Solo departure for Lund at 7:00 A.M. after tying up loose ends yesterday, including the resubmission of a reformatted version of “Genes and Genesis,” the article now rejected by five journals.  Jan cancelled her trip to stay in SLO because of late-breaking family developments.

Between Paso and Salinas, at the outset of the long drive I  listen to the podcast of one of Dan’s Dharma talks, calmed by his voice though skeptical about the comprehensive reassurance he offers on all fronts, spiritual, emotional and political. Then the Beethoven Rasoumovksy quartets bubble in my earbuds as the wheels spin up the freeway at 80 mph. Then This American Life, Science Friday and Fresh Air.  Despite disdain for Corporate Takeover, I’m grateful for what I get from the automobile, petroleum, and digital entertainment industries.

An hour before Davis, where I’ve arranged to have lunch with Caesar and Penny, my new iPhone dingalings to interrupt the podcast with a call from Chad, a former Cal Poly student organizer and political collaborator since 2007.  He and Megan have taken a day off from their five month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in Mt. Shasta City and he just wanted to say hello and thank-you for Jan’s email to him. I’ve read their endearing blog, Trail 4 Two, and have thought of them wistfully since they started back in April.

I’ll be in Shasta City that evening.  Could we meet? I’ll get them a hotel room. He’s incredulous and hesitant.  They just had a night in a hotel and are getting back on the trail to keep to schedule.  Maybe we could meet, with further prearrangement, on my way back around the 22^nd.  I say I don’t want to pressure them of course, but what a coincidence this is.  He needs to talk to Megan; they’ve just got a hitchhike ride to Castle Crags where they’ll rejoin the trail.  I know Castle Crags I say; see it from the freeway every year for the last 42 years.  He asks if I have camping gear and whether I could I meet them on the trail. Absolutely.  He says he’ll phone back. A half hour later he does; says there’s a little road at the Centralia exit that leads to a spur where they can wait for me and we can hike and camp together tonight.

Caesar bubbles with news of his second grandchild born ten days ago and cooks up a  fritata filled with his own garden’s vegetables.  By 1:30 I’m eager to get back on the road for the rendezvous at Castle Crags. In our phone conversation I came up with between 4:30 and 5:00 out of the air, having little idea how long it would take from Davis, but as the hot Central Valley rolls by, the hour looks plausible.  Chad emails  the number of the ranger which I can miraculously click on the iphone, and he gives me the specifics of the location.  Then there’s a sign about traffic delays due to a fire ahead, and just above Lake Shasta the smoke and the slowed traffic that might abort the meeting.

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But the delay is brief and at the Dog Trail  parking area, Chad and Megan are sitting under a tree. We embrace and marvel at the coincidence of our trajectory.  I load my backpack with sleeping bag and the bread and sardines Jan had sent along and we head up toward Castle Crags and the maintrail.

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They are concerned about whether the climb is too steep, but I keep up the pace talking the whole way along the mercifully shaded path. It was 110 in Redding that afternoon, while they carried their 35 pound packs for hours through large changes in elevation.  They brim with adventures on the trail and are curious about  SLO politics and our family drama.

Around 7 we encounter some of their fellow PCT hikers setting up camps along a stream in deep shade.

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We find our own flat spot and are soon joined by “Fall Risk” a  veteran of the Appalachian Trail. He hikes in special shoes that partially compensate for an orthopedic defect. Among many other roles he’s a musician and composer and has been producing fully mixed songs with a phone app and sending them to his girlfriend.

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Chad and Megan prepare a sumptuous dinner using vegetables they dehydrated before their trip, one example of the vast project of planning and preparation it required.

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Another is the coordination with “Trail Angels” who’ve met them along the way with luxury provisions and fresh company.  But despite the totally upbeat atmosphere of our brief encounter I imagine that this project has involved a great deal of endurance of both physical and emotional rigors.

Though I sleep fitfully, the night is most pleasant lying next to Megan, breathing the balmy evergreen scented air, gazing at patches of light from the full moon sprinkled throughout the forest, reveling in the sense of escape from a burdensome routine of obligation and anxiety  and the prospect ahead of staying at Knoll House and spending time alone with Joe and more time with him and his family.

We all awaken at dawn for an early departure to keep up our several travel schedules and catch up on the time time lost with this happy delay.  The goodbyes are lengthy and poignant

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”better too brief than too long a visit. Along the trail I feel continued companionship with the moon and the crags

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as  I head back to the car  concerned that it may have been vandalized by the locals who littered the parking area with shotgun shells and targets.  But Jade waits intact, and I get back on the road, talk to Jan, listen to music and decide, a little recklessly, to take an alternate route to Portland, where I’ve arranged to meet Andy P. at his studio in the afternoon for coffee on the way to rendezvous with Joe that night somewhere close to the Canadian border.

The drive to Klamath Falls on route 97 through volcano country and farmland is fast and beautiful, but the road gets ugly, busy and slow on the way to Bend and beyond.  I listen to a  lecture by a Harvard Medical School Professor on recurrent Glioblastoma, Steve’s condition.  I phone Andy to postpone and then cancel our meeting, perhaps until the return trip, and hear from Joe that he was late in leaving Ketchum and wont get to Bellingham until 1:30 A.M.  So I decide to kill some time, process and upload photos and eat dinner at the Timberline Lodge near the top of Mount Hood. It’s a beautiful stone and timbered structure built by the WPA, graced with with vast views, mountain flowers in full bloom and the summer snowfields of the summit.  A walk on the heavily travelled trail in back leads to a sign indicating a junction with the PCT.

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Here, Chad and Megan will again cross my path, but only after several more weeks of toil and deprivation.

I drive down the shoulder of the mountain and rejoin Interstate 5 north of Portland and carrying on my musical and literary migration as night falls.  I hear Librivox recordings chapters from John Muir’s 1915 Travels in Alaska describing the beauties of the Northwest, the charm and geology of Victoria, the splendors of the inside passage and Alaskan glaciers.  At midnight I reach a rest area five miles south of the border from which we can make an early enough departure to avoid what will be lengthy delays at immigration and at the ferry at the beginning of this midsummer holiday weekend.  I fall asleep behind a picnic table, and waking for a pee at 1:30 I see Joe’s truck parked next to Jade.  I get up with the first light at 5:00 A.M. wake and embrace him, and we get through the border and onto the ferry with no wait.  His truck is loaded full with construction tools.

