Still worse and worse...

"The worst is not--so long as we can say, 'This is the worst'"

 --Edgar in Shakespeare's King Lear

For more times than I can count, since the Catastrophe--that is, the ill-fated election of Donald Trump as President last year--I have been reminded of this gloomy quote from Edgar, Shakespeare's bellwether figure in King Lear.  With every passing day, we see horrific headlines about yet more unprecedented outrages from the White House, and it has become clear that the morally bankrupt Republicans who control Congress are nothing but callow and shameless enablers who will do nothing to stop Trump's thuggish power grabs and assaults on democracy, on the planet, and on the rule of law. We could well be heading into a new Nazi era, a new Great Terror, instigated by this power-mad psychopathic fascist and his cronies on behalf of the corporate oligarchy and the Military Industrial Complex. All bets are off, and the worst may be yet to come--whether nuclear war, economic collapse, resource wars, runaway climate destabilization and ecocide, and the unraveling of the social order and descent into chaos and violence altogether.  To quote Shakespeare again,

"Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into Will, Will into appetite,

And Appetite, a universal Wolf

So doubly seconded by Will and Power,

Must make perforce a universal prey,

And last eat up itself."

So once again, we ask, plaintively, "What can we do?"

Social activists, young and righteously indignant, will naturally cry "Hit the streets!"  But in truth, what good will that do these days?  While mass demonstrations feel good for the participants, they do precious little to change anything.  The corporate-controlled news media largely ignore them unless they turn violent--and then these few violent incidents then become an ideal tool for Fox Noise and the Republican noise machine to loudly marginalize and condemn all protesters as "terrorists" who should be rounded up en masse--and Trump will be only too happy to oblige. They have all the money, after all, and all the big guns, tanks, and hired thugs they need to wreak bloody mayhem on even the biggest mass demonstrations. China, after all, got away with this at Tienanmen Square, and the memory of this bloodbath has been effaced from the younger generations of Chinese (much as Douglas MacArthur's bloody assault on the peaceful Veterans' Bonus March of 1932 was never mentioned in our history books).  Likewise, who even remembers the mass protests of the Occupy movement--which were likewise squelched by raw force and brutality? So storming the castle on the hill, whether peacefully or violently, is not a viable option these days for confronting tyranny and corporate domination.

What is? More thoughtful people will advocate Satyagraha--nonviolent mass resistance and noncooperation with evil--but this tactic--however effective and morally grounded--calls for charismatic moral leadership (e.g. Gandhi, King, Mandela, Chavez, Havel, Wangari Maathai, and Vandana Shiva) but also systematic grassroots organization and strategic intelligence to target the leverage points of the power elite and to use mass media effectively.  There is much to be said for this, but Satyagraha campaigns also require patience for the long haul; the courage to endure humiliation and abuse without lashing out in rage and hatred (and thereby becoming your own enemy) is a rare human trait, and generally requires extensive inner training and discipline to even attempt.  So while I would never discourage this nonviolent approach--and we may well need to be ready for it, as the Trumpian tyranny becomes more naked and brutal--it is well to remember that any Satyagraha campaign, to succeed, must be mindful, strategic, and relentless.

So what is left for all the rest of us ordinary folks, who may lack the moral courage, the charisma, and the organizational skills to mount an effective Satyagraha campaign? Where can we find refuge from the Trumpian insanity that is destroying our nation and planet simultaneously?

Obviously, our planet being an "inescapable network of mutuality," there is no escape from the ramifications of a dysfunctional mass society or a dying global empire morphing into pervasive corporate tyranny.  But there are useful and healthy things we all can do to cultivate the health, competence, and resilience we will need to become agents of regeneration, no matter what happens in the big world. And these (for me, at least) fall into the three general categories of Tonglen, Satyagraha and Permaculture--the three essential disciplines.

Tonglen--the powerful Tibetan meditation technique for cultivating universal compassion--becomes an even more important starting point as the world becomes more chaotic. It can be done either in formal meditation or "on the spot" (as Pema Chodron puts it). It consists, briefly, of an exercise of the empathetic imagination: taking on the vast suffering of all living beings on the inbreath, owning it and transforming it, and then, breathing out healing, love, and compassion to all beings.  

There are numerous techniques for doing this effectively, but my favorite formal approach is the "expanding circle" approach: begin by taking in--embracing with your inbreath, as it were--your own inner pain and anguish, whether physical, emotional, or mental--and--imaginatively contacting the "diamond in your mind,"--your Buddha nature, Christ nature, Witness, Still Small Voice, Peace of God, or whatever you choose to call it--and then, breathing out healing, comfort, and peace to your own inner afflictions.  Then do likewise, first for those closest to you (significant other, family, close friends), then gradually expand your circle of compassion to include your acquaintances, whole categories of people, all people, all living beings, anyone in particular distress--whoever. Use your imagination to make it vivid and personal.

