091309

My mother is spitting mad about something and I'm sure she'd appreciate my taking note of it here: the (lowbrow) debate (which isn't a debate) we've all been embroiled in the past few months is _not_ about health care! Unfortunate but true. What we've been arguing about is health-_insurance_ reform and nothing else.

*Enlightenment*

A couple of weeks ago I posted a status update on Facebook in which I noted: if enlightenment must come by way of shedding all attachments in this world then it must follow that those with children can never attain enlightenment. I know for certain that if I ever had kids I would never be able to shed attachment to them. I got many varied responses; one woman who lives, works, and studies in China sent me a private message. She said that indeed in all her studies of Buddhism and meditation, her teachers had constantly remarked about this insurmountable obstacle for adults with children. I realized that this is one reason that in many (if not most/all?) traditions, holy men are celibate.

*Mini-farming*

I've been an avid gardener in my time. When I left New York in 1992, I was already a radical back-to-the-lander; John Jeavons' book How to Grow More Vegetables than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land than You Can Imagine was at the forefront of my schemes, as were the various writings of a man who is my foremost idol, Scott Nearing, grandfather of the Back-to-the-Land movement which took hold across the country in the 1960s. I'd been studying Home Power magazine for months and was determined to live "off the grid." I had become a radical on many levels. I was working at a health-food store in the East Village and one day I was spewing my new local-independence, anti-city, neo-Luddite convictions when a co-worker said, "If you hate it so much why don't you leave?" I left for Maine within a week.

Somehow I convinced a girl I'd met only a couple of weeks before to join me. My plan was for us to set up a self-sufficient homestead on family land, a beautiful spot right on Blue Hill Bay, mid-coast Maine. The furthest we got was to build a cabin (we lived in the old barn while we were there) and to plant a garden, using Jeavons' Biointensive methods. Jeavons calls his method "mini farming" and it is indeed that, focused on growing complete diets (including grains, legumes, tubers, etc.) for all people, on this increasingly crowded planet, with less and less arable land each and every year--Jeavons is spot on to point to the contrary curves of increasing population on the one hand and decreasing amounts of land from which to feed the people on the other as an alarming fact of 21st-century life. Here follows a partial list of my gardening/mini-farming experiences:

1. Through my first adult-life garden in Maine I learned a great deal about the difference between books, theories, and their application to the real world, to seeds, and actual garden beds, and crop yields.

2. My girlfriend and I drove to Seattle at the end of 1993. My plan was to continue on for a return trip to Taiwan, to earn money for the homestead, for solar panels, and a water pump, and a wood-burning stove. I instantly became enchanted with Seattle, broke up with my girl (again, that one was the very last good relationship I ever had with a woman), and decided to stay. My homestead plans met their demise, but not my passion for gardening. I had one great garden in Seattle, at a large community garden on the north side of town. I'm usually a quick study, and gardening was no different.

Other gardeners were genuinely amazed at what I was able to produce on my one small plot, a dozen types of vegetables, lots of potatoes, and the gem of the lot, a large stand of sweet corn. All of it planted unconventionally closely together, all of it growing healthy and strong. Subsequently, I got a job at Puget Consumer's Co-op (a real prize for a newcomer) and no longer had time for the garden; then I started college at Seattle Central Community College, and was preoccupied with school for most of the following five years.

3. Luckily, in my upper division studies at Western Washington University, I was easily able to incorporate agricultural studies into my (complicated!) self-designed major, which was actually like minors in five or six different areas, microeconomics, physics, moral philosophy, engineering, agriculture, etc. To accomplish this feat I had to convince three PhDs in my fields (a doctor of economics, one of resource assessment and analysis, one of physics) that my chosen classes were all on target (in the name of Sustainable Development) and that my (10-page) reasoning for my courses of study was sound. In nearly killing me, that massive undertaking made me stronger and more resilient.

