especially for the times we are in; but of course, we’re always in a time of some sort.  I spent many years singing and hearing this song with the line “Let the cruel and raging seas. ” I found “seas” a bit confusing, but oh well, it’s Greg you know, and he knows his way around a lyric.  Then, in the Age of the Internet, when all lyrics are found by a Google search rather than patient listening, I discovered that the line is a much more seniscal “Let the cruel and raging cease.”  I still like “seas” though.

This song has always been to me a prayer.  Today it is a very fitting post-election, Thanksgiving prayer.

Here is the whole song:

Wash my eyes that I may see
Yellow return to the willow tree
Open my ears that I may hear
The river running swift and clear
And please
Wash my eyes
And please
Open my ears

Wash this world that is one place
And wears a mad and fearful face
Let the cruel raging cease
Let these children sleep in peace
And please
Wash this world
And please
Let these children
Sleep in peace

The Great Oil Spill is stopped, but the sea is still pretty oily.  Are the whales safe?  How about those coral reefs?

I saw a sail boat for sale a while back and it got me thinking.  What it would be like to sail the seas today in a small ship, like Jack London on the Snark?  Maybe such a sail to Australia is in my future.

Change continues.  Two years ago we were celebrating Obama’s election; two years later some other people are celebrating Boehner’s ascension to power: no one is publicly celebrating the current progress of the human race.

We’ve lost a sense of unity, of common purpose, of mission.  Are we here for selfish ends?  Are we here for each other?  Do we make up what we’re here for as we go along?  Are we here for a purpose that calls upon us to eliminate or dehumanize anyone who does not share our purpose?

Time to restart.  Come on people now.  Everybody get together, try to love one another, right now.

Or, maybe just plan a sailing trip that will take several months, if not years.

two old men stand and wave their arms and hands in a gentle mid-west kata

what they’ve seen and wanted

whom they both might know

all the change and who has passed

and who’d had that surgery

old friends the other didn’t know

time they spent like nickels and dimes

many loads a day

of egg crates and bottled milk

all the fish they caught

the day OSHA came to the shop and shut them down

for lifting thirty-seven pounds or more above your head

ten years of work and now it stops

and do you know Mueller down by the dam?

my house is there behind the tress, so many tress

some herbal thing she’s drinking to lose wieght

it’s funny who you run into and who you know

in Rapid City, South Dakota, a pretty slow place

I heard they had some good wheat years

she works for my cousin

I drove truck for thirty-five years

but she didn’t really advertise

I haul to the cities

she’s got a couple guys who spread the word

The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico is turning out to be one of the events of the century.  Maybe of the millenia.

The Blob will likely engulf the Gulf as it swirls and expands into the largest oil slick ever, catches the Gulf Stream, coats the Florida coast, and smears it’s way right up the eastern seaboard.  This oil spill is rapidly becoming an unprecedented disaster:  The Oil Spill of 2010.  Spew Orleans.

Already we hear reports of anger at the oil company and at the government for failing to make sure it didn’t happen, for not acting fast enough, and for not fixing it already.  As it drags on, the anger will solidify into a story of who should and must be held accountable for this mess.  A price must be paid.  It will change the political calculus of the 2010 election.  So much for “Drill, baby, drill.”  And who will Pat Robertson blame for this?

All the while we retain our right to a tank of gas.  How common and expected it has become to stop at the gas station, fill the tank, buy a bottle of milk, and maybe even have a chat with the neighbors.  The routines of many millions of lives include a stop at the local filling station.  We don’t question it.  It’s almost impossible to imagine life without a car or a 4 wheel drive truck.  As for the gas, we don’t want anyone to tax it, we don’t want to pay a higher price, and we most certainly feel entitled to have our gas available whenever we need it just about anywhere we go.

As we watch the slick spread to fill the Gulf from the satellite view, it’s not at all hard to see the reflection of everyone responsible right there in the sheen of oil, events following our collective actions with the inexorable logic of cause and effect.