On one hand, journalists are known for writing in any and all situations: from the backs of camels or the tense dampness of foxholes. They do this because it's their job and it's got to be done, whether the conditions are right for writing or not. On the other hand, journalists are not known for their brilliant writing.

And I, bone-tired from too much work and not enough sleep, standing in a crowded, operational bush kitchen, am not writing brilliantly.

My brain hurts, and I want to offer you some sort of insight in it all but there is just too much confusion going on around me. Last night, for instance, I had a good robust argument with the resident determinist on my crew, Binyam. Normally this would provide me with a lot of fodder for my rant-o-logical cannon (canon?). But when it is all I can do just to keep my thrashed fingers typing, the best I can offer anybody who comes here for my better writing is this: see you later.

quitting

Let me tell you a story. I know you like them, and they're fairly cheap. My only difficulty, having offered, is to distill the rather complex happenstancings of the day to day into a coherent vignette with all the elements of (plot, symbolism, etc.) that will somehow both entertain and challenge you. Things happen to me, yes, but they happen to you as well. My challenge is to rise above that and present to you my life in a way that is in some small way more interesting than clicking away from this site and surfing somewhere you shouldn't. I'm trying to protect you from yourself, you see.

Today, I give up. I could tell you that last week a dust-devil (mini-tornado) snapped up Christine's cache with a loud BANG and shot it 100 meters up into the air. It also took a box of seedlings (with fifty trees in it) and threw it fifty feet up and forty feet across. The sound of that tarp was so loud that Christine just dropped what she was doing and ran in the opposite direction, while the rest of the crew a quarter mile away looked on in stunned disbelief.

None of this, however, would interest you much. And I have to go to the bathroom so badly that I can't be bothered to try to package it for you better. Too much information? I am a bushman these days - so deal.

Here is the real news: I'm quitting treeplanting. No, Not like those dejected, dirty folks you see on the sides of the highways and byways of summer with shovel, a bag of garbage, and a little cardboard sign that says "mommy or bust".

That is to say - my planting career is winding down and will peter and piddle out sometime in the beginning of august. I have done one of those newfangled "cost-benefit analyses" deelios and planting, while nice and lucrative and full of fluffy niceness, is costing me too much in terms of health, sanity, and the pursuance of that elusive fantasy of "who I am as a person".

Each day is now, therefore, tinged with both melancholy and joy as I approach both a new beginning and the end to a large part of my life and who I have become. I expect I'll be writing some trippy weirdness at the end of the season, laced with a bunch of questions and wrapped up in a tortilla of uncertainty. For now, though, I wave and take a bow.

cold and wet

Yesterday it snowed on us a little and it reminded me of the "last" day of my "last" summer of tree planting, back in 2001, when I sat down on the cut block, took off my boots one at a time, and through them over my shoulder. I then turned to my crew leader. "Leigh," I asked, "do you think that now that I've quit planting I can go the rest of my life without ever being cold and wet at the same time again?" Leigh just laughed.

So here I am again, accepting it - wondering if the only reason I am mentally doing all right out here these days is that I have started making a lot of money again. My planting years are coming to an end, though. This is the last, which has prompted a lot of introspection. Planting as taught me a lot of really interesting life lessons - lessons I doubt I could have learned in as real a way anywhere else.

I've been thinking about faith, for instance, and personal choices. Any time a person decides to do the right thing they are making a faith decision. This is because no matter how strongly your feelings, reason or experience may testify to the correctness of an action, it is impossible to ever completely know if what you are doing is fully right. Emotions and reason can be deceitful or deceived, experience can be misinterpreted, and motivations generally emanate from your subconscious - an area of yourSelf you will never truly understand.

Even Hitler thought he was right. Most people (here, now) would say he was not, but what if he had won? Are we to accept morality as a function of majority? From my knowledge of human nature, I'd say that's a laughable idea, but strangly enough there are whole cadres of folks who think this way. They're called relativists. They and their dank brethren the Humanists must, for the sake of consistency, view morality in this way. This is their own faith-based decision, however they might deny it. There I've gone again and done it - I've revealed a bit more of my worldview.

But that's the bare bodkin of it, isn't it? A clash and defining of worldviews? These worldviews are a product of emotion, reason and experience - yes - but they are also grasped in a symbiotic life struggle with our faith. The Big Question is this: which worldview is true? Or which is most true? Or which is most easily decipherable as true?

We all make worldview decisions in every tiny little choice we make. These choices come to define our character and ultimately drive our future. It takes a supreme effort of will to overcome a lie we have allowed ourselves through our actions to accept as truth. The difficulty arises from the reality that all worldviews contain peices of the truth. Even Hitler, no doubt, was right about some things.

Still, it is obvious (I'm guessing) to any thinking person that with all the mutually exclusive statements made by proponents of various amorphous masses of ideologies grouped losely under that term "worldview", that some of them must be more right than others - by which I mean more connected and aligned with the truth.

The human moral life is a process of deciphering what is true and then (with much fear and trembling) acting accordingly. This action is the defining characteristic of a moral choice, since raw belief has very little of a moral component to it - probably since belief is most often an involuntary thing. Action, on the other hand, requires will and is therefore morally linked. People will not ultimately be judged by what they believed, but rather by what they did.

Action always precedes belief in the sense that it (action) is always a faith-based activity. We never entirely know when we do something why we're doing it or whether it is a fully morally correct act. The challenge we need to be raising, then, is not for everybody to believe this or that, but for everybody to do this and that.

With regards to my own roughly defined worldview as a follower of Christ, for instance, I would argue that people should know I am a Christian not because I say I believe in a triune God orthodox this and that blah blah blah, but rather because I love spectacularly. All that other stuff, in the absence of love, is fluff and nonsense.

Morally qualified action is an inevitability. The question is not whether we will make moral choices, but how rigorously and consciously we will examine our moral choices to see if they are in alignment with the Truth. This is an awesome, mind-smushing responsibility. It is, however, our only option.

For those who can believe in the existence of God, this process loses some of its instability - because now there are constants. For those who can believe in a loving God, the moral movement through life is robbed of a lot of anxiety and fear - because those constants are geared towards an ultimate Good. This is a hard pill to swallow, I know. But sometimes the only thing separating us from reality is a cold, hard pill.

until august

I am once again in the thick of it. A moment here and there, snatched on a supposed day off, is all I can manage for any sort of abstract thought. Planting is my own personal Faustian devil. I'm not sure how, but it sounds more ominous than a plain old devil. It haunts and torments me, consuming my every moment. I barely have room to breathe.

In august, it will be over. I will be free - perhaps forever. For now, though, I stumble on across cut block after cut block, willing myself to care. Life is short and fragile, though, so I will love every moment, by choice if not by passion.

So smile today. Be glad you have room to think. In your thinking, though, don't forget to live.