Took my listening walk with the dog up Poly Mountain this morning. The clock moved back on Saturday. The dawn was fresh and brilliant after last night’s rain. On the way down, near the gate, I was arrested by a burgeoning yellow acacia at the side of the path. Two peeps emerged from inside its opaque crown. The new leaves glowed green as the light swelled. Pearl-shaped leftover raindrops glittered like diamonds in the sun. The slow strains of cello and viola in Beethoven’s Hymn of Recovery slowly crescendoed in my earbuds and burst into a high-pitched dance of the first violin. A tiny bird flew out of the canopy, remained suspended and vibrating, then fired a blast of colors from its emerald head and ruby throat.

When I saw white butterflies in the sun
Flutter among my broccolis,
Like a tragic king at the oracle
I knew what was in store.

Now dark mornings find me
On aching knees
With headlamp pointed down
Searching undersides of ragged leaves
Stems fouled with droppings
Tangles of shredded buds.

I spot the velvety worms
The color of what they’ve eaten,
The shape of where they hide.

I lift them tenderly
With forefinger and thumb
To squeeze out their guts.

the prequel:  Traitor Joe’s

from SLO New Times

It may be of interest to readers who shop at Trader Joe’s that the company has agreed to shift all its seafood purchases to sustainable sources by December 12, 2012. This decision came after a campaign called “Traitor Joe’s,” mounted by Greenpeace, pressured the company to abide by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “red list” of species to avoid.

Trader Joe’s had refused to do that and didn’t reply to e-mails from customers back in February, but I just discovered an update on their website stating the intention to “address customer concerns including the issues of over fishing, destructive catch or production methods, and the importance of marine reserves.” Hooray for Greenpeace, for Trader Joe’s, and for its customers.

Slideshow

This is a win for San Luis Obispo. Jan will serve effectively and humanely. She has the talent, the experience and the dedication to do an excellent job as mayor, leading and representing the City—which according to last month’s newspapers is both the most desirable place to live in America and is about to fall off a cliff. Either way, it will benefit from her leadership.

It’s a win for her, because it provides the opportunity to fulfill not an ambition, but an ongoing mission of public service and leadership. When I first met her 44 years ago as a junior at Stanford, she organized a campaign to get women equal rights with men to live off campus at much cheaper rents than those in the dormitory. This involved facing down the President of the University who wasn’t eager to lose the revenue provided by the policy of protecting female purity.

When we lived in the wilds of British Columbia during the 1970’s, she helped found a satellite campus of a community college and became its first director. When we moved back to California, she got a job as Director of Graduate Student Housing at Stanford and devised a network of neighborhood coordinators—now called Community Associates–which still remains vital.
While attending Law School, she organized the mature returning students and then took a part-time job as a law clerk involving the preparation of a landmark Supreme Court case assuring equal opportunity for women in the workplace.

When we moved to San Luis Obispo 22 years ago, she immediately embarked on a course of public service that led to appointment to the County Parks and City Planning Commissions and to her election to City Council in 1998 and again 2008. All of her political and humanitarian work in this place has been volunteer or for minimal pay, for she’s been able to make her living as an attorney.

The mayor’s job will allow her to use and expand abilities cultivated over a lifetime.

It’s a win for me, not only for the reflected glory—imagine the pleasure I’ve taken in knocking on thousands of doors and telling whoever opens them about the virtues of the woman I love, and in posting hundreds of signs of tribute to her all over town. But also imagine what it would be like to live with someone this energetic and smart whose time was not occupied being in charge of a whole city.

So here’s to our new mayor, and to this fleeting moment of triumph, and to all of you who contributed in one way or another to make it happen.

The title of Bill McKibben’s latest book, Eaarth, sounds like the cry of someone falling off a cliff. McKibben has been writing about climate change since he published The End of Nature twenty years ago, always mixing a prophetic pessimism about the magnitude of the danger with an activist’s optimism about how disaster could be avoided. In the two years since the publication of his last book, Deep Economy, the option of avoidance has disappeared. Eaarth is McKibben’s name for the less friendly and predictable planet humans now inhabit. Two years ago, people were still quaintly worried about the effect of climate change on their grandchildren. Today its consequences are already upon us. “Eaarth,” he concludes starkly, “represents the deepest of human failures.”

This book is worth reading now because it fully takes into account three recent catastrophes: the acceleration of geophysical climate changes, the near collapse of the global economic system, and the failure of the U.N. Copenhagen Climate conference to arrive at any meaningful international agreement. McKibben’s prescriptions for dealing with our predicament are consistent with what he and many others have been advocating since 1970: recognizing limits to growth, promoting localism and decentralization, and affirming that conservation and satisfaction of basic needs must replace our excesses of consumerism and greed.

During the years he was working on this book McKibben was remarkably successful in organizing two grassroots worldwide movements largely driven by young people, Step-It-Up and 350.org. Despite their inability to produce the kind of changes needed, his recommendations for adaptation to our reduced circumstances could allow us to face them “lightly, carefully, gracefully.”

my notes and comments on Deep Economy (Word doc)

9:30 Fog quiets the landscape and makes this wide open space intimate.

