Rain and Janis Joplin's Deepest Heart

Janis Joplin
Morrison Hotel Gallery

It is the rainy season here and I am sitting in the rain in the nostalgic early morning. - Thinking about a quiet saturday afternoon in the late summer. My father and I had just gone for a long walk in the forest and were rained out and made it back to his wood paneled ford station wagon. It smelled of woodworking and cigarettes.

He put on this tape by Janis Joplin and we listened to her speech a few times through while we sat in the dryness of the car with the rain drawing a curtain between us and the rest of the world. Just my Dad and me and Janis Joplin, she was totally hopped-up on some kind of crazy drugs and energy and sharing her heart.

Here is the poem that she shared on stage in the middle of a song. It might be titled 'You can destroy your now by worrying about tomorrow'.



I don't understand how come you're gone

I don't understand why half the world is still crying

when the other half of the world is still crying too, man
and it can't get it together.

I mean,
if you got a cat for one day
I mean, if you, say, say...
maybe you want a cat for 365 days, right?
You ain't got him for 365 days
you got him for one day, man.
Well I tell you that one day, better be your life.
Because, you know
you can say, oh man
you can cry about the other 364
but you're gonna lose that one day,
and that's all you've got.
You gotta call that love, man.


That's what it is, man.


If you got it today you don't want it tomorrow, man,
'cause you don't need it,
'cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, man.
It's all the same fucking day, man.
  

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The Peace Of Wild Things

Mary Oliver
Cleveland Arts Prize

Sitting now in the breezy cool quiet after a storm in Luang Prabang. - All my colleagues are busily working on making maps and carefully preparing to present our research ideas tomorrow.

- Presenting the research idea to them all day was enough work for me so I am reading poems and eating bananas.

I'll sneak out for a beer now and look at the Mekong and the forests.

The Peace Of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.



— Wendell Berry

"I sound my barbaric YAWP over the rooftops of the world"

I'm now on the rooftop of the Mekong Region in Luang Prabang Province about to head off into the wilderness to work for Hmong and Khmu ethnic minority groups. I am lucky enough to be traveling with three incredibly hard-working and dedicated environmentalists and permaculturalists who are acting as translators and sounding boards for ideas about how to test the hypothesis - that utilization leads to conservation: all within the new model of Bio-Human Ecology (unpublished) by my boss and the Founder of the Social Policy and Ecology Research Institute (SPERI): Ms. Tranh Thi Lanh.

Life is exceedingly good and full of adventure mixed with hard work and laughter.

Here is a poem by Walt Whitman I am revisiting this morning:

Photo of Walt Whitman
Smithsonian Magazine

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

Sister Chan Khong

I've been listening to the songs in Thich Nhat Han's "Touching the Earth" for some time now and have basically memorized the song by Sister Chan Khong. - It took some doing to find out what the actual words were (I have been singing it to my friends and they catch a word or two as I get better at it).

Sister Chan Khong

Here they are:

Đây là tịnh độ, tịnh độ là đâyMỉm cười chánh niệm, an trú hôm nay
Bụt là lá chín, Pháp là mây bay
Tăng thân khắp chốn, quê hương nơi này
Thở vào hoa nở, thở ra trúc lay
Tâm không ràng buộc, tiêu dao tháng ngày.

Pure being is happening now
Mindfully smiling, reside in today
Buddha-nature is ripe
Clouds spreading over the countryside
The sangha is everything, everywhere
Inhale in as a blooming flower, exhale as a mountain
We are not bound, sailing among the islands of our days.

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Paldang Organic Farms

Some good news has just come from Korea – a success in the struggle for the preservation of the Paldang Organic Farmlands.

The Paldang region is the birthplace of modern Korean organic agriculture and is the source of drinking water for the residents in the metropolitan areas of Seoul. The Korean government under its ambitious Four Rivers' Restoration Project planned to convert the region into bike trails and public parks, claiming that organic agriculture has a negative impact on the water quality of the region.

The struggle of the Paldang organic farmers was joined by the organic, environmental, religious and other social groups in Korea and it became symbolic in the national struggle against the Four Rivers' Restoration Project. Dumulmeori, a beautiful scenic haven in the Paldang region remained the last region to be developed under the Restoration Project.

