My pre-dawn run leaves me bathed in peace, pleasure and inspiration. I started up with exercise again last Saturday with an hour’s run-walk on the Miossi Ranch and then yesterday morning with four laps around the track. The sense of self-neglect has been growing for months, along with intensifying bouts of anxiety and depression: body protesting to mind. Yesterday and today I woke up before the 5:30 alarm relieved to escape dreams of embarrassment, frustration and failure. There was no longer a choice, something led me to the tennis shoes in the closet, to the door, and down the steps under Venus and a crescent moon.

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Dear Steven:

Here are my reflections on the demonstration in DC: Please put them on your blog if you have room.

Love, Jeff (Parson)

I had planned to meet my old college buddy, Steven Marx, in SF, managing to get a seat on his flight to DC for the major peace demo on Jan 27. The only problem was I had promised myself I would mail out over 200 copies of my CD of 17 original songs for peace and justice, “The Baby and the Bathwater.” (available on porchswingmusic.com) It was important to get them to radio stations before the official release date and I was cutting it very close. If I waited ˜til I returned from DC, I wouldn’t make it. Feeling almost as exhausted as the many printer cartridges I had gone through, I finally accomplished my first goal, but it was going on 10 pm and I had a five-hour drive ahead of me. Gulping a large green tea, I headed down the highway only to arrive sleepless in SF with insufficient time and stamina to meet Steven. Damn it! I had stood up one of my best friends! Not a very peaceful way to begin the journey!

Sadly resigned to this failure, I shifted my focus to my next scheduled meeting, with my 17-year old daughter, Dakotah, a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College. We connected at an international youth hostel, where many other protesters were beginning to arrive and the mood was of growing excitement, determination, even apprehension. What would it be like? There were many college age activists and veterans but there were also lots of older folks and people of diverse backgrounds and occupations not normally associated with peace demonstrations, such as George, a former commercial pilot from Spokane, Washington. As we traded predictions on the coming event I had the sense it was going to be huge. Vince, a parade marshal with a prominently displayed arm-band warned of protest bashers who might try to start fights. Dakotah and I agreed we would try to avoid being arrested. She had to return to school. I needed my passport for an up-coming trip and didn’t want to lose it on some hoked-up charge. (more…)

[For photo album and slideshow for this entry, go here]

Sunday 2:35 P.M. United flight 0871 Dulles to SFO

The sun is shining when A. and E. arrive Saturday morning. Their Honda van is covered with a mural depicting kids in the city and fish, birds, and plants of the Chesapeake watershed along with a logo of a sailboat surrounded by the words “Living Classrooms Foundation¦Learning by Doing.”

While E. chats with S. about work, A. tells me about her program taking inner city kids on hikes and boat excursions to study their bioregion and get involved in restoration projects. I tell her that my University, Cal Poly’s motto, is “Learn by Doing,” and that I teach courses in Bioregional Place Study.

We park near Teism and hear a roar coming from a crowd with pink banners in front of the National archives across Pennsylvania Ave. On the sidewalk outside the teahouse, a circle of Grannies for Peace stand singing. The people I’m with seem to know everybody outside and in. Two young men at our table say they work for Campus Climate Challenge. I say I’m working on Focus the Nation at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. They say do you know Tyler Middlestadt, our charismatic student sustainability activist. I say let me take your picture for him. A. says that Washington is filled with young activists working for NGO’s. They last about five years before burn out.

When I mention the man on the cell phone yesterday, S. says yes there are a lot of those too. They stay longer. She went to a party recently where she talked to four girls working in the State Department. Their assignment was to figure out ways to influence the elections in Nicaragua. When S. asked how can you do that in good conscience, they replied that it was a benefit to the region to promote stability. (more…)

United flight 0936 San Francisco to Dulles
8:00 AM, Friday January 26

The sun shines from the direction we’re heading. The coast range pokes through cloud cover thickly wrinkled like the top of a souffle blanketing the valleys below.

The 5:30 AM flight from SLO to SFO: Venus cast her pristine beams above an eastern horizon striped pink and orange as we descended in the dark, only mountain peaks and a couple of beacons protruding through the marine layer. A few thin spots glowed pale, traces of the sea of lights hidden below. This is what the Bay Area might look like after the deluge. Morning coffee served by a pretty stewardess.

I love flying. Planes and airports let me admire rather than scorn our human achievement: thought, organization, community. Even the corporations.

