February 4, 2014

I live under the elliptical of a family of bald eagles.

Each morning they circle the jagged line that divides land and sea.

I live among the slums of gulls, crows, pigeons and ravens.

Each morning they raid our dumpsters for spoil.

I live on the woods’ edges with the robins, thrushes, juncos, sparrows, warblers and wrens.

Each morning they flit and flutter to warm themselves while grazing the trunks and grasses for morsels.

And I live among the silent trees that were spared, and the sapsuckers, woodpeckers, owls and hawks that make their living in them.

Each morning the sun christens the upper branches before kissing my cheeks, while the hawks, owls, woodpeckers, sapsuckers, wrens, warblers, sparrows, juncos, thrushes, robins, ravens, pigeons, crows, gulls and bald eagles weave a new day into being.

Contemplation at the shore

 

Descending the gritty staircase carpeted with wet maple leave, I can hear the hush of waves getting closer.

I scale wind and water smoothed logs and hoist myself onto a boulder at the edge of land and sea.

I look out into the grey fog.

Sea and sky are blurred.

With my beads, I mumble the Jesus Prayer 100 times.

Meanwhile, the ocean eternally laps at my feet.

Stones imperceptibly lose their edges as the sea pulls them closer to her.

Gulls and cormorants fade into being from the right and then the left.

Slosh and crash…Slosh and crash in stochastic eternity.

Fog horn bellows punctuate my contemplation and the waves.

I begin to climb the gritty staircase once more, the hush of waves getting dimmer.

Solstice

For the last several years I have tried to commemorate the solstice with at least some acknowledgement of this our longest day of the year. Nothing to New Agey, ritualistic or woo-woo; solitude, a hike, etc. This year I awoke early and watched the eastern sunrise from my Forest Service station at the Mill Hollow Guard Station east of Heber, Utah. As I watched I thought of the trip I had recently made to the Chaco Canyon Pueblos in New Mexico where the Puebloan peoples that lived there for approximately 1,000 years developed an elaborate sun, moon and star watching practice. It is thought that the astronomy of these people developed to plan festivals and trade fairs that were held each year and which were attended by thousands of people from all over the region. Being able to predict the cycles of the sun and moon in their ascent and descent in the sky were essential aspects of everyday life because Chaco was the ceremonial center of this brief empire that synchronized trade and streamlined architecture into the uniform masonry that the Chaco ruins reflect. The sun and moon were meticulously watching using simple instruments like a stick in the ground whose shadow was measured each day to orient the villages along a north-south axis. Natural monuments such as Chimney Buttes and small cracks in the rocky mesas were used to track the journey of the Sun high into the summer sky and back to its winter nadir.

How little I know about the cycles of the sun, moon and stars. They have been mostly eclipsed, so to speak, by our more precise technological time pieces and secular calendars. I struggle to remember whether the moon is waxing or waning. I sometimes notice the ascending and receding position of the sun throughout the year, but am never still enough, in one place long enough to watch it actually change. Yet, on the solstice I try to be present to this silent but ever present liturgy as the sun rises and sets, ascends and descends in the sacred sky.

On this particular solstice I didn’t do anything that different. I watched a spotted sandpiper drunkenly walk the shore of the creek near the cabin. I listened to unknown birds call from hidden bows of a nearby aspen wood. I watched the slow advance of a beaver logging operation on the other side of the creek. I walked endlessly through forests that were being ravaged by spruce beetles; the sappy trunks of towering trees smattered with the frass and pitch of fresh beetle entries and exists. The tall, ancient boles whose glory fades one needle at a time; from green to faded brown.

The spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis) is such a small creature having such a huge impact on a place. I am reminded of us; our voracious appetite for material things, money and comforts is killing the earth upon which we have evolved, lived, loved, laughed and learned. And just as the beetle knows nothing else but to eat, mate and reproduce; we too, despite our supposed enlightened minds, technological prowess and religious moralities are eating ourselves out of house and home. And like the beetle, when the trees run out, we may very well face a crash. I hope we have the strength to buck this powerful evolutionary urge and course correct. Perhaps we will, and perhaps we will not. Yet on this solstice, even under the fading green of spruce trees fighting to stay alive, I have hope that we too will survive, that the trees will grow back and that a balance will be struck.