We buy groceries in Powell River, arrive at Knoll House in the sunshine, sleep-deprived but satisfied, and gasp at the immaculate condition of the place left to us by Tai and Theo, hardly a trace of their possessions visible, and all the Marx family stuff placed exactly where we left it.  Neatly stacked next to the half completed deck for the cabin is a pile of timbers cut from a tree near the driveway by Sam Richards.  Peter and Margaret stop by with a big zucchini and an invitation to a 70^th birthday party at Pam’s, but we politely decline.

Amor vincit omnia
says the Prioress’ golden brooch
in a Middle English prologue
I recited yesterday to my class.
Love conquers all:
all order, constraint, justice
hope and resignation
dissolved
in the assault
of horned buck, spurred cock
and rival knights,
in the swoon of a smitten queen,
in a country parson’s charity.
When offspring wander wayward
with their brood
it herds them home
undaunted.

I began this blog six years ago at the start of a long, gradual splashdown toward full retirement which yesterday concluded.  Larry and I chose Bob Dylan as the topic of the final week in the Great Works course we co-taught, and hoping to make a small gesture of farewell for the last interpretive sally, I selected a song which has been my friend since I was the age of this year’s students.  I woke up at the usual time, gripped by the usual anxiety about facing the class eight hours later, and decided to write out some parting remarks.

Song lyrics

1965 Performance

This song is about departing and starting, about being through and beginning anew, about relinquishing the past and welcoming change, about what Virginia Woolf called “Time Passing” and what Mary Oliver called “The Journey,” and what Thoreau called “Spring.”

The song’s emotion is elegiac, the paradoxical bittersweetness of a eulogy–a mixture of strong feelings that modulate from harsh to insistent to comforting and encouraging.  That mixture is expressed in the repeated melodic line of every stanza, the regular meter of the lyrics, the amazing congruence of the rhymes, and the complexity of the singer’s tone.

The situation the song sets up is one of forced evacuation from one’s home”the rocky transition from resident to refugee. The speaker’s rough voice is that of the cherub holding the sword at the Gates of Eden, chasing Adam and Eve out of Paradise”proclaiming the end of Innocence.

This is a metaphor for other endings:

• breaking up a love affair
• striking the set after the performance of a play
• concluding a dinner party
• attending the last day of a class
• graduating from college
• retiring from a career
• facing death

One strain in the voice is threatening, cruel, even sneering.

• You must leave now— the place you occupied is no longer yours”you have to abandon whatever you’ve surrounded and protected yourself with.
• Take what you need¦you better grab it fast”And make it quick, I mean it.
• Otherwise you’ll be shot or trampled: Yonder stands your orphan with his gun¦ Look out the saints are comin’ through.
• Your position has been given to someone else, who’s waiting to occupy what used to be your room and is already wearing what was in your closet: The vagabond who’s rapping at your door/Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
• Whatever you’ve committed to, accumulated and relied on in the past has lost its strength.  That means the forces with which you built your defenses”All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home/All your reindeer armies, are all going home–and also the desire that let you drop those defenses in bed: The lover who just walked out your door/Has taken all his blankets from the floor.
• The reality on which you’ve based your life is shifting: The carpet now is moving under you— and even the heavens above are collapsing like a tent: This sky too is folding over you.

Another strain in the voice offers cold but prudent counsel:

• take what you need, you think will last. Now you must distinguish your grain from your chaff, your goods from your stuff.
• The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense: there’s no more security and predictability, so be wary and wise.
• Take what you have gathered from coincidence. You cant rely on abstraction or principle, only the tentative knowledge gained from your own personal experience.

The chill in the voice is also bracing.

• It urges courage: Leave your stepping stones behind
• It promises freedom: Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you.

And finally the voice redirects nostalgic longing for the old flame that’s burned out to the opportunity for beginning: Strike another match, go start anew

And it alerts us to the sound of a future unseen, perilous, and yet beckoning, where something calls for you.

So on this last day of our class, where the works we’ve read have stimulated all of us into affirming new beginnings, this day before all of us “must leave,” lets listen to what this song of Innocence and Experience has to say.

This morning I finished the transfer and update and backup of files, erased all my data from Lubertson and turned him in to the College of Liberal Arts. Most likely he’ll be sent to China for recycling of parts. Now I sit in my armchair comfortably typing in front of an extremely bright glass covered screen with a good deal higher resolution than Lubertson’s. There’s no power cord to worry about, no throbbing furnace in my lap, no loudly whirring hard drive, no long waits between operations or need to shut down applications to move from one to another, no need for an external hard drive except for backup. My pose is a lot like that on the ubiquitous billboards for ipads in Los Angeles: relaxed, at leisure. This is all extremely nice: a huge upgrade in comfort and convenience in using the instrument I spend most of my waking hours with.

But what’s more amazing is the fact that this machine, nine years newer than Lubertson, has no functions, cant do anything, that he couldn’t do, simply does it all better. If one compares technological progress in the most recent interval to the progress of the previous nine years, 1992-2001, the slowing of innovation is what’s striking. Netscape was founded that year”the beginning of the world wide web. In 1992 Doug and I created the Multimedia Blake Hypercard stacks that within two more years were rendered obsolete by html. 1998 marked the advent of the Powerbook G3 laptop, allowing for portable computing. I carried the machine everywhere”to England for the Shakespeare conferences, to Lund, to Ketchum. Digital cameras and iphoto and itunes came online at the end of that span, in 2001, just before I got the Titanium. By then I had all my course materials generated in Dreamweaver, was working paperless and was taking the computer to every class and projecting onto the screen most of the time, for better and for worse.

The technological change of the preceding nine years was even more transformative. In 1983, computers were only for geeks. My high technology was a selectric IBM typewriter. We got the first Mac 512 in 1984, when Jan started law school. The power it conferred to delete, replace, find, cut, paste, outline, and save was as magical as the ability to flap my arms and fly in dreams. I still have it in the garage.

Letter to Editor New Times

The Cal Poly Crop Science Department’s decision to kill the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Program may have been cruel and ill advised, but it did provide an effective display of raw power (“Harvest of disappointment,” Aug. 25). Its execution with blitzkrieg haste at a time of year when the university is deserted was well timed to maximize the shock and bewilderment of the many students, faculty, employees, and customers who held a stake in this real community institution.

