cartoon by charles barsotti; purchase his work here

You say you want it fixed. It is not good enough, you say, it does not work the way it was supposed to, the way it was advertised to work. It does not meet your expectations.

All right, then, I will look at it. I will perform a laying of hands on it, and free it to become what it was intended to be. I will mind-meld with it, to enlighten it. I will percolate it with my aura, blinding, pulsing waves of meaning, of intent.

But still I know it won’t be enough. It doesn’t soar, you say. It doesn’t end world poverty. It does not make you desirable to others by whom you wish to be desired. It lacks resonance, purpose, that old magic.

I bring it into the shop. I apply torque, and ratchet it up tighter. I mesmerize it, enthrall it with my very presence. It offers to do anything I want, so I ask it to grant you a hundred wishes, provided they are each worded in the form of a question.

Won’t do, you insist. It doesn’t sparkle, enchant. It cannot cut through steel, or broken hearts. It shudders when it hears the cries of children. It leaves calcium deposits, puncture wounds, a bitter aftertaste.

I take it to the specialist, the guru, the wizard, the doctor of imperfect things, the one who surpasseth understanding. I am in tears now, pleading for improvement, repair, freedom from the pain, the injury, the injustice.

The all-knowing one blesses it, decrees it to be of the highest colour, beyond colour even, achieving perfect clarity, integral, transcendent, at one with the force, copacetic.

But as soon as you see it, you frown. It still hasn’t provided global liquidity, you complain. Poxviruses continue to proliferate, everywhere there are locusts, sexual dysfunctions, fungi, celebrity scientologists, plagues of idealists, reality tv. It’s not working, it’s worse than useless. Take it away, you demand.

So I do. I wrap it in feather down and steal it away, in my arms, through the blizzard, the sandstorm, the anticyclonic gloom. I place it in a pyramid, which I place in turn in a box of styrofoam worms.

I return empty-handed, chastened, cleansed. I should have known better, I confess. I throw myself at your mercy. I genuflect, bow, drill holes in my forehead, scrub myself with baryons, admit to past indiscretions, libels, illicit thoughts about checkout girls, minor felonies involving periscopes, bicycle seats.

You are inconsolable. It’s not that, you say, not that thing that you kept trying to fix. It’s you. You are the cause of the epidemics, assassinations, Davos conferences, stuttering, extreme sports, anomie, conspicuous consumption, genital warts, Nascar, pthalates, failure to achieve cold fusion, failure to achieve carbon sequestration, YouTube beheading videos.

There is no defence for this. I failed to factor in the causes and effects, do the multivariate analysis. I ask how I should pay for this, what should be my recompense.

Accept responsibility, you reply. That is enough. Carry that weight. Push that rock uphill, and don’t stop. Wear a sign on your forehead, so everyone will know.

I sighed. This was much worse than I had feared. I had expected hanging, electrocution by faulty taser, lethal melamine injection, death by water.

I had hoped for excommunication, banishment.

Exile.

[Last month, at the behest of my friend Colleen Wainwright, I made a contribution to an organization called WriteGirl that helps young women become skilled writers, through writing workshops and by partnering them with professional women writers. Colleen's campaign offered several rewards for contributions, and I chose the option to have a poem written for me by one of the WriteGirls on a topic of my choice. I asked that the topic be Their message to my generation, considering what a mess we have made of the world we are leaving to them. I told them that if this was too difficult an assignment, that was fine -- they did not need to send me anything. Earlier this week I received the poem that follows from 21-year-old Portia Jeri Frazier (photo above). Needless to say, I was dumbstruck -- well-crafted, clever, creative, exhibiting the skills of an exceptionally competent and experienced poet. Portia has kindly given me permission to repost the poem on my blog along with her photo. She of course retains all rights to this work, which should not be reproduced further without her permission. If you'd like to see more of Portia's, and other WriteGirls' work, they have several award-winning anthologies you can buy. Thanks, Portia, and Colleen, and all the WriteGirls and their mentors, for your important and inspiring work.]

Me & You

by Portia Jeri Frazier

To measure a generation against the vastness of the earth,
We humans overestimate our own worth.

The earth is without time, holds deeper memory.
It has survived change, brought about by misery.
How many species have risen on her skin?
How many have passed, taken back within?