8.7 Million Names for God

In a recent botany class I took for fun, I learned the taxonomic Family, Genus and Species of about 60 different woody plants. This month I also attended the annual Great Salt Lake Bird Festival, a mecca for migratory bird enthusiasts and avid birders, who devoutly greet the some 5 million birds who migrate through our state each year. In all my efforts to identify plants and birds using dichotomous keys and beautifully illustrated books, I wonder about the process of naming. In Genesis, Adam names the animals. But what’s in a name? Is naming an act of relationship? Or, is it one of dominance and control? Keying out plants was sometimes frustrating, and I did more reading than observing the actual plant. But, as I learned the new vocabulary of plant anatomy and was able to identify more and more plants and their habitats, the landscape took on a more transparent feeling. It was like adding letters to an alphabet, or the slow process of getting to know someone. In some small way, knowing something about a plant connects me to it. And lately, I have been desperate for connection to myself, the earth and to God. So, while the process of naming plants was frustrating and hardly very spiritual, as I learn more and more plants, their habitats and uses, I feel surrounded by familiar faces. Naming has also allowed me to be present to the creatures before me, as a miraculous manifestation of the Ground of Being, the one become many. So, to name something, to recognize it, is to enrich my vocabulary for the face of God. He was once a white-robed, bearded male in the sky; now s/he is a dizzying diversity of plants, animals, rivers, rocks, lichens, mosses, invertebrates, fishes, and birds.

As I learned to identify birds and their calls, the incomprehensible chatter and flitting of a dusk sky became a grammar of winged fellow creatures. The general descriptor ‘Bird’ became the myriad Northern Flicker, Yellow Warbler, Sand Hill Crane, etc. Since the GSL Bird Festival birding has becoming a kind of walking meditation. The other day, I was standing on a flat boulder on the west bank of the Provo River just outside of Heber, Utah; I was mesmerized by the rush of water as it meandered slowly southwestward. The body of the river I was in had been restored to an undulating meander, and was surrounded by ponds and wetland. I focused on my breathing as I scanned the sky for flying objects. An Osprey appeared suddenly, hovered in place and dipped out of site beyond the trees. In a small pond in sight of the passing freeway, a beaver swam through the shallows. A buck froze with the whiff of my scent. I heard the haunting call of Sand Hill Cranes in the distance. By actively searching for birds, I am that much more present and mindful to all creatures. I am not so distracted by my thoughts as I would be if I were simply hiking, thinking about my to-do list for tomorrow. This is the focused meditation of the mystics that opens to door to God. As I walk, I feel the quality and temperature of the air passing through my nostrils as I go from shade to sun, I hear the sound my shoes make on the gravel and I anticipate any warble or dip in the air. I feel a deep sense of calm. What beauty there is to behold in the some 8.7 million creatures on this earth, each unique, each striving to live, and each a manifestation of the miracle that is life. Eight point seven million names for God, the Ground of Being.

Back in my truck, a man with his fly rod ambled by not noticing me. Loading his gear, he mumbled some unrecognizable words in melody and then broke into a more clear singing voice:

“Oh, it is wonderful that he should care for me, enough to die for me.

Oh, it is wonderful, wonderful to me!”

I smiled to myself and began to sing along to this familiar hymn. I felt a deep happiness that this (most likely) Mormon man was connecting his deeply held spiritual beliefs to a quick after work fishing trip. But I hope he also realizes that just as his temple rituals and church meetings teach him how to become closer to God, the fish that slip through his fingers, the river he stood in, the plants on its banks and the birds overhead are closer to God than he thinks! 

Cercocarpus ledifolius

City Creek

Not far from my downtown apartment the city gives way to a meandering stream. I follow it for several miles; first on paved road, then on a trail made by snow shoes and marauding deer and elk. I am hardly ever alone: bikers, walkers, runners, doggers—huffing, puffing, nodding, muffled helloes. The tinkle of fresh melting snow joining the chorus of gravity-enslaved stream ebbs and flows as I meander up, up, up.

In the spring this snow will become my body. 
I am walking on my body. 

Tufts of oak and maple colonized rocky slopes give way to quorums of fir and spruce. I don’t see any aspen, though I long to. The creek is cuddled by tangles of squid-like birch, rose, cherry, feral apple, hawthorn, and winter stick miscellanea. I try not to think about the future; only this moment. Yet my mind wanders with the wavering tops of tall trees in the icy breeze. My feet hurt. Fresh elk poop. I hope I see one, what if I do see one? Silence. Stillness. A distant hush of water. I eat bread and cheese proudly, hungrily, dip my hands into crunchy snow, drink deeply from my canteen.