One wonders if any of the decision- makers has ever shared my experience as a 10-year CSA member”being personally connected to the elemental process of planting, cultivating, harvesting, and cooking food grown by people they knew, in soil they loved. One wonders if these agriculturalists were aware of the decades of dedication invested in this program by visionary volunteers as a tiny offset to the servitude of most of the College of Agriculture to corporate industrial-chemical interests. One wonders if these crop scientists had considered the impact of being left in the lurch mid-season on several local small farmers who had partnered with the CSA.

One also wonders if their bumbling explanations, insulting to any person of intelligence, convinced their own authors or were just a smokescreen for a show of force. The only statement that made any sense in the letter sent to the press and to CSA members was that the program has been running a deficit. Apart from the fact that innovative, educational, and community service projects should not be judged simply by the bottom line of short-term profitability, a reasonable approach to the CSA’s financing problems would be for Cal Poly to activate some of its educational resources and opportunities”for instance in agricultural marketing and distribution”to help it thrive.

[Written for ASLE Newsletter at Ruth’s request]

At the 2009 ASLE Conference in Victoria B.C. the plenary speaker at the final banquet, Ruth Ozeki, suggested that members of the Association make room for the practise of contemplative meditation in their activities of meeting, writing and teaching.  Ozeki is the author of two influential novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), which dramatized issues of industrial agriculture, animal welfare, genetically engineered crops, and malnutrition which have taken center stage in recent discussions about sustainability and the food system.

Lately, in essays and poems and in her role as editor of Everydayzen.org, the website of her mentor Norman Fischer, Ozeki has been promoting the practice of Zen meditation. From June 5-9 Ozeki and her colleague Kate McCandless, a poet and ordained Zen priest, conducted a workshop on writing and meditation at the Hollyhock Learning Center that provided compelling support for the value of adding contemplative practice to the mix of analytic, creative, scientific, political and recreational activities associated with Literature and the Environment.

The setting was appropriate.  Hollyhock is located in a spectacular wilderness on the coast of remote Cortes Island in the Straight of Georgia, within view of peaks and glaciers on Vancouver Island and the mainland Coast Range. The island’s sparse population includes indigenous peoples, loggers and fishermen, hippies, artists, and environmental activists, including Ozeki and her husband.  The site was originally developed during the 1970’s as Cold Mountain Institute by Richard Weaver and served as a gathering place for Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, Alan Ginsberg, r.d. laing, among others.  The facility was sold to a consortium of artists and activists in the 1980’s and since then has developed as a model of local organic food production and home-built sustainable architecture offering hundreds of educational and outdoor recreational programs to the public.

The five-day workshop featured guided meditations directing attention to posture and breathing, to the impressions on the five senses, to memories of childhood, to the four elements shared by the body and the natural world, to the consciousness of emotions and to empathy with others.  Emphasizing the complementary aspects of sitting and writing, each of the meditation exercises was coupled with prompts and time for composing, presenting and listening to others’ work. The many opportunities for exploration”kayaking, a boat trip to a world heritage bird sanctuary, hiking the inland trails”were forsaken in favor of the contemplative practices, which were however heightened by the surrounding presence of forest, sea and sky and to which connection was intensified by silence and concentration.

The workshop reinforced the importance of frequently ignored components of the ecoliterary tradition: the pastoral of solitude and the pastoral of contemplation celebrated in  Chinese and Japanese nature writing as well as by European and American authors like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau. It led participants to the place in Andrew Marvell’s Garden where

the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
¦
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

I arrive at the Sanctuary on time. Martha’s the only one there.  After the hour of sitting and walking meditation our conversation continues. I mention that it was a real-estate agent publicizing cheap rural property in the Georgia Straight newspaper that drew us and many of our neighbors from far-away places to settle in the Powell River area forty years ago. She asks why we left, and I say a sense that after nine years, the time was ripe for me to return to the active life of career development and public engagement from which I had withdrawn into a rural retreat. Also that this personal feeling provided an answer to the research question which had kept my doctoral dissertation in English Literature unfinished: why, in literary tradition, is the pastoral setting associated with youth and old age while middle age is associated with the city.

“Interesting,” she says, “that corresponds to my own experience. I left Cortes to marry and live for many years in Chicago, before returning here.  It reminds me of a great class I audited at Harvard as an undergraduate by a professor¦what was his name…”

” Erik Erikson,” I exclaim, “the author of Childhood and Society. He’s the one whose ideas about stages of the life cycle guided my research. I still have his wonderful response to a fan letter I wrote him in 1967.”

“I’d like to read your dissertation,” she says.

“It’s online, Google ‘Youth against Age’.”

Before breakfast I call Jan, who is driving Claire to Santa Maria today for a biopsy of the cyst on her ovary.  I thank her for handling all this alone while I’m away.

The morning workshop begins with announcements.  At 2 p.m. there will be a memorial service in the sanctuary for Christine, a friend of Ruth, Kate and Martha who was active in their Vancouver Zen Center, and for Anna, an Islander who recently succumbed to cancer. We’re invited to join and include names of our recently departed. Tonight after dinner, Ruth will host a little farewell wine and cheese party in her Hollyhock living quarters. Tomorrow after breakfast, we’ll gather at the beach to see Steven off, since he needs to start paddling back to Lund before our final session.

Kate introduces the day’s theme of Metta, the Buddhist directive of Compassion or Lovingkindness for all living creatures. To prepare, it’s traditional to ask forgiveness of others, offer forgiveness to others and offer foregiveness to oneself, with appropriate variations of three utterances:

There are many ways I have hurt, betrayed or abandoned others, knowingly or unknowingly, through greed, aversion, or ignorance.
I ask your forgiveness.
I open my heart to receive your forgiveness.

Now comes the expression of Lovingkindness itself, through an utterance like this:

May you be free from harm
May you be well in body and mind
May you be happy.