At the beginning, after I first moved to Bellingham (with which I had a terrible relationship from the day I arrived to the day I left), I lived about six miles outside of town, in a beautiful apartment overlooking Bellingham Bay. There I was able to have a very large garden, and to continue my own experiments with mini-farming. Increasingly I became dedicated to growing all of my own food. One winter, I survived solely on potatoes I had grown myself the summer before (if you eat enough of them, you can get plenty of calories and nutrients from potatoes, assuming they're _grown on healthy soil_).

4. After a couple of seasons, a small group of us got a grant from Fairhaven College to go to Willits California for a weekend workshop with John Jeavons himself. At the workshop, folks were very impressed with my detailed knowledge of the subject, especially Jeavons and his staff. Jeavons and I continued correspondence for several years afterwards (he even published an article I wrote for Whatcom Watch in his own newsletter). [On that trip, I also met a Franciscan monk who veritably changed my life, and who is the subject of the fifth poem I ever had published, Monks Follow Me.]

Around the same time I got to be a Teacher's Assistant for the Agroecology class at Huxley College of Environmental Science. The teacher, one of my three main mentors, the PhD in resource assessment, really believed in me and what I knew. She left me in charge of marking up and commenting on student papers and exams, even the graduate students; she did not mind it one bit when I was stern (some would say harsh) in my assessments. Lord, did I ever have fun calling graduate students on their bullshit. I ended up dropping out for a year, so immense was my workload, and never had a garden again in Washington state.

5. After I'd moved to Portland and lived through my marriage fiasco, I eventually found an assistant who agreed to have a garden with me, across the road from my last abode in Portland (another community garden). Really, I called all the shots and watched as she did all the work. Ours was the shining star of the whole garden. By this time, I had become quite adept, not even needing to consult books anymore for tips on planting methods, plant spacing, or companion planting. Every crop we grew flourished beyond all reason (I'm convinced we had angels like they have at Findhorn); people were particularly amazed by our robust broccoli, interplanted with companion flowers. It did make a nice show.

And that was the last garden I will likely ever have.

*Poem*

This is from 1996, though it seems like yesterday:

Monks Follow Me

regularly, give me plain looks that insist across

the silent distance between us, "You know what

you need to do. You know." Especially on

those days when I find it particularly difficult

to be nice and when I feel particularly bad for

not being nice very much of the time--those

are the sort of days that signing up at the local

abbey hangs over my head like a devoted

cloud, fully realized, unrelenting. Recently I met

a Brother Timothy in Willits. Brother Timothy

had a constant frog in his throat, and when he

spoke I knew some of the things he had seen

in his day without having to ask. He talked

about the other monks with an extremely

judgmental tone. The ones he liked he said

were "hot" monks. To a Franciscan, that meant

they must have damn near lived on air. To be

hot you had to have been eating out of

dumpsters since '64, had to have been wearing

and washing the same one set of clothes since

two weeks after the day you lost your last job,

had to stand up fast after eight hours straight

of praying and prostrating in front of the altar

and cry, "More, more! Give me more! I want

more burdens to shed. Give me another

chance!" Brother Timothy told me in one of his

heated asides that They (with a capital 'T')

had given it to Judi Bari, had finally forced on her

a slow and painful death, not just because

she loved the trees so much and was willing

to fight for them, but because she was a woman

who loved the trees. This was a terribly rich

and dangerous combination. "Don't be too rich,"

he warned, "And above all, don't think They

don't know what riches really are. In the end,

They have no choice but to lash out and grab

hold of whatever They can in Their final, frantic

efforts to fill in the massive holes Their money

carved out of Their hearts."

*DJ*

One of the best years I had out west was the year I was an on-air programer (DJ) for KMHD, the main jazz station serving Portland OR. I had taken a class earlier taught by the head of the station; I had to drop out, but I guess he liked what he heard. Out of the blue I was called in by the personnel manager to do an audition tape; actually it turned out to be three tapes (for one try). He explained that if I didn't pass muster, I would have to wait and try again later. The whole KMHD crew listened to my tapes and I was accepted to be on-air. The first couple of months, I was filling in for people with regular shows who couldn't make it on a particular day; I was on call. Finally I was offered my own spot, prime time, 2-6pm Mondays. What followed was a fairly magical time; I got to call all the shots and play anything I wanted.

