Feeling Sorry for the Dead

A few days ago, my wife told me, for the millionth time, how strange I am. What prompted her to again reiterate my uniqueness was that I said I felt sorry for Robert Louis Stevenson.

Robert Louis Stevenson is, as you may know, the famous author of such stories as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and a small library of others. What many don't know about the man was that he spent nearly his entire life searching for a place where he could have good health. He was born sickly, as many people in the late 19th century were, and suffered, scholars think, from pneumonia and tuberculosis until his death in 1894. He was 44. (While they may have weakened him and led, indirectly, to his death, he did not die of these diseases. He died after straining to open a bottle of wine, which caused, most probably, a cerebral hemorrhage.)

I feel for him in his illness and how it drove him from his home. He loved Scotland very much, I have read, and he longed to go back to it as he neared death. It was the seat of his heart. I feel for how his illness confined him to a bed for a large percentage of his life. I see paintings and photographs of him. He looks so thin and fragile. I think, no one deserves such a life, such a sickness.

My wife says I am strange because, she claims, I often feel bad for people so distant from me.

I don't think that is why my sympathy for Stevenson makes me weird. My sympathy seems completely natural to me because I feel sadness about his illness. The thing that makes me weird, in this case, is that, really, he is everything I want to be despite his illness...

Robert Louis Stevenson was a writer, not only of renown but of great skill. He was not merely a romance writer, as many believe, but a man of sincere dedication to his craft and a keen observer of the everyday, especially in his later work. He was a world traveller, who chased his dreams and his desire to know, see, and experience life--even while being pursued by his illness and death. He focused his life on what was important to him and poured himself into his art. He stood up for what he thought was right and did his best to see that it happened.

I have traveled. I have written. I have, on occasion, stood up for what is right and good. But I have not dedicated my life to any of these things. I want to. I fear I never will. So, my desire to emulate Stevenson and embrace his romantic, lusty way of living perverts itself in my mind, and I fumble into the safest alternative emotion: sympathy.

I don't want to deny the feelings I have about Master Stevenson's illness, plight, and premature death; they are true and good. I also recognize, though, that they are linked to something deeper in myself: a drive wishing to be realized and acted upon in my life. A drive to dedicate myself to something I may never be great at, but that I love. A drive to leave caution behind and drive into the exotic parts of the world and my mind. A desire to leave fear behind.

My feelings about this topic have been complicated as tonight I looked over the myspace sites of some old friends and acquaintances who seem to be living their dreams, who have become moderately famous, who have become skilled craftspeople and artists. I feel that while I have done what some find impossible and reached many of my dreams, I am still struggling to find myself in the midst of my life. I am still swimming against the current as a writer who never writes, a teacher who is unsure of himself and his knowledge, and a man whose daily actions are at odds with the deepest desires of his heart and soul.

Someday I might learn what I really need to do to accomplish my next set of dreams. Or, more accurately, maybe someday I will find the courage to do what I already know I need to do, but am too scared/weak/unable to do. Maybe someday I will stop feeling sorry for the dead and myself, and I will actually move forward.

Experiments in Time

Two Mondays ago, I really felt the weight of the beginning the next work week. But like Atlas or Sisyphus, I accepted by burden and trudged forward. To my surprise, the day flew by, despite the tons upon my head. The next morning before classes, I met my friend and colleague, Kay, and I said to her, "It's already Tuesday!" As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I laughed and added, "That was a strange thing to say, wasn't it? Why would it 'already' be Tuesday? It's only the second day of the week!" I explained to her, as she smiled her always-benevolent smile, that I felt that as soon as we got through Tuesday, the week was felt as if it were over due to a strange half-day Wednesday we have at our school. She agreed. Then we decided to experiment. Throughout the week, we would check in and see if the week was really going as fast as we thought it was.

The week zoomed by.

On Friday after classes, we talked again. The week had gone by with incredible speed because we kept thinking and saying, "It's already..." This was the key. We weren't watching the pot boil, we were commenting on how it already had. I said, as I was leaving, "It's already summer!" We both laughed and joked about how we wished it were. Then, in my youthful impetuousness, I said, "It's already NEXT summer!" Kay, again with her angelic smile, said, "Not too fast. I'm old enough as it is." I laughed and walked out the door, thinking.

She was right. I was going too fast. It was like that stupid movie, Click, in which Adam Sandler's character moves ahead in his life and, in doing so, misses it. The movie was horrible, but the idea was correct, it seemed, from my real life application a similar concept. I walked back down to Kay's classroom (I have a habit of bothering my coworkers when they are trying to work), and explained all this to her. We talked and decided that the best course of action would be to take up an experiment in the opposite direction. Could we slow time as easily as we sped it? The next week we would try.

