~~~~~~~


NATURE: THAT BIG SCREWUP

"...toward the harmonious coexistence of the natural environment and human beings." I see this phrase earnestly stated with one or another paraphrase in just about every corporate profile, every announcement of corporate reorganization, every statement of environmental agency intent. It implies that in achieving such harmony with the environment we are overcoming some natural barrier between us and the natural world, some barrier that we ourselves had nothing to do with creating, and that through our own noble and altruistic endeavors we will set things right at last despite the unwillingness of nature to be a party to all this progress; as though such harmony is an unnatural state we have to work to achieve, that only corporations or governments, as the primary embodiments of human intelligence, can realize such harmony, and as though for the first time in the history of humanity. Not a hint that the toxins up to IQ level are our own, spread in commission or omission by those very corporations and governments, or that we both individually and as a species came into this world originally very much in harmony with it, in fact of it, and have since distanced ourselves from it, and despoiled it in vast ways we have yet to comprehend, through selfishness, greed, nurtured ignorance and special varieties of narcissism; are we not wondrous and progressive creatures, now let us get busy and fix Nature, that big screwup, the business of big business, get this planet into harmony, fix those rivers, manage those forests, clear those oceans, repair the air, bring nature into harmony with ourselves and our ambitions. Fact is, as this tricky little self-delusional phrase indicates, corporately we're not budging an inch, and never will until we're all dead of profit. These are our resources, after all. We often lie to ourselves in this way, the privilege of our unchallenged position in the hierarchy, like the dinosaurs had.

~~~~~~~~~~


SCORECARD OF EVIL

"Two years into President Bush's term, the damage he has done to the nation and the world is incalculable. On issue after issue, Bush does what's good for big corporations and right-wing extremists at the expense of the public. The Wage Slave Journal offers this scorecard to help you keep track of all of the evil deeds Bush commits and, more important, to provide a record for your perusal when November 2004 rolls around."

Brings chills to the contemplative soul...
[ARIGATO to Ron Andrews for this one.]

For further frissons, see Dubya's resume...

~~~~~~~~~


BABIES AND TOYS

Last night just as I was getting home the Ts pulled up in their truck to give us some pamphlets to hand out for the mayoral recall campaign. The Ts are wooden-toy makers who live down in the village in a big log house they built themselves, and where they have been making new and traditional wooden toys for many years now. As this indicates they are a very gentle couple; they have four children of their own, but no grandchildren yet. The fact that they make wooden toys is another big indicator of how much they love kids. So when Echo came to the door to talk to them with one of the twins in her arms, they practically melted on the spot with delight; then when I went in and brought out the other twin in a baby basket (they hadn't heard there were twins) they just about vaporized. For some time they bounced with glee on our veranda, looking at and holding the tiny red new feet, the hands, looking into the eyes and laughing, wanting just to hold the babies ("How small and light they are!"), enjoying the pure delight it is to delight in a newborn child, and this child no direct relation to them. I guess a lot of that love goes into the wonderful wooden toys they're famous for.

~~~~~~~~~


SCAREWILDPIGS

These latter summer nights as the rice heads richen, each time I zone up the mountain, just past the patch of forest where the wild pigs hide in wait for their chance to raid the rice fields, where you have to be careful going around the far curve because it's blinded by the bamboo that grows up and leans out over from the left, you get careful and cautious and watchful just as the headlights sweeping their arc around the curve suddenly starkly light upon a ghastly figure looming by the roadside, a kind of mad farm woman dressed to the nines in stylish hat and garish jacket of green on ivory with casual gray slacks, very casual gray slacks, in seeming danger of stepping right into the road: "Is she ill?" "What is she doing?" type thoughts flash panically through the driving-habituated mindzone grabbing the steering wheel trying to get a quick handle on this sudden dangerous apparition, this horrible creature with no legs, no face, no life you can see now as you draw carefully closer, and beyond her is her husband it would appear, moving closer, he as boneless, as faceless as she, though less stylish of dress from the discards someone in a farm household was willing to leave suddenly out in the rain on sticks like scarecrows, only to scare wild pigs away, bring the hearts of nighttime drivers, wending their ways up the dark curving road, abruptly into their mouths like this...

~~~~~~~~~


WELLSPRINGS

A diversely enspiriting and freedom-nourishing resource. Via the always rewarding Plep.