 In the spring this snow will become my body. 
 I am walking, ever so gently, on my body. 

Liturgy: Breathe

I spent the last hours of 2012 in meditation on a cot in the St. Francis cell of the guest house of the Lady of our Holy Trinity Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.Breathe in. Breathe out. In the morning I went for a walk along the ½ mile road leading to the Abbey in 12 degree air. Breathe in. Breathe out. The fields surrounding the monastery were silent, sleeping white in their winter coats; the mountains surrounding the valley cloaked in shimmering snow. Breathe in. Breathe out. The air was still and smoky as it left my mouth and condensed as ice on my beard. Breathe in. Breathe out. The snow uttered muffled low squeaks under my feet as I walked in panoramic awe. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Seeing the Universe in the Trees

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
-John Muir

“Still with all my faults, I draw my breath from an ancient earth.”
-Bowerbirds

I spent most of that day with my nose in a book memorizing the form of leaf shapes to Utah’s mountain trees, and the cumbersome Latin of their nomenclature. My summer had been spent rambling around in the mountain forests of the Wasatch and Uintah Ranges, and I was getting pretty good at identifying trees and some understory plants. Out on an assignment for my internship, I arrived at the Cedar Breaks National Monument campground just in time to watch the sun set over the chalky white and alternating red cathedral-cliffs that make up the monuments main attraction. The jutting striped walls were created by millennia of deposition when the area was at the bottom of an ancient lake. With time, millions of years, the Hurricane fault has slowly uplifted the area to over 10,000 feet. The wind and water slowly gnawed away grain by grain at the spires, canyons and arroyos; so much so that the Southern Paiute called the place “u-map-wich” or, the place where the rocks slide down constantly.

I began setting up my tent as the dusk breezes cooled the 10,000 foot mesas. It was getting cold and I wanted to cook a hasty bowl of rice before going to sleep. With the tent finished, I focused my attention on getting a fire going in the wind and, after several tries, ended up using my backpacking stove to boil the water.

Sitting on the ground while eating my bland meal, hypnotized by the silence, I glanced up at the night sky. It was the first time in a long time that I was able to see the thick dusty trail that makes up the Milky Way, our cosmic cul-de-sac. In Salt Lake City the stars where faint and few, outshined by stars of our own making. But here they pulsed and shined in their billions, white-blue light bursting through the atmosphere, that laid to rest all around me, millions of years after leaving home. As I sat in wonder and awe, the trees dosing sleepily in the night wind, I recalled the words of Brother Muir atop a Douglas-fir tree which he had climbed to shake hands with a Sierra storm.

We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings—many of them not so much. (The Mountains of California)

Staring at the stars, mouth agape, I remembered that there was a resident astronomer at Cedar Breaks. It was nearly 10 o’clock, but if I hurried, I could make it in time to have a peek at the sky through a decent telescope. In the dark, I made my way over to a small group of campers, and arrived just in time to hear the astronomer, in a nasally voice, repeat his lesson for the night, “and remember, from Polaris, the North Star, you arc to Arcturus and speed on to Spica.” It was a simple mnemonic device to trace the position of these prominent stars. As I traced the path between the big dipper, the North Star, Arcturus and Spica with my finger, I could see how the big dipper spins around the North Star in a huge circle. It’s not that I didn’t know that the stars move in the sky as the earth’s axis tilts, but I had never comprehended its path all at once, which gave the sky a sort of readability that was liberating.

It is hard to describe the subtle feeling that came over me. It was a sort of warm security, of orientation, like arriving home from a long journey and settling into the familiar routes between door, hallway and bedroom. I wasn’t just in a forest, a National Monument, or the state of Utah, but hurling through space among the gaseous space dust, planets and stars that make up our galaxy. The very atoms in my body, turned out by the massive bodies of distant stars being born and dying. Separated by time, but unified in substance.

As I walked back to my tent, tripping over sage and scrub in the dark trying to take in as much starlight as I could before going to sleep, I thought of another passage, this one by Larry Rasmussen:

When you peer at the Southern Cross, Orion, or the Big Dipper, the gnat on your arm, the flower near your path, or the food on your plate, you are gazing at a neighbor who shares with you what is most basic of all—common matter as ancient and venerable as time and space themselves. (Earth Community, Earth Ethics)

In learning to find my way in the forest, I stumbled upon my place in the cosmos.