She guides us in Metta meditation, which applies the blessing to a sequence of recipients: first, the self, then a friend or benefactor, then a person to whom one has no emotional reaction, then a “difficult” person”someone by whom one feels aggrieved or irritated”then to all four as equals, and finally, through an expandable set of steps, to all sentient creatures.  The sequence is then followed in reverse order, concluding with the expression of lovingkindness to oneself. Kate’s subdued enthusiasm for this practice in ethics complements the quiet righteousness of the poems she read two nights before. After four days together, I can apply these categories to fellow participants in the retreat. It works.

Ruth says that the practice in developing empathy, opening the heart, dissolving the barriers between self and the world honed for thousands of years in Buddhist tradition is indispensable for writers, facilitating imaginative access to others from the inside. Our prompt is to select one of the people from our Metta meditation and to write from that person’s point of view.

At first I’m at a loss. I’ve never been observant enough to record the details that would allow me to imagine another person’s story.  But I did have that disarming flash a couple of days ago about the teacher’s momentary succumbing to Doubt, probably only my own projection, but neverthess concrete and vivid.  And Ruth is the person I chose in the Metta meditation as “friend or benefactor.”  I wished her relief from any fatigue she might be experiencing while giving so much of herself to our small circle of students.  Perhaps I could use that session as the framework for doing this assignment.  There’s just enough time now to get started, but I’ll come back to it later.

Next prompt is to adopt the point of view of a child, using simple sentences and vocabulary: “a time when you were sad, a lie you told, a time when you were too big or too small, a time when you got wet or dirty.”

O shoot, it’s grandpa again.  I wish my mom would pick me up at school, like Max’s and Kevin’s. Now he’s going to ask me questions about the spelling test and tell me to talk louder and take me to Trader Joe’s for a healthy snack before karate. I don’t want him to see me taking off my boxers and putting on the cup. I really hope she isn’t late  so we have to put off dinner and everybody gets cranky.  Or even worse we hold hands around the table and start without her.

It still feels forced, but I’m starting to enjoy this task, and occasionally images and words take off on their own.

Another prompt.  “You’re an old man in a supermarket shopping. Don’t mention your wife’s recent death, but evoke it indirectly.”

Howard steered his cart carefully up to the checkstand.  It was full of frozen dinners that reminded him of their meals: Turkey and mashed potatoes, steak and broccoli, spaghetti and meatballs. From the overwhelming selection, he’d limited himself to the ones marked “Von’s Club Special, save 30%”.

At lunch I meet with Kate in a personal consult about meditation.  I learn a little about her history as an anti Vietnam war exile from New Jersey, her work as a hospice chaplain in Vancouver, and her recent move to the fringes of the city where she and her husband have  established a community zendo in their home.  I tell her about my attending this workshop as a kind of revival effort to infuse more intention into my meditation routine and of my enjoyment of longer and more directed practice under her and Martha’s guidance.  She asks if there is a Zen community near me and I say yes, and I know several people who belong, but I’ve steered clear of any institutional religion since adolescence. She says nothing, and then I hear myself say that I think I’ll get in touch with them upon my return.

Before the afternoon memorial service, I work on the point-of-view exercise.  As with the dying person’s monologue yesterday, my effort to summon up detail leads to irony. Invading another person’s mind uncovers the difference between what they’re projecting and what I can imagine they’re feeling. At least that’s a way you can engage the reader, find the juiciness, even if you have to make it up.  But it gets morally risky. Empathy can be spying and stalking, like a hunter knowing one’s prey. Invention can be forgery.

In the sanctuary at 2:00, Ruth, Kate and Martha sit wearing little rectangular bibs around their necks, Kate and Martha in black robes.  Also attending are fellow workshop participants, Carol and Fran. The carefully orchestrated ritual begins with silent meditation and is followed by a fifteen-minute monotone chant we read from a single page of transliterated syllables, their sounds from the pre-Sanskrit language of Pali, their meaning lost centuries ago. Names of the recently departed are incorporated: Christine, Anna, then Carol’s mother, and my mother-in-law Ruth.  Afterwards we speak in tribute to the dead. From what is said about Anna, I recognize a person I never met, but whose name was often mentioned by Larry C., the man whose Vancouver home Jan and I lived in while looking for land in 1970. He too now lives on the Island, a friend of Ruth and Martha’s. He was sitting in the first row at the reading two nights before.

After the service I call Jan again.  She says this morning’s exploratory surgery turned more serious. The whole ovary had to be removed and sent to pathology.  Claire will spend three days in the hospital recovering.  The doctor thinks its benign, but further conclusions await the lab report in two weeks.

My last workshop session starts at 5:00.  Just time to share our reworked point-of-view sketches.  Laura reads a long rollicking account of two sisters from a remote Alberta farm getting intiated into the Banff party scene during high school summer jobs.  What an ear! Carol narrates her childhood experience of riding in the backseat of the car with her mother singing a tragic folksong. What a memory!  I read my piece.

Day three. Getting tired. Trying dutifully, but this afternoon I’m losing incandescence.  Is it these baggy pants?  This dirty hair? We’re at the place where the startup wonder wanes, and they hanker to do their own work. Three hours of workshop in the morning.  Those avid consults while I’m supposed to be eating, and now more lecture. All prepared. For only six people, sometimes five.  Babysitter’s wages. Maybe tonight will spark it up.  Right now the rat in the wall’s more interesting than synaesthesia.

There’s some laughter and a request to read it again, which I do.  Then silence.

I finish dinner early and linger in the bookstore planning to catch Ruth and apologize for the intrusiveness of my sketch, but hoping she’ll say she liked it.  She exits the lodge and approaches me as I walk toward her in the garden.  She speaks first and says that she was really hurt by what I wrote.  Not for herself, but because of what the other members of the workshop must have felt when she laughed and seemed to accept my characterization of her thoughts about them.  It was so far off that when I read it aloud she didnt get it, and by the time the connection registered, it was too late to reassure them that she’s really loved doing this workshop and deeply respects the people in it.

I’m flooded with shame.  I’d meant to be a diligent student.  And I’d meant to be a compassionate  colleague. But instead I played a cruel trick on the person I held in highest esteem.  I’m amazed at  her concern that they, not she, could be hurt.  I try to explain: getting into another’s point of view as a writer was very tough for me.  Being a teacher myself allowed me to imagine that situation. I was looking for the juice, following directions, trying to be sympathetic and also to be special.

She says yes, she understands.  It’s her problem.  I’m warmed and relieved by her hug of forgiveness, but still  confused by my own motives.