Our danger is to ourselves, and to our animal kin.
The earth, she can shed us, and have new life begin.

Effects are transient, with no lasting impression.
I do appreciate your confession.
There is no blame, no finger to be pointed.

No need for new heirs to be anointed.

Her strength is recovery, however long that may be.
No fear in the sky, or in the rising sea.

Sun heats the water. It rises into steam.
Collected in clouds, then rain as in a dream.
The heat builds, and ice melts as before.
The earth tilts her axis toward a new shore.

She is the master of juggling,
Nothing new in struggling.

Here to evolve
Me and you,
Do what is right,
Change what matters.
Decide for yourself,
Leave blame in tatters.
Here to evolve
Me and you.

it’s important for us to believe
we live a better life than birds.
without that faith we could not go on
we would have to give up everything
and be merely
free.
…..
“it could be worse…”
say Hopeful Man and Hopeful Woman
in unison, seeking reassurance,
“we could be enslaved, imprisoned,
we could be beaten down daily, without reason,
we could be in constant pain,
ill, hospitalized, with no chance of discharge,
we could be homeless.

or we could be dependent on others
we do not know and who do not care about us,
we could be wracked each moment with fear,
or anger, or unrelenting grief,
or paralyzing anxiety,
locked in a hell inside our own heads.
we could have no way out.”

at night we wonder, though,
if all these “worse” possibilities became real,
and life really was worse,
would we know, or would we just think, gratefully,
it could be worse still?

but we can’t imagine.

in the morning a bird soars overhead
singing anotherway anotherway
but we can’t hear over the noise
of construction, development, improvement of the land,
the noise of deception and distraction and of propaganda,
the noise inside our own heads.

at night i dreamt, restlessly,
of walking out, in the dark,
and pitching a tent, by candlelight, in the deep forest,
with warm blankets and soft cushions
and sixty days of rations for my sustenance
where i lived, naked, not seeing another human,
and said and read and heard no words.
i was ready to die of loneliness
because that would be at least
an honest death.

and after sixty days
i ceased to think in words
and learned that i was not alone
and could not be, and that
the company of my own species
was just invention,
an idea we made up, together
so we would not go insane
in this life
that could be worse.

(photo by Cheryl Long)

ready as Noah

so i gathered the members of my community
and we prepared our Transition Plan:
we’re set to handle a world without cheap oil,
without a stable climate,
without an industrial ‘growth’ economy,

and i’ve done the Work That Reconnects
so i’ve come to grips with the unbearable grief for Gaia
that has weighed on me all my life, and moved on,

and every day i read the latest post-civ advice
from Casaubon, the Druid, and the Automatic Earth
and the newest evidence that the Long Emergency‘s begun,

and each evening i learn to play the sad music
of world-weary worried singer-songwriters
who sensed what was going on years ago
but couldn’t quite put it into words.

i’ve shrunk my dreams and expectations
to such a sustainable degree
that even the “i”s i write are small letters,

and my footprint’s now so small
it doesn’t even leave tracks in the snow.

i should be ready as Noah.

so what do i do now,
when there’s nothing more that must be done
and in this newly terrible world
nothing seems easy or fun anymore?

i thought my role would be to chronicle collapse,
and through my gentle fiction
help the ones still here beyond the end of days
imagine better ways to live

but now that seems a joyless task
whose purpose is not clear
and whose intended readers do not care
what i’d presume to tell them anyway.

i’m learning, much too late in life,
how to be present, self-accept, how to be generous
and love without restraint
and to let go the unreal stories
taught to me by those with best intentions,
and repeated to myself ’til i went mad.

i’m learning now to live a natural life, and value time,
and simply be
the space through which stuff passes.

Derrick Jensen tells us all to listen to the land
and in good time we’ll know exactly what to do,
but i’ve been listening hard
and my land merely whispers words
i cannot hear or understand.

so now i simply wait to learn the role
the world intends for me.

oh hurry up please world i’m waiting now i’m ready
can you tell me, ’cause i owe you so much
and i feel your suffering
in this dark and empty hole inside my heart:
what can i do to pay you back for all you’ve given me
throughout my privileged western life?

i’ll be your Noah, Gaia, i am ready
but i don’t know what to do…

I had been for a run in the forest, and now, back home, I stopped to rest, sitting on a mossy rock near my house.

