On Time

Oh not because happiness exists

that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

But because truly being here is so much

because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world

which in some strange way

keeps calling to us.

Us, the most fleeting of all

-excerpt from The Ninth Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke

The Country of Marriage

I.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

II.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth's empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.

III.

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

IV.

How many times have I come to you out of my head
with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light
and all directions. I come to you
lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes
into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend
slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace
in you, when I arrive at last.

V.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don't know what its limits are--
that puts us in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen tine and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

VI.

What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

VII.

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for the love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in the ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy--and this poem,
no more mine than any man's who has loved a woman.

-Wendell Berry

Still reading Eating Animals , still consumed by the facts, figures and disturbing images it is creating in my mind.

My decision to not eat meat/poultry/seafood until I find a humane, ethical alternative source (if that exists) has been going well save for the Easter dinner I had with my international roommates last night where there was a plethora of chicken, beef, pork, seafood and venison. Speaking of venison, Im looking into the possibility of substituting the normal meat and poultry choices with those that have yet to be turned into factory farm models. Venison, buffalo, wild boar, perhaps some wild game birds? Its something I plan on looking into soon, but perhaps those have gone the way of the industry as well. Maybe I need to find a local game huntsman and purchase meat from him - or just stop with the meat all together.

You dont realize how dependent on meat your eating lifestyle has become until you cut it out of your menu. When thinking about what to make for lunch or dinner I have been going down a mental checklist thinking, "no, no, no" as nearly everything has meat in it. It is challenging yet sort of freeing in a creative way. Of our dependence on factory farms to provide us with the bulk of our food, the amazing farmer/writer/poet Wendell Berry says in his The Art of The Commonplace:

"Our methodologies... have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining... This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations... Most people... have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food."

With every dollar we spend on factory farmed meat we are telling the corporations that run these places to keep doing it - faster, cheaper, easier. We might mentally remove ourselves from the steps that happen before we buy it, neatly packaged, at Safeway or Tesco, but we are the ones encouraging the entire process with our spending and demand for the product. It will be difficult and uncomfortable and a pain, but we need to stop the dependence and send a different message.

Did you know that Smithfield, the largest pork producer in the US, produces at least as much fecal waste annually as the entire human population of the states of California and Texas combined? There are no rules or regulations in place that determine how these companies must dispose of the waste. You can imagine where its going.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Love After Love, Derek Walcott

How Now, Brown Cow?

After finishing a truly bad novel by Kathy Reichs from which one of my favorite shows, Bones, is based I picked up something completely different. Having previously been a vegetarian for nearly 12 years and having lately been keenly aware of environmental, animal and sustainability issues, I decided to pick up the highly-controversial Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Long story short, he decided to become a vegetarian after having a child and worrying about what to feed him. What he found in his research turned him off meat.

I cant lie, this book has been bringing tears to my eyes for the last few nights I have been reading it. Sure, some of it is the typical shock and awe, but I think the public in general may be used to the PETA-style shock and awe campaign, which in fact, REALLY should shock and awe us – and not in a good way. Ive realized that all the reasons I became a vegetarian when I was younger still hold true. I still love animals. I still feel badly when Im eating a factory-farmed burger. I still think about what all the methane and raw sewage we are dumping from these factories into the environment is doing for our future.

One thing that I really hadn’t considered before, which now weighs on me heavily is the issue of seafood. When I was younger I didn’t eat seafood, so it wasn’t an issue I confronted. Now, I crave sushi daily. Until recently I had been one of those people who believed that being a vegetarian, but still eating fish may be the best choice. I figured the true evil was red meat and cattle slaughter houses. Chicken plants weren’t at the top of my list either. It wasn’t until very recently that I have realized that mass production fishing is probably the worst of the food evils. The author puts it best when referring to “bycatch”, the unintentional animals caught when fishing for one particular species:

“The average shrimp-trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch… What if there were labeling on our food letting us know how many animals were killed to bring our desired animal to our plate? So, with trawled shrimp from Indonesia, for example, the label might read: 26 POUNDS OF OTHER SEA ANIMALS WERE KILLED AND TOSSED BACK INTO THE OCEAN FOR EVERY 1 POUND OF THIS SHRIMP.”

So, the question is: can I justify killing 145 other species as bycatch so that I can have tuna in my sushi hand roll? For me, the answer is simply, no. My claims to be a lover of the sea, the waves, its creatures, diving, and the underwater world cant really hold true if I am simultaneously encouraging companies to dredge the sea floor, killing everything in their path, so I can have a nice shrimp cocktail. Its just not acceptable and I am opening my eyes and become aware of my own contradictions. I might miss my salmon sashimi, but Ill miss the animals when Im diving in an empty ocean even more.

I am reading this book with a renewed passion for changing myself and the things around me in which I have influence. When I was younger I took a hard stance. I refused any meat or meat product at friends’ house, was ridiculed by my cattle-raising, meat-loving family, and stood outside KFC in a chicken suit. I really had beliefs, but those went by the wayside as I grew older, busier, let the reality fade away of what my craving for a cheeseburger means for the suffering, terrible life of that factory-farm cow. So, I think. Im looking into the possibilities of small local, truly farm-raised and humanely-treated animals for my meat source. Those are getting harder and harder to find, though. If so I will return to the creative life of a vegetarian.