The one muddy patch on Poly Canyon road, just past the DWR pipeline, drew me toward a little watercourse heading eastward up the hill into an oak woodland I’d never explored. Led by it I came to a fence bordering La Cuesta Ranch and slipped underneath, then followed a well-trodden cowpath into a grove of immense live oaks, their central trunks fallen over centuries ago and since then growing their branches into forests of vigorous verticals.  I came out into the clear and stopped at the base of a small chapparal-covered peak shaped like Chico Marx’s hat.

The ecotone separating it from grassland is wide and empty, evidence of much furtive animal activity.  This is where the coyote chorus I’ve heard during many nights in Poly Canyon originates.  I found a seat with a good prospect, outside the dripline of the oaks, which I fear will drop ticks.  The quiet swells after I stop moving and then gradually is broken by the sounds of activity.  A bunch of big birds on thick branches of the oak across the streambed, probably quail. Now they drop to the ground  and resume feeding on bugs and worms, occasionally cackling.  Five magpies glide from the tall sycamore below into the brush above.  Jays scold and chatter.

First stage of the fast: hangover listlessness of caffeine withdrawal upon awakening, exaggerated by sinus infection.  Hardly able to speak or pack before I left this morning. Now the second stage: hunger, fatigue, dullness.

10:30 An hour has passed. Under the oak the quail have been joined by two grouse, a rabbit and many small brown birds.  It must be a luxurious plentiful buffet.  Sounds of cheeps and and warbles and a woodpecker’s tap, then a gopher’s warning chirp sends the quail into the cover of the brush.  I’m alert now after a 45 minute reverie. The fog has lifted to reveal the Citadel and Rockslide Ridge across the valley, but the sky is still overcast; there are no shadows.

I open the Bible at random to Isaiah 6.1 and read the description of God sitting on a throne above the ark in the Temple. He says:

Go and tell this people
You may listen and listen but you will not understand
You may look and look again but you will never know
The peoples wits are dulled
Their ears are deafened and their eyes blinded…
How long O lord…
Until cities fall in ruins and are deserted
Houses are left without people and the land goes to ruin and lies waste…
Even if a tenth remain there, they will be exterminated.

11:30

I’ve sat zazen 45 minutes.  As I open my eyes, a white hawk lands in the top of an oak. Quail chattering close behind me earlier, but now they’ve ceased.  Overcast breaking up.  Pieces of blue sky against the yellow gold grass on the ridge.  Colors emerging.  Monkeyflower, this years shiny oak leaves, sage greens of Artemesia and Black Sage.

More ground squirrel cheep, like a smoke alarm with low battery. No traffic sound here, bermed against the freeways and town.  Not moving for two hours.  A fly crossed my brow slowly, explored the furrow between my eyebrows, my irritation turned to enjoyment.  Mood changed to alert and content.  Colors brilliant, shadows black where the sun breaks through cloud.  I take pictures for a panorama.

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Looking at the oak, I want to draw the flowing curve of a branch’s shadow on the grass.  At twenty five I took a life drawing class.  That was it.  My father, especially in his later years, spent a lot of time sketching landscapes.  He would have loved this spot.  If he were still around I’d try drawing with him.

1:50

Climbed through the oak forest up the steep slope behind me, enjoying movement and the changing angles of motion and perspective. At the top of the ridge I could see east along Cuesta Ridge and over much of Poly Land.  The sky is blue with patches of cloud moving fast west to east.

Sitting in dry grass near the top, I read the first chapter of EAARTH, Bill McKibben’s sequel to Isaiah, which I’ll lead a discussion on for the faculty book club.  Earth needs a new name to indicate we no longer inhabit the hospitable planet we used to.  The consequences of our excess have started to snowball.  It’s still not perceptible today here, nor in B.C. this summer, but his prophetic descriptions make it real. What is perceptible is the continuing failures of political systems at all levels. And yet Jan is running for Mayor and I knock on doors for her.

3:30

Ninety minutes of zazen and a little chanting.  The fast now makes it easy and pleasureable.  The mind less busy.  Afternoon light is almost supernatural.  Colors are radiant, including the blue of cloudless sky.

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4:25

Psalm 104:
From thy high pavilion thou dost water the hills
The earth is enriched by thy provision
Thou makest grass grow for the cattle
And green things for those who toil for man
Bringing bread out of the earth
And wine to gladden men’s hearts
Oil to make their faces shine…
The trees of the land are green and leafy…
The birds build their nests in them
High hills are the haunt of the mountain goat
And boulders the refuge for the rock badger…

The breeze of late afternoon rustles sycamore leaves and then quiets, but a long twisted branch still shudders.  The shadows lengthen and the sun creeps below the tree tops.  The fragrance of cow dung returning to its source in grass and dirt.  A magpie sings his complaint.

Back to Bill McKibben.  My attention drawn from his warnings by the loud chirp of a groundsquirrel close by.  Twenty yards away a coyote lopes silently along the cowpath, the edges of his fur red in the sun.  Higher on the hillside, three more coyotes run in a line. A moment of apprehension, then I go for the camera, but they are gone.