~~~~~~~~~


THE RAIN IN SPAIN FALLS MAINLY IN JAPAN

The Land of the Rising Sun it used to be called, before an unknown 500,000-year weather cycle (or maybe global warming, as hypothesized a couple weeks ago) brought all the rain here. An extremely distant rumor has it that the Japanese government will soon be busy designing a new flag, to more accurately depict the newly primary characteristic of the nation: a dense rain cloud right where the sun is on the old flag, with steady rain streaking down like water lasers. The sun is now largely a memory in these parts, though it's still visible on the flag. In June, July and August this year we've had maybe half a dozen of the kind of days that a liberal and Japanophilic weatherman, if gotten drunk and generously bribed, might, with a bit of hedging, call sunny. Swimming? Just jump outside and stroke away. Lake? Who needs a lake when the air is an ocean? Guy just went by on a low altitude jet ski. Surfers hang ten on cloud curls. Birds fly like fish swim. People are all pruny looking, like they just got out of the bath; and the insult "Go jump in the lake" has lost all meaning, because you can't tell the difference if you do.

~~~~~~~~~

BRAND-NEW TWINS MITSUKI AND MIASA MAKE THEIR BLOGGING DEBUT

And sleep through the whole thing.

~~~~~~


GOOD FOR AMERICA

Today, for the first time since I started Pure Land Mountain back in April of last year, site visitors from the US have surpassed visitors from Japan. The former started out far behind, and have been incrementing upward since the beginning, a tenth of a point at a time, but I wasn't sure they would ever actually surpass visitors from the country I reside in and post mainly about. It is a privilege to thus behold a manifest and growing individual American interest in the daily local doings in the rest of the world. That can't but bode well for America.

~~~~~~~


BODY AND SOUL

As those of you kind folks who made repeat visits to PLM over the past couple weeks no doubt noticed, until today there were no new postings after August 15. I wasn't on vacation, or ill, or suffering blogger's block; I was suffering from Blogger.

Seems every month they go silently down for about 10 days, without saying anything to anyone. And as I watched others blithely blogging away, smoothly and lavishly posting goodies on their blogger blogs, Pure Land Mountain just sat there stagnantly silent as I wrote and posted the few posts I could get up to doing for no immediate point, which anyway didn't get published because there was no template, just a white hole where the template used to be.

So just to do something about it, I emailed the support folks there, detailing the problem as the form requests, and received this response: "We wanted to let you know that we've received your support request. As a paying user of Blogger, we treat your issues with the highest priority."

After some days of silence and no change, I wrote "Yeah, sure you do." And received this: "We wanted to let you know that we've received your support request. As a paying user of Blogger, we treat your issues with the highest priority."

Ever the lover of intelligent progress, I wrote back some changeless days later "ARE YOU PEOPLE ASLEEP??" and got this response: "We wanted to let you know that we've received your support request. As a paying user of Blogger, we treat your issues with the highest priority."

The support folks there appear to be body by IBM, soul by Microsoft.

~~~~~~~


EDITING ODDITIES

"The bureau meeting will be free to those not attending."

~~~~~~~~


THE GOLDEN ACHE

Well, Keech left for Seattle just a couple of hours ago, after about 2 months here, and I miss him already. Already all the tasks yet to be done-- the new stone steps, the cedar thinning, the bamboo cutting, the log hauling-- seem to loom so much larger, be so much more daunting, without him. And will be lonelier to do, than when we could banter as we worked, making the work go faster as the sweat fell, seeming to be easier as we took on the task together. And now there is an intense ache where he was, where he would have been in all these things.

I never used to feel this way after farewells, even long ones, maybe even forever ones, but I guess when you're young you don't yet have the life-time required to understand what farewells deeply mean, how hard they can fall on the long-lived heart.

How blithely I left home myself at age 18 to enter the military, never to return again as the naive teenager I'd been, being then even more blithely unaware of the pain my mother was no doubt feeling as I went off into my life, off into the intense experiences that dimmed any pain of departure. You have to be young to get away so easy with goodbye. But it all catches up with you, and now I'm feeling to the heart what my mother must have felt, what all doting parents must feel, that golden ache it is to love someone who must, in the nature of things, go away into their own far reaches of life.

