gollum

When I studied literature at university we spent a lot of time taking enjoyable, fascinating books and ripping them to shreds with our minds and words, creating "symbols" and "metaphors" where before there had been instinctive empathy with an author's Purpose. It is a murderous process, this pursuit of knowledge, but sometimes kernels of wisdom show up.

In Fantasy Literature, for instance, I was taught that the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings was a symbol of vision and thereby of power and control. Boo-yah, eh? And also, "whoop-de-doodle-doo". Still, there is something to be learned.

Ready? Ok: always let Love supercede your desire to know. The desire to know, which disguises itself as a desire for the truth, is usually just a desire to control. True love does not desire control or power. True love (in people) desires right relationship with all other things and pursues that desire through a truth-aligned acceptance of the self as a finite, limited being who can only become completely whole in the context of the Source.

This "Source" I refer to is Love. Not just the feelings that accompany romantic entanglement, but something far Bigger. Love is patient and kind - not jealous. It doesn't brag or think of itself as greater than it is. It isn't rude or selfish and it easily forgets the wrongs inflicted upon it by others. Love doesn't get pleasure from pain, suffering or lies. Instead, it gets its exhuberant fullness of purpose from being lined up with the way things really Are. Because of this, Love bears all manner of indignity, hoping for the best and believing in the power of itself. For my part, I believe that Love is what God is.

I believe this without Knowing through a still, small voice coiled around whatever it is that lives in my guts and makes me be me - a sort of super-reason that goes deeper than any cogniscent thought. It is as though my whole life I have been standing naked in front of a fogged-up mirror. Although my eyes can just barely make out the form of a man, a vestigial image of what I really am resides somewhere within me - perhaps in the cockles of my heart (or maybe the sub-cockles). This image is my inbuilt sense of the way things should be - it is the part of me that reacts to that which is Not-Love and says "No! That's wrong!" It is Love. It is God.

I forget this memory with great ease, suppressing it beneath the weight of a thousand selfish agendas. But some day, I hope, love will out and all not-love will fade. In the meantime I will cling to my lost memories of Love, struggling every day to allow them to surface and overcome my lust for control.

The hands-down worst day of my entire life I spent planting trees. And the second worst. And the third. And so on. There are a few reasons for this, but mostly it is because I am your basic ninety-pound wuss (give or take) with a body fat percentage of around point two. In planting it will snow or POUR icy rain all day long and you can’t get out of it. So for a guy like me with very little natural insulation and abysmal circulation in the extremities, cold is cold is COLD. When winter says “hello” out planting, I have to work at psycho-insane-turbo speed the entire day just to stay alive.

If that were all, I could probably just laugh it off. But there are bugs of every shape and size by the thousands. There are heavy, heavy trees and persistent lower-lumbar pains. There are venomous plants and surly bears and belligerent moose and irate squirrels. And you mustn’t forget the odd power-tripping logging company representative, the obnoxious planters, the overbearing bosses and the absolutely psychotic cooks. There are chafings and rubbings and sores and boils and heat cramps and heat stroke and depression and loneliness. There is beaver-fever. There is waking up in the morning with ice on your tent and putting on frost-encrusted boots. There are low prices and resentful town-people and repetitive strain injuries and bursitis and body-fungi of all colors and shapes.

Yet here I am again in Prince George. Preparing to plant trees. For the ninth season in a row. Why do I do this to myself? I’m not an overly stupid person. In my normal, non-planting life I don’t have any overt sadomasochistic tenancies. Yet here I am. Again. In Prince George.

The reasons are somewhat complicated. One summer and you can walk away fairly easy. Every subsequent summer the addiction grows exponentially until you eventually begin to refer as your non-planting time as the “off-season”. It’s a sick way to live, but you have to fund your decadent, extravagant, absent-minded bohemian artist’s lifestyle somehow.

The people, too, are great. Because you go through the trials of Hercules together on a semi-daily basis, you grow together like most people only get to do by going to war. There is far less killing on a cut-block (of people, that is) and even though you are actively participating as a cog in the “Rape-The-Forest” machine, at least you are the part that puts a little something back. You get to be in the woods among the mountains, which is nice, and you get to challenge yourself every day to achieve new levels of awesomeness.

Bottom line, though, is that I’m here for the people. I love the folks who work for me. I love stumbling around the forest, trying to figure out how to get them to believe in themselves – to achieve their utmost. If I yammer on and on about a few key principles (“You are not a victim. You can decide what to do with your life. You can make a difference. Etc.”) maybe they’ll sink in and a few less young people will spend their lives chasing after the Canadian Nightmare.