Time is marked by his grandfather’s gold watch mounted in a belljar by my father, now placed on the antique commode in my study that holds his and my mother’s ashes.  Reading Montaigne and Tagore.  The former on aging and illness, the latter on love of God.

I’ve been thinking about hygiene, since having my teeth cleaned on Wednesday and going to Dr. Malotte on Thursday.  My morning ritual lengthens, reminding me of my father’s: hot bath to reduce joint pain, three medications plus nasal irrigation with nettie pot to reduce sinus infections, water pik and electric toothbrush to reduce gum recession, shaving to reduce decrepitude, 35 minutes meditation to reduce depression and anxiety. But even with the new cushion and posture instruction, its not good for me to sit cross legged, I’ve discovered after several months.  Bending the right knee laterally produces swelling and pain.  Experiment leads me to relief with proper adjustment of the new desk chair. All of this therapy within my power, controlled with habit.

But tonight is Yom Kippur, the annual holy night. I intended to observe by sleeping out, but reneged because of my cough.  Tomorrow I will leave early for a day of outdoor silence.

I have again started searching, taking on a little of  the restlessness and frustration of a lover.  Meditation is not just hygeine, it’s an effort to be open to something more, to clear resistance, to be ready for help if it should come.  And gardening is full of longing and gratitude and fear, and eating is a little sacramental.  The preparation of next Spring’s course is leading me back to classical music.  Attending to Beethoven, Brahms.  Buying some CD’s, listening for texture and structure, a struggle to attend, like to attend to breathing and walking and the sound of waves.  Another title, Mishima’s novel, reading books, finding patterns and meanings and details.  Trying to connect with the books lining my walls, towering over me.

The newspaper and the radio and even the emails on my computer create a world of gloom hard to reconcile with the light on the mountain, the sharpness of the horizon line, the laughter of my grandkids and the returning college students.  Desperation and deception, cruelty and violence, denial or trivialization of what we are doing to each other and our planet.  So much misplaced energy, problems constantly worsened, speeding toward disaster.  And no way to detach from it.  Driving fifty miles a day to keep a little contact with my grandson, putting up yardsigns, watching movies.

What do I want?  The connection with inner and outer worlds that produces the abundance of feeling that finds expression in creativity.

A doleful awakening on a foggy Sunday morning,  joints aching from the strain of lifting boxes of steel wires and forcing them into hard ground to hold Elect Jan Marx Mayor signs.  Looking forward to meditation for escape from the nattering in my head, then impatient for it to be over.  Not swimming enough because I wont use the Poly Rec Center in protest against that revolting expansion.

I wont let my alienation from the University–latest outrage disbanding the CSA- alienate me from Poly Land.  I’ve been wondering about the red blanket of vegetation on Poly Mountain since June.  Is it dried monkeyflower or buckwheat?

As soon as I slip into my West Coast Trail boots, my mood lightens and my legs urge me to get started, like the dog when he sees Jan lace her runners. I stride through the silent foggy streets, climb over the fence, and feel the spring of my footfalls through the grass.  The sensation of freedom in the question, which way to go? Feet find a trail of cracked soil showing through trampled grass pointing straight uphill.  Breathing muscles mobilized.  The absence of the forty-pound pack makes the steepening ascent effortless, and the mixture of tarweed and horsemanure pleasures my nostrils. The trail continues beyond the fence.  Two strands of barbed wire slack enough to allow me through.  The sun is a faint disk penetrating the fog, recalling its appearance at Klanawa River.

Perhaps I’ll go to the tree house and sit there and write.  I’ve done it before. The trail winds through the chapparal right to it.  A new resident?  Entering the secluded clearing under the great  oak, I see a  spade and a rake leaning against the twenty foot ladder that reaches the lowest branch.  Ten feet above the tree house a large improvised hammock hangs atop another ladder. As I stare I hear a sleepy “hello?” Not wanting to trespass, I say “Hi, my name’s Steven. I come here every few months.  Do you know E.C. the guy who built this house?”  “Yes, met him once,” answers a voice whose origin seems to be a pile of blankets in the hammock.  I ask if it’s OK to come up, and then mount the lower ladder. At the treehouse platform I see a mop of hair at the edge of the blankets above and try to build more trust.  Yes they know M, they’re his students.  I wrote in the guest ledger here on previous visits.  I climb the next ladder into the bedroom.  Two people snuggle under the blankets, K. and T.  They work with the same environmental organization I do.  I  built a hammock like that forty years ago for kids on our farm in B.C.

After fifteen minutes chat I descend the ladders and continue up the mountain,  serpentine boulders providing foot and handholds.  The fog  now just a ribbon draping Bishop Peak. The dark red scrub I’d been wondering about from the house and while approaching SLO on the freeway is neither monkeyflower nor buckwheat, but deerweed stalks, all the leaves and flowers gone. A huge exclusive patch, easy to walk through. Three years after the fire, it’s choked out all the poison oak.