Finally--and this is most difficult--we breathe in the suffering of our enemies, of the perpetrators of violence and bigotry, from irritating people we know all the way up to Trump and his maligant ilk.  For Buddhist psychology teaches that all hatred, all meanness and cruelty of whatever sort, is ultimately rooted in a deep inner suffering of the perpetrators themselves, which, unless it is alleviated by genuine, selfless compassion, only becomes worse and worse, creating greater and greater harm to others.  (This is why a figure of the Buddha appears in each of the six Samsaric realms in Tibetan iconography).

Extending your circle of compassion to your enemies is very challenging and difficult, for in order to practice with authenticity, we need to acknowledge and cut through our own hatreds--those parts of ourselves that are most Trump-like, which we often do not want to face, in order to generate authetic compassion for Trump. This is what the Buddhist story of Angulimala is all about.

Angulimala is a vicious, thuggish serial murderer--the worst imaginable kind of person--whose name derived from his habit of stringing the fingers (anguli) of his victims around his neck like a necklace (mala). The story goes that when Angulimala encounters the Buddha, he has 999 fingers around his neck and is eagerly looking to score his thousandth. But the Buddha's total lack of fear, his equanimity and boundless compassion, disarms Angulimala, who then hears the teachings, joins the Sangha, and becomes a devout and caring monk. But due to all the bad karma accumulated by his many savage murders, Angulimala must nevertheless endure beatings and abuse wherever he goes.

So by generating compassion (against the odds) even for the likes of Trump, Bannon, Bolton, and all the other craven thugs currently in his orbit, we are paradoxically embracing and healing those aspects of ourselves that we don't want to admit, that are most like those we detest.  But nobody ever said this would be easy. The commandment to "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you..." is always by far the most difficult one to achieve. But it is also the most transformative.

Tonglen--meditating and imaginatively cultivating compassion for ourselves, our friends, all life, and our worst enemies while our nation collapses into tyranny and the world careens toward apocalypse--may seem like a waste of time, a trivial, self-indulgent way of avoiding reality--but in actuality, it is a direct and mindful way of inoculating yourself from despair by embracing the horrors directly, such that whatever the world throws at you, you take it in, embrace it, filter it, transform it, and turn it into loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

The other two essential disciplines, Satyagraha and Permaculture, I have already written about extensively through this blog, so I will leave them alone for now. Suffice to say that a serious Tonglen practice provides a solid foundation for both nonviolent noncooperation with evil, and for sowing the seeds of a Gaian future from the ground up by growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness.

Earth Day Sermon

Recently, Rick, the pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem which I have recently joined, invited me to collaborate with my new friend and fellow parishioner Angela, who is in charge of the landscape committee for the church, in preparing an Earth Day service next April. Pursuant to this, here is a draft of a possible sermon I might deliver on that day:

Working Title: "A Gaian Future--or No Future."
-----------------------------
If you saw the title of my sermon this morning, you might reasonably ask, "What do you mean by 'A Gaian Future?'"  Or more briefly,  "Huh??"

"Gaian" is a recently coined adjective or identity label--which is, in fact, the only label with which I am fully comfortable, since it excludes nobody at all.  I am a Gaian, and so are you. And so is every living organism on the planet, from the simplest bacterium to Donald Trump. (Yes--even Donald Trump is a Gaian, whether he knows it or not!)

So what is a Gaian?  The broadest definition I know is the one that includes everything from bacteria to corrupt political leaders. It is a living, breathing being, an inhabitant of Gaia, which is the ancient Greek name for Mother Earth.  This name has more recently been recycled by both scientists and visionaries, starting with British biochemist James Lovelock and American bacteriologist Lynn Margulis, to refer to the theory, now generally accepted among Earth scientists, that life and our planet coevolved--and that the processes of life create and sustain the conditions that, in turn, sustain life. For example, without plants and photosynthesis, there would be no free oxygen available on the planet--it would all be bound up with carbon, as it is on Venus and Mars. Without topsoil, there would be no plants or fungi--and vice versa. And without plants or fungi, animals--including ourselves--could not exist. Gaia--powered by solar energy and interweaving earth, air, and water into a miraculous and self-regenerating web of life--is our biological support system, the condition of our very existence.

So if we are all Gaians, what use is the term?  Quite simply, it is something that we, in our global industrial civilization, have forgotten. We are taught to think of "nature" as either a resource or a refuge--but not as a system of which we also are a part, interacting with every breath. If we think of nature as a resource, we think it has no value at all until we transform it into commodities, whether by mining, clearcutting, or pesticide-soaked monocultures. If we see it as a refuge, it is still "out there"--remote from our daily lives. So I think we need this new name Gaia to refer to what we have forgotten--that we also are a part of, and not apart from, nature. And unless we find a way, not simply to remember this fact, but to incorporate it into every decision we make, we have no future.

So what might a "Gaian future" look like? And how would we get there?

I think of a Gaian future as one in which it is axiomatic, and generally recognized by everyone, that--as Martin Luther King once said, "whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."  And that this understanding of our global interconnectedness informs all our institutions, becoming the foundation of our educational system, from Kindergarten to graduate study.  We can't possibly know what a Gaian future would look like--we can only know, today, that it is our only remaining alternative to oblivion, whether through climate change, nuclear war, societal collapse, or whatever. The creature that parasitizes its own biological support system destroys itself.

So how to we get to a Gaian future? I don't pretend to know in any detail, but I am quite sure that it starts in the same way that ecosystems start: by planting seeds, both literal and figurative, from the ground up, not from the top down.  And it starts with each of us, and radiates outward, building upon itself--just as an ecosystem is self-regenerating and self-diversifying. So here is one such seed of thought, which I like to call the "Gaian Categorical Imperative:"

In every decision, we must strive to assume responsibility for the health, competence, and resilience of ourselves, our communities, and our planet.

Health, competence, and resilience are the three survival conditions of every living organism, from bacteria to blue whales. We all need to eat food, drink water, and breathe oxygen, in order to maintain the internal homeostasis of our bodies. Second, we need to develop and hone skills to survive and prosper within a specific ecological niche, whether that niche is a wetland, an organization, a city, or a nation state.  Finally, we all need the resilience--the flexibility--to adapt to unpredictable changes in our niche--whether from a warmer climate, a threat from others, or a catastrophe.  In short, we all need to eat, survive and reproduce--not only ourselves, but also our communities and our ecosystems.

Since we are part of larger communities, whether families, organizations, or cities and states, we also need to preserve the health, competence, and resilience of these. If a person promotes his own interests at the expense of the community, he will probably end up in jail. But if a corporation promotes their own interests at the expense of the community or the biosphere, they become rich and powerful. Obviously, this is the mark of a dysfunctional civilization, a civilization that is parasitizing Gaia.

To restore the health, competence, and resilience of ourselves, our community, and our planet, and to create a Gaian future from the ground up, I therefore recommend three essential disciplines, that we can all undertake, starting this moment:

(1) Meditation; (2) Satyagraha; (3) Permaculture.

Meditation, practiced by every authentic spiritual tradition on the planet, takes many forms, but these forms all boil down to three simple injunctions: Breathe, Observe, Let Go.  And repeat as often as necessary. By this means, we recharge and restore the inner equanimity and compassion we need to become healing agents in our community and on our planet.

Satyagraha was Gandhi's term for becoming a healing agent in a dysfunctional culture and society. It consists, he said, of three practices: Ahimsa, Satya, and Swaraj.
    Ahimsa means doing no harm--practicing absolute, unconditional compassion for everyone and everything. In the political realm, it means nonviolence, and a nonviolent disposition in a politically charged environment is best maintained by regular meditation practice.
   Satya means speaking truth to power, mindfully, strategically, and relentlessly. We may recall, for example, the magnificent courage, eloquence, and integrity, under duress, of any of the great Satyagrahis: not only Gandhi, but also King, Mandela, Vaclav Havel, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, and Wangari Maathai. (And of course, most recently, the courageous and articulate students at Parkland High, standing up and speaking truth to the NRA and the politicians in their pocket).
   Swaraj means "self-rule" or "self-reliance," which Gandhi symbolized with his spinning wheel; that is, unplugging from dependence on the forces of greed, oppression, and ecological degradation in every way we can, and creating local self-reliance.

Permaculture, then, is Swaraj in practice: a design methodology and a cultural movement, catching on at the grassroots all over the planet, that is predicated on three interrelated ethics: Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share. It is a systematic and flexible Gaian approach to design, whether of gardens, farms, or cities, that is based entirely on ecological principles.

By adopting such principles, precepts, and practices, I am confident that we can be the change we seek to make, and co-create a Gaian future for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

Permablitz

In recent months, since I retired from teaching and moved across the country to Oregon, I finally have gained the leisure time I need to pursue my aspiration--to transform my own small, suburban property into a model Permaculture garden, to take the Permaculture Design Certification course offered online by Oregon State University, and to use all my communication skills to help others propagate Permaculture theory and practice throughout my new community of Salem, Oregon, and everywhere else as well, right up until my last breath.

