It's Snowing!

In the last few months, trillions of dollars of imagined wealth has dissipated like sorcerer's smoke.  Now people are trying to hunker down out of the draught to hold on to whatever they're to be left with.

The economic pain is real - there are kids going hungry, houses going dark, and cancers going untreated.  But as we look for an exit I hope that we can seize an opportunity to imagine going somewhere other than just back to where we were before.

In the eyes of this anthropologist at least, our Earth-wrecking consumerism and the autophagic worker-consumer-producer nexus that we subsist within hasn't created impressive amounts of health and happiness.

And yet, I know from teaching my course on utopianism that we have tremendous - usually insurmountable - difficulties imagining that things could really be much different.  At some level people truly believe in the brutal inevitability of the way things are.

(It's not surprising that elites desire to create an aura of inevitability about the status quo - a lot of cultural energy is expended on this wherever people squabble over power - but it's been startling to see how successful they've been in our otherwise relatively open and diverse society.)

So will our fear and pain drive us with even more fervor toward the over-worked and over-spent materialism that is being threatened - or will the scales fall from our eyes and let us see something new?

Bad weather, so we thought we'd put out some birdseed.

Yesterday a warm, wet, drizzly morning turned crisp as cold air seethed in.  It was Nico's 7th birthday.  With help from Charles I brought him and 7 of his classmates back from school.  They swarmed the treehouse and quickly found the zip line out of the climbing tree.  I'd had some games in mind, but never got to most.  We strung up a pinata up in the tree, and they made short work of it.

Inside, they rummaged the costume bin and put on a play, The Stolen Slipper.  Nico was decked out in beads and red silks as the rich man -- Annabel in sparkly blue was a flute playing princess.  Grace was the thief in prison stripes who would make off with the slipper.  Jamie was the guard in gray armor with sword in hand.  Anya was a wizard with a battle ax.  Matteo made a racket with the musical instruments.  Robin ran the lights, and Camille tried to direct.  And it was all as chaotic as a real opening night.  

Monica arrived with pizza and ice cream cake.  Candles were blown out -- presents opened.  And out in the windy darkness we built a campfire and toasted marshmallows.  Finally, I drove them back to school, where the older kids were staging their own play, Charley and the Chocolate Factory.  And there the parents gradually gathered them up.

Singing in Sign

On the days that I ride the bus into the city I've been reading Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. Each short story is a carefully crafted set piece.  The characters, in Calcutta or Boston or London, circulate past one another, never quite in contact.  The author only hints that the cool, enameled exteriors of people serve to contain magmatic emotions -- a vulcanism of feeling kept in check by every artifice of politeness, habit and culture.  The stories describe a tension between, on the one hand, the fight against and resentment against the isolation caused by silence, indirection and artifice, and on the other hand, the desperate reliance upon this artifice and self control in order to make life livable and save oneself from emotional destruction or dissolution.

On my way home from Pennsylvania I stopped at a restaurant in Port Jervis on the Delaware river.  It was an old-fashioned little place with uneven low ceilings that kept the sound in and made everyone an eavesdropper.  I stared out the window into the drizzle.  The 50-ish woman at the next table was eating with a burly and bearish older man, maybe her husband.  Faded traces of a Germanic accent thickened his speech.  As she fumbled distractedly in her purse to find payment she complained about having three checkbooks and the burdens of other people's finances.  The old German didn't voice the sympathy she wanted and instead asked her why "Sue" couldn't look after her own money.  The woman said with irritated defensiveness that right now she just couldn't deal with it all, and added wearily that anyhow she was never any good with money.  As they debated back and forth I stared into the rain at the brightly placarded army surplus shop across the road and tried to imagine the dramas and comedies that had brought three checkbooks into her purse -- and this blunt, grizzled German to her table.

At the other table sat another woman in her late fifties, with a heavy, pouchy face and rough, yellowish hair.  Her companion was an elderly man with reddened, watery eyes.  I wasn't paying attention to them until she said to him with utter contempt and viciousness, "My god, you think I've never heard that story before?  Every single time you tell me that."  And I had to replay in my mind moments of conversation that I had only half heard.  She had expressed surprise that the mannequin across the street was out in the rain, that she thought they would have brought it in.  (It was an infantryman in camouflage fatigues crouching in front of the knife shop.)  He had said pleasantly, "My son-in-law went to buy a knife there . . . " when she had cut him off so acidly.   I felt a jab in my chest for the old man -- whose stock of stories had gone stale and whose life was now so circumscribed by age that he was not likely to add much to it.  Certainly nothing to interest the embittered woman who shared his meal.  But like the characters in Lahiri's tales the man and I both remained silent and said nothing at all.

