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Place, the place we call home, the place
we belong to, defines us. When we have lost our sense of place, we
have lost our soul. Last Christmas I wrote a piece about homelessness, and suggested that the homeless and the addicted are a perfect metaphor for all of us living in modern civilization. I wrote:
Civilization is our Pusher. It's The Man who keeps us hooked on
consumption and debt, The Man who holds the key to our prison and
gives
us our illusory rush of elation when we buy and use His addictive
product. The Man who seduces us back even when we have decided that
life in His prison is insane, self-abusive, worse than death. The
monkey is our addiction, without which we cannot live. And we wander
the streets of civilization's artificial world in a daze, never really
home, wondering what is missing, why we feel so lost. Civilization is
our ghetto, a whole world of six billion homeless people, setting
fires
on every corner for warmth, ganging up and stealing everything we can
get our hands on to pawn for our fixes, breeding babies already
drug-addicted at birth.
So the next time you see a homeless person, or an addict, don't be frightened, angry, or filled with pathos. You are looking in the mirror. It is we who are homeless, and addicted. What will it take before we break the habit, walk away from The Man, and find our way home? On another occasion I wrote: Know your place. We are all part
of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, but ultimately we have our own
place, our 'home'. If you're not totally connected with everything and
every creature that is part of your place, then it isn't your place.
If
you don't have a place, then you don't yet really exist. A house is
not
a place, though if it's open it can be part of one. A mind is not a
place.
 The wonderful books of biologist Bernd Heinrich are about birds and animals, but most of all they are about the places that the creatures he studies call home, and about the importance of those places. In his latest book The Geese of Beaver Bog he talks about another biologist, David Ehrenfeld, who writes about animals and the importance of place to them. I've ordered Ehrenfeld's 1994 book Beginning Again, but I've already read the amazing first chapter from Amazon's 'search inside' page for the book. The chapter is called 'Places' and here is an extract that shook me to the core of my being: Because the turtles [I was
studying in Costa Rica] come out to nest after dark, much of my work
was done at night. There was a great deal of waiting between turtles,
plenty of time to sit on a driftwood log and think. In the first years
of my research I was often the only one on the beach for miles. After
ten or twenty minutes of sitting without using my flashlight, my eyes
adapted to the dark and I could make out forms against the brown-black
sand: the beach plum and coconut palm silhouettes in back, the flicker
of the surf in front, sometimes even the shadowy outline of a trailing
railroad vine or the scurry of a ghost crab at my feet. The air was
heavy and damp with a distinctive primal smell that I can remember but
not describe. The rhythmic roar of the surf a few feet away never
ceased -- my favourite sound. I hear it as I write in my landlocked
office in New Jersey. And then, with ponderous, dramatic slowness, a
giant turtle would emerge from the sea.
Usually I would see the track first, a vivid black line standing out against the lesser blackness, like the swath of a bulldozer. If I was closer, I could hear the animal's deep hiss of breath and the sounds of her undershell scraping over logs. If there was a moon, I might see the light glistening off the parabolic curve of the still wet shell. Size at night is hard to determine: even the sprightly 180-pounders, probably nesting for the first time, looked big when nearby, but the 400-pound ancients, with shells nearly four feet long, were colossal in the darkness. Then when the excavations of the body pit and egg cavity were done, if I slowly parted the hind flippers of the now-oblivious turtle, I could watch the perfect white spheres falling and falling into the flask-shaped pit scooped into the soft sand. Falling as they have fallen for a hundred million years, with the same slow cadence, always shielded from the rain or stars by the same massive bulk with the beaked head and the same large, myopic eyes rimmed with crusts of sand washed out by tears. Minutes and hours, days and months dissolve into eons. I am on an Oligocene beach, an Eocene beach, a Cretaceous beach -- the scene is the same. It is night. The turtles are coming back, always back; I hear a deep hiss of breath and catch a glint of wet shell as the continents slide and crash, the oceans form and grow. The turtles were coming here before here was here. At Tortuguero I learned the meaning of place, and began to understand how it is bound up with time. Ehrenfeld goes on to describe the cruel and careless treatment of the turtles by local fishermen, and how the witnessing of such atrocities by the President of Costa Rica so enraged him that he took steps to protect the green turtle's Tortuguero breeding ground in perpetuity. Often, at night, I sit out on the back hill behind our house, overlooking the 1100-acre Albion Hills Conservation Area, with Chelsea the dog, just paying attention to the sounds and the smells and the shadowy sights in the moonlight. I soon forget there is a house behind me, and behind it a community of 34 houses interspersed with wilderness wetlands, and beyond it a city of 6 million that is