My first discovery, of course, has been that I have a steep learning curve in all of this. Although I had my own modest summer vegetable garden for many years in Virginia, I know little to nothing about gardening, since I spent my professional career as an English professor, doing little with my hands besides typing on a keyboard!  So I decided, before I attempt a Permaculture Design Certification course, to take a crash course in basic gardening knowledge and skills through the OSU Extension Service's Master Gardener program--a rigorous curriculum consisting of 12 weekly all-day classes, followed by a comprehensive exam and some 66 hours of volunteering in various capacities before I can be certified as a Master Gardener.  And this has been well worth the effort: I am learning a vast array of conceptual, procedural, and contextual knowledge of basic botany, orchard pruning, weed control, plant diseases, water management, beneficial insects, and all sorts of other skills necessary to be able to offer others sound, research-based advice when they call into the Master Gardener's hotline. I have also made a lot of new, knowledgeable friends, with lots of good advice.

I have also volunteered, in March, to team-teach a free six-week course offered by the local food bank, called "Seed to Supper"--a basic course in Vegetable Gardening 101 for low-income residents--and I have made friends with the manager of a community garden near my home as well.

But now that I am gaining a footing in serious gardening, I have another practical challenge: in order to achieve my dream of converting my lawn into a full-fledged Permaculture garden, I face a lot of heavy lifting--digging up my lawn, laying out flagstone paths, creating keyhole gardens and raised beds, composting, mulching, building Hugelcultur mounds, etc.  In a Permaculture design, most of the heavy labor comes upfront, in laying in the "hardscape" or infrastructure for the thriving, integrated garden to follow.  And at 68 years old, with declining upper-body strength and a bad back susceptible to painful spasms when overworked, and with little to no experience or manual skills, I face a fearsome uphill battle.

This is where the delightful concept of "Permablitz" comes in.  It is a recent coinage--I don't know who invented it, but etymologically, it is a felicitous oxymoron, meaning, roughly "Permanent Lightning."  And it refers to the Permaculture community's equivalent of a barn raising among the Amish: an event where a large group of "Permies" converge upon one person's garden, to pitch in and help take up their monocultural lawn and lay the more complex infrastructure for the Permaculture garden to follow.  In return for this service, the beneficiary agrees to participate in Permablitzes for others to follow. Here is a delightful videoclip from New Zealand that illustrates a Permablitz in action. Note how they begin by laying out a set of specific tasks, and then the participants learn and teach each other by doing, throughout the day, so that everyone is enriched with new knowledge and skills, even as they help one of their members get off to a running start.

What I love about the Permablitz concept is that it is a vivid illustration of the truth embedded in a slogan I came up with some time ago:

Grow Gardens...
Grow Community...
Grow Awareness...

In short, the minute you undertake, seriously, to grow a garden, you start creating community almost immediately. First, you get into conversations with neighbors and passersby, who are all too willing to share insights and information about local growing conditions--what grows well, what doesn't, etc. And a Permablitz will accelerate this process of community-building enormously, as participants learn and teach one another the skills they are implementing on behalf of one of their members.

Finally, through such bonding and community-building, everyone's awareness is raised of both the guiding ethics of Permaculture (Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share) and of the challenges they share in healing the landscape and community. In effect, a Permablitz is a practical and visionary way of creating a convivial Gaian culture from the ground up, for the fruits of it will be more thriving Permaculture gardens along with greater reciprocity, shared problem-solving, and conviviality throughout the community--taking care of everyone, and abandoning no one.

It is a vivid illustration of the benefits of reciprocity--of sharing knowledge rather than hoarding it, of working with one another rather than for a boss or employer. A Permablitz illustrates the truth embedded in the Chinese concept of Guanxi --their traditional social network of reciprocal gifts and obligations within an ever-expanding community. As a Chinese proverb goes, "Guanxi is better than money."  Likewise, through the expansion of Permaculture, people may yet discover as well that Gaia is better than Glomart--that working together, sharing ideas, and restoring topsoil, ecosystems, and bioregions is far better than competing, exploiting, hoarding, and polluting. As Permaculture guru Geoff Lawton put it, "You can solve all the world's problems in a Garden."

Renewal--A Fantasy?

Imagine, as Western Industrial Civilization goes into its terminal phase, with corporate oligarchy displacing democracy, workers' rights giving way to corporate slavery, hordes of environmental refugees destabilizing societies, and gangs, militias, and warlords battling it out on the streets in every city, and hateful, vicious demagogues like Trump running rampant, all while climate change wreaks ecological havoc and starvation sets in--as the rich and powerful recede behind walled and gated compounds, fiercely defended by security guards, while swarms of the poor and destitute besiege their walls...

As our earth careens toward ecological, economic, and social collapse...