Round about a month or two ago, I found myself sitting on a stool with a microphone in front of my face, center stage before about a hundred and fifty people. Digital images of some of my paintings were being projected on a screen behind me and a fellow with a doctorate was asking me questions. So I talked.

I talked about how an artist should be a prophet – not in the sense of telling the future, but by identifying problems in the present and then speaking that truth to people. I saw a lot of rigorous nodding of heads. If they’d been southern Baptists, the “AMEN!s” would have been shaking the roof. Encouraged, I started to get into it – laying into consumer conformity with both barrels blazing and chastising the lazy, status-quo addicted gang that is us for standing idly by while fifty million children die every year of malnutrition-related illness. I finished with a flourish and a challenge as the name-brand attired people with their Starbucks coffee mugs continued to nod and smile.

I have done this sort of thing before and gotten the same response. In the moment it feels good. (Inner monologue: “oh, yeah – I’m Josh – I’m Awesome – It’s my birthday”.) But eventually I get back to reality and start to feeling like I have once again run smack dab into the great stone wall of Nothing Doing.

My conclusion is this: I am either not communicating correctly or I am not a good prophet. When you are a good prophet, people will do one of two things. First, they become aware of their shortcomings and fall down crying and begging God for forgiveness. (This almost never happens). Or second, they run you out of town with much cursing and flinging of heavy projectiles. They don’t nod pleasantly.

Here’s a trivia question. You may recall that in the beginning of the Bible God goes crazy on Sodom and burns it to the ground. Even if you have not spent your life swirling around in the vortex that is organized Christianity as have I, you have probably heard that story. It’s famous. Do you know why the Bible says God did that? Well, if you’re like me, you will probably say “God destroyed Sodom because the people were really freakin’ naughty.” If pressed you will probably add, “They were wickedly sodomous, of course. Where do you think the term sodomy comes from?”

This is sort of telling – that this is one of the “famous” Bible stories. This is the one that gets taught to kindergarteners to keep them from looking over their shoulders in church. This is the one that gets used to show that God hates people who do the dirty homosexual deed and wants to destroy them all in flames. The best part is that it is easy. Most people are not homosexually oriented, so it is easy for the average church person to sit back and smugly throw stones, confident that they are more righteouser than all those (insert derogatory term here) homosexuals.

You can use the Bible to prove anything, attack anyone, and justify all manner of evil behavior. If, however, you come to the Bible with an honest desire to understand what it actually says, you will find a startlingly different truth being taught. While the rape and attempted homosexual rape described in Genesis nineteen were clear indicators of the nasty depths to which the people of Sodom had sunk, there is only one verse that actually describes specifically why God destroyed Sodom. Here it is. Ezekiel 16: 49 – “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.”

So. Um. Ouch. Not exactly the easily ignorable lesson taught from a thousand pulpits, the sort of lopsided teaching that can whip us into a “holy” rage and open our pockets to the latest politically-intentioned religious figure. “Arrogant, overfed and unconcerned”? That strikes a bit too close for comfortable apathetic nonchalance.

I am truly sorry, Mr. Ancient Scribe Person, but you’re going to have to strike that verse from the record. What’s that – you won’t? Well, damn you for judging me. Let’s see – how can we get around this? No problem. Nobody in churches actually ever reads the Bible, so we will just ignore it. We will teach pleasant things. We will smile and we will nod and we will watch the world burn.

michael and the military

To wrap your mind around any scary problem you have to be willing to muck about a bit in the archives of history. Take the United States Military. Now that’s really something to wet your pants about.

Want to understand the magnitude of this monstrosity? Come with me then, waaaay back through the annals of time to the fourth of November, nineteen-ninety-six. Where are you? Well, no, that won’t work. You are going to have to hop a plane and fly from wherever you may be to Lima, Peru. From there, catch another jet over the Andes to Pucallpa in the Amazon basin. At the airport, ask one of the multitudes of mototaxi guys to take you to “El Plantel”. He’ll do it for less than a buck, but you should give him ten. Don’t be such a rich tightwad.

If you arrive around 5:30 in the afternoon, you might see two skinny kids sitting on motorcycles on the brink of a really, really, really steep seventy-foot dirt embankment leading down to a strip of mucky sand on the edge of a dirty jungle lake. That’d be Michael and I.

I, of course, am a little nervous. First, because we shouldn’t be riding our dads’ bikes off the Institute. Second, because it’s a really steep cliff. And third, because I’m with Michael. “You know what?” he says as the glow I’ve long since learned to fear begins to kindle in his eyes, “That looks like a really nice strip of sand down there along the lake. I bet it’d be fun to rip up and down that on a moto.”