There really aren’t anymore excuses left for any of us. I encourage you to look into it for yourself.

Oh where?

Today I sat silently reading articles in the laundry room as my clothes went on whirring in the dryer. It was nice. Peaceful. Spring break in a small, college town. All the students have gone, it is early Saturday morning, nothing to distract me, nothing to interfere with my enjoyment of the rare British sun coming in through the windows. Or so I thought.

Enter single remaining undergraduate student in all of Durham. She trudges into the room in her mud-stained Uggs, dragging her feet intentionally, "shhhhf, shhhhf". Her hair looks as if she got into a fight with her cat, but I suspect she spent quite a bit of time creating this style. Her bloated face reveals a long Friday night of drinking and the unfortunate use of non-waterproof mascara. Her low-rise jeans are three sizes too small, revealing the final resting place of all those beer calories. She doesnt seem to be in the best of moods. She is slamming washer doors, dropping laundry powder all over the floor and cursing at the machine change slots. I am staring at her. She looks at me with annoyance. I move out to the lobby in an attempt to continue enjoying my morning. She follows (I hear the "shhhf, shhhf" of her sad Uggs behind me) and sits on the bench next to me. Im a bit irked. Really? Of all the places, she has to sit here? Then it happens.

We are in a college town which is now void of most undergraduate students being Spring Break, yet this one straggler has decided to get up early on a Saturday morning, come into the laundry room (which has been void of anyone but myself all morning), sit right next to me, break out her cell phone and relate the story of last nights drinking to every friend she has. Its truly unimaginable. Im not sure how many buildings we have on campus, but its a lot. She could have picked any of them. Or her dorm room. Or the cafe. Or any other spot, but right next to me. Its like being on an empty airplane with one other person and choosing to sit in the center seat right next to them.

So, what is my point? As this situation was unfolding, I happened to be reading an article that got me thinking about things like, "Are we really better off?" Technological innovations (cell phone girl), food innovations (the joy of corn syrup) - they all seem to have their pluses and minuses. This got me to thinking about my previous post on hunter-gatherer sleeping patterns... which related back to the article I was reading.

Cordain, et al. write in 'Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets' (Am. Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2000), when discussing hunter-gatherer diet vs. the modern diet:

"Total fat intakes would have been similar or higher; however, under all circumstances, protein intakes would have been higher and carbohydrate intakes would have been lower. These differences are due, in part, to the high reliance of Western societies on cereal grains, dairy products, beverages, oils and dressings, and sugar and candy in lieu of meat and fruit and vegetables.

Anthropologic and medical studies of hunter-gatherer societies indicate that these people were relatively free of many of the chronic degenerative diseases and disease symptoms that plague modern societies and that this freedom from disease was attributable in part to their diet. Therefore, macronutrient characteristics of hunter-gatherer diets may provide insight into potentially therapeutic dietary recommendations for contemporary populations."

"Whats wrong with us?"
"I dont know, ask the hunter-gatherers."

Ha. I just love the we think of ourselves as so advanced in comparison to archaic hunter-gatherers. So advanced we are killing ourselves. Michael would say KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

OK, admittedly sometimes I let this get me down. Politics, Ugg girls, text messaging, terrible eating habits, the state of the world in general. Thats when Wendell Berry becomes helpful.

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.

-The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry

This one scar...

There is something to be said for checklists. I am a big fan. I am an even bigger fan of checking things OFF checklists and today was a whopper.

Something I saw or heard yesterday must have set off a chain reaction in my mind, because my dreams were something else last night. It was as if someone was playing a filmstrip of every childhood memory I have between 4-14 on an endless loop. The last thing I remember when waking up is something that has often been a point of contention for me. The image was that of a red-haired, monocle-sporting ventriloquists dummy with a maniacal grin. I go through phases of insisting that I remember some movie or show with this scenario, especially this dummy. I have searched the internet, asked so-called ‘horror movie fans’, scoured old video store collections. Nothing. Im pretty sure people think I am making it up or imagining it.

And this morning, again, the dummy. That fuzzy red hair, that monocle. So, I decided it was finally time to put an end to this haunting memory. I did some real investigative work on the internet today (always a productive way to spend time when working on a PhD). And… SUCCESS! I am happy to report that I have not lost my mind. In fact, there are apparently legions of people my age who have faint memories similar to my own and have sought out this movie as well. I give you… Joey (1985), also known as Making Contact. Its German (I should have known!) and apparently it is a movie intended for kids, which is truly shocking as it was clearly scarring for myself and others who saw it as children. I mean, this is a movie whose plot involves an evil, possessed dummy who tries to control a young boy by faking phone calls from his dead father. Not the plot of your typical Disney movie.

If you feel the need to put yourself through the psychological trauma, have at it. As for me, I am checking this off my list and attempting to heal my childhood scars.