A chickadee flew down and perched on the cedar tree above me. “I know about you,” she chirped to me. “We’ve heard your story. It seems as if you’ve followed the advice that gaia gave you two years ago, and changed your life in many ways. But you are still obviously lonely and full of grief. You still haven’t found what you’re looking for. So tell me why this is, why you’re so sad in this place of such astonishing beauty?”

“Well, first…” I replied, “In my dreams, and songs, and ideal world, I can be who I really am. I don’t have to pretend to be something I am not. When I discover a woman who’s beautiful and smart and passionate and grounded and full of energy, I dream that it’s easy to just express my feelings to her and, wordlessly, we fall in love, and express that love, endlessly and effortlessly. I don’t want to work so hard to find and sustain love. But it seems the women I want to love are not interested in me. And I’m not interested in loving the women who are, at least not in the ways they want to be loved. So I’m discouraged, and feel guilty, and just tired of trying.”

“Still thinking far too much, I see,” chirped the chickadee. “If you’re going to be one with gaia you’re going to have to learn to trust your senses, your feelings, your instincts, and stop letting your head get in the way. Listen to your soul song, it tells you that the real you is destined to love, to fall in love, again and again, and whether that love is reciprocated or not does not matter. That is who you are — you know that. All you can do, when you find someone you are drawn to in that primal way, is make the offer, the invitation — be clear and honest and authentic about how you feel. Instead of getting discouraged by rejection, learn from it, and try again. If it takes a hundred or a thousand rejections before the ones you choose to love accept that love, and give you what you want in return (perhaps only their presence), then that’s what you must do. That is what you live for. So live – fly! – my poor sorrowful friend. Have the courage of your convictions.”

“Here is my first question for you –” she continued. “What is holding you back? Why are you still afraid, or unable, to be authentic, to put yourself out there, to be who you really are, raw, damaged, and extraordinary? What do you have to lose, now?”

I thought about her question, and as I did so she asked “What else? Why else are you so sad, so full of grief?”

“I want my life and my relationships to be easy, joyful, playful. Natural. But beneath the smiles and laughter, as I get to know people, there is only darkness, sorrow, anger, self-hatred, shame. The relationships I long to be uplifting turn out to be disheartening, burdensome, a chore. So while I want to find like minds, to play, to be close to people, I end up fleeing, disappointed and weighed down, preferring my own company.”

The chickadee looked at me incredulously, and then sang, slowly: “You know why this is; you’ve said it yourself a thousand times. What you perceive in other people is your own imagining, what you want them or expect them to be, not who they really are, since you will never know who they really are. So the darkness, the sorrow, the neediness, the emptiness you perceive in others is simply a reflection of what you are projecting, reflected back at you like in a mirror. And this darkness, this lack of joy and playfulness in you is not something you should be dismayed or dissatisfied with. It is a terrible, terrible world your human kind has created. You are right to be filled with unbearable grief. No one else can ‘cure’ those dark feelings by being a ‘sink’ of joy and playfulness that will draw out and heal all the grief and pain within you. You must know that you cannot expect others to ‘fix’ your sadness.”

“So here is my second question for you –” she chirped, quietly. “Why are your expectations of yourself, and of others, so absurdly high, and why are your judgements of yourself, and of others, so bitterly harsh?”

There was silence for a moment, and it began to rain. “Go on,” said the chickadee, “loneliness, grief… there is more; what else is causing you sadness?”

“I still haven’t found where I belong,” I replied. “I know it’s someplace natural, someplace warm. But the places I find, as beautiful as they may be, are too cold. They are unaffordable, which means most of the people around are people who have given their souls for money, people I abhor. And these places are unsustainable. They are living on borrowed time, waiting for the bulldozers and chain saws and “developers” to desolate them, turn them into everyplace else. Into wastelands. So I am still homeless.”

“Still stuck in human clock time,” replied the chickadee. “You cannot live in fear of the future, grieving what has not yet happened, regardless of its likelihood. As for finding your place, you cannot expect it to announce itself to you. You must pay attention, listen, hear its call. This place you belong, your home, will require you to become a part of it. You will have to learn about it before you can do that, before you can belong to it. You have lived so long inside your head that living in the real world as part of all-life-on-Earth will not be quick or easy for you — you have a lot to unlearn. But first you have to open your heart and your senses and your body and your intuition and really be present with all these parts of you, all these non-intellectual, visceral ways of knowing, to find your true home. As long as you are stuck in your head you will never find it.”