“Sure, Michael.” I say. “Too bad it’s so far down and I guess we’d better get ba….” And that’s as far as I get. Michael is over the lip and riding down that hill on his dad’s ’82 Honda 250cc trail bike like the Man from Snowy River, screeching like a howler monkey in heat. Michael – being Michael – survives intact and cackles maniacally as he zips back and forth along the sand. Six native fishermen in banana slings (Speedos) sit just offshore in their large dugout canoe, mending their nets and shaking their heads.

Now, I’d like to say that I turn at this point and drive away. Or at least that Michael hollers a lot of insults and potty words until I cave. It looks like fun, though, so with no further prompting I angle my dad’s ’92 Honda 50cc grandma moped slantways down the precipice to join him. “See, no problem”, Michael says. We ride back and forth, screaming in defiance of tyranny, adulthood and good sense until I notice that the sun’s going down. Hordes of five-pound vampire mosquitoes are starting to rise off the lake and visions of our impending doom thrum through my generally pessimistic brain.

Michael, of course, is unconcerned. He points his bike up the hill, roars about twenty feet and then falls over, bending his handlebars and brake pedal. “POO!” he says, with all the missionary-kid vehemence he can muster. “What are we gonna do now, Josh?” And there you have it – our relationship in a nutshell.

We can’t go south, because there’s a military base there and they tend to shoot first and then go through your pockets for reasons later. North, however, does not look much better. It’s a half-mile of muddy, nasty, weed-choked shoreline away. Still, calling our dads for help would be worse, so we point north and give ‘er. For about fifty feet. Then we’re stuck over our axles in about a gajillion years of accumulated jungle clam poop. The six native fishermen in marble bags fall out of the canoe laughing. They slap the water and giggle as we strain and struggle and think about our Father’s Belts. When they’ve had enough fun they swim in and lift us free. We jump back on and ride another 50 feet and get stuck. Again. Our fisher friends have never had so much fun. Gringos are a real hoot. “We’re in deep poop now, Josh” Michael says. No kidding.

This time when we get out, we thank our saviors and actually apply our sadly atrophied rational minds to the problem. We decide to put the motorcycles in first gear, rev them all the way up and rip along through the water just off shore. I’m not really sure of the rationale behind this.

Surprisingly enough, it actually works and we tear along through overhanging vines, thorn bushes and one nest of very surprised hornets until we arrive, scratched and muddy, at the airplane hangar. Michael walks up to make sure his dad isn’t still at work and then we ride up the gently sloping concrete ramp, go wash off our bikes with the power hose at the Y-shop, bend Michael’s handlebars back and call it a day.

At this point you, who have traveled through time and across an ocean, are wondering what in the sam hill any of this has to do with the United States Military. This is the problem with the internet/instant gratification culture you’re stuck in – it’s taught you to have no appreciation for a good old-fashioned oblique ramble. I’m gittin’ to it, sonny boy. Ok, so. That Plantel embankment was just one day in the life of Michael. He was always doing something fairly irrational and when we all graduated high school and returned to our countries of origin, Michael had earned himself quite a wide-spread reputation as a Captain of Insanity.

He at first intended to become a pilot, but couldn’t be bothered to study. Instead, he moved to L.A. and bought a massive Ducati crotch rocket that he used to take rearview mirrors off cars and run from cops. He didn’t put a passenger seat on because chicks cramped his style. He worked construction and messed around and wasn’t doing a whole lot of anything until the day when a drill bit snapped and went into his left eye, nearly costing him his vision. After a few months of sitting around recuperating he re-thunk himself and went and joined the United States Navy to learn the mechanics of mechanicking. And do you know what they put this man, this captain of all that is Nuts in charge of? Go ahead, guess.

Yep, that’s right. Missiles. Inter-ballistic missiles, probably equipped with nuclear warheads or something equally nasty. Be afraid, people. Be very, very afraid.

and in a moment, it was gone

This is a sunflower, yes, and a special sunflower it is. This sunflower was grown by Christopher, my freind. The picture doesn't show that it subsequently fell over from neglect. Why? Because Christopher was too busy growing something else, a beautiful album for you.

Don't let that flower die in vain - go buy it today. It's called "Happiness and Disaster" and it's under the name "Stabilo". Furthermore, if you purchase it at Future Shop you'll get a bonus sampler disc with an absolutely exclusive you'll-never-find-it-anywhere-else song by Christopher himself on it - ABSOLUTELY FREE!

