Million Dollar Bill

Yesterday, I pulled up to one of last mailboxes on the mail-route and there was a man that looked to be in his early seventies standing there. As I was getting the car positioned I noticed him reach into his back pocket, pull out a wallet, open it up and retrieve a bill. I got the window rolled down, he greeted me warmly and handed me a one million dollar bill. "Here is a million dollars," he said "for delivering my mail today. On the back is some important words about the go...spel." I told him thank you and I'd be sure to read it. Here is what it said:

"The million dollar question: Will you go to Heaven when you die? Here's a quick test. Have you ever told a lie, stolen anything, or used God's name in vain? Jesus said, 'Whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already commited adultery with her in his heart.' Have you looked with lust? Will you be guilty on Judgement Day? If you have done those things, God sees you as a lying, thieving blasphemous, adulterer at heart. The Bible warns that if you are guilty you will end up in Hell. That's not God's will.

"He sent His Son to suffer and die on the cross for you. You broke God's law, but Jesus paid your fine. That means He can legally dismiss your case. He can commute your death sentence: 'For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.' Then Jesus rose from the dead and defeated death. Please, repent (turn from sin) today and trust in Jesus alone, and God will grant you the gift of everlasting life. Then read your Bible daily and obey it."

The next time he tries to hand me some fake money I'm going to tell him that I've joined the William Blake Cult, and we've married Heaven and Hell. Then I'm going to quote Blake:

"Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps."-- William Blake

I've grown to despise sin-based theology.

Green Mama and The Angel of Fire

This morning I decided to put down my reading on Community Rights and pick up a book on The Soul. I Pulled Thomas Moore's "Original Self" off from the shelf and wasn't disappointed.

"What would it be like, I wonder, if we were born in some dramatic spiritual way. Say the soul like a sheet of silky gauze fell down from the heavens in a soft flutter? Would that be preferable to the birth of a human being at the fork in the legs amid blood, excrement, and waters? I don't think so, because we are given life by the green mama as well as the angel of fire, and the green mama doesn't think much about what she does. She loves and gives birth and then takes back to herself everything she has birthed." (Pg. 82)

I think it's interesting that me mentioned the green mama and the angel of fire in the same sentence.

Imagining Local Democracy

In a truly democratic society We The People don't sit around and hope for the Federal and State levels of government to deliver any kind of meaningful change, or for corporations to magically transform themselves into socially respsonsible corporate citizens. We also don't sit around and hope for economic markets to do this or that to decide our community's fate. We get busy at the local level and assert our right to local self-governance. That means We The People get to decide what we want and don't want in our communities, and this is done at the ballot box and by making local laws. It's a democratic race to the top not a fascist fall to the bottom.

Thinking Critically, Community Rights, and Corporations

Daniel (15 yrs. old) and I are back at reading Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" to each other this morning. I can think of 3 powerful quotes that I could pull from today's reading. I'm going to go with this one.

"It is possible to perceive the world such that it makes sense to gas Jews and others at death camps. It is possible to perceive yourself and others such that it makes sense to destroy the planet in order to make money and amass power, to perpetuate and make grow an economic system. None of this is to say these are "wise" choices: It's to say they're choices. It's also to stress once again, how often unquestioned assumptions frame our choices. If we wish to make different choices we must smash the frames that constrain us. We must, if we care about our own lives, and if we care about the life on the planet, begin to remember how to think critically, how to think for ourselves." -- (Pg. 119-120)

I had a couple thoughts related to Community Rights and Corporations this morning.

The first: It occured to me that I'm not against corporations. What I support is once again making corporations subordinate to We The People. A free and sovereign people define and have power over the robots they create. In other words, under the the theory of The United States the corporation was never meant to govern We The People. In my mind, a big reason why the American Revolution was fought was to drive a stake through the heart of the corporation.

The second: What does an authentic win look like for a community fighting a corporate harm? I think an authentic win looks like citizens within the community voting "no", or making a law against the harm being done to them. If a corporation decides to leave because of economic reasons or because of the hassle-factor that is the corporation leaving. You, as a self-governing people have not defined what your values are and codified them into law. Once you have expressed your values into law it's all out there in the open for the next corporation that will be coming in to do the harm.

Do I think this will be easy? No. Do I think it's a magic bullet? No. But I think it's far more effective than fighting corporate harms one at a time. It reminds a lot of whack-a-mole. That is what it looks like for citizens and activists fighting the harms.

We Are The Relationships We Share

Daniel (15 yrs. old) and I are done reading a chapter out of Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" to each other this morning. I look forward to this ritual, especially with this book. I would consider Derrick Jensen one of the most important thinkers and writers of our time. Every teenager should be exposed to the words in "Walking on Water." The sad thing is that barely any will based on the simple fact that we can't stand too much reality. His analysis is so spot on that there is no place for the reader to hide. You're left with having to do something however small about our current collective suicidal path to extinction. Anyway, I was delighted to read this paragraph with him and discuss it.

"A human being is not simply an ego structure in a sack of skin. Human beings, and this is true for all beings, are the relationships they share. My health--emotional, physical, moral--is inextricably intertwined with the quality of these relationships, whether I acknowledge the relationships or not. If the relationships are impoverished, or if I systematically eradicate those beings with whom I pretend I do not have relationships, I am so much smaller, so much weaker. These statements are as true physically as they are emotionally and spiritually." ( Derrick Jensen, pg. 107, Walking on Water

Two things I'd like to mention from Community Right's front:

Another brilliant post by Paul Cienfuegos. This post is full of great ideas for local ordinances to combat climate change and assert a communities right to govern itself.

The Community Right's folks in Oregon are organizing to add a “The Right to Local, Community Self-Government” amendment to their state constitution. They asked that folks who support Community Rights like their Facebook page. The big picture plan is to drive a "The Right to Local, Community Self-Government" into our state and federal constitutions.


 

Hierarchy in School

Back to reading Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" with my teenage son this morning. I'm glad that I got to read the paragraph below to him. I wish all schools (I know, I know, children don't need schooling. But we're stuck in the myth of Bottom-Line Economics for now) had this in their vision statement. The world would be a different place. And it would've made getting out of bed a whole hell of a lot easier for the majority of my mornings from ages 4 to 18.

"We perceive the entire hierarchy in school exactly opposite to how it really is. You're not here for me, and I'm not here for my supervisor. My supervisor is here to help me, the administrators are here to help him, all the way down the line. 'You' are the reason we're all here. What do you want to do?" (Pg. 96)

Who are you?

The lines below are some of my favorite lines ever written. They are a big reason why I don't send my kids to public school. They are a big reason why I live the way I do. They are a big reason why I resist this culture. I read them to my son last week, and I'm eternally grateful for this. They should be read in high schools across the nation. Ever since first laying my eyes on them I have wanted to type them out so I have quick access to them. Well, this morning, I finally did it. After exactly 30 minutes of typing they are now copied to my computer. It's funny because my book is a signed copy from the author. This morning I noticed he signed his name on 2/19/04. That's almost 11 years to the day. I remember the day I got this book. I pulled up to the mailbox in my pic-up, opened the door, reached in and grabbed it out, then closed the door. I drove up to where I usually park my truck, shut it off, then proceeded to tear off the brown grocery bag paper covering it. I opened the book and didn't get out of my truck until my future wife asked if I was going to come in the house (Life was a little different for me back then). I had to be out there for well over an hour. From where I'm sitting right now I can look out the window that wasn't there at the time and see myself sitting there in the old pic-up that I'd recently bought of my dad reading these revolutionary lines. Gawd, what memories. What a place. It's good to be alive resisting.

Be careful when you read the lines below. You just might do something you never expect to do.

"There's really only one question in life, and only one lesson. This question is whispered endlessly to us from all directions. The moon asks it each night, as do the stars. It's asked by drops of rain that cling to the soft ends of cedar branches, and by teardrops that cluster at the fold of your nose or edge of your mouth. Frogs, flowers, stones, pieces of broken plastic, all ask this of each other, of themselves, and of you. The question: Who are you? The lesson: We're born or sprouted or hatched or congealed or we fall from the sky, we live, and then we die or are worn away or broken or disperse in a river, lake, or sea, ripples flowing outward to bounce back from the far shore. And in the meantime, in that middle, what are you going to do? How are you going to find, and be, who you are? Who are you, and what your going to do about it?

"If modern industrial education--and more broadly industrial civilization--requires 'the subsumption of the individual,' that is, into a pliant workforce, then the most revolutionary thing we can do is follow our hearts, to manifest who we really are. And we are in desperate need of revolution, on all scales and in all ways, from the most personal to the most global, from the most serene to the most wrenching. We're killing the planet, we're killing each other, and we're killing ourselves.