Ruth’s room in the guest house is abuzz when I arrive.  People are setting out cheese and crackers, opening bottles of wine, and fussing to get a large monitor hooked up to her laptop.  This is the occasion to roll out the weblog she’s been adding to while we were writing in Kiakum.  Accessible by password only to us participants, it’s an archive of the lecture notes, prompts, and citations that she and Kate have assembled in preparation, and it will contain work that we’ve produced while here and any links we can recommend.  She clicks links to my website, to her own blog, Ozekiland, to the huge Everydayzen.org site she moderates for her teacher Norman Fischer.  I drink my first glass of alcohol in a week.

She talks about her upcoming ordination as Zen priest by Norman and brings out a large piece of black needlework she’s about to finish as part of her preparation: Buddha’s robe, fourteen thousand tiny even stitches. Her head will be shaved. A couple of weeks later she and Kate will be led by Norman on a tour of Zen monasteries in Japan.

I empty my glass the second time. Outside the wind has come up in the treetops. I think about kayaking back tomorrow.  For the last three days, storms have been predicted. Several of the women express worry.  I assure them that if necessary I’ll get someone from Hollyhock to take me and the kayak by truck ten miles down the road to the sheltered harbor in Cortes Bay and call the Lund Water Taxi to come out and pick me up.

Another early awakening next to the big cedar, a soak under a pink sunrise above the sea, a sitting in Kiakum. The pastoral of solitude: Marvell, Wordsworth, Thoreau.

Before breakfast I call Jan to hear news and report in.  She says, “you went for that workshop like an arrow to a target.”

The theme of the morning session is awakening the senses. Kate guides the group meditation.  “Move your attention now from posture and breathing to sound: sounds of the body, the room, the outdoors, the silence surrounding the outdoors, and then back step-by-step to the body.”  Then we write:

Breathing quiet after settling, throb of heartbeat in the temples, the room silent, distant woodpecker rattles outside, then speakers on inside my head: a buzz, like soft, high pitched crickets, steady current, ringing.  Spare me from tinnitus.

Kate says that the senses are the gates to awakening and being present; meditation is about awakening, being present.  We can train ourselves to extend that presence and awareness to the rest of the world.

Ruth says that the sense gates are the interpenetration of the self and the world.  Breathing involves taking in and putting out to the world; so does writing.  Open the sense gates; ground yourself. Move from meditation into writing; when you’re confused or tight while writing, move back into meditation.  Sound is essential to writing. Read what you write aloud to make sure it works. Sound bridges the gap between what I think I said and what I really said.

I’m stirred by the teacher’s presence, flickering between girl and wise woman.

The next exercise: let the memory of a sound be the trigger of what you write. Make a list of sounds, choose the most vivid, try to recall it, its beginning, middle and end, the effect on your heart rate. My list: chanting on acid in 1970, her cry, “So Strong,” Appleton Creek Waterfalls, chainsaw and falling tree. The writing:

He pulled the ripcord on the old Homelite. It sputtered and fizzled.  Once again, this time harder, still nothing.  “Flooded,” he said the to the child from the city who wanted to help with firewood.  He pushed back the choke and waited. Then he yanked again. Now the roar filled his ears with pleasure: the fury of a lion he held in submission with bare hands.

Not enough time to tell the rest of the story: his directing her to take the weight off a branch he was sawing from below, the bar lifting as the branch fell, the moving chain touching her soft forearm, the scar still there.

Ruth lectures now from a three-hole binder with typed notes for each session separated by dividers. “If you get bogged down or bored with where the writing is going, stage an intervention.  Say ‘What I really want to say is¦’.”  Not my problem, I just want to get back to the writing.  She moves on to an explanation of synaesthesia, a way to make sensations sound fresher and reads us a poem by Donald Lawler, “With Amy, Listening to the forest.”  Very appropriate, but I’m thinking about how to convert my little four elements project into a sonnet.  Her talk is interrupted several times by the noise of a rat rapping in the wall.  I feel unsettled by the sense that she is struggling to stay in character, no longer priestess but vulnerable colleague.  This frees me from a thrall but heightens my empathy.  I recall the flush of fatherly love I experienced for her two novels’ pained protagonists.

The next exercise is to go back outdoors and this time write in situ. I’m relieved. My own immediate task is to plausibly describe the growing ends of cedar branches, the destination of water sucked up from roots in the ground. There’s a large boulder just outside Kiakum surrounded by saplings. I scramble up it and find what I’m looking for, “tough top tips.” I sit on the rock and start arranging the sentences on my yellow pad into quatrains, discarding material, redoing lines from the rhyme end backward.

The hours after lunch are unscheduled. I walk to the Sanctuary back behind the orchard.

[picture credit]

From the outside it looks like an awkwardly designed set for a hobbit house, but the interior space feels sacred.  The thick walls are contoured white plaster, the window frames and beams irregular unmilled wood. The light descends from a transparent cupola at the top of a dome that’s both circular and tilted, creating two focal points–one at the center, the other at an altar extending from the perimeter wall, above which a small window opens on dense forest.  I’m here alone.  A dozen round pillows and mats are arranged in a circle on the carpeted stone floor.  I sit on one for half an hour. This is how it’s supposed to feel.

I walk back through the blooming orchard to the library in the lodge and grapple with the sonnet.  By three p.m. it’s finished, the couplet almost writing itself, and in the last minute, an epigram popping out of nowhere.  A voice inside says “These could be published!”  With beating heart, I walk downstairs and see Ruth in the dining room still in a consult with another workshop member. I imagine she must by now really need a break. Nevertheless I wait until she heads back to her quarters and thrust the yellow pad in her way.  She reads the poem and asks me for a copy to post on the workshop website she’s in the process of assembling.  Placing my arm around her shoulder, I declare “You’re my inspiration.” She makes her escape, and as I walk down the path to the shore, I’m stopped by the fragrance of wild roses.

I could paddle back to Lund now, I tell myself, trophies in hand.  As a reward, I’ll break my five-day computer fast.  In the basement of the lodge is an ugly cinderblock cubicle known as the Chat Room.  It’s equipped with a few older machines and high speed internet. When I enter, a woman on one of them asks for my help.  She can’t download a Word document that she tells me contains some divorce papers that she came here to try to get away from.  After I succeed she strokes my arm. I log in to my blog’s posting page and copy out the sonnet, but when I press “publish,” the machine crashes.