Imagine a soft-spoken, gentle, but intense young man or woman leading a weekly Dharma Gaia Circle, a meditation/study group whose members work together, practicing the Dharma Gaia Mantra (Breathe-Observe-Let Go-Be Well-Do Good Work-Keep in Touch-Learn-Teach-Heal-Create) and studying the Three Essential Disciplines: Tonglen, Satyagraha, and Permaculture...

And this group catches on and buds off, creating similar Dharma Gaia Circles elsewhere, all of whom stay in touch...

And they manage to pool their money and buy land, creating Dharma Gaia Practice Centers, where other people are invited to learn the Three Essential Disciplines in concert, and train others in them as well...

And as time goes on, Permaculture projects begin to restore devastated communities to flourishing, as Satyagraha practices neutralize aggression and convert antagonists to supporters, one by one...and some form of mindfulness practice becomes embedded in the lifeways of every civilization, coupled with the threefold Permaculture ethos of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share.

And in good time, even their most resistant enemies--Republicans, or Christian and Muslim fundamentalists--begin to see the immediate and long term benefits of Gaian practices and adapt them to their own ideological purposes.

Could it happen?  Perhaps something like this could happen, with luck. Similar mass movements have transformed the consciousness of whole civilizations before--e.g. Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam--and even (for a while) Communism. But could this happen without polarization--without "us" vs. "them" arising in any form, with predictable violence and bigotry to follow?

Even the devoutly Buddhist culture of Burma, after all, is currently engaged in an appalling genocide campaign against their own demonized Other--that is, the Rohingya Muslim refugees whom they see as a threat to their culture.

Is it possible for people to call themselves "Gaians" without the tribal instinct arising, in which they pit themselves against, and demonize "Anti-Gaians" (or perhaps they might be called "Glomartians")? Even if we build into a Gaia movement the idea that we are all Gaians, conscious or unconscious, this differs little from the core idea of Buddhism--that everyone has a Buddha nature within--or Christianity (loving our neighbor--whoever he is--as ourselves). Yet this deep spiritual insight of Oneness common to most religious cultures has done little to curb the factionalism, the bigotry, or the violence that these religious cultures inflict on one another. Perhaps, as humans, we are simply not good enough to live up to our own highest ideals, when we feel threatened.

Gandhi, after all, had scarcely succeeded in peacefully throwing off the long, oppressive yoke of British imperialism before a nasty schismogenic split arose between Muslims and Hindus, the former breaking off to form Pakistan, and all involved in bloody, persistent intercommunal violence. And when he tried to make peace between the warring camps by traveling to Pakistan, he was assassinated by one of his own--a Hindu ideologue for whom peace with Muslims was treason.

So perhaps such tribalism is in our genes indelibly. The minute we posit an "us" we simultaneously must create a "them" by which to define ourselves (and of course, vice versa--the "them" would then demonize "us" in turn).

This raises a larger question: if an ideal (such as universal brotherhood, sisterhood, tolerance, and care for all living things) may be impossible to achieve in actuality, does that negate the value of striving for it?

The short answer, for me, is NO.  We all routinely strive for what I like to call asymptotic ideals--that is, ideals which, like an asymptotic curve in mathematics, are an approximation to which we can draw ever closer without actually realizing it in full. I would go even further in saying that ALL ideals, worthy of our striving, are inherently asymptotic. For any one of them, there are likely, and inevitably, to be setbacks--periods in which we backslide from that ideal, rather than drawing closer. An obvious example is the recent regrettable transition from the Obama era, when Dr. King's dream--the image of a nation that had finally abandoned racism--finally became conceivable, to the current, toxic Trump era, when ugly, vicious racism has crept out of the shadows and is cropping up everywhere.

Yet when a nation backslides so grievously from its own highest professed ideals, that is all the more reason for us, as individuals, to recommit ourselves to those ideals, with mindful, strategic, and relentless determination. But real change happens, not from the top down, (as with Obama) but from the ground up. Even if Trump destroys our American democracy, the ideals at the founding of our nation remain inviolable, and always available to us as individuals both to proclaim and practice.

But I would go further than this.  The rise of Trump and similar hateful demagogues throughout the world, and the retreat of liberal democratic values, may also signal that the era of the nation state itself has reached its horizon of efficacy, and that as our nation and its institutions dissolve into corporate-sponsored tyranny, violence, corruption, and chaos, we must plant the seeds of a worldwide Gaian culture close to home--in our own backyards, and in reaching out to the destitute, threatened populations within our own communities-- refugees, immigrants, minorities, and all threatened and demonized "others"--to stand in solidarity with them, to teach them how to garden, and to create communities based on the three core values of Permaculture--Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share.  America is (or may well be) dying; long live Gaia!