Flying also sends my mind inward, propels me to the edge. At any moment the plane could start falling. I’d grab my cell phone, call Jan, say it’s been great”buddhatrip, eclipse, wabikon, barrel stove, venice, thank you, have fun, travel. What do I leave behind? The initials of my password: wife, children, grandchildren. Three books. Three places: New York, Lund B.C., San Luis Obispo.

Over the Sierras now. Low light on snow and rock, sharp line between brightness and shadow on the ridge crests. The mountains wont suffer from global warming or nuclear winter.

9:00 AM

Still over mountains, snow covers the country, normal for January. Not the weather weirdness of two weeks ago, with sunbathing in New York and wild blizzards in Denver. For the last week I’ve been immersed in the apocalyptic prophecies of An Inconvenient Truth to prepare for my new English course: “The Rhetoric of Sustainability,” and working on plans for “Focus the Nation: Global Warming Solutions for America” coming up in 2008. But this trip is about the War. The ads for 2 million dollar vacation condos in the airline magazine deny both threats. What has my generation bequeathed to our grandchildren?

9:40 AM

I delight in reading Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George. The language gives pleasure one sentence at a time. The author’s sly slow release of information about the characters makes you engage with them before learning their identities. After 80 pages it turns out that this is a real-life Sherlock Holmes mystery about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It takes place in the world of Bleak House that Jan and I were immersed in last night in the final episodes of the BBC serial. Anglophilia is my guilty pleasure, even as an English professor.

11:00 AM Pacific Time above North Dakota

Graph paper road grid, a right angled overlay on squirming fractal landforms.

7:00 PM”Il Rumbero

I wanted the airplane to be filled with people converging on Washington to protest. My old college friend, P., who was supposed to be sitting next to me never showed up. I felt a duty to tell the stranger in his seat that I was going to march against the war, but I kept chickening out. On the shuttle bus from Dulles to the Metro I looked for allies and spotted a man with a gray beard carrying a sign. He was from Mountain View California, a retired Cambridge eye research scientist.

I’ve arranged to arrive around 8:30 to crash at the apartment of young people I was introduced to last summer. A. is the son of friends who lived in the barn loft on the farm in Lund for two years in the seventies. We visited his mom on Saltspring Island and met him for the first time since he was one year old, shortly after his marriage to S, whose picture I saw in their wedding collection on Flickr. (more…)

Yesterday morning, on an impulse, I drove to Morro Bay to spend a couple of hours kayaking during the winter bird festival. The day was warmer than last year, the Bay calmer, and the tide more friendly. Already high at 9:00, when the rental opened, it provided me with two more hours of suction up the estuary before it would turn and leave me stranded. Slight dabs with the paddle propelled me across the spreading silky surface.

A friend had told me she spotted 30 species on the Bay a few days earlier. Equipped with binoculars and camera to capture a grand wildlife display, I felt guilt for possibly disturbing creatures I knew were resting here to gather energy for their long migrations. How much to take of nature’s bounty without creating harm? Sustainability in the abstract takes up much of my time, but I’ve done little to reduce my personal footprint. This has come home to me while reading a book about logging in British Columbia called The Golden Spruce that recalls my days of working in the pulp mill up there in order to be able to live close to the land. Another book about the world’s water shortage called When the Rivers Run Dry makes me anxious about running the soaker hose to establish new native plant seedlings during this drought year.

I paddled past a sandbar far enough from the receding shoreline to avoid spooking a crowd of pelicans, herons and cormorants, but close enough to admire them through binoculars. As I rounded a clump of submerging eelgrass, a grand panoply unfolded: thousands of birds lined up single file, all facing the low sun, motionless in pleasure and adoration.

(click on thumbnail then on enlargement for full size panorama)

Yesterday I went to the Mission Plaza at noon to attend an anti-war demonstration organized by Code Pink, the national organization, largely of women, who have been mounting protests since the war started in 2003. I was reminded of Women Stike for Peace, to which my mother belonged in the 1950’s.

It was one of those beautiful west coast January days.Low light and long shadows. The creek was flowing, the bells were tolling, music wafted through the plaza from one of the restaurant patios. Pairs of shoes of all sizes labelled with the names of Iraqi casualties were laid out on the pavement, an effort to put passersby “in their shoes.”

Prayer flags fluttered from the bandstand, each inscribed with the names and ages of U.S. soldiers killed in the last year and the dates they died. An art teacher unveiled a group canvas produced by her students showing the lofty ideal of the dove of peace and its ragged reality, trapped in barbed wire.