There you have it - my first and last dip into consumer marketing on this site. It's over. You can come out now. I'll finish off with a few quotes from one of my favorite philosophers, Calvin:

"Doesn’t it seem like everybody just shouts at each other nowadays? I think it’s because conflict is drama, drama is entertaining, and entertainment is marketable. Finding consensus and common ground is dull! Nobody wants to watch a civilized discussion that acknowledges ambiguity and complexity. We want to see fireworks. We want the sense of solidarity and identity that comes from having our interests narrowed and exploited by like-minded zealots. Talk show hosts. Political candidates, news programs, special interest groups… they all become successful by reducing debates to the level of shouted rage. Nothing gets solved, but we’re all entertained."

"People keep talking about opening more wilderness for development. We seem to understand the value of oil, timber, minerals, and housing, but not the value of unspoiled beauty, wildlife, solitude and spiritual renewal."

"Ever notice how many conversations revolve around TV shows and movies? Our common references are events that never happened and people we’ll never meet. We know more about celebrities and fictional characters than we know about our neighbors."

"Change is invigorating. If you don’t accept new challenges, you become complacent and lazy. Your life atrophies. New experiences lead to new questions and new solutions. Change forces us to experiment and adapt. That’s how we learn and grow."

- Note: All quotes clipped from the book, "It's a Magical World", by Bill Watterson.

I saw the white crow fly

After two weeks of twentyfourseven first aid training I have passed both my written and practical tests and am now a certified Level Three Occupational First Aid Attendant. My advice to you is this: if you’re going to go down, do it in a hospital lobby. I’ve heard enough horrific stories and seen enough vile photographs in the past two weeks to make me hope against all hope that I never have to attend anyone involved in a massively painful event ever, ever, ever. Still, if you do intend to undergo severe blunt trauma to any part of your anatomy while I’m around, I promise to do the best I can to help you live through the experience. Failing that, I’ll work like a madman to keep your blood pumping until the doctors can harvest your organs. How’s that for a happy thought on a Monday morning?

I learned a lot more than just recognition of the stages of hypothermia, though. There were other things, too. Like I learned a bit more about snap judgments. Take my first aid instructor – we’ll call him James. He pulls in the first day and gets out of his absolutely beater-looking car wearing a tarnished old-school BC Lions Football jacket. He is a good deal overweight and seems a bit flustered. He’s about five-foot-eight with brown hair and a bit of reddish lining around his eyes. Have you got him pictured? Think you know him? Let us see.

James is British, for one, which you could not tell by looking at him, which means he’s got a nifty accent. For two, that Jacket you mocked as unstylish was actually given to him by one of the players on the team, who was one of James’ students. For three, he’s worked for years as a first aid attendant and a paramedic, saving thousands of lives – possibly the life of someone you know. For four, that ratty car with the oxidized paint job is actually a very rare Toyota that he’s been restoring bit by bit. It’s almost a metaphor for his life, which got thrashed by a raving beauty of a Russian vixen who left him with loads of debt because she found out the Muscovian consulate was not going to allow James to sponsor her family as well. As a sponsor of her efforts to become Canadian he was still under legal obligation to support her. He took on all their debt and let her keep their assets because he wanted his son and he knew the courts never favor the man. James got depressed. He ate a lot.

Like that car, though, he is a rare individual and he’s coming back. He is a champion table tennis player, good at sports, full of great stories, and a fanatical fan of the Arsenal soccer team. He chuckles a lot and has a good sense of humor. James has lost forty pounds in the last six months and he’s going to lose the rest of it over the next three years, as the doctor orders. He’s started a first aid school.

Appearances are often illusions created in our minds.

Backtar is an east Indian man. He wears a collared plaid shirt, some cheap slacks, puffy basketball shoes, a large mustache and a deep purple turban. He is tall – probably six-three – and a bit round in the gut. He steps through the door of our classroom, bangs both his fists on his chest, and says with a booming voice, “Who wants to wrestle me?” He lets us secure him to a spineboard for one of our first aid scenarios. Think you know him?

Backtar owns the first aid school. Backtar owns other businesses. A lot of them. Backtar is rich and powerful. He has a lot of friends.

One day I was sitting in class and for no reason I can understand, lights began to spark before my eyes. They were like beads of sunshine on spiderwebs, flashing and floating and prancing around in the air. It lasted only about five seconds, but it was the most beautiful fireworks display I’d ever seen, created for my eyes only by some “mis”-fired neurons in my mind.

Fresh appearances are a terrible and lovely thing.

I saw the white crow fly by. It swooped low across the road in front of me, accompanied by two of its black brethren. I wonder what they think of it, an isolated miracle like that. I wonder about its life. Was it driven here to this more accepting crow population by a murder of tyrannical crow bullies? Has it been appreciated and valued for its whiteness, or reviled? Does it live in fear of cold-minded scientists who wish to murder to dissect?

Today, at least, I am glad it flies free and will die unrestrained in all but our memories. I am glad for the miracle of the white crow.