Zion, Inc.

This revelation is brought to you by the City of Enoch Country Club.
The asphalt prophets have paved the burial grounds of the United Order.
We preach a theology of prudence. Why resist when the world has so much to offer?
The Gospel of thrift has become the Gospel of wealth.
The millennium is here, but who knew it would take place in a mall?
The beautiful name of Zion used to hawk merchandise to our masses.
Has Mormonism become a pyramid scheme of the soul?

Pumice and Water

(I found this poem in a back corner of my hard drive)

Pumice stone and ice cold stream water are my bread and wine this Sabbath
These ancient emblems of volcanic body spilled in atonement, at-one-ment for the land
The catastrophe blessing its priesthood
I hug cold stone-lined trails reverently approaching a tabernacle of ancient lava kneeling in still silent prayer
The windswept expanse whistles like a sad organ
My temple, my refuge, carpeted in green moss
Chipmunk, grasshopper, and dipper my congregation
My covenant with the earth renewed

-October 2007, Crater Lake National Park

The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Spring

I sit in a steel chair, listening to the rhythm of well intending white shirts and Sunday dresses relate a 4,000 year old text to their morning commutes.

Exodus 3:2 There the angel of the LORD appeared to him [Moses] in flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.

V. 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”

Outside, through the west facing window of the Sunday school classroom, the tiny yellow and green buds, flowers and leaves are emerging from the tips of maple fingers; stirring and tickling the wind-laced sky. The shiny green leaves take their first breaths of warm spring light in an April afternoon.

As I sit, staring at the trees, I wonder if perhaps the great I AM, is better interpreted as WE ARE; for surely God was present in those trees as much if not more than a brick building called a church.

Airport Panic

I follow a fluorescent corridor out of the fuselage into a large rectangular lobby, stumbling into a stream of human traffic that leads to my connecting flight’s gate. I have just flown two and a half hours from Orange County airport to Houston, Texas, and in a few hours will board another flight to Charleston, West Virginia. I follow the large illuminated signs that point toward ‘Terminal B.’ At a dead end hallway after a labyrinth of escalators and industrially carpeted pathway, I board a small mono-rail for the last leg of my intermediate journey. As I secure myself to handhold, a glossy voice announces the destination (first in English and then in Spanish). After a few moments I notice that I am alone on the train.

As I leave the train through automatic doors into Terminal B, I am again awash in a sea of faces, the most intoxicating mixture of human variety. The atoms that make up the molecules and organisms of society. But here we break from the comfort and magnetism of society and become completely atomized: producers, consumers, departures, arrivals; haves and have-nots. I am stumbling through Milton Friedman’s utopia.

As I make my way through ever narrower passages, I feel waves of panic. I am terrified by people and I am in love with them, all in the same breath. Eyes dive for cover as I peruse the being-scape. I hear many words but few conversations. A human ant colony teleporting ourselves into and out of each other’s lives, cities, jobs, dreams: A body catch a body as its coming through the rye.

I arrive at my gate. Why am I doing this? Why am I here? The birds outside spend their days searching for food to fill their bellies; but I have to fly across the country to exchange my labor for cash that will buy food that will fill my belly. In the distance I catch sight of a bird caught inside the airport. There is of course nothing I can do. So I take my seat, a few away from the nearest body, and wait for the airplane to board.

A Navajo Man

Since April 25th, I have been on a ranch in New Mexico, enrolled in a three week Permaculture Design Course. As I drove from Provo, Utah to Las Vegas, New Mexico, I passed through a number of Native American reservations. Growing up in Orange County California, Native American issues were practically unknown to me. The native populations of the South Coast we all but wiped out by disease, slave labor, and forced integration. So, in traveling through many Native American reservations, I began to see that in many cases the third world we romanticize as being in Latin America or Africa is really in our own back yard. Conditions were squalor, and the air was filled with depression and hopelessness. How is it that my culture could simply roll over these first peoples with such reckless abandon?