I arrive early in Kiakum for our workshop and find Ruth and Kate conferring about their presentation at the upcoming evening program that’s been advertised all over the island. The session begins with reading the products of our afternoon’s labors. The response to my sonnet is muted. The topic moves to publication strategies. Ruth says that blogging is easy to do and a good idea, and that these days self-publishing in hard copy with a company like Lulu or Trafford no longer has the stigma it used to.  She reads “Berryman,” a tribute to the suicidal alcoholic poet written by his healthy disciple W.S. Merwin.

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips ¦

I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write.

After dinner, Kiakum fills with “Islanders,” the residents of Cortes. Some settled here when we did in Lund, during the late sixties and early seventies. Others are later immigrants of succeeding generations. A number are Hollyhock staff.  They seem like invaders to the space we’ve claimed for two days, but of course we are the outsiders and Ruth is more theirs than ours”a celebrity member of a remote community of artists, environmental activists, and back-to-the-landers, akin to the one I belong to peripherally over on the mainland.

Ruth appears energized by the crowd that packs the room. She and Kate are introduced by Dana along with the editor of the island’s arts and ecology magazine, Howl, who thanks her for contributing a poem headlined in the current issue. They explain the format of our workshop and lead everyone in a meditation. Dressed in her monk’s robe, Kate reads some of her own poems”reminiscences of an alienated childhood in New Jersey and elegies for a lost sister”and Ruth presents a section of her powerful essay on Writing and Death that I’d read twice before arriving.  The audience is invited to participate in a writing exercise of the kind that we’ve been doing, and most people seem deeply engaged, but I’m pleased that my appointed partner wants to talk about kayaking instead.

Friday May 7 was the thirteenth and final meeting of the Sustainability Book Club.  I looked forward to that conclusion with mixed feelings.  Since I had deferred my last year of part-time teaching until 2010-2011, it constituted my only regular contact with the University and a small remnant of the teaching obligations that had weighed heavily as complete retirement approached.  I welcomed the relief and dreaded the loss.  It was also an occasion to evaluate the project”through the judgments of participants who’d filled out a questionnaire circulated by the Center for Teaching and Learning which hosted and supported it, and through my own reflection. The gift of a collection of environmental writings signed by most of the seminar members a few months ago made me less anxious about their verdict than about my own.  The drama of the moment lay in a choice I’d have to make about whether or not this outcome warranted the effort of trying to renew the program for next year.

The last meeting’s moderator was Rob Rutherford, Professor of Animal Science, Director of the Sheep Unit, veteran Sustainability activist, voracious reader whom I liked to call our Good Shepherd. He’d selected a book called Resilience Thinking, as our text for the day. It introduced a concept new to me, which for some people was replacing the idea of Sustainability at the cutting edge of environmental discourse.  It emphasized 1)observing processes from multiple scales to understand how very small and very large changes interacted and 2)studying universal cyclic stages of growth, solidification, decay and reconstitution. I’d found the book poorly organized–often redundant, yet in several places too dense in its use of models plotted with three dimensional calculus.  However, its elaboration of the idea of tipping points–when systems lose the capacity to absorb disturbance and flip into conditions with new baselines of equilibrium–seemed applicable to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill two weeks old at the time, after which the return to the kind of stability implied by “sustainability” seems increasingly unlikely.

Rob had suggested that instead of meeting in our regular location on the fifth floor of the library, we get together at Cheda Ranch, the home of the sheep unit, where he would show us around a landscape that embodied some of the resilience concepts and where he could serve us some of its highly sustainable fruits: fresh lamb, bred, raised and barbequed by his students.

I biked out a little early on that glorious May morning, approaching the ranch through a gate across the road from the Poultry Unit, one of those notorious CAFO’s, which kept five hens in each two foot square cage, which I had visited with my Cal Poly Land students a few years ago.  The sight of the old Cheda barn nestled in the vegetation around Stenner Creek and guarded over by the monolith of Bishop Peak, recalled the many times I had made the pilgrimage to this historic hardly known corner of the University’s large land holdings.

larger image

I crossed the creek and sat on a haybale in the old barn making some notes for the seminar, and glanced at the student historical project framed on the wall,

used on the website that one group produced to spread the word about this place after Rob had given them a tour

and introduced them to the idea of holistic management.

A red shouldered hawk fat from hunting gophers that lived in the barn’s basement settled on a fencepost,

reminding me of the hawk in Mary Oliver’s poem that my environmental literature class read by the little reservoir up the hill while watching the raptors she described

This morning
the hawk
rose up
out of the meadow’s  browse
and swung over the lake”
it settled
on the small black dome
of a dead pine,
alert as an admiral,
its profile
distinguished with sideburns
the color of smoke,
and I said: remember
this is not something
of the red fire, this is
heaven’s fistful
of death and destruction,
and the hawk hooked
one exquisite foot
onto a last twig
to look deeper
into the yellow reeds
along the edges of the water
and I said: remember
the tree,  the cave
the white lily of resurrection
and that’s when it simply lifted
its golden feet and floated
into the wind, belly-first,
and then it cruised along the lake”
all the time its eyes fastened
harder than love on some
unimportant rustling in the
yellow reeds”and then it
seemed to crouch high in the air, and then it
turned into a white blade, which fell.

Not noticing me, Rob drove a little cart past the barn entrance loaded with folding chairs and tables and headed toward the sheep paddock where he’d arranged for us to meet.  Down the road from the reservoir four members of the book club came racing on their bicycles and scaring off the hawk.

Four more people moseyed over from the parking lot. Rob returned to lead us by foot across the creek and riparian corridor which had recently been returned to health as a result of proper sheep grazing management after decades of degradation caused by earlier overuse and later neglect.  Last winter two good sized steelhead trout were observed there, illustrating the principle of resilience.

At our meeting place upstream, Rob had placed paper bags full of raw wool (yessir, yessir) on chairs for each of us arranged to enjoy sunshine or shade.  This was the perfect fibre, he noted, stronger than steel, durable, waterproof, and produced by animals transforming vegetation created from water, soil and sunshine with no other inputs. I said nothing about the classic account of the effect of sheep on landscape and rural economy found in Thomas More’s Utopia and cited at length by Vananda Shiva.