“That brings me to my third question for you,” she continued. “Why, with all the unlimited freedom you have now, is it so hard for you to just let go? To just be. To weep. To free yourself from your stories about the past and future, about what others think of you or might think of you, and about who you should be or what you should do. To walk away from the prison of self-colonization?”

I sighed. A fog was rolling in.

“There is yet more behind your sadness, isn’t there?,” chirped the chickadee. “Go on then — loneliness, grief, homelessness, and…?”

“Directionlessness, I guess,” I replied. “I want to discover what I’m meant to do, and that means I have to find who I’m meant to collaborate with. I want to find people who share my beliefs, my ideas, my intentions. But all that is so contextual on where you’ve come from, and my journey of learning and discovery has been so unique, so privileged, so solitary, that whenever I think I’ve found people who want to do the same things I want to do, and who share my view on how to go about doing them, I discover that either I misunderstood or they did, and that what I want to do and what they want to do are completely different, completely out of sync. I keep thinking that I’m ‘too far ahead’ to find collaborators, but I suspect it’s not that at all. We all sail alone, and the waters I’m sailing in aren’t those of the mainstream culture or any of the alternative cultures out there. I’m in my own ocean, a culture of one, of my own imagining, and I’m despairing of ever finding other intelligent life in this empty place I’ve taken myself.”

“Artists are often solitary creatures,” replied the chickadee. “Whether you realize it or not, you are already doing what you’re meant to do. In everything you write and talk about you are, in one way or another, ‘re-presenting’ natural life in contrast to life within industrial ‘civilized’ culture. You’ve described yourself as ‘vegan, earth-loving, poly, unschooled, nudist, intuitive, anarchist, hedonistic, and a dreamer’ and in these attributes you personify the natural life you re-present in your imaginative and creative writing. This is your gift to the world, what you’re meant to do. Carry on, because there is much more work that needs to be done here. Most people still can’t imagine another way to live, and until they do there is no hope for your poor befuddled species.”

“As to how to find collaborators, people who share your worldview on what needs to be done, and who would want to work on that with you, perhaps my fourth question to you may help you address that. My fourth question,” she chirped,”is this — if someone were looking to collaborate with you, how would they find you and persuade you to work with them? In other words, Where would you look for you?”

We just looked at each other for awhile, and finally I nodded and thanked her and asked if there were something I could offer her in return. As she flew away she chirped: “You’re already doing it.”

The original plan was to sell my car (’02 Honda Odyssey minivan) in Toronto, and to live car-free forever after. It turned out that there are so many cars on the market that what I was offered was less than the cost of my last repair. So I decided that, after helping my ex to pack up her belongings (and throw out the accumulated junk of thirty years of cohabitation), I would load up the few things from the old house in Caledon (Ontario) I wanted, and make one final road trip across the continent to my new home on Bowen Island (part of greater Vancouver BC) — 5100 km in seven days of driving. One more trip ‘for the road’ to see if I could learn something more about (North) America before permanently retiring my car (except for emergencies). Of course, I have kept a journal. Here is the first of two posts on my road trip.

So far (days 1-4) a few things have really stood out for me. The first, as the title of this post suggests, is the awful realization that this vast continent has been systematically pillaged, despoiled, used up, and ruined. North America is not an easy continent to tame. It’s rugged, sprawling, and compared to most continents inhospitable to humans. It’s intimidating in its sheer vastness and its ecological extremes — impassable mountains and forests, savage storms, staggering expanses of prairie, bleak steppe (some of it called ‘badlands’), swamp, brush, tundra and desert, extremes of temperature and humidity, insect hordes so thick and relentless they can drive you insane. It’s hard not to sympathize with the pioneers who did everything they could to conquer and subdue everything natural on this continent.