"Our current system divorces us from our hearts and bodies and neighbors, from humanity and animality and embeddedness in the world we inhabit, from decency and even the most rudimentary intelligence. (How smart is it to destroy your own habitat? Who was the genius who came up with the idea of poisoning our own food, water, and air?) I've heard defenders of this system say that following one's heart is not a good enough moral compass, that Hitler was following his heart when he tried to conquer the world, tried to rid the world of those he deemed unworthy. But Hitler was no more following his heart than any of the rest of us who blindly contribute to a culture that is accomplishing what Hitler desired but could not himself bring to completion. The truth is--as I have shown elsewhere, exhaustively and exhaustingly--that is only through the most outrageous violations of our hearts and minds and bodies that we are inculcated into a system where it can be made to make sense to some part of our twisted and torn psyches to perpetuate a way of being based on the exploitation, immiseration, and elimination of everyone and everything we can get our hands on.

"Within this context, the question the whole world asks at every moment cannot help but also be the most dangerous: Who are you? Who are you, really? Beneath the trappings and traumas that clutter and characterize our lives, who are you, and what do you want to do with the so-short live you've been given? We could not live the way we do unless we avoided that question, forced others to avoid placing that question in front of us, and in fact attempted to destroy those who do.

"As we see." (Derrick Jensen, Pg. 41-42, Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution)

Apologies

Well over a decade ago I had a friend out of the blue come up to me and apologize.

"We blew it." He started out. "It was the moment we could have changed things for the better. People were organized and energized, and we blew it. I apologize to you for that. I apologize that you have inherited this horrible economic and political system, and world that is systematically being destroyed."

"No problem." I said uncomfortably and sort of surprised.

It was a few years after George W. Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court to be President of The United States. My friend came of age in the sixties, at the height of one of this countries most revolutionary moments. He watched Martin Luther King march on our nation's capital with 50,000 people, Malcolm X shot dead on a stage, Gaylord Nelson, the father of Earth Day, elected as our State's Governor then move on to the United States Senate, Federal clean air and water standards enacted, etc.

At the time I thought he was being tough on himself. Why should he shoulder his generation's shortcomings? I thought. Then, over a decade later while reading to my teenage son this morning, I unexpectedly read this paragraph to him:

"I want to apologize, just as people in the generation before mine should have apologized to me, for the wreckage of a world we're leaving you. The people of my generation are passing on to you the social patterns and structures, the ways of being and thinking, the physical artifacts themselves that are killing the planet. We're blowing it, badly, and you'll suffer for it. I'm so very sorry." (Derrick Jensen apologizing to an auditorium full of students at an all boys boarding school, Pg. 50, Walking on Water)

Shortly afterwards it all came together for me, and I apologized to my son. In a couple years he will be entering an economic and poltical system that is far worse than it was when I entered it in 1992. And a world with far less diversity.



　

　

　

Unschooling with Derrick Jensen's Open Letter to Environmentalists

Some friends have asked what we do to educate our children at home. Here is a good example of what we did about a month ago. Since I'm a member of Derrick Jensen​'s reading club I received this open letter in my email. I thought it was so spot on that I wanted to read it to my family and see if they'd be willing to sign it also (I especially wanted to hear what my teenage son's thoughts were on it.) So I went through with my plan and read it, had a discussion focused on it for an hour or so, then we decided to sign it (numbers: 28, 29, 30). My son's first response after reading the letter was: “Dad, they’d rather see us go to Mars than restore grasslands to restore carbon.” If you notice that whoever put the list of signees together added his comment behind his name. I'm really glad they did that. I would have loved to have a letter like this read to me back in high school.

A Slice of a Trip Down to Scheels Sports

Hayden (5 yrs. old), Sophia (2 yrs. old), and I are in the men's bathroom at Scheels All Sports out of necessity and circumstance. After Sophia looks with her hands where the liquid disappears in a urinal it's time to wash them. In case she touches anything else I quickly pick her up and carry her over to the sinks, set her back down and reach up to give the soap dispenser lever a pull to successfully fill the palm of my hand with a mound of white, bubbly foam. I take what I'...ve got in my hands and put it into hers, then tell her to rub her hands together. As she's doing this I get her picked up and horizontally position her over the sinks so she can rinse her hands off. To an outside observer this could look like I'm playing airplane with my daughter. When in reality I'm worn down, frazzled, and just want to get the hell out of the store after spending well over two hours in there bowling 20 frames of miniature bowling, finding hidden children in racks of clothes from one end of the store to the other, helping reassemble a camping mess kit, chasing down what they call the "First and Best Really Bouncy balls ever created", and so on. We get her hands rinsed off and I fly her over to the electric-forced-air hand dryers, she smacks the button and starts to handle the hot air. Meanwhile I look over at the machine next to ours and there is my son positioned under the rush of hot air with his mouth wide open, lips and puffed out cheeks vibrating from the blast of air. "What in the heck are you doing, H?" I exhaustingly ask. "I'm drying my mouth out, dad!"

That's how our experience ended at Scheels in Eau Claire yesterday

The Big Impossible

A few nights back I couldn't sleep, so I got out of bed and pulled a book off from the shelf to read until I could fall back asleep. It's title: "Man Enough: Fathers, Sons and the Search for Masculinity," by Dr. Frank Pittman. I'm interested in the subject because I will be periodically working with young men between the ages of 14 and 19 through spring and well into summer on the baseball diamond. At that age I remember the question the took center stage in my mind was: What does it mean to be a man? This quote jumped off the page at me during my fit of sleeplessness.

"Masculinity is an 'artificial state, a challenge to be overcome, a prize to be won by fierce struggle.' So says David Gilmore in "Manhood in the Making," after he examined the ways in which boys become men in various cultures. Gilmore tries to define what it takes to be a man, what the puberty rituals attempt to instill in boys. He says, 'To be a man in most of the societies we have looked at, one must impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin...Manhood is a kind of male procreation; its heroic quality lies in its self-direction and discipline, its absolute self-reliance.' Gilmore tells us that the Fox tribe of Iowa considers being a real man 'The Big Impossible.' No man who sets out to achieve total masculinity can ever be man enough.

"Masculinity is supposed to be about protection of the family, but the pursuit of this Big Impossible can lead men to escape domesticity and the power of women. Men can't always do what man's gotta do to "feel like" a man and still do what a man's gotta do to "be" a man."(Pg. xiv)

I also like this quote about how terrifyingly dangerous and terrifyingly important women are to men. I remember reading somewhere that younger men look for the guidance of older men because the older men have been with women longer. They have more experience with the danger and importance of women, in other words.

"Why do men love their masculinity so much? Because men have been trained to sacrifice their lives for their masculinity, and men always know they are far less masculine than they think they should be. Women, though, have the power to give a man his maculinity or take it away, so women become both terrifyingly important and terrifyingly dangerous to men. It's all quite crazy, but this, too, is a part of the 'masculine mystique.'" (Pg. xvi)

Checking Rabbit Traps

It's 7:30 AM. I'm sitting at my T.V tray in front of the masonry stove fire reading an email. I hear Daniel's (15yrs. old) dresser drawer close behind his closed bedroom door. I sigh. He's up close to an hour earlier than usual. That means my cherished time to be alone reading and writing are about over. He comes out of his room carrying a loaded CO2 handgun dressed to go outside, which is slightly unusual. Usually he comes out grumpy with a handful of school books dressed ca...sually.

"Where are you going with that gun?" I ask.

"I'm going to check my rabbit traps." He says casually.

"Good luck," I say as he heads out the front door.

I'm a happy, proud, and grateful father this morning. Plus I get to read and write in solitude for a few more minutes.

Slowing The Rush To War The Redneck Way

Watching American Sniper brought up a memory for me that I'd like to share. On the morning the trade towers went down my grandfather stopped me on the road outside my great-grandmother's house. He in his pic-up and me in mine. It was a cold, crisp morning with the feel of fall in the air. I was driving home from cutting firewood at my future mother-n-law's house. He on his way home from having coffee with his sister, some brothers, and cousins at ma's house they called it. We got our trucks stopped, our windows rolled down, and after the "did-ya-hear-what-happens?" he said, "Don't you go fight for them. It's not worth giving up your life." We went on with our usual what've-you-got planned-today coversation and went our separate ways.

That's the redneck way of slowing the rush to war. It wasn't cowardice or just another one of grandpa's directives to rebel against. He'd seen his uncles rush off to WWII, cousins to the Korea War, and younger brother to Vietnam. He didn't want to see his eldest grandson rush off to war. It was an older man loving a younger man. It was a grandfather loving his grandson.

The Warrior and American Sniper

I decided to take my 15 year old son to see American Sniper. I don't go to the theatre or watch movies at home very often, so I surprised myself. Movies in general just don't interest me, or maybe it's just I don't feel like I have the time for them. But after listening to a hour long discussion on NPR about the movie, some lines by James Hillman came to me: There is a love and beauty in war that many of us don't want to see. And if we want to oppose war we have to go to war ourselves in our hearts and minds. We must imagine into the hearts of our enemy (All paraphrased).