Beyond Asceticism

In the Judaic and early Christian near east and medieval Europe, as in India and Tibet, asceticism, or radical self-denial in order to cultivate spiritual insight (or Divine Grace--whatever the local term might have been) was widely practiced. The Essenes, the Desert Fathers, the early Christian monastic communities in such barren, remote, and isolated outposts as Skellig Michael off the west coast of Ireland, took very seriously the injunction that "purity of heart requires denial of self" as Meister Eckhart, the Medieval German theologian and mystic, put it. In medieval Europe, anchorite nuns would even lock themselves inside basement chambers and live on charitable handouts from passersby, while spending their entire lives in contemplative prayer. Many of them did this in the devout belief that their own contemplative self-denial would somehow heal the world--that their prayers would lead, by a kind of osmosis, to a more peaceful and just society.

Any evidence for this remains to be seen. From my reading of history, the cultures that honored and encouraged such asceticism were every bit as corrupt, as power-hungry, as brutal, and as greedy as any other cultures.

Today, of course, we have gone to the opposite extreme.  In Glomart culture, both here and worldwide, the ideology of totally self-indulgent consumerism has run rampant: to be is to buy.
We are brainwashed with this consumer ideology all day and night, and most of us, myself included, fall under its spell, simply because of its almost irresistable appeal to our grasping, unconscious, animal selves: "That's cool. How much?" We are dazzled by constantly evolving strategies by merchants and advertisers everywhere, in our communities, on television, and online, to win over our next dollar, so that we seldom pause for a moment to reflect on where the money for this new toy, new snack, or new service is actually going, or what its longer term effect will be on our bodies, our minds, or our planet.  The net effect, inevitably, is the upward concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, coupled with a gnawing, inchoate discontent in the masses, all of whom want even more stuff without even pausing to ask why. Yet we remain perpetually dissatisfied; we always want more or better stuff, and the advertisers spend billions to ensure that we keep buying the latest new product or service--that we are never satisfied.

One deeply disillusioned Vietnam Vet, commenting on an article from Alternet about the online mega-retail giant Amazon.com and its most recent efforts to solicit handouts of taxpayer money from cash-strapped state governments in their bid to win over its new headquarters, wrote of his principled decision to adopt an ascetic lifestyle--to dumpster dive for clothing and shoes (even if mismatched) and to keep the purchase of anything to an absolute minimum, based on his realization of the deep connection between corporations and the government that had led to the horrors he had witnessed in Vietnam.  Here is my response to his comment:

I deeply respect your principled choices. However, self-sacrifice and organizing one's life around personalized resistance to corporate consumerism and militarism may be virtuous, but it is a kind of futile martyrdom--it will never catch on, never even make the slightest dent in Glomart (my shorthand for the Global Market Economy and Consumer Culture, of which the US is now the paradigm, but all other industrialized countries are complicit as well).

What can and will make a dent, then? My own response is a triad, which combines vertical (body-mind-spirit) with horizontal (self-community-planet) healing. That triad is--

(1) Mindfulness practice--to cultivate clear but non-self-flagellatory awareness of one's own mental impulses and gradually transform them from addictive habits of self-indulgence (the basis of consumer culture, nurtured by 24/7 advertising) to attentive, mindful choices to promote the health, competence, and resilience of ourselves, our community, and our planet simultaneously. I use a simple triad to remember this: Good buy, Good work, Good will.

(2) Satyagraha, or nonviolent refusal to cooperate with evil. Much of what you are doing falls into this category already, for which I commend you. But Gandhi laid out three interrelated aspects of Satyagraha:
--Speaking truth to power (through LTEs, Public Protest, voting, and calls to elected officials and their appointees);
--Acts of strategic nonviolent mass resistance, when appropriate.
--Cultivating self-reliance on behalf of ourselves and our communities.

...and doing all of the above mindfully, strategically, and relentlessly.

(3) Permaculture, an enlightened design methodology based on mindful observation and emulation of natural processes that is rooted in three core ethics:
--Earth Care
--People Care
--Fair Share, or (reinvesting the surplus in the first two).

This is my path. Thank you for sharing yours.

Gaiacide

Warning to readers: Reading the following linked article may ruin your day. Be forewarned.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/20/insectageddon-farming-catastrophe-climate-breakdown-insect-populations

When I read this article this evening, I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach. A recent longitudinal study in Germany has revealed that the population of flying insects across the study area, which included wildlife preserves across Germany, has declined by 75% in the past 20 years, due to industrial agriculture and pesticides.  Rachel Carson's terrifying vision of a "silent spring" seems well on its way to reality. Yet this appalling worldwide crisis gets scant attention from the news media (which is wearily preoccupied with the latest grotesque idiocy, posturing, lying, and boorishness of the Orange Man...)