Starting with a woman in her nineties, people read the names of the 110 US troops who died in December written on flags that had not yet been mounted and placed them slowly in a box. After each name, one of the organizers beat a gong. Some wept as they read.

The day before, I had cashed in my United Miles and got a ticket to go to Washington for the January 27 national mobilization. Last night I listened to the CD just sent to me by college friend Jeff Parson: The Baby and the Bathwater–seventeen songs about the horrors of this war he felt called to write and perform with one of his daughters and friends.

Passions are rising. What comes next after elections?

A Walk to the Confluence of Warm Springs Creek and Big Wood River

What do you call a guy who does the Luge? Click mvi_7408.AVI for the answer. Then run the Quicktime movie backward.

Monday November 13, 2006 12:30 P.M.

Abel sleeps, second nap this morning. I fed, changed, carried, played with him since 9:00 when Amy and Joe left with Ethan for school. He got tired in my arms, turning to jelly, eyes closing. While I worked at the computer he sat in his rocker and talked, and when he complained, I just tapped the moon and star rattles.

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Friday November 10, 2006

Isabel is in the third hour of her weekly cleaning Joe and Amy’s house as I sit on the couch in the slant sun illuminating the back sides of the bare aspens in the front yard and creating complicated patterns on the walls through the many windows in sight. North November light.

Inga swearingen croons through the sound system. Four year old Ethan is in nursery school and ten week old Abel is deep asleep. I held, rocked, played with, sang to, fed and changed him for two and a half hours until he drifted off in my arms. As he relaxed, his body got heavier while his consciousness thinned and floated away–along with my own. Now he’s awake again. Only a forty minute nap.

12:10 Abel sits in his bouncy seat listening to the Bruch violin concerto. He’s waving his hands and feet, fascinated with the soft moon, star and blue dog on his toy bar. He stares at them, his own movements rocking him, occasionally furrowing his brow, swatting and talking, and I talk back.  Now the sounds intensify. They could lead to crying or just be self-expression, cheering at the ball game.

I have nothing to do but attend him. Behind the music, the sounds of the Spanish soap opera from the tv in the kitchen as Isabella cleans. We conversed a bit in Spanglish: she has five children, aged 22 to 7. She looks youthful and moves fast.

It’s three days after the election, after the national headlong plunge into darkness has been arrested, after the citizens of San Luis County voted overwhelmingly to approve a huge shopping center on prime ag land with no environmental review. I flew here for a week to provide some support for Joe and Amy as she returns to work.

Friday November 17 enroute Salt Lake City to L.A.

Last night Terry Tempest Williams spoke and read at the Wood River Presbyterian Church. The day I arrived in Ketchum, when I saw this event announced in the paper I’d bought tickets for me Joe and Amy to attend on our last night. The large parking lot was full, the sanctuary of the church, which houses Ethan’s preschool, is a large wood panelled cavern with side windows giving on a view of the dashing river just outside. I’d read Williams’ canonical ecoliterary text, Refuge, years ago and essays in Orion along with her collection, On the Open Space of Democracy. Eloquent and informative, her writing is driven by urgent personal grievings and celebrations, by the need to formulate dilemmas without resolving them, and by an activist’s unrelenting drive to battle for what she believes in. I would have gone out of my way to hear her speak in California, and yet here she was at the doorstep of our home away from home.

On the way into the hall, Joe and Amy introduced me to people of many ages they knew. I was glad to have nudged them in the direction of folks interested in writing and ecology among their own extended circle of neighbors, especially after talks about Amy’s community involvement on the board of directors of Ethan’s school and her strong opinions about the error of demanding twenty percent rather than fifteen percent from developers to create affordable housing.

Terry was introduced by a young woman who sat on the Ketchum Arts Center board that sponsored her talk in connection with a display of photographs on the theme of nature and place that I wished I had known about. The bad setup of the p.a. system made her hard to understand, and for the first part of the program I was irritated to the point of distraction that in such lavish surroundings and at such a pricey occasion, nobody was taking responsbility for the sound. Terry took the stage, and with an apology for shakiness due to diarrhea from food poisoning, sat down to deliver her presentation. I was surprised by her appearance, for some reason expecting a dowdyish presence from the Mormon wife of a contractor, but instead finding a svelte, blackbooted, silverhaired beauty.

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