Contemplating the Fertile Ground of Politics

The doomsday clock clicks down, 3 days and counting. On Friday, March 1^st the U.S. government will begin to cut federal spending, bluntly slicing programs affecting nearly every citizen in some way or another. The coming sequestration fills me with anxiety and angst from so many perspectives, and so provides fertile ground for practicing the dance of grasp and release, of desire and being.

            I work seasonally with the National Park Service, as do nearly 39% of its’ employees. The running joke we share when starting a day of work, invariably starring across some beautiful landscape, is “just another day at the office”. It hints at the reality of my work. I work in America’s playgrounds. Collectively these national treasures stand to loose $183 million in federal spending if our congress continues its hands off approach to doing their job. It’s been three years since they last passed a budget. But lest I digress and follow that tug…

            Our Parks are not merely playgrounds. They act as a respite and sanctuary for a city weary and nature-deficient America.  When the hordes descend on Memorial Day, some in the park service adopt an air of cynicism, but most of us see the deeper message. People yearn for a re-connect, to feel bare earth, to soak in cold streams, and for just a minute to close their eyes, move beyond themselves and experience truly awe inspiring creation. I love being a caretaker for the places that give us back our human perspective. Come Friday, thousands of jobs like mine will disappear.

            That is the grasp, and now the release.

Along with the nonsensical cuts to programs that feed our kids, house the needy, fund science and spur innovation, the vast majority of the federal spending cuts will be born by the Department of Defense. As a nation we are addicted to violence and these cuts were purposefully structured to scare a congress to compromise, to talk… and actually listen to each other. No congressman (or woman) wants to loose Defense dollars for their district. It’s un-American. And here I see a silver lining in the coming torrent. Could this be start, just a small unavoidable start to really beginning a conversation about America’s addiction to violence and war? Could these budget cuts mean that we actually have to rethink the ease with which we start a war, drop a bomb and hold ever so tightly to our guns, to the idea of control? Could this mean one less morally justifiable drone strike on collateral kids. If so, I’m in.

It seems a rather strange choice though.

            Which leaves me with desire and being. I wish for a world where these artificial choices don’t leave me struggling with a cognitive dissonance, struggling with a sane place to rest my mind and sit. I desire a world where we replace the uniform of aggression with one of stewardship. I desire a country that treasures its’ common spaces and natural wonders, within everyone of us, as well as those on the outside. The ones we call national parks and natural treasures.

            So Friday will come and this is where I have found myself to BE. I hope over the next year everyone gets out to enjoy our parks, to our forests, mountains, deserts and beaches. Go recharge and explore and take a minute to breathe, IT in. I really hope to see you there, SERIOUSLY! But if perchance I don’t, I hope, bow and sit for the silver lining.

Peace by Piece.... thoughts on 2012

     By training I am a paleoecologist.  I study how our environments evolved through time in response to all the forces, large and small, that conspired to create the world in which we live.  What we know is that the type of response we see in an ecosystem is related to the scale of the mechanism at play.  Our continents move ever so slowly with shifts in tectonic plates at a temporal scale of millions of years.  Glaciations lasting tens of thousands of years once covered huge portions of our planet, carving the landscapes I look at today.  Rain and wind scour away our plateaus, sending them grain by grain back to our oceans.  Fitting, as they were once the beds of ancient seas, long, long ago.  Piece by piece everything we see in our world today, the mountains, deserts, trees, oceans forests, birds, and even we humans, all come from what was before.  Everything that makes up my body today was once a breath of my ancestors.  They were once mountains, and one day you and I will become a drop of ocean.  But, this is our stuff, our bones, and skin, and sweat.  What of our souls?  What of who WE ARE?
    I think perhaps that like our bodies, our personalities, traits, habits, cultures and societies are all a monument to what has come before.  Piece by piece we carry aspects of yesterday with us as we move into tomorrow, as individuals and societies.  Some are obvious.  I have much the same schedule today as I did yesterday.  I have the same interests, hobbies, passions strengths and faults.  Some of these I am aware of and as such can actively choose to carry with me and pass on to tomorrow's world, or let be.  Others are far subtler.  These are the aspects of each of us buried deep within, passed down from generation to generation.  Combined they create culture upon culture which in turn become the moirés of our societies, over and over again.  Cycle upon cycle of building and rebuilding the backgrounds of how we act, what we do, what we expect, what we contribute, and what we pass on.  For the most part these pieces of the world we create go unnoticed, and we design it to be so.  Ours is a world created to distract, created to entertain us as we endeavor to build ever more enticing shiny trinkets, physical and mental, that sustain a jumbled mind and utterly confused societies. 
    However, some of our machinations become horrific.  We unleash our darkest aspects as we kill each other in ever more industrious fashions.  We celebrate the creation of a drone so that pilots are now out of harms way, but the bombs are still dropped.  We close our eyes, look at the commercials, and pass this into our future.  We strap bombs to our chests in crowded markets to slaughter innocents, all the while praising our gods, and pass not into paradise, but into our future.  We pillage our only world, enslaving billions, so that a select few can find a level of distraction that is truly awesome.  We create global systems of money and war to sustain graft, greed and excess for the super select, while building fewer schools and more prisons for those whose needs are meager.  We tell ourselves it's THEIR fault, vote for Mr. Perfect, turn our heads to the commercials, and pass into the future.  Turn after turn, cycle after cycle, this has been with little exception the path of humanity.  Our foundations were laid long, long ago and our founding fathers and mothers are many.  And yet we continue, piece by piece, building tomorrow. But not all we build is corrupt and not all bricks we lay are done blindly.  On certain scales there is no shortage of thoughtfulness, insight, compassion, empathy and love.
    Why this essay now?  There are many that believe that we are in a unique period in human history, a time of endings and beginnings.  Much hype and speculation exists with the ending of the Mayan calendar one year from now.  For many it's a fearful time with visions of catastrophe.  The more common understanding of the Mayan calendar however is that this time is simply the ending of one cycle and the beginning of not just the next one, but a new one altogether.  I like this interpretation, regardless of whether or not I believe in the 2012 realm as a whole, and this is why.
    Knowing that everything we are physically, mentally, spiritually, culturally and as societies has been built on the foundations of what came before, I like the possibility of an ending to this cycle.  What if each one of us decided to truly use this time to be conscious of what we pass forward?  What if we truly took note of and responsibility for our actions, words, thoughts, judgments, and habits, of how we as individuals navigate this world.  It starts with the tiniest of seeds in each of us but grows exponentially as we come together as friends and families, in a spirit of compassion and hope in action.  At the level of community, be it physical or virtual, we have the potential to imagine a world far greater than any one of us could imagine alone, and from here we transform our societies, and the future.  Peace by piece, pun fully intended.  It's not the goal but the path, because with each thoughtfully placed addition to our common future, we have succeeded.  In essence to see our future as William Blake wrote, "To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour". Peace by piece we can end those cycles that need to end and move into this New Year, this New World as truly invested creators.  Namaste my friends,  I see the beautiful creator within you, and thank you for being a part of my world.