Insects are the cornerstone of our continental ecosystems, and have been ever since they first co-evolved with land-based plants during the Ordovician period, some 400 million years ago. Flying insects form the diet of countless birds, their grubs contribute enormously to the food chain of topsoil and streams, and they pollinate most of our flowering plants--including most of the food we eat. This precipitous loss of the remaining insect population likely spells doom for humanity, as well as most of the other plants and animals we know. Coupled with current alarming trends in anthropogenic climate disruption (mislabeled "climate change" by Bush-era propagandists in order to cloud the minds of the public by their delusional platitude that "climate always changes"), along with topsoil loss, deforestation, desertification, and collapse of fisheries, we may well be looking at Gaiacide--the murder of the only life-supporting planet we will ever know. But this murder is, of course, suicide as well.  Global industrial civilization (or what I call "Glomart"), the Cancer of the Earth, may be in its terminal phase, wherein it consumes and destroys its own support system and perishes, condemning us all to a horrific early death.

Yet as I read this article, my despair increased yet further when I read some of the (perfectly reasonable) policy recommendations at the end, such as "a global treaty to regulate pesticides" and a call for "firm rules" based on environmental assessments, requiring those who use the land to protect and restore ecosystems, and so forth. Perfectly reasonable suggestions--but what is the likelihood that any of these will ever be enacted? Practically zilch--since all the governments and intergovernmental bodies responsible for enacting and enforcing such policies are now totally dominated by powerful corporate interests, who control not only governments, but the global mass media as well, ensuring that the vast majority of the population never suspect that there is anything wrong with pesticides or monocultures, nor that there is any problem with precipitously declining insect populations.

The root of this crisis, which threatens to put an end not only to civilization but to life on Earth as we know it, lie in the money system, for money is just arithmetic, an abstract measure of the marginal value of commodities--the value they have when they are no longer immediately useful to the owner. As a consequence, Glomart--the system we have built based on the global exchange of money--has everything to gain and nothing to lose from turning nature into commodities, as rapidly and efficiently as possible. And those with a vested interest in steadily expanding profits--the global corporations and their stockholders--will never consent to any proposed policy that limits or reduces the profitability of their enterprise or their influence over their consumer base, and will use every means available--corruption of policymakers through intensive lobbying and huge, unregulated campaign contributions; saturating the mass media with pro-corporate propaganda and attack ads aimed at politicians who dare to promote regulation in the public interest; externalization of costs (through pollution); and suppression or falsification of any information from scientists that threatens their profit margins.

Yet the logic of money is diametrically opposed to the inherent logic of healthy ecosystems. While Glomart runs on a logic of maximization--the major premise of the money system that more is always better--all biological systems run on a logic of optimization: enough is enough, for too much or too little of any biological value--from energy input to water supply to population, predator/prey ratio, body temperature, heart rate, or fat content--is toxic to the system.

From this perspective, it is obvious that global industrial society--and especially industrial agriculture, with its dependence on monocultures drenched with topsoil-destroying fertilizers and increasingly toxic pesticides--has become a terminal cancer on the Earth, and that cancer is now going into its final stages, where it is unstoppable even while it clearly destroys its own biological support system. And cancer, as we know, has only two possible outcomes: systemic collapse (death) or spontaneous remission.

All of which leads to the burning question of our time: is spontaneous remission even possible for the cancer of the Earth? 

I don't know. The skeptic in me shakes his head and says "fageddaboudit." The odds against it are simply too vast to warrant any hope, given the intensity of our collective addiction to the money game, and the inherent propensity of the money system to concentrate both money and power in fewer and fewer hands, all of whom have ever more to gain from plundering the planet and commandeering its remaining resources, both physical and biological, to turn into commodities for the market as quickly as possible. Regardless of how horrible things get, they will not voluntarily relinquish either their money or power or influence over the clueless masses. Instead, they are already caught up in a feeding frenzy, competing intensely with one another to loot what remains of our petroleum, natural gas, coal, fisheries, forests, endangered wildlife, agricultural topsoil, and public lands, and turn them all into commodities for quick sale. In this respect, the election of Trump constitutes the death of democracy, the final corporate takeover of the entire planet, and the poisoning of the well of public discourse.

And yet...there is Permaculture. Although the worldwide Permaculture movement is invisible to the mass media, and fewer than 1% of our global population has ever heard of it, I still see it as the only potentially viable means we have for triggering the spontaneous remission of the Cancer of the Earth.