We exchanged widely divergent impressions of Resilience Thinking, a couple of people planning to assign it in their classes, others having no use for it.  The sheep flock came as close  as the electric fence permitted, occasionally bleating their opinions.

An hour later, three students arrived in the cart and set barbequed lamb, chopped heirloom tomatoes and other fixings for pita pockets on the white linen covered table.  Even those of us who’d recently converted to vegetarianism couldn’t resist partaking of the marvelous offering grown in our own back yard.

On the walk out to the paddock, Christine had handed me her tabulated results of the questionnaire.  It’s taken me several weeks to consider them. As opposed to student evaluation forms, which I rarely found useful, there was no way to discount the opinions of faculty colleagues.  Ten questionnaires were returned out of probably about twenty distributed by email.  Twelve people were “presenters,” that is actually enrolled in the program, recipients of free books and a stipend and obligated to moderate one session. Seven respondents identified themselves as presenters and five identified themselves as “participants,” regular attendees who were not enrolled.  The non-response rate suggests that the results were skewed positive. Eight respondents were ladder faculty, two were lecturers. Five respondents had been here five years or less and five ten years or more.

Evaluation questions were answered with a number between 1 and 5 along a scale from Disagree to Agree

1.  The readings and discussions were useful to me.    7 fives 3 fours
2.  The time and effort required to participate was well spent.    7 fives 2 fours 1 three
3.  I liked the overall format of the discussion.    7 fives three fours
4.  I would participate in a continuation of the Sustainability Book Club next year with the understanding that copies of the books would be supplied but that stipends would not.  5 fives, 2 fours, 2 threes, 1 two
5. I would recommend participation next year to colleagues.  7 fives and three fours

Two discursive questions followed. “What did you find valuable about the program?” elicited these responses:

• I had two motivations to join the book club “ I wanted the encouragement to read new books and I wanted the opportunity to meet and better know colleagues across the colleges who are interested in sustainability (broadly defined). I met both of those objectives.
• The opportunity to read about sustainability from a different perspective.  It was also wonderful to learn that others in our community were interested in advancing their knowledge about sustainability.  Finally, I really enjoyed the conversations.
• Networking… breaking down the Cal Poly silos…
• The presentation of books that I would not read outside this opportunity.  The presentation by other participants and the opinions about issues raised in the books.
• The discussions by colleagues from different colleges, and the monthly schedule for reading one book by all.
• I am roundly enthusiastic about my experience in the SBC and might list any number of things here.  In broad form, it was most illuminating to have a truly interdisciplinary conversation about a series of excellent, often challenging books and ideas.  I learned as much from my colleagues as from the texts and am grateful for the various perspectives to which I was introduced.  My whole notion of “sustainability””what it is, who the stakeholders are, to whom it applies, etc.”has been significantly revised and expanded over the course of the last year and a half.  This workshop has been extremely important to the development and reinforcement of my research and pedagogical interests and approaches.
• Discussion with colleagues from other disciplines that I didn’t previously know.
• A few books like Biomimicry and Deep Economy
• Books I wouldn’t normally read, perspectives from other members I wouldn’t have thought of myself, getting to know (just a little) instructors from other areas of the university
• Hearing other perspectives because of the interdisciplinary membership.  Presenters did an excellent job.

Each of these echoed my own positive responses. I was nervous before the meetings and excited by them from the first minute to the last.  Having an extended voluntary conversation on a shared topic allowed me to appreciate the wit and wisdom of colleagues. Reading the books closely, whether or not I liked them, offered bracing mental exercise and brought me current on important topics.  A high standard was maintained by each moderator’s prepared introduction of the book, which was preserved for useful reference on the wiki, along with detailed notes on the discussion, outlines of the books’ content and some written reflections by seminar members, including Alypios regular trenchant reviews.

The second question, “Which aspect(s) of the workshop could use improvement?” yielded these comments:

• Attendance was very spotty.
• Quality of the books.  The content was at times more rhetoric than useful, and the essence also got repetitive which became boring.
• More discussion/work on how to tie to curriculum.
• Connection to curriculum development
• Would like to know if there was any consensus on the learning gained and how the learning is going to be actually utilized.  What has the core decision making group achieved.

They also confirmed my assessment. Spotty attendance was partly due to people being away at conferences and having conflicts with teaching schedules and partly to voting negatively with their feet.  However, only one session, last May’s, drew fewer than ten and most drew fourteen or more.

Another concern for me was a sense that a number of attendees hadn’t done much of the homework. This was partly due to the uneven quality of the readings, some of which were poorly edited, overburdened with rhetoric, and overlapping in content. Even two classic Sustainability books that felt like world-changing prophecy when they first came out, Biomimicry and Cradle to Cradle, seemed overly optimistic or questionably argued when reread in the cold light of recent history.

Conditions two years ago, at the time this project was planned were perhaps more hopeful.  Sponsored by the Academic Senate Sustainability Committee, itself an outgrowth of Cal Poly’s becoming signatory to the Talloires Declaration and joining the burgeoning Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education(AASHE), one of the Book Club’s stated intentions was to be an incubator of a large university-wide Introduction to Sustainability course.  A year ago three Club members met to start planning such a class.  Implicit also was an aspiration to follow the strategy for institutional transformation of the kind proposed in Peter Senge’s “The Necessary Revolution.”

But these aspirations never materialized, a significant factor being my own flagging commitment to them.  And what accounts for that?  In the big world, the new Congress and Administration’s being swamped with economic catastrophe and stymied by Republican obstructionism, the failures of Copenhagen, the slowing of progress toward a sane energy policy, the expansion of our wars in Asia, and the general continuation of business as usual in the face of growing crises. Cal Poly history took a parallel course:  budget cuts, threats, and furloughs undermined hopes for experiment and reform, the sudden disappearance of the UNIV program eliminated any institutional framework for mounting interdisciplinary courses, and the Academic Senate Sustainability Committee itself was threatened with dissolution.

Over time, the Book Club itself settled into a comfortable groove. Presenters gave polished introductions, discussion was fluent, strangers became familiar, and  the activity seemed sufficiently satisfying without moving toward goals. The Necessary Revolution was put on hold.