But they have now succeeded all too well, and the damage we have done is now accelerating and out of all control. There are substantially no wild places left in the inhabitable parts of the continent. We have clear-cut almost all of the forest that once covered much of the continent, and clear-cut the prairie and steppe as well, planting the former in monoculture grains and allowing grazing animals to consume the latter, so that now we have moved most of the grazing animals to feedlots, crowded together in vast concentration camps of misery, stench and horrific confinement, with nothing natural to eat and no place natural to spend even a tiny part of their ghastly lives. We stupid humans still don’t realize that animals are not ours, they are not meant to be confined, and they suffer terribly in our heartless corrals and cages. As I drove across this continent I could hear the constant and collective scream of the land and all the life that struggles to live upon it. We have desolated a continent that the pioneers thought could never be tamed, and now we are killing it with increasing energy and skill.

On the bookshelf of one of the B&Bs I stayed at on this trip was a 40-year-old book called America the Raped: The Engineering Mentality and the Desolation of a Continent. The author spoke about the need to change our mindset about our relationship with nature before we destroyed it all. Forty years later it is too late, and we’re still pumping out books with the same weary message. The place you love is gone. We cannot be other than who we are.

St Joseph Michigan — a packed Mexican restaurant

The second thing that has stood out for me is how well-intentioned, caring and hard-working almost all North Americans are. They are busy coping with the needs of the moment and trying to do their best for those they love, to be good citizens and providers and parents and workers. They have neither the time nor the information and education to know what is really going on in the world, so they believe what they’re told by those they trust, and they do their best. And they’re cheerful, and hopeful, to a degree that makes no sense. Ignorant, distracted, bewildered, still full of dreams and unintentionally playing perfectly their role in the brutal destruction of their land and our planet.

And the third thing that has stood out for me is the startling evidence of the disappearance of the middle class, and the unimaginable debt load of the ‘average’ North American (i.e. working/unemployed class North Americans, in contrast to those in the shrinking privileged class). I’ve tried to get everyone I meet to tell me their stories, and these stories just make me shake my head. I drove through two neighbouring communities on the Lake Michigan coast. The first, Benton Harbor, looked as if someone had set off a bomb in a struggling nation: whole blocks leveled or completely boarded up, and the only people I saw on the street were drunks and scavengers through the garbage, which was everywhere. A dock town, it is bankrupt, being run (according to the local radio station) by a receiver for the state and unable to pay back wages owed its civic employees. It is not the only, or largest, town in this predicament.

Yet right beside this town is the town of St Joseph, which is affluent, full of mansions and busy restaurants and resort hotels, with a downtown full of trendy shops and tourist attractions. The two towns sit in apposition, a statement of two economies, two societies, two worlds in one place, each apparently oblivious to the other and what it all means. I saw this juxtaposition everywhere — the larger cities in each state are clogged with construction projects financed with stimulus money, and (with a few exceptions, like Detroit) look to be thriving, while the small towns and countryside look mostly deserted, abandoned, lost, with excellent businesses dying for lack of customers, roads crumbling and streets empty.

I spoke to people who admitted that they had $40,000 in credit card debt, making minimum payments each month, and paying 28% interest on balances. I spoke to people who admitted they had $200,000 in medical debts that they never expected to be able to pay back. I spoke to people who said the only chance they had to ever pay off their mortgages would be if someone offered them twice their home’s current value. I spoke to people who have been running successful and respected small enterprises for thirty years, and are still in debt over their heads, and are now, suddenly, thanks to this endless economic crisis, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. I looked at houses once valued at $200,000 now valued at $30,000. The only people I spoke to who had no debts were those who had no assets. But then I didn’t speak to anyone in the privileged class.

This is slavery, except that now the slaves either don’t know it or think it’s their own fault.

Beyond these three major observations, here’s what else I saw (or think I saw — it’s sometimes hard to say when you’re whizzing by so much so fast and when the stories you hear are anecdotal):