How so? you might ask, with justifiable skepticism. Shortly before he died prematurely of pancreatic cancer,  Toby Hemenway,  renowned Permaculture guru and author of the magnificent books Gaia's Garden and The Permaculture City, gave a podcast called "Liberation Permaculture" in which he sketched out his latest thinking about the revolutionary potential of Permaculture design for subverting the systems of control by which local, state, and federal governments monitor agricultural land in ways that benefit their corporate sponsors. His argument was that controlling a resource requires measuring or counting it, and the practice of Permaculture, with its web of diverse, interacting elements, functions, and needs among plants, animals, topsoil, and humans, makes it extremely difficult to count or measure any output. And since money is nothing but counting and measuring, this fact enables Permaculture practitioners to gradually and inconspicuously emancipate themselves from the oppression and domination of corporate sponsored governments, as they build self-reliant communities from the ground up to replace them.

But can Permaculture spread rapidly enough to make a difference--to halt our ongoing global destruction before we all fall victim to the collapse of our biosphere? Obviously, I don't know. It depends on whether or not we can propagate the idea of Permaculture rapidly enough for it to catch on before the Glomart neofascists get wind of it, and bulldoze every Permaculture-based backyard, farm, or settlement they find to plant chemical-drenched monocultures.

So yes--Permaculture can, in theory, bring about spontaneous remission of the Glomart cancer, but only in conjunction with other forms of nonviolent resistance and public education. (For a perceptive reading on this topic, see Joanna Macy's article, "The Great Turning.")  Permaculture is therefore a discipline and a movement to which I can happily devote the rest of my days as a living being on this planet, in the time remaining before I return to compost and humus for future generations.

No matter what...

As most of us know, our political landscape has turned bizarre, surrealistic, and deeply unnerving since the malignant rise of Donald Trump, that personification of Adharma, and of all that is selfish, greedy, childish, short-sighted, willfully ignorant, and mean-spirited in the collective psyche of America.  His destructive, malevolent craziness continues and accelerates, unabated, day by day, yet our politicians (especially Republicans) daily give new meaning to the familiar couplet from Yeats' "The Second Coming:"

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full/Of passionate intensity."

How do we cope with this "rough beast" that has slouched his way into the White House?

At such unnerving moments, I often turn to two simple injunctions that succinctly summarize the wisdom traditions of both West and East.  By "West" I refer to the Abrahamic religions as a whole--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Even though I do not subscribe to the ideological litmus tests of any of these, I have long believed that every wisdom tradition on the planet--East, West, North, and South--is an admixture of Dharma and Identity Politics. The latter--Identity Politics--takes the form of creeds, and of claims of either primacy or exclusive divine sanction by any of these traditions; Dharma inheres in the perennial wisdom at the core of most of them.  As the great Indian guru Nanak once put it, "I do not accept creeds.  Truth remains truth. It is the colored lenses of the self that reflect it in various colors."

But back to the two injunctions, here they are:

1. The wisdom of the West, in a nutshell: No matter what, trust God.

This slogan, which started cropping up on lawn signs and bumper stickers here in Hampton, and perhaps elsewhere, nicely encapsulates the essential wisdom shared by all Abrahamic traditions.  And it is very good advice, regardless of whether or not one "believes" in God (whatever THAT may mean). One need not adhere to a tradition-sanctioned ideological definition of God, whether by the Torah, the Bible, or the Qu'ran, in order to "trust God." If we understand the concept of "God" as a personification of the Sacred, even if we choose not to commit ourselves to any further definition, the advice is still sound, and in fact, indispensable to a healthy attitude toward life: to accept that that is, and let go of the subjunctive--especially the past subjunctive--altogether. This attitude of trust is nicely summed up in the mantra that Jesus gives us as the centerpiece of his recommended prayer: "Thy will be done."

2. The wisdom of the East, in a nutshell:  No matter what, breathe, observe, and let go.

If "trusting God" is the essence of a healthy spiritual attitude, then the above injunction encapsulates the  essential practice of all the Dharmic religions of the Far East ( including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, etc). It refers to the best, time-tested way to translate a healthy attitude (i.e. trusting God) into actual daily practice--the way we live our lives, moment to moment. It is helpful to remember that the Latin word "spirit" is rooted in the verb spiro, spirare which means "to breathe." So everything we might call "spiritual" is rooted in the simple act of returning to our breath, that ongoing flow of oxygen in, CO2 out, that sustains our lives and mediates our interactions with all other life on our planet.

So the simple practice of breathing, observing and letting go, infused by an abiding attitude of trust in God (or whatever you call the Sacred) is something we can all do to preserve or restore sanity, and thereby become agents of healing (be well, do good work, keep in touch) and regeneration (learn, teach, heal, and create) even if, or as, our social and political order spirals downward into chaos and madness.

No matter what....