With one exception.  The most prominent theme running through all the books that we read related to food.  Whether in McKibbens call for localism in agricultural production and distribution, Pearce’s account of the water lost and polluted by industrial agriculture around the world, Foer’s expose of CAFO’s and story of his conversion to vegetarianism, Louv’s report on the value of school vegetable gardens, Shiva’s call for resistance to global chemical-food monopolies and rescue of small farmers, all seemed to reinforce the vision of sustainable agriculture and sensible eating habits presented in Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food.  This was amplified in the talks Pollan gave at Cal Poly last October, hosted by our Book Club member, Hunter Francis, and the Sustainable Ag Resource Consortium, recently reinvented as the CAFÉ Center for Sustainability. Cal Poly’s role in the food system controversy put him and fellow member Rob Rutherford in worldwide headlines for a couple of weeks,  highlighted the contrast between sustainability and its opponents, and appears now to be in a state of real transformation.

Our readings on food changed at least two of our members’ behavior in significant ways, turning us from omnivores into qualified vegetarians (fresh lamb raised by friends being an exception, as noted above). In addition they contributed to my tripling the size of my vegetable garden and focusing my own activist energy into developing a working farm, processing facility and distribution system to school lunch and food bank programs on city-owned land. Food seems an arena where on a personal level it’s possible to make strong changes toward sustainability without the major sacrifice of giving up one’s car or one’s  travel plans, and where on a political level, promoting localism can have some appreciable consequence.

The questions on the survey I  had most difficulty answering dealt with the future of this project. Seven out of ten respondents said they would continue in it if offered next year and ten out of ten said they would recommend it to faculty colleagues.  The Center for Teaching and Learning has offered continuing financial and logistic support.  But given my misgivings, do I want to stay involved?

After weeks of vacillating now I can say yes.  Yesterday I started hunting for possible titles and came up with nine books published in the last two years that sound intriguing.  I’d like to try alternate formats for some meetings, such as reading and commenting on blogs like Andrew Revkin’s dot.earth or Real Climate.com, or picking a theme like oil addiction instead of a book to discuss.  So whether or not the Club will meet again next year will now, as they say, depend upon enrollment.

Doris “Granny D” Haddock died peacefully today in her Dublin, New Hampshire family home at 7:18 p.m. Tuesday, March 9, 2010. She was 100 years old. Born in 1910 in Laconia, New Hampshire, she attended Emerson College and lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. She was an activist for her community and for her country, remaining active until the return of chronic respiratory problems four days ago.

I only met Doris once briefly when she visited San Luis Obispo in connection with the Cal Poly Preface Reading Program but she touched me permanently.  As I seek ways to adapt to growing old in a world that feels easy to abandon, her love of life, her pride in her past, her urgent concern with the future, her fighting spirit, and her refusal to give up in spite of disappointment, provide me with guidance and inspiration.  What a sad irony it is that during her last few months, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that, for the time being at least, reverses so much of what she worked for. Finally now she gets a break from that relentless struggle.  Or perhaps, somewhere, her spirit still is on the march.

Two freshman student responses to Granny D’s visit to Cal Poly in 2004

Go Granny Go!

When I got to Cal Poly this fall, I soon learned that not too many people actually read the shared reading book, Granny D., You’re Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell.  Furthermore, those who did read it did not really like it.  I was surprised because I loved reading the book!  I love to travel and have been to most of the states of our country, so I loved hearing about her adventures in the different states.  In addition, I have gotten really into politics over the summer, and I have loved forming my political identity and views.  Doris “Granny D” Haddock is very inspirational, and she demonstrates what a difference one person can make.

I have looked forward to hearing Granny D. speak since I read just a few pages of the book.  I was very excited to finally have the opportunity last Friday night when Granny D. gave her speech entitled “I am in the Example Business.”  She is an engaging speaker, and it was delightful to hear her.  I liked how her speech started regarding writing a cheaper and shorter book, although I was not one of the students with an “independence streak” (at least as far as this book goes).  I liked how she drew us in with her stories of New England autumns, which I remember vividly from the year I lived in Massachusetts.  Additionally, I loved all the “political stuff” and her stories of life in New Hampshire.  My favorite part of her speech was when she said, “We cannot move the world toward our wisdom and love so long as we permit political systems that run on greed and fear instead of love and ideas.”  At the end of the speaking, I enjoyed the question and answer time.  For example, her sticker that said “Vote Dammit!” and when Dennis Burke told her that a question was “regarding Iraq.”  Throughout her speech, I loved to applaud her and give her standing ovations.

Attending Granny D’s speech was one of the most enjoyable things I have done at Cal Poly.  It was motivational, and I felt “the hero inside my heart.”  Granny D. is one of my heroes, and she is what this country is all about!

Granny D

When I found out Granny D was coming to speak at Cal Poly, I was excited but did not think it would be worth my time. Looking back to the event and reflecting on what she said, I am extremely glad that I decided to attend! As in her book, her speech was filled with inspiration, politics, life lessons, biographical anecdotes, and of course humor. Her opening statement “Had I known that 3,000 of you would be forced to buy and read my book instead of enjoying your summer, I certainly would have written a cheaper and shorter book” had the crowd roaring with laughter. That statement was a perfect example to explain her personality. She is a person who loves life and has made her mark in the world and will continue to do so in the United States Senate if she gets elected.

I enjoyed learning about life in her small hometown of Peterborough, New
Hampshire. Her description of autumn made me want to become a “Leaf Peeper”! Peterborough seems to have a lot in common with San Luis Obispo and through the examples she gave, it made me want to get involved here in my new hometown and find out about local issues since I am a citizen. The fact that a play was written about the town struggles showed what a tight- knit community Peterborough is and how it is good that people don’t take things too seriously in the end. There has to be a sense of humor to get through life and not let differences divide one another. That message was strong throughout her talk.

It was nice that the forum was opened for questions. It was good to hear about local issues and hear what Granny D had to say. She is a person who knows her stuff and is not afraid to tell you. She has and will continue to fight for what she believes in until she gets what she knows is right. The United States Senate is a good move for Granny. She will be a strong influence and I believe a good influence to the senators. She will make changes for the better. Granny D will make America better and keep its ideals alive and on track.

My notes in preparation for the discussion of Granny D, during the 2004 Preface Program at Cal Poly
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