I offer no easy answer. But when I arrived at the Wind River Ranch, I noticed there was a Navajo man in our class. I have been to Latin America, and have spent many hours in the presence of the First Peoples of Guatemala, but there was something very personal about being in the presence of a Navajo man. It was my ancestors that conquered his. During the first week of the course, we learned each other’s names, covered the course material, and dug our hands into the soft red sandy soil of a grass land flood plain. In our class discussions, the Navajo man would make long, slow, and deliberate commentary related to his people and to Native Americans in general. His insights were good, and everyone respected him; but I could not bring myself to talk with him. One day as we were both in the kitchen on separate tasks, he spoke to me in a quiet voice, asking where I would go next. I replied, and we started a conversation. At one point I told him about a friend that was doing her field work for her anthropology degree on the Navajo reservation. I told him that I was an anthropologist, and wondered what he thought of them. He took a deep breath and looked at the ceiling. He was kind, and said that there were some that are good, but that some take without asking, and disturb things that were not meant to be disturbed. I asked how I, as a white person could be in closer solidarity with Native American movements. To this, there was no easy answer, and in response he began to recount to me his journey, one that would take him through a small kitchen in New Mexico, talking to an ignorant white kid from California.

He had grown up on the reservation. And as a young man realized that he had quite a talent for baseball, he could run fast and hit far. But whenever his team would play border towns—meaning towns on the border with the reservation—he would always ask himself why the other teams had bleachers, dugouts, clean uniforms, and nice equipment. All he ever had was a dusty field. He would ask his parents and his grandparents why, and they would simply reply that that was the way things were. Gerry had more questions, and only ever received “I don’t know” answers. All these unanswered questions led him to doubt the wisdom of his people. He began to notice how the blacks and the Latinos were treated by the whites, and began to understand. This was something he felt was real, and he began to direct his hatred toward whites, and started getting into fights. He showed me the scar on his wrist, his nose, and his eye brow. He felt that his situation was hopeless, and began to drink heavily. He was in and out of jail many times, and had to rely on family members to bail him out. At some point he began to tire of the never ending cycle of destruction that he had put himself in, and one night while in jail, made a promise to God that he would turn his life around in order to help others. He faced many trials along the way, but eventually gave up alcohol and drugs, fighting, and most of all hatred. He began to understand why things were the way they were, and began looking for ways to make them better.

The Navajo man’s pedagogy utilized his whole body and face to express the emotions of others, and to illustrate his frustration. I didn’t really get a straight answer to my question that day, but we had many more conversations throughout the two week course and the wisdom of his stories became apparent. Solidarity is understanding the other so that they do not seem so other anymore. It was teaching me his ways. He had taken a life that was destined for ruin, and turned it into one that was successful. He shifted from draining society, to regenerating it; a paradigm of consumption, to one of production. Which is illustrated perfectly by something he said one day in class when we were getting a little apocalyptic. My Navajo friend raised his hand and said: we may be surrounded by shit, but it is our job to turn it into compost. His life is a perfect example of what Permaculture is all about. Shepparding a society that is on a crash course with disaster, to one that is sane, rational, and above all sustainable.

One night we kneeled over stones and made hurricanes with our hands to make fire in the ancient way. In my mind, a hand drill was almost fictional, could anyone really actually do that? But he could, with large calloused hands he drew smoke from the charring wood beneath his drill and turned it into fire. When I tried it, well, there was less smoke and no fire.

One day when the class had planned a day hike to see some petro glyphs in a nearby cave, my friend decided to stay behind out of respect for the tribes that had left them. I approached him quietly, and asked if it offended him that we were going. He was kind, and said no, that for us it was a learning experience. But for him, he had been taught that there are places one must not go. That there are spaces that are sacred, a concern that must have been at the heart of his ambivalence toward anthropologists; they came in handy sometimes, but mostly they were just whites looking for an adventure, a place to dig, a people to study. Sacredness and boundaries really are foreign concepts to the Western mind, which is dominated by a history of frontier, discovery, and invention.

At the end of the two weeks, I was grateful for my Navajo friend’s wisdom though still unsure how to proceed. I told him that perhaps I could help raise some money for the ailing schools, or for the local baseball teams. He smiled and nodded appreciating the effort. As we said our goodbyes, I looked at him and said, ‘The irony of the situation is that for 400 years whites have been trying to save your people in one way or another. But when the shit hits the fan, it will be your people who save us.’ He liked this idea, laughed, and disappeared into his large Dodge truck.