The week did creak by, but not in a bad way. Kay and I had decided the best way to keep things slow would be to enjoy and savor ever moment, to live in the now. We adopted a Zen mind in which the past was nothing more than what came before and the future was nothing but air in front of us. The NOW was the goal, the center, and the focus. It worked incredibly well. The week went by at a good pace...not too fast and, surprisingly, not too slow. By focusing on the now, it seemed that we were able to regulate time as we needed. The power of perception is an amazing thing.

I don't know if I will pay attention to time in the future as closely as I did last week. I don't know if I can handle the responsibility of working with time so closely. I feel almost as if I should go with the current of time--fast or slow--in any given situation instead of trying to work it. Perhaps that it just what we did l week because now, as I write, I realize that in the slow week, I didn't really pay all that much attention to the time, but rather just to the NOW. Maybe I can handle it, and I should. Maybe we all should.

It does seem to me, as I said here pondering the NOW, that the world would be a whole lot better if people weren't in such a hurry. If we could just enjoy this time to write, this time to eat a sandwich, this time to ___________. Perhaps I am in a place in my life now when/where I have stopped waiting for the next milestone, the next rite of passage, and I can just appreciate this place and how it looks, instead of trying to see over the horizon.

Wow. I think, that just now, I may have passed the biggest rite of passage of them all.

Poem In Your Pocket Day

April is National Poetry Month. To celebrate that, we have a little event at my school called Poem In Your Pocket Day. Throughout the day, we English teachers will accost students and ask them if they have a poem in their pocket. If they do, they can earn a little bit of extra credit. The poem can be a favorite they have read or something of their own creation. So, I will be carrying around my favorite poem today as well. It happens to be the source of my blog's title, so I thought that I would share it here...in my cyber pocket...as well.

"Ozymandias"

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Thank you, Mr. Shelley, for this gem.

And all you out there, why don't you slip a poem into your pocket, too, and even if no one asks to see it, you will know that you are carrying a little beauty with you all day long.

The Environmentalist who is afraid of Nature

These past few days, I have been pulling ivy out of my backyard. My lovely wife started this project weeks ago, and while she was making headway, it was not going fast enough for her. To expedite things, she suggested we hire some of my students to come do it for a nominal fee. Being Mr. Cheap, I said, "Why don't I just start helping you? It will go twice as fast with two people." It has, and, frankly, I don't know why I wasn't helping before.

I like working in the yard, I have found. I often lose sight of that. But as I have been ripping and pulling the obnoxious, noxious weed from the ground, I have realized that I am scared of that which I hold as holy. I am afraid of Nature. Or, at least, I was.

I enjoy the feel the dirt on my hands and the sun on my back. The smell of freshly turned soil soothes me. The birds singing and wind rustling in the trees as I work is better than the sweetest music. I wonder at the sights as around me. However, as my senses thrill, I find my mind drawing them away from reverie and toward self-defense. I fear dropping ticks. I fear striking snakes. I fear the deadly bite of an unseen brown recluse. I fear the stealthy attack of a hungry mountain lion. These fears rush through me and drive away the enjoyment and serenity that being outdoors holds for most. Why?

1) Perhaps this is natural. Maybe my brain is reverting back to the survival mode of my ancestors. I mean, it isn't completely unhealthy to fear the beasts that lurk in the depths of the primordial woods. This fear is what brought our ancestors to a place where they could create the next generation. A dead man cannot reproduce. Indeed, nature and fear have a long documented history. Dante refers to the fear he feels in the woods in the beginning of the Divine Comedy. Before that, to the ancient Greeks, Nature was personified by the horned god Pan, whose name gives us the word "panic." There must be something to it.

2) Or perhaps this fear is the epitome of unnatural. Maybe I am just the product of the modern world in which humanity has cloistered itself indoors where it is safe, warm, and sterile. It is hard for Nature to kill someone who inhabits a world populated by TVs, DVD players and computers rather than spiders, snakes, and pumas. And I am not the worst case of the modernized man. I was raised in a rural area where I played and worked in the great outdoors. I romped in woods. I chopped wood in dense forests. I am not an urban boy who has never seen a tree. I have lived among them all of my life.

Why then am I afraid that nature will kill me at every step?

Perhaps it is what I have been exposed to. The media relates story of deadly puma attacks around the Bay Area and killer bees imported from Africa that will soon ravage the West Coast. They tell us of every danger that could possibly whisper fear into our ears. They build an Everest where only a hillock belongs, and I plant my flag in each and every peak in their fabricated range.

The point, I have learned, is that I need even more exposure to the real deal, not the image on the screen or the story on the page. The sensational, I need to remember, is what sells advertisements and increases circulation. Just by being out in the ivy, where spiders abound, I have come to be more at ease.