In October 2011, the IFOAM membership present at its 20^th General Assembly unanimously passed a declaration in support of the Paldang farmers. The Declaration "openly supports the determined efforts to maintain organic management of the land inthe Paldang region" and recognized that Paldang as the birthplace of Korean organic agriculture "has a symbolic value for the national and the international organic movements."

On 12^th August 2012, the Ministry of Land, Transportation and Maritime Affairs and the Committee for the Preservation of the Paldang Organic Farmlands came to an agreement on the preservation of the organic farmlands to be managed as a community ecological park, taking as example CERES of Australia, a measure that was suggested  by the organic farmers since two years ago. 

 The success of the negotiations was possible due largely to the mediation of the Catholic Church whose members held daily mass in the Paldang region for more than two years.

A common consultation body is to set up with the participation of the local governments of the Paldang region (Yangpyeong County and Gyeonggi Province), and the members of the Committee for the Preservation of the Paldang Organic Farmland. The budget for conversion into a community ecological park would be borne by the government. The organic farmlands will be preserved and Paldang will be a model of sustainable development in watersheds.  

Based on the peaceful resolution of the crisis and the public consensus reached, Paldang farmers "promise to strive to promote and preserve organic agriculture in Korea."

The Four Rivers' Restoration Project has proven to be an environmental disaster with floods and environmental damage in all areas developed under the project. Wetlands have been destroyed and the natural habitats of many migrating birds have disappeared. Contamination of the rivers have worsened and  flooding have become more frequent.

Many politicians are asking for the dismantling of the dams built as part of the Restoration Project and most of the presidential candidates have taken this up as their campaign slogan.  

The courage of the four farmers who remained and fought to the last will always be remembered in solidarity.   

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What is this?

Max Erdstein, Global Manager of Google, gave a great talk at the Insight Meditation Center about 'peeling back the onion' through a combination of vipassana and zen meditation. He said that after years and years of zen practice he went on a vipassana retreat and suddenly realized that he did not know how to meditate - and had a consequent breakthrough in deepening his mediation practice.

"The ritual is an elaborate ruse; a kind of kabuki."

The moral of the story seems to be letting go of learning how to do meditation is the way to learn how to do meditation. - To breathe in you have to first breathe out. - In a way, not knowing is a way to 'breathe out;' breathe out the ego-based practices by letting go of 'knowing' how to do something or about something; a kind of learning through 'don't know mind' as Suzuki Rochi says.

In the vein of celebrating not knowing, here is the poem 'A child said, What is the grass?' by Walt Whitman. It is a part of 'Song of Myself' and is one long and hopeful question.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it is
any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we
may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe
of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps,
And here you are the mother's laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.

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Grow Nothing Gardening

I just talked to a friend in New Hampshire who lost a few rows of lettuce to a gopher one evening and her compost bin to a bear. - I tried to comfort her while klüchscheißing about my radical wild collection ideas at the same time. In part it is an exhaustive rationalization for laziness and in part I really feel i am right. - In any case I didn't get quite enough of it out then, so I'll rant a bit about it here.

'In the vast majority of cases a person will be happier if he has no rigid and arbitrary notions, for gardens are moodish, particularly with the novice. If plants grow and thrive, he should be happy; and if the plants that thrive chance not to be the ones that he planted, they are plants nevertheless, and nature is satisfied with them.' ― L. H. Bailey, Manual of Gardening

I remember in Witzenhausen I was invited to look at a friends newly planted garden in the early spring, the last frost had just passed and he had put out a number of seedlings in the fresh tilled earth. - There they were, tine tender and helpless little baby plants in a sea or upturned bare earth. - I looked up to the edge of the garden and saw fresh spring green nettles and dandelions bulging from the hedge, practically begging to be part of a dinner. I thought about the nutrition available there in that readily abundant food source that nature had provided without any effort on the part of these hard working young farmers and I laughed.

I say we should just eat what grows rather than growing what we want to eat. Why are we dong all of this work?

"I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done." ― Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution