On the Steerage of the World

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Saturday June 04, 2011 · 8:46 AM PDT

2011/06/04 · 08:46

This post was inspired by a thread with Marko in my previous diary (on Street Prophets -- I'm getting errors trying to publish there tonight, so maybe this will work):

So a new diary is shaping up here; how is it that one person's view of the circumstances transforms their world into an entirely different experience from the next person who begins with the same circumstances but a different view? I like the idea of "steerage of the world" as juxtaposed with the idea of "navigating the terrain."

On Saturday I was at my parent's house after Mom's birthday on Friday. I was sorting through my remaining possessions stored in a trailer in their garage, and had emptied the trailer out into floor of the garage to make it easier. I'm thinking in terms of "kits" rather than individual items; as much as possible, I want to be prepared to take care of my own daily needs. So daily tasks all have kits of associated stuff, bath kit, sleeping kit, medicine kit, kitchen kit, working kits. Everything left over out of these kits generally is one of those trinkets whose value is in its story, its associations, its memories, and not in the thing itself. I'm down to one (big) box of that stuff. Heh. It's progress.
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Love Dog Trail Guide

spotDawa

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Wednesday May 11, 2011 · 6:29 PM PDT

2011/05/11 · 18:29

So here we are at the trailhead. Behind us is a half-life of learning, struggling, hiding, rat-racing, fence-sitting, city dwelling; searching, striking out, retreating to safety. A few short decades of making one's way in and through the world we share, trying the accepted route, venturing off onto a side trail or two, always ones that parallel the main road of human behavior with short feeder trails between them. Like, living in the country but designing databases for city clients.

One of the most enticing things to me about a life of faith are those reassurances we find in both scripture and biography that God provides for those who seek to serve the highest purpose, whether that be seeking God or providing for the defenseless, meditating or teaching. The sparrows of the field, right?

spotDawa

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Sunday June 06, 2010 · 10:59 AM PDT

2010/06/06 · 10:59

This diary is in response to gmoke's post last week, How to Change US Energy in One Growing Season. The first recommendation gmoke made was

Consistently demonstrate practical, affordable energy efficiency and renewable energy ideas, devices, and systems at the over 4000 weekly farmers' markets that take place across the USA from Memorial Day to Halloween or Thanksgiving.

This is something that we had already started doing this year when taking our organic leaf lettuce to market. The farm that I am working at hosts the workshop portion of a solar cooking course each semester, offered at the local community college. So we are able to demonstrate solar cooking as well as provide an opportunity for further learning for those that become truly intrigued.

Please note that we do not sell solar ovens or the biscuits we make to demonstrate their use -- we take our produce to the market, and take the opportunity to educate our community further about sustainable alternatives.

The remainder of this diary will be photographic:

spotDawa

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Tuesday April 13, 2010 · 3:55 AM PDT

2010/04/13 · 03:55

I'd like to suggest that we begin to carefully divorce ourselves from money. While Teabag Jesus certainly wouldn't have gone around cavorting with a tax collector, for Christ's sake, and would be rather more likely to vend in the temple market -- something crafty, no doubt -- than to borrow a whip to mark the actual disgrace.

What could provoke such a violent reaction, an assault by any measure, perhaps the act of a terrorist -- from the Prince of Peace? One has to wonder, if not at the answer, then at least on the disconnect between Jesus and his hangers-on. Few of these can meet the stringent requirement for discipleship: Sell your possessions and give to the poor. The rich dude goes away sad. Poor sad rich dude.

But anyway religion is beside the point entirely. I wondered for a long time when I would see the q-word in reference to some global economic catastrophe. Quadrillion. Cue "The Jerk": "One hundred dollars!"

Well it happened.

spotDawa

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Sunday April 11, 2010 · 12:25 AM PDT

2010/04/11 · 00:25

I went out to a small remote farm near the Little Colorado River this week for a couple of days and one night. I go there to help out the farmer on various projects that involve a lot of labor and love. The farmers are Sufis, and so I borrowed their copy of Coleman Bark's The Essential Rumi during the night I spent between our two workdays.

With strong intention, and a virtual certainty that Rumi's poetry would never, will never fail to press my soul to the window of God's eyes, and bathe me in their tears -- in this knowledge I opened the book "at random" somewhere and read Chapter 14. There are three poems in that chapter, and the first one, entitled "Love Dogs", ends with this:

spotDawa

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Monday March 22, 2010 · 11:21 PM PDT

2010/03/22 · 23:21

I always found it ironic that machine-stamped uber-processed sugar-laden carbohydrate chunks with inorganic chemical vitamins added was named "Life." I'm sorry, but that cereal is and always has been pretty much death by the spoonful, like so much of what passes for food in these days when small farmers are hounded into oblivion by the likes of Monsanto, and the entrepreneurial founders of organic food companies find a suitable exit strategy in being bought by multinational corporations whose first order of business is cost-cutting. Hey, Mikey likes it!

What with all of the political celebrating going on around the center left over the supposed Republican Waterloo, I decided to cut to the chase, and see what the impact of the health care reform passage through the House of Representatives was on the stock markets today. Hey, markets like it!

Oh, great. I might as well take nutritional advice from a four-year-old child then.

spotDawa

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Tuesday March 09, 2010 · 2:20 AM PST

2010/03/09 · 02:20

As an unrepentant idealist, one of the great challenges of my life has been the reconciliation of my idealism with the inexorable need for pragmatism. As with the political process of legislative reconciliation, the vagaries and specifics of which we are increasingly familiar, the reconciliation of ideals with what the natural cynic calls "reality" mainly involves those issues which touch the budget.

Tellingly, the typo I made in the above paragraph was to write "tough the budget." It is tough.

For a brief period in my life, I made six figures. The fact that this was in a contract involving the Social Security Administration, and that the contracting agencies and recruiters made more on my work than I did every hour, troubled me a great deal. It was as close as I'd come to the "American Dream", and yet I could not help but mourn the implications of the waste my good fortune seemed to rely upon.

spotDawa

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Wednesday March 03, 2010 · 1:24 AM PST

2010/03/03 · 01:24

Reading Minnesota State Senator Marty's diary about the cost of the wars being the budgetary elephant in the room, I flashed on The Art of War. This diary is simply a re-presentation of the comment I made there, because even though some part of me remembered this, I was shocked to read it again.

In the spirit of "no one could have seen it coming," I present to you the 2500+ years old treatise which lays it all out, and which presumably at least a few of our military and political leaders have read:

spotDawa

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Tuesday March 02, 2010 · 1:16 AM PST

2010/03/02 · 01:16

I'm out. 44 years has been long enough for me to learn to listen to my heart. My early diaries here and at Street Prophets, already years old, told some of the story of my graduation from Christianism at 18.

Losing one's childhood faith is a difficult thing. What is left? Why am I here? These questions confronted by all thinking beings, religious or not, are much more deeply felt when you once believed you knew the answers. I found some succor in Taoism, because of its ruthless simplicity and calm rationality; and later I became a sort of Buddhist, though I am no longer a joiner. Thoughts of still pursuing a spiritual life got confused by the practical implications: who pays the bills?

spotDawa

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Saturday October 18, 2008 · 5:05 AM PDT

2008/10/18 · 05:05

Consider a colony of bacteria as a single organism growing in a dish. The colony increases in size, its character as a whole changing and taking on large features that are visible on a scale that does not require the aid of a microscopic lens to examine. In fact determining the fuzzy mass to be comprised of individual cells is a feat of scientific acumen and technological sophistication due not to the difficulty of the concept, it being as simple and mundane as the relation of a person to his family and community, but rather of the practical challenges of seeing into the microscopic realm itself.

spotDawa

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Friday April 25, 2008 · 3:54 AM PDT

2008/04/25 · 03:54

A real flash from the past, via observer2 at TPM.

The NYT article, published April 10, 1992, is a very ironic walk down memory lane. Interestingly, the issue of short coattails was on the minds of Democratic representatives. After 1996 mid-terms, it appears this was a valid concern:

"There's a real tug-of-war up here," said one House member. "Especially on this side, there are a lot of people who are terrified that all the character questions, all the negatives about Clinton that showed up in New York, make him so weak that a lot of people will lose their seats."

spotDawa

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Saturday March 01, 2008 · 6:57 PM PST

2008/03/01 · 18:57

I propose that we adopt Hussein as a multi-layered greeting, along the lines of "Aloha."

Aloha means different things depending on the context, both 'hello' and 'goodbye' -- not knowing the language, I'll leave that to others to explain!

So what are the layers of Hussein?

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On the Steerage of the World

Love Dog Trail Guide

Solar Cooking at the Farmers Market: Photo Diary

Back away slowly.

Love Dogs

Enjoy that spoonful of sugar.

Work as a Spiritual Practice

The Art of War: Who Knew?

Out of the Rat Race

The Scalar Empire

THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Doubts About Clinton

I Am Hussein and So Can You!