More than anything, I need to become comfortable with the fear that Nature instills, as it is, well, natural. The problem, exsacerbated by the media, is that Western society is so risk adverse. Everyone needs to hold someone accountable, but the fact is that no one can be held accountable for the acts of a dangerous world. I read an article recently about a girl who died on an Outward Bound trip in the wilds of Colorado or some other wild state. Her parents are now trying to sue the organization. I understand their rage and pain, but they (and the poor girl) must have known the risks involved with doing a trek through the middle of a wild desert in the summer. They can't hold Nature accountable, but should Outward Bound take the fall for the acts of the earth and the failings of a human body? I don't know.

I don't know, even, if I will ever stop fearing the world because, I guess, that is just who I am. However, the more I see that there is no way to stop the inevitable and that the more I go to the very heart of Nature--even if that nature is only my small plot of land, the more I will find my ease there. A relationship with anything needs to be cultivated and renewed.

Response to Thang's post on the 100 mile diet

The beauty of the concept of eating locally is not what it limits, but what one gains from and gives to the community in which he or she may live. Indeed, I believe, more than anything, it is about creating a community through the most basic of human needs and desires. It builds community by safeguarding the environment in which we live, but also by supporting the local economy and reestablishing the connection to the earth that is being lost in the modern world. Fewer and fewer people know where their food comes from. Only 2% of Americans are farmers these days (as opposed to 20% fifty years ago). There is no progress in these numbers, only danger. Danger because the essence of life is now so foreign to many in the developed world and, most importantly, to young people. Eating locally protects this fragile link to the earth by, at the very least, letting people know where that last mouthful came from.

Over the last few years, I have tried to minimize my ecological footprint. I have become a vegetarian. I have tried to abstain from killing animals, which means, in turning, not buying leather or similar products. My vegetarianism is a product of various pieces of ethical reasoning, most important of which is that I think it is wrong to kill--anything. The second line of thinking is that it takes fewer resources to raise an acre of vegetables than it does to raise a beast for slaughter. If the world were better suited, this would mean that more people could eat. Of course, there are economic disparities that also stand in the way of such a plan coming to fruition, but I have made my metaphorical stand. I have also taken to transporting myself as much as possible under my own power; I am a proud cyclist. The next logical step is a combination of the two above changes: to somehow limit the amount of greenhouses pumped into the atmosphere in the conveyance of my food. The answer, simply put, must be to eat locally (as much as possible).

I have not reached my goal. Not by a long shot. I have grown accustom, like most of us in the developed world, to eating what I want when I want it. If I want a tomato in the dead of winter, goddamit I will have it. If I want a mango in the dead of winter, though no mango tree would survive in my environment let alone during the freezing winter, it will be mine. However, this is neither natural or beneficial. I all but negate the other choices I have made in life to sustain my need for out of season and exotic fruits and vegetables, not to mention the hundreds of other rare and foreign delicacies I ingest throughout the year.

Like all of my ecological (and thus spiritual) endeavors, the cultivation of my food must be as personal a matter as I can afford to make it. Therefore, Jenn and I have started a very small garden and laid the plans to expand it. We have also taken to buying organic food and WHEN POSSIBLE buying food from near our town. This is not always easy or possible. I still love mangos and bananas and other more tropical and exotic fare, but we are trying. This is the only thing that one can do.

I, with my limited expertise at automobile repair and construction, engineering, and fuel efficiency, cannot focus on creating a better means of transportation to help lessen the impact of foods' transport; all I can do is try to eat as consciously as possible. This includes thinking about the people out there in lands far from mine who toil on plantations and farms to harvest for a pittance. It is unreasonable to assume that anyone other than scientists specializing in these fields can make any headway in the complex task of mileage reform; to say otherwise, seems like a abdication of personal responsibility to me. It is all of our job, however, to monitor ourselves and our choices.

It is not regression that brings me to this point thinking. It is progress. I never thought of where my food came from three years ago. My thinking has matured and evolved. And I know that living in Northern California offers me many more dietary choices than someone in, say, Saskatoon at any given time, but, as I said, there is no hard rules about this in my mind. There is only an effort to be made.

Try to grow what you can. Try to buy what you can locally. Try to eat at home more. Try to cut processed food out of your diet. Just try. The trying is what makes the world a better place.

Not to be outdone

Well, I was reading my good friend Thang's blog today during my prep period at school, and I thought, "It isn't right that he is writing while I sit idly." That, of course, isn't exactly true. I am anything but idle. But if I am to be like my idols (Steinbeck, Stevenson, Chabon), I had better get writing. Hence the address of my little blog: finally writing something.