Now being a DJ I must tell you is anything but glamorous. Ninety-nine percent of your time is spent alone in a detached, insulated room and you never get a chance to meet your listeners. On top of which, KMHD is a public-radio station so the gig was volunteer. I had a great time while I was there; I called my show "Post '69" and I featured "the best jazz from the last 35 years" (this was 2005 obviously). It was my conviction then as it still is that the best jazz ever made has been made recently; I aimed to prove that fact on my show. Mostly, those few brave souls who called in raved about how good the show was, saying they'd never heard such great jazz on KMHD (there was the occasional little old lady calling in to wonder what happened to Ella Fitzgerald).

The very vitality which made the show excellent was also my undoing for various reasons: after about ten months, the disparity between the amount of time I spent preparing for each show (a _lot_) and my lack of pay became more than I could handle. By that time, there was at least one old-time DJ gunning for me. I had heard that he objected to a track I played once by Dave "Fuze" Fiuczynski; looking back now, I have to admit that was a pretty outrageous track to play during business hours on a Monday (Fuze is a guitarist and he's all about rock-jazz with an emphasis on the hard-core rock). Still my listeners expected me to push the boundaries, and I most certainly did.

One day I played Cassandra Wilson singing Crazy, a really stand-out track in her inimitable folk-jazz style. As always, when I introduced it I mentioned who wrote the song: Willie Nelson. Within 20 seconds the phone rang; it was that same old-time DJ out to get me. He clearly didn't get it that my understanding and immersion in jazz was much more complete than his own; maybe he did and that's what made him feel threatened. He was just dying to find anything he could to find fault with. He said, "Adam, really. That's Patsy Cline," as if _I_ were the idiot. I said, "I don't know what you do on your show but on mine I mention who _wrote_ a song, not who made it famous." Never mind that Ms Wilson's rendition is so good I know there were countless people who were nothing less than thankful I was playing it.

This fellow was, among volunteer programmers, a heavy weight. The fact that he would have seen the death of my show, and been happy, eventually became more than I could bear. I had my last show not long after his call. When I announced my retirement on air, the phone was ringing off the hook; that felt great. Folks called to say things like: "You _can't_ stop. You only just started," and, "Oh crap! I guess I'll have to get used to Mondays with Ella and Louis again," and, "What does that mean, you're stopping? Will the show go on?" It was not a happy parting but it was one that had to happen. I'm happy I did it while I still could; it would be next to impossible for me to do anything like that now.

*Quotations*

They financial crises are all different, but they have one fundamental source: the unquenchable capability of human beings when confronted with long periods of prosperity to presume that it will continue.

--Alan Greenspan

[BLOW HARD! Of course his deregulation had nothing to do with it.]

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece. No other task is of any consequence.

--Cyril Connolly

[Explains why I'm perennially daunted.]

Homo sapiens are a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.

--Stephen Jay Gould

[I feel less probable even than all this, and not all that fortunate.]

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

--Mary Oliver

[Am i no longer young?]

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

--DH Lawrence

["Say it hot" !!!]

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

--Oscar Wilde

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.

--Hebbel

If there is no passion in your life, then have you really lived? Find your passion, whatever it may be. Become it, and let it become you and you will find great things happen for you, to you and because of you.

--T Alan Armstrong

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chase down your passion like it's the last bus of the night.

--Glade Byron Addams

*Music*

In the installment before last I mentioned some of my favorite music from Me'shell Ndegéocello and I forgot to mention one of the most important of her recordings: Peace Beyond Passion. Dig it. Tracks like Leviticus: Faggot are sure to win you over.

Peace love and ATOM jazz