~~~~~~~~~~


WISDOM OF NATURE HARDER TO FIND IN AICHI PREFECTURE

Most of the world doesn't know it yet, since it's only a 'local' thing, so far (and, given the state of the world economy, very likely to remain so), but the felling of forests, the leveling of hills, a general plowing under and concretizing and building of soon-to-be-unused buildings, roads and parking lots is well under way now in Aichi Prefecture in preparation for Aichi Expo 2005, under the ludicrously paradoxical theme: "Wisdom of Nature." One wonders how this wisdom is fostered by its erasure. Perhaps like whales are helped by killing them. Go here for the story and a gory photo of what can happen when nature gets in the way of its own promotion.

~~~~~~~~~~


FACES, MIRRORS, LIGHT

Seems I've been awfully political in here of late, and to what effect after all… those dim bulbs in office fade to below zero importance when I've got a grandtwin in each arm staring at my face like there's some vast secret to be found there, and I suppose there is, though I'm not really in on it either, but I don't tell them that. I stare into the mirror with the same look they have on their newborn faces when they look at me for the minutes that are their hours. I guess we're all newborn every moment, hungry to learn where we are and what to do there so as to better rely on ourselves (if we're honest), see further by our own brightness and that of honest others, not by some dim bulbs...

~~~~~~


RECALLS

Like the entire state of California, the entire township of Shiga is having a recall vote soon, only in this case it's not a governor, but a mayor, and there is no "mayonator" in the running. Lucky us. Our mayoral recall vote, coming up on August 31, is getting a bit of national news, we find leaflets in our mailboxes, recaller vans are cruising the streets with their speakers playing folk songs and "natural" type music, as opposed to the thought-suppressing ad-jingle type that usually accompanies the white gloves and warblers, in this case encouraging voters to clear their minds, get out there and unvote for the guy they voted for who shafted them but good, the mayor on tv as blandly affable as any shell-game operator, defending his policy (do as you're told) with three microphones as though he himself is a natural guy and not an LDP apparatchik who did his time on the ladder...

~~~~~~


TUMBLEWEED HOUSES

Beautiful little houses you can put anywhere, big enough for all your living needs, with lots of land to spare. Gets you thinking of all those beautiful places you've ever thought you'd love to build a house... via Rebecca's Pocket.

~~~~~~


PROFESSIONAL OPINION

"I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history."

Nobel Prize Winner George Akerlof, referring to the astonishing ministrations of AWOL Guardsman George Bush, who was recently found to have a psyche, and who will soon cut the pay of the US troops he sent to Iraq!!

For further precipitous jaw dropping, see Who Served? on the excellent site AWOLBUSH.com. With thanks to blogD.com.

GOODNESS AND JOY

Well, the newborn twins are with us for a while, and are they ever new. And since we know from experience that newborn newness is as temporary as a dewdrop we are making the most of it, short of keeping the little sleepies awake too long.

After each of the babies in my life has grown up, I've somehow managed to forget how tiny newborns are, a lapse absolutely corrected by the next newcomer. Throughout their ephemeral awakenings, how wrinkly and skinny and endearing they are, with their tiny actual legs and feet with genuine toes, hands and fingers that work, professional yawns as though they've been yawning all their lives, which in fact they have been.

Between yawns they lie there patiently, practicing all the many faces, smiling a full-bloom smile before they even have a sense of humor; then there's a look of heartbreaking disappointment, hopefully never to be used, but practiced nonetheless. And rage, and glee and other excitements: all rehearsals.