As I walked toward the house in the dark I heard a squeaking twitter in the branches above -- too low-pitched to be a bat.  I stood a few moments patiently and a small form skittered to a branch tip.  It launched itself, unfolding into a cream-colored swatch that glided smoothly across the night to land and disappear onto the dark skin of an oak.  The first time I've ever seen a flying squirrel take flight, and that must be a good omen for something . . . .

After the feast I went for a hike.  The railroad right of way that once ran from Cornwall Furnace has been turned into a trail for walkers, riders and bicyclists.  Chris, Hanno and Fred and the boys were strolling with the dachshund back from the pond.  But I wanted to walk far and fast to clear my head of the turkey-fog, so I struck northward past Mount Gretna.  The trail takes its gently graded way through the state gamelands and woodlots rustling with squirrels and woodpeckers.  

I've always detested backtracking and so I imagined an ambitious loop in my mind.  After about three miles or so, I turned off the railbed and struck a trail up the ridge into the thousand acres of the Governor Dick preserve.  The climb to the ride-top is only about 400 feet or so and something less than a mile, but I still was winded and sweating by the time I got there.  I hadn't been up there in 20 years probably, but the geography is pretty straight-forward and I figured that even if I got caught out in the dark (which had grown increasingly inevitable) I'd find my way back home.  (In the cub scout pack, I'm always tasked with leading the night hikes, because I'm the one with a sense of direction even at night.)

But I met a couple there on the trail, who offered me a lift back home -- saving me from the unsafe descent down Pinch road that I had not been looking forward to.

New Bridget, of course, was the star, 

who passed from hand to hand.

And her parents were happy 

to let the momentary band

of family do the coddling

and the cooing.

Anthropologists have fretted sometimes

that babies cut off within their nuclear families

don't get handed around enough.

New Bridget took it all, 

of course, 

as her due.

In Pennsylvania,

the family is gathering.

Fourteen there'll be

around the table.

Porter wields

a knife in the kitchen.

After days of locked in cold that froze wind-sheltered ponds and inlets, I was surprised to see a pair of hermit thrushes scratching at the leaves under the maple tree.

Another hard frost this morning, and the hummingbird feeder is frozen solid.

(Why, you ask, is the feeder hanging out there when the last ruby-throat fled south two months past?  Is it possible that we are still in denial about the talons of winter sinking in?)

But here is the stuff of evolution.  Long after most of the brown-eyed susans sent their seeds to ground and withdrew in retreat, one lonely stand has insisted on a late bloom.  Despite the nights' frosts and the days' stingy sun; despite the demise of the pollinators, they are trying out November.  And as global warming continues its march (and November loses its ice), maybe it'll be these flowers with their out-of-sync genes who will be colonizing it.

Photos by A.B.

Alberto's been in the hospital down in Medellin.  70+ years of breathing - and too much of it through a Marlboro filter.  His lungs can't cope with the mountain air.  He fell to pneumonia.  His sisters now have taken him home, but Monica and her sisters are mobilizing to get the medical bills paid and get their father out and back to the US or Costa Rica where his health insurance can cover these things up front.  (Eventually the US insurance pays, but meanwhile cash has to be gathered and spent.)  As the hospital bills' echo, however briefly, through the extended family's bank accounts, the migratory man may be losing the Colombian option in his itinerary.

We'd invite him here, but he's probably right that nothing would kill him more quickly than the New England winter.  He'll be bound for Southern California.

Nico . . . .

Chloe's been holding her grudge about the kitten.  

We've been putting some catfood outside on the step for her on the days she doesn't come inside.   But more than once we've failed to bring it in at dusk, and a skunk has grown proprietary of the food dish, now.  Tonight Monica and the boys had to come round to the front door because the skunk couldn't be bothered to move off away from the side door.  Monica wondered what it must be like to be a small creature so utterly fearless among the many larger beasts.

Photo by A.B.