forecast to grow to as many as 40 million by the end of this century. To us for a few moments there is only the wilderness, the sounds of owls and wood frogs and wind through the trees that have been here for a hundred thousand millennia -- the dogwood and the balsam poplar and the maple and the trembling aspen and the white birch and white cedar and bur oak and ironwood and pussywillow, and the smells of rain and muskrat and decaying leaves. And I long to see and feel how this, my adopted home, this place that has welcomed me and allowed me to be a part of it and to share in its wonders, looked before man arrived to change it quickly and utterly. For even here, where nature is respected and where the actions of conservation authorities and lack (for now) of development stress has allowed some of this land to remain unaltered, and some more to start the slow path back to something like what it was like before we arrived, it still bears little resemblance, to the trained eye, to what it must have been, in the eons of silence and darkness before man arrived with his noise and artificial light and carelessness and altered it beyond recognition. If I am to believe the biologists, the area I call home once probably looked like these photos:  I can imagine living in a place like this, but only because I do live in a place vaguely like this. If I were to have spent my whole life living in a city, or even on a farm, I don't think I could imagine it. And even if I could, I don't think I could conceive of it as my place, the place to which I belonged. While this is my adopted home, it is only, naturally, the place of a rare and scattered minority of humans, the First Nations, who learned, in ways that we never have and which I cannot hope to comprehend, to live with the bears and wildcats and mosquitos and black flies and bitterly cold winters and lack of year-round food supplies. Without my protection from these dangers and discomforts, I could never call this place home. So in order to make places like this habitable to us, as we destroyed the places in the cradles of human civilization that were habitable to us naturally, we had to reform them with our cities and farms, until they became unrecognizable, nothing like the pictures above -- terraformed, civilized, converted to a dreadful sameness all over the planet. These cities and farms were as alien to us as they were to the creatures that retreated in their wake. When we try to imagine how bizarre it would be to live on a space station, or on the moon, we should consider that we have already made a much more profound and barren adaptation here on our suffering planet. But these cities and farms are not natural places for humans. They are not where we lived and thrived for three million years before their invention. Then we lived in the warm climates of Africa, of South Asia and of the Southern edge of Europe, when all those lands were heavily forested. We were and are, like all primates, creatures of the forest, and specifically of the tropical forest. And while three million years is but an instant compared to the hundred million years that the giant green turtles of Tortuguero have called that place home, that tropical forest is still the place our DNA tells us is our home, our place. Most of that tropical forest is now destroyed, cleared for cities and farms, and we have been gone from there so long that the thought of returning there even if there was room for us, which there is not, is too terrifying to countenance. So we moved from there to less hospitable and more dangerous lands and remade them into cities and farms as well: Since we could not live in these hostile environments we destroyed them and built ourselves artificial landscapes, vast alien prisons which protected us from the terrors of nature and weather but detached us completely from any sense of place. So now we are all homeless, six billion of us living in an artificial world of our own making. We have destroyed our own three-million year home and most of the homes and places of every other species on Earth, making them mostly homeless, too, those that we haven't yet made extinct. I bow my head to the turtles of Tortuguero. They are so much wiser, so much more alive than we shallow newcomers to this planet can ever hope to be. They know the importance of place. They know how to live as part of a world to which all life on this planet once belonged. They show respect for the grand design of our fragile, troubled world, and know their part in it. While we are merely astonishingly fierce, wondrously adaptable, utterly homeless, arrogant beyond reason, hopelessly lost and addicted to the perpetuation of our own folly. |
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 Common Dreams recently published an article by Huck Gutman, a man who had the opportunity to spend a week in New York City. While he partook of the usual visitor experiences in the city, what struck him most was this brief experience watching a man in a laundry through the store window: As I walked, I passed a dry
cleaner’s shop. At its front, immediately behind a large plate
glass
window, was a man ironing a shirt. I stopped and watched. (I should
mention that I like ironing my own shirts. In America, ironed shirts
are an expensive luxury unless one does it oneself; and I have found
that the repetitive motions of ironing, and the concentration required
to assure that one irons wrinkles out and not in, is a restful
activity. For me.) He ironed, and I watched. And watched. He ironed
one
shirt, then a second. There was a defined progression for each shirt.