• Canada is living in a real estate bubble that cannot continue. The Canadian and US economies are joined at the hip, and it just doesn’t make sense that Canadian real estate prices haven’t fallen significantly, and are now (my guess) close to twice those of comparable houses in comparable places in the US.
• It took me 2.5 hours to cross the border. There were no Americans going home, just Canadians going south to shop now that our dollar has again reached parity with the US dollar. And while US services are cheaper than those in Canada, there’s no evidence that the stuff Canadians go to buy (mostly, apparently, electronic and textile products made in China) are any cheaper. Insanity. This is what ‘recreation’ has come to.
• While I’ll admit it’s not tourist season, there was almost no out-of-state traffic on any of the interstate highways, except for long-haul trucks. When I was younger we used to play a game of crossing off each state and province on a map when we saw a licence plate from that place. This game has become much, much harder. Most of the traffic on the roads, outside of the cities (where the interstates are actively used by cars presumably going to the big box malls), was semis.
• I was intrigued at the psychology of speed limits. In areas where the limit was 55mph, traffic drove mostly at 65mph (trucks 60mph). Where the limit was 65mph, traffic drove mostly at 70mph (trucks 65mph). Where the limit was 75mph, traffic drove mostly at 75mph (trucks 70mph), and there were almost no speeders.
• I expected to see a lot of anger and hear news of violence and acts of meanness born of frustration at the poor state of the economy, the waste and theft of the bankers and corporatists, and the disconnection between politicians and people. I didn’t see it. I’m sure cynical politicians and corporate exploiters are able to effectively stir it up for the mainstream media when it serves their purposes by playing on public ignorance, but for the most part people don’t seem very cynical, or depressed, or angry. I think they’re a bit frightened and overwhelmed, but they’re still hopeful. The meanest things I saw were the road signs telling you what the fine and jail terms were for hitting a road worker with your car. Even the strange billboards for ‘entertainment centers’ where you could try shooting a ‘real machine gun’ didn’t seem designed to play off anger, but rather childish curiosity.
• It’s hard not to get overwhelmed and intimidated by the sheer scale of the landscape of North America. Everything is too big, too wide, too far apart. When you’re driving, even on the interstates, the hazards seem so large that you want to ask everyone for reassurance that it’s safe. Blizzards, huge tumbleweeds, dust storms, black ice, sleet, whiteouts, rain and fog that comes from nowhere and reduces visibility to zero, rockslides, gale force winds and tornadoes, wild animals darting across the road. The mountains seem so high and daunting that you can’t imagine you’ll ever be able to cross them. The prairie and brush areas go on for so long you forget what state you’re in. The whole landscape seems, well, cruel.

I’m also learning to ask the locals questions — what are the best B&Bs, restaurants, routes. We settle for consistency in chain restaurants and hotels when we travel, when we could get much more — better value, and wonderful stories — by trusting people in each community to tell us what their best places are.

More in Part Two, probably in a week or so once I’ve had the chance to digest my thoughts.

a couple with urgent, anxious looks in their eyes
enter a vegan cafe;
their basset hound companion lies down in front of the cafe
to wait, as if she were accustomed to this routine

the couple brings in a wheeled baby carriage
piled high with old, worn plastic bags full of what i guess to be used clothes

they sit, squeezed together, in one huge overstuffed chair by the door
and kiss, then order, carefully, from the menu;
he pulls out a newspaper with a bunch of ads circled
and they talk about them, pointing in various directions at the street
to show where, relative to the cafe, the addresses in the ads are located

the cafe worker who brings their food knows them
and they chat for a few moments;
he proudly puts his hand on his partner’s stomach
and she smiles and blushes

he is wearing a pair of sad, threadbare gloves
as he counts out the coins for the bill
reaching twice into his pocket to ensure he has enough

as they leave, the worker congratulates them;
they feed the leftovers to the basset, who eats them enthusiastically
and then the woman takes the newspaper with the circled ads
and walks off in one direction
and the man takes the basset’s leash
and walks off in the other

V

at a table near the back of the cafe
a young woman sits reading;
she is wearing a cap with cat ears, and a striped jacket with a cat’s tail,
and a giant black felt hat with a slip marked “5 1/2″ tucked in the band

at the next table a woman and her young daughter are eating vegan nachos
and the girl laughs and points at the cat-woman
and is shushed by her mother

the cat-woman smiles and winks at the little girl
and then signals her in mime — a raised finger “wait”
and then the finger curls in and wags slowly “come over here”
as she pulls an ocarina out of her bag
and begins to play a haunting tune

and the little girl, delighted, begins to dance among the tables

VI

a man with a sad smile comes into the cafe
and sits, alone, at a table for two,
pulling out his laptop, logging in,
tapping the keys slowly, hesitantly

a kris delmhorst song comes on the cafe’s music system
and he quietly sings along:

he’s smiling broadly now, a giant grin from ear to ear
but if you look closely, you can see
his face is streaked with tears