Even when their kitten-cries pierce the air like arrows, carry upstairs and downstairs, penetrate thick walls and doors and bring instant silence to the most important adult conversation, they aren't really crying, they aren't in actual despair; like humor, that also requires personal experience of the highs and lows of the world out there, for which they're busy rehearsing. So as they weep and laugh it is our pleasure to feel it on their behalf.

And before they drift off to sleep, they watch for miracles with those bright brown eyes, as the faces of ancestors drift through their own by the minute, as clouds through a sky: there is their mother in the smile; now their father about the eyes, then the look of an uncle of mine, and then the young face of my mother, as they pass through all the faces they have come from, including me, I guess. It is startling to see one's own memories flow across those tiny others, who just got here. At no moment in our lives are we apart from eternity.

Hence the familiar ancient feeling one feels, on peeping in through the bedroom door to see them at last asleep: two tiny quiet bumps in the coverlet beside each other, two tiny lifesteps out into the world that we will do our best to ensure are continued on pathways of goodness and joy.

~~~~~~~


DISPATCH FROM BAGHDAD

"George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair and Dick Cheney are insane. I don't know what they think they are doing here, but if it involves order and sanity they have failed miserably and indefinitely. It's obvious enough from the newspaper accounts but you have to see it for yourself. They have caused a catastrophe here. The events of the past year have moved so quickly we tend to forget about the effect of 12 years of economic sanctions. "The price is worth it?" I don't know what they're going to do, and the masters of war themselves must be terrified."

Excerpt from dispatch by Attorney Scott Fleming, posted in full by Anita Roddick.

~~~~~~~


from FERMENT

"If embraced, the awareness of our vulnerability can free us to develop new perspectives, and new perspectives can lead us to new ways of living, can push us beyond what we thought were our limits to reveal fresh, surprising, and exhilarating ways of being in the world."

From a wise and eloquent post by JMG at RedTurtleLaughing.

~~~~~~~~~


WHAT ARE POLITICAL CONSERVATIVES MADE OF?

In re my previous post: at UC Berkeley, "Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the [sic] resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

Fear and aggression
Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
Uncertainty avoidance
Need for cognitive closure
Terror management"


Although none of the above will come as a surprise to any activist who has ever questioned a status quo, the academic cachet is nice. Already I can hear the pallid spokesmen of the concretized saying "Well of course, it would come out of Berkeley..." A veritable hotbed of spiritual evolution. You can read the entire article here.

[Thanks to Ron Andrews for this one.]

~~~~~~~

TERMINATOR FALLS INTO CALIFORNIA FROM HOLE IN HOLLYWOOD, WANTS TO BE GOVERNOR


I remember the shock we felt in Berkeley when tv cowboy Reagan from Illinois ambled out of Death Valley Days (where for black-and-white years he'd washed his hands with borax) to take on the role of California Governor and they played his old commercials as cartoons in the Bay Area movie houses and they were hilarious, but times have changed, people now believe that Hollywood is legitimate prep for politics, and they're right in many respects.

Movies and politics both involve big productions, big spin, big parts, scripts to follow, promotion campaigns, production values, illusions, disbeliefs to suspend, raspberries to ignore.

Dubya (currently in the major national role), the son of Reagan's bland supporting actor, has no theater background himself (no personal background at all, really) and is a lousy actor, like a movie-extra who looks into the camera. He's always wanted a part in a war movie.

Reagan, on the other hand, for whom reality was never a major intrusion, simply followed the Governor script, then the President script, did his walk-ons, said a few lines, let operatives run things, waved-- and events the producers wanted to happen happened. The rich loved what Ronny did for their portfolios, the poor as usual couldn't afford to pay much attention to what wasn't trickling down from way up there, and the middle class were content with modest raises, though taxes soon took those away and more...

And here we are back again in very low budget California, where a naturalized Mr. Universe action movie robot from Graz, Austria falls into California from a hole in Hollywood and walks around wanting to be Governor. The question is, will today's Californians also vote for a fading action hero, or are a majority of them smarter than he thinks they are? Anyway he wants their vote, like 40 years ago he wanted muscles.