First, he sprayed the shirt lightly with water to dampen it. Then, as
he ironed each successive portion of the shirt he sprayed on a light
dose of starch to make the fabric stiffer. He proceeded to iron the
collar, then carefully laid out each sleeve and ironed them, one at a
time. Then he starched and ironed one half of the shirt, placed flat
on
his white-cotton clad ironing table. When he was done, he lightly
touched the iron to the middle of the collar at the back of the neck
—
just a small crease so it would fold properly. He hung the shirt on a
hanger, and proceeded to the next. I, an amateur, iron quickly. He, a
professional, did not. He took care, making certain that each sweep of
the iron made a flat expanse of brilliant white fabric.
There is something almost primeval about this recognition of the importance of doing a job with excellence. As I mentioned in my article two years ago, It's What I Do, doing something extraordinarily well is more than just a matter of pride. It essentially defines us. We are all inherently social creatures, and our sense of belonging to the communities which we adopt, and which adopt us, is caught up in, and expresses itself through, our role, our specialization. Even in the earliest tribal cultures individuals recognized other individuals' strengths, experiences and talents, and this recognition refined and defined each individual's role, and importance, in the community. These skills, these differences, established one's position, one's membership, in the community. Doing what we are, what we enjoy doing, and what we do well, is essential to our self-esteem, so it is not surprising that it is naturally selected for. A Lakota leader defines 'mastery' -- the need to build on personal competence -- as one of the four 'capacities' of 'the circle of courage' that gives each of us heart, self-confidence, and spirit. What is it that determines this special role, whether it be ironing, running, painting or writing or giving care to others? It is, I think, a product of four things:
 The
search for one's personal role, our place in community, is often a
lifelong quest. Today, when it is so easy to be anonymous or left
alone, and in which we move from community to community often, the
fourth element -- our audience -- can be the hardest to achieve. When
we have no audience, when we do not know where we belong, we are left
to choose what we will do in abstraction. As a result, many of us
devote large parts of our lives to study and diligent work only to
find
we have no audience, and that no matter how great we see our own
talent
and acquired skill, it was all wasted time.The task is much easier when we find our audience, the community with the need for what we can do, first. In this respect we are all entrepreneurs at heart. We are all seeking to find something that is needed, and for which we have talent and passion, and the rest is just hard work. Or rather, it isn't hard work, because our passion, our natural talent, and the recognition of its value by our community makes it easy work, obvious and important. As we learn, lifelong, to do it well and then exceptionally well, we are merely following our heart, our destiny. The characters depicted in the vidcap above, from Aaron Sorkin's comedy Sports Night, have found, in journalism, the intersection of talent, experience, passion and audience. That's why they can, and do, say That's What I Do, That's Who I Am. How many of us, in the real world, can say the same, without a sigh, a doubt, a frown? |
Better late then never. The State Department announced Tuesday that their report that terror has been decreasing was in fact incorrect. Terror actually ROSE in 2003. However, they are still arguing that they "winning the war on terror." ( AP/NY Times - Amended Report Shows Terror Rose in 2003)
On our home front, the Japanese diet passed the controversial
pension bill (the pension that 1/3 of the cabinet members have been shown
to have evaded at some point). It is shown that an inflated
fertility rate was used for the bill to show rosier numbers and lower,
more accurate numbers that had been finalized for more than 2 weeks by
the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry were withheld. Public sentiment
has already been very negative about the pension system. The
government had been pushing this new bill, were paying commissions to
retired bureaucrats to collect such pensions from normal citizens, and
the politicians themselves not paying. Now this. (Japan Times -
Inflated fertility rate used for pension bills)
What surprises me is the stupidity of these lies. Neither of these lies were likely to remain unchallenged. Did these people believe that they could just fudge numbers to make some false short-term point. Amazing.
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