Then I started second guessing myself, so I thought I'd better consult one of my elders and mentors. I pulled Robert Bly's "Iron John" off the the shelf and opened up to the chapter on Warriorship. This quote sealed it:

"We can all add further details to the account I've given of the decline from warrior to soldier to murderer, but it is important to notice the result. The disciplined warrior, made irrelevant by mechanized war, disdained and abandoned by the high-tech culture, is fading in American men. The fading of the warrior contributes to the collapse of civilized society. A man who cannot defend his own space cannot defend women and children. The poisoned warriors called drug lords prey primarily on kingless, warriorless boys.

"And it all moves so swiftly. The massive butcheries of 1915 [World War I] finish off the disciplined or outward warrior, and then within thirty years, the warriors inside Western men begin to weaken. The double weakening makes us realize how connected the outer world and the inner world are, how serious the events of history are." (Pg. 156, Iron John)

It's an interesting thought that part of the reason civilization is collapsing is because there aren't many warriors around to protect women and children. It brings up the question, at least in our house, what does it mean to be a warrior? I look forward to going to the movie and the discussion afterwards.

 

Music and Schoolwork

Daniel (15yrs. old) says to me, as we're sitting at the kitchen table with books and computers listening to the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, "I bet there aren't many kids that get to do their school work and listen to drug induced music." I laughed, then said, "One time I had a history teacher named Mr. Posselt. He was heavily influenced by the sixties, never married, led guided hunts in Minnesota, lived as a beggar, coached wrestling and football, taught your aunties, uncles, and grandparents, grew up in Antigo, and so on. Every Friday he'd let us move our desks wherever we wanted, shut all the lights off, and we'd listen to drug induced music for the hour. He called it Moments of Enrichment. His number one rule was: No Dope!

"Dad?" he interrupts and asks, "Do you think he'd stand with Scott Walker?" I laughed my ass off.

U.S District Judge Overturns First County In U.S To Ban Fracking And Oil Drilling

The first county in the United States to ban fracking and oil drilling to protect their water had their local law overturned by a U.S District Judge recently. You can read the article HERE. This makes it clear to me the difference between minority and majority rule. As it stands right now we are ruled by a corporate minority. We don't have the right or the power in our communities to stop corporate harms when they are imposed upon us.

If you want to see how mean-spirited some writers can get about Community Rights and some of the leaders involved take a look at this article. Calling Thomas Linzey, Stalinist, self-serving, and narcissistic is just crazy. All for just standing up for communities to have the right to govern themselves. Thomas Jefferson is probably rolling his grave.

Reading, Writing, And Revolution With My Son

I'm once again grateful this morning for the opportunity to sit down at the kitchen table with my teenage son and read to each other Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution." Given that he's working on writing a novel and generally likes to write I couldn't think of a better book to read at the moment. I would recommend this book be required reading for all 16 year olds. It would also be a part of my adult bookstore and my class on revolution that ...I fantasize about nearly everyday. Hey, a guy could be having much worse fantasies. Anyway, it was a pleasure to read these lines to him:

"Someone asked me once at a talk why I so stress the positive with my students yet am such an unstinting critic of those who run our culture and who are killing the planet. I answered immediately, 'Power. If I've got power or authority over someone, it's my responsibility to use that only to help them. It's my job to accept and praise them into becoming who they are. But if I see someone misusing power to harm someone else, it's just as much my responsibility to stop them, using whatever means necessary.'"--Derrick Jensen, Pg. 17

A lot of people over the years have criticized Derrick Jensen for advocating violence in his writing. After all he has made the claim that we have to take down civilization if we want a planet for our children to live on. But I consider him to be an "everything on the table" type of guy. He advocates talking openly and honestly about the dire situation we are in (political, economic, ecological, spiritual, psychological) and all of the strategies we can use to improve the situation. I have no problem with that. And if the difficult subjects of sabotage and violence and such come up I have no problem with that either. You don't get anywhere, I think, burying your head in the sand. The things that you're burying your head about come back and bite you, like violence and war. We are born with violence and war in our souls. That's part of our inheritance as human beings when we come into this world. It's archetypal and given to us in the womb. It's part of the cosmos.

That's the truth as I see it right now. I'm glad my son and I can talk openly and honestly about it.