Pine Point school was closed today for parent-teacher conferences.  Porter's friend Aithan and his sister Katia were over for the day.  I was working in the upstairs office, but even over a long conference-call, I couldn't help but hear the louder tussles outside in the back yard.  Four strong-willed and stubborn kids, two fifth-graders a third-grader and a second-grader -- squealing happily, hollering in outrage, screaming in mock terror, raging about some violation of the rule or spirit of the "leaf monster" game.  Cracking out in laughter at another story of Aithan's.  

I remember that everything important I learned about politics and people I learned among the kids of my neighborhood in what is now called (somewhat sadly) unstructured play.

They had a great time and are lobbying hard for a sleep-over.

There's been a breathing space in the research-scape, but it's passing.  

At midsummer we had finished 50 interviews on a project about framing national security issues in progressive terms.  By the time that was written up we were doing elicitations in New York about "disconnected youth" -- talking to both regular New Yorkers and policy-makers.   And ramping up into a set of 20 interviews in Ohio about people's conceptions of "the arts."  While I was looking after the elicitations projects, Joe and Axel were also focusing on smaller consultations with Demos and the Union of Concerned Scientists and some internet surveys for the Ford Foundation on government accountability.  

As the reports have passed over to clients there's been a lull, at least for the Research Director.  Time to do some overdue maintenance on the subjects' panel.  And go sniffing around the academic job market to see if there's anything there to tempt me to jump back.

But now we are wading hip-deep into some fairly complex research about communicating on global warming.  So, break's over . . . .

Betty, our Unitarian-Universalist pastor called me up the other Wednesday to ask if I'd be willing to speak for a few minutes that Sunday about my own "spiritual journey."  I was a little flattered that she felt she could ask me on such short notice.  I said I would and this is what I shared:

"I grew up in the Unitarian church.  My parents had both turned away from what they'd seen as the small-minded, rural churches that they'd grown up with.  But when they had children they got involved in the church in Lancaster, PA.  So I came up through the religious education program there and came out a fairly comfortable agnostic.

I had no real interest in what I saw as the big religious questions about the existence of God or whether there was an afterlife.  I felt no great need for a divine underpinning for my moral compass or the meaning of life.  I had internalized the central Christian tenet of my parents -- that you shouldn't put your own interests above the interests of others.  If you could live that, then you were doing good.

So I went on with going to school, working, traveling, falling in love with girls and all that.

When I was about 25 I was living for a while in Eugene, Oregon.  I was hanging around with pagans.  It was a very active and politicized scene.  And I knew some guys -- or rather I didn't know them very well, but our girlfriends were all getting together to do pagan witchcraft.  A lot of it excluded us males, and we got envious.  So we decided to do a men's sweat.

Someone knew someone who had a sweatlodge out in the woods and one evening we gathered there for the sweat.  You sit there and you sweat -- and then you jump in cold water and hoot and yowl and holler at the moon and then you sweat some more.  And the sweat pushes out of you; it pushes the dirt out of your pores; it pushes the toxins out of your body; it pushes the clutter out of your mind.  And someone had brought drums, so we sat there drumming and chanting and singing Simon and Garfunkel songs.  And someone else had brought some bowls of clay - gray, brown, white, black - and we painted each others faces until they were bestial masks.  And we sat around and gave each other names, guessing what each person's totemic name would be if they had one.  And it was fun.

That evening I looked around at these 8 or 9 guys and I realized that I loved them.  I just loved them.  And I knew for a certainty that they loved me, too.  This was shocking.  For mid-twentyish heterosexual males to just come to love one another like that -- well, I didn't even know that was possible.

I recognized that Christian tenet that I'd understood at an intellectual level: don't put your own interests above others.  Well this love was exactly that and it was something un-utterably beyond that.

And I realized that the spiritual practices and technologies that we were playing with: sweating, drumming, singing, masking, naming -- which humans have been doing for a hundred thousand years at least -- had an incredible power to open us up -- emotionally, psychologically, socially to connections and potentials that we didn't even know existed and which we couldn't achieve on our own.  I was amazed and I'm still amazed.

Now what I'm describing of course is an epiphany.  It's not something I live every day or would want to live every day.  But what I took from that experience and from others like it is the importance of what we have here -- where there is music and singing and sharing and candles are lit.  I carry the knowledge that spiritual practice does have this power to take us beyond what we can see and be on our own."

Photos by A.B.

Esperanza sent us a picture she took a few weeks ago as we were stepping out to a friend's wedding.

Photo by E.Gallego