Provost, Provos and Provo

Provost: (1785-1850)
A French Canadian Fur Trapper. The first what man to see the Great Salt Lake. He narrowly escaped death at the hands of “savages.” Where Provo, Utah got its name.

Provos:
The radical Dutch counter-culture movement that exploded onto the European stage in the early 1960s which created virtual panic for the national government and local authorities. The Provos were a radical group of freethinkers; inspired by anarchism, Dadaism, and radical philosophy. They used non-violence and performance art called “happenings” to provoke reactions from the local police, working towards social change. The group was officially formed on May 25, 1965 by anarchist Roel Van Duyn and others who quickly began organizing around the international anti-war movement. In their brief manifesto they proclaim: "It is our task to turn their [the state’s] aggression into revolutionary consciousness." The group’s tactics are generally associated with “Situationism” and the work of Guy Debord, who authored Society of the Spectacle a Marxist inspired critique of industrial society’s obsession with consumption. The groups loosely defined mission was to break the strangle hold capitalism had on society through creative action directed locally. The Provos were a mixture of radical leftists, Marxists, street kids, and artists. Many were anti-work, and praised the writings of Paul Lafargue who penned The Right to Laziness. But most were more politically active, writing anti-monarchy leaflets, organizing demonstrations, and publishing a magazine. One Provo even landed himself on the city council in Amsterdam.

The Provos are most famous for their series of “white plans” of which the white bicycle was the most popular. The plan called for the prohibition of cars from the city’s center and the strategic placing of white community bicycles that would be maintained by the police. The group even donated fifty bicycles that they had painted white, but which were quickly confiscated by the authorities and the plan never materialized. Other white plans included the white chimney, which called for filters to be placed on all large smoke stacks in order to reduce air pollution, and other white plans that called for better health care for women, legalizing squatting, and disarming police officers. One plan even proposed that victims of car accidents be immortalized in the pavement by outlining their bodies in white paint. The so-called "traffic terrorism of a motorized minority" would thus become an ever-present reminder of the violent potential of the automobile.

As the movement grew, the police began to react more and more violently, which created a mystique for the group who were few in numbers but do to media coverage appeared to number in the thousands, which terrified government authorities. During the royal wedding of Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands to a German man who had been a member of the Hitler Youth, police expected a massive terrorist attack by the Provos, and over 25,000 troops were deployed! A newspaper headline even said “The Provos are Attacking!” The Provos ended up lighting off a few harmless smoke bombs, but the police reacted violently and images of the embarrassing incident were printed all across Europe. By 1966 political violence was at its zenith in Amsterdam, hundreds were being arrested, and demonstrations were made illegal. Eventually the group began to faction into more radical elements who supported the use of violence, and some who began to seek political careers within the system. These were criticized for institutionalizing the movement, and after 1967 most had gone their separate ways. The Provos dissipated into political and social obscurity. Today the Provos are survived by the Kabouters (gnomes) a leftist political party in Holland.

Provo:
The Utah city with 105,166 people. Most conservative city in America with over 100,000 people. 88.52% white. Home to BYU, the LDS MTC, and a host of other Mormon-specific acronyms (mostly surrounding dating).

Vignette

I just started working at the Provo City Water Sources Department. Every Morning we stop at a gas station, Mavericks. There are usually a lot of people there, getting gas for the day, buying coffee. I see coke trucks and other mechanical beasts of burden. There is a gaggle of sea gulls that circle overhead. One day a man in a taxi drove off with the pump in the tank. He stopped suddenly and ran out shaking his head to put the pump back. As we drove away, we passed a McDonalds with a DVD rental machine outside, there was already a man standing confused in front of it, getting his media fix for the day. We pass a large truck with a Lexus add on the side, a car in nature, whizzing down a country road. A car in its natural habitat. Our foul attempt to reconnect to the nature we destroy at 60 MPH. On the radio, the report talks about the recent Starbucks share holder conference, a gathering of the faithful in times of trouble. The audience erupts in applause as the CEO takes center stage and prophesies of future growth and innovation. I feel comforted that their stock has fallen 45% in the last year. The quicker the economy crashes the sooner we can get back to what matters most. The announcer’s voice explores the idea of an ethical stock market that would not invest in Sudan for example. A glossy stock broker’s voice chimes in with a sneer at how ridiculous it would be for a stock person to have to think about morals AND profits.