Occupying our Local Governments

This article lays out some of the basic strategies of the Community Right's movement. One of them is to create local laws that end up breaking state and federal laws. As it stands right now state and federal laws create a ceiling in which citizens who wish to improve upon those laws by making better laws at the local level cannot because, well, it's against the law. In other words, state and federal law trump local law. It's governing from the top-down instead of from the bottom-up. That's not how I imagine democracy. And that's why we fought the American Revolution: The central authority (The King) refused "to recognize local laws enacted as an exercise of the people’s right to local self-government."(Mazda)

"We must use our cities and towns to drive upwards against state and federal frameworks of law that protect decision-making authority by the one percent. It means that, in each of the cities where we live, we need to start working together to define the rights we need and then use those municipal structures to obtain them."--Thomas Linzey

Bucky Fuller and Breaking The Law

Buckminster Fuller once said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Under our current system of law you have to break the law to build the new model Fuller is talking about. In other words, they've made sustainability illegal.

The Box of Allowable Activism

This is a very important video describing how We The People can step out of the box of allowable activism, quit participating in what Jane Anne Morris calls our Democracy Theme Park, and stand up for our right to govern ourselves at the local level.

You're The Only Daddy That'll Walk The Line

It's close to 8 P.M. We just got done having dinner. The Beatles are playing through the Bose. Most of the lights are on in the house. And Hayden (5 yrs. old) is performing is usual evening ritual; he's naked, making every sound imaginable, and spinning like a whirling dervish in the middle of the kitchen. As I pass by him on my way to the sink with a handful of dirty dishes he stops in mid-spin, looks up at me, and says, "Dad, pick me up." I'm physically tired. Just like the night before that, and the night before that, back as far as I can remember. I say to him, "you're getting too big to be picked up, H. Pretty soon I won't be doing this anymore." He stands there undeterred staring at me in silence with his arms raised. He won't take no for an answer. So I set the dishes down on the counter, reach over and put each hand under each of his armpits, bend my knees, and heave him up into my arms. He looks at me and says, "You're the only daddy that'll walk the line. I love you." Then he gave me a kiss on the cheek. I smiled, told him I felt the same way, set him down, and he went on spinning.


When the kid has got something to say he says it.

PUSSYWILLOWS!?!?

My phone chimes letting me know that I have a new message. I get the car stopped, put the mail in the box, grab the phone off the dash, and open the message. It says, "PUSSYWILLOWS!?!?"

It's Saturday, so we're both working the mail-route. She's got the smartphone and I've got the measily tracfone. What takes me seconds to type a sentence on the former takes me minutes on the latter. I respond with, "wow." Hoping she doesn't send me another text. A minute later the phone chimes again. I get the car stopped at the next box, reach up on the dash, grab the phone and open the message. It says, "Nature is out of balance...:-)"* I laugh out loud.

If you've seen The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp you'll understand why I laughed. And if you know anything about my wife's sometimes unexpected subtle sense of humor you'd see that it came out in that moment. And that's one reason out of many why I love her.

*The pussywillows usually don't flower around here until some time in March.

Is That Oak?

I get home from work. It's late. I'm tense and tired. It's been a long day. I've got to get a fire going in the masonry stove before we sit down to eat. So I get the doors open to the stove. Turn around and reach over to grab a stick of wood. Standing there is Sophia (2 yrs. old). Before I can ask her for the stick she fires three quick, rhythmic questions off at me:

"Is that oak? Is that oak? Is that oak?"

It sounded like bird song, it was that rhythmic. I smiled proudly knowing that I didn't know what a stick of red oak firewood looked like until I was atleast 18. She's ahead the game in that regard. And damn cute in the process. Needless to say the tension lifted.

Under a Government?

This morning my teenage son and I started out with a question. Do we still imagine ourselves as living under a government? I know that we used to live under a King. He was granted authority to rule from the divine. And our Revolutionary War of Independence was fought to get rid of this idea. And now our government receives its authority to govern not from the divine but from us, the sovereign. But do we still imagine ourselves living under it like we once did under the King? I want to say it doesn't seem that way anymore. The tyrant is no longer the King or The Government but the ideas of the mind perhaps. Perhaps a good move for us is to get clear who the real tyrant is.

I don't know, just rambling. Feel free to add thoughts.

Lucky Pieces of Mud

My teenage son and I have a daily ritual in the winter: We split firewood together (except when I'm called in to deliver mail). He does most of the talking and I do most of the listening while splitting. Over half the time the conversations are focused on myth, philosophy, religion (This is a guy thing, I think) or whatever he's reading at the time. The other day, he broke the silence between us with this statement: "Dad, did you know that all we really are is just lucky pieces of mud that got to sit up." He chuckled. I laughed my ass off.

Thank you Kurt Vonnegut.