1-11-11 and the Garden [original posted January 11, 2011 – 5:13 pm]

The number 11 has energy that calls to me. It has always been so. This day, so far, is no exception. Already in email a very special letter has arrived, from my dear colleague and friend, Zinai Shi, the vice director of the Luminary Buddhist Monastery of Taiwan. Then, a phone call from one of the founders of an ecovillage which is committed to permaculture, here in New England, and which I was able to visit this past weekend.

Permaculture is not new to my Buddhist friends. One of my favorite photos of my dear departed mother is from a visit by my parents to Taiwan, when we spent a night at the rudimentary rural temple complex. Mother was very uncomfortable on the tatami mats with no mattress and only a few duvets. There was a laywoman from the area who stayed in that room, living at the temple to help with the gardening. She was very devout and prayed aloud in the sacred language with her beads, which frightened my mother. When she stopped sobbing, I learned she worried I was becoming a Buddhist. Rather than ask why this would be such a disaster, I only tried to reassure her. Although, when the huge gong immediately next to our resting place called the sisters to prayer at 4 am, her anxieties began all over again.

After breakfast one of the nuns who speaks excellent English took us on a tour. When Mother saw their garden, completely free of pesticides and weed killers, wholly organic, her face finally lit up into a wonderful smile, and from that moment on, she was able to relax and relate to those shaved-head women. A connection had been made.

The photo here is one view inside the wonderful multi-seasonal garden at the entrance of the Rodale Institute, which is visited by many for education and enjoyment. Ancestors from my mother’s family are buried in a small, brick-walled cemetery there, because eight generations of her ancestors owned that land before the Rodale family bought it. Mother understood gardening. And that served as the bridge for her to relate to my friends, the Luminary Buddhist nuns of central Taiwan.

Only recently, I pointed a friend in Asia to the Perelandra garden website, a co-created garden I want to visit someday.
Perelandra in Virginia, USA
Machaelle Small-Wright, whose vision created Perelandra and who continues to teach about the relationship of our species and the living planet called Earth, once said a garden is not possible without human activity. Gardens don’t start themselves. Sure, you might trip over a zucchini vine while on a walk through a nature preserve, but only if a seed got transported there by a generous bird and managed to derive nourishment enough to grow. It's a garden only if humans somehow were involved.

Like permaculture, gardens do not need to be on an outdoor plot of soil. Gardens are wherever human beings decide to combine the elements provided by nature to create something new and useful, according to Machaelle. When we create a garden, or a farm, or even just grow some herbs or bulbs on a windowsill or balcony, plants will flourish more when we honor them, and consider them entities with which we are co-creating something useful to the cosmos.

When I was growing up on the farm, this time of year the seed catalogs began to arrive. Vegetables, fruits, herbs, all appeared in bright colors and many variations. These became, for me, the stuff of wonderful day dreaming. I miss those. They beckoned us to go on during gray cold winter days. Browsing them counteracted despair. They were the heralds of life as a garden.

This is a gray cold winter day in my life, as the farm that has been in the family for generations, lovingly husbanded by my parents, has been sold to another family. For some, the money mattered more than the vision or the family ties. I will do what I can with what remains to me to insure that the vision does not die. I’m still searching for a physical location in which to invest myself, but for the moment, this writing is enough.

In winter, indoors, I speak with, and listen to, my poinsettias. In the tropics they are considered a weed, a wild plant. Now, they epitomize the festive season, a superb example of what can happen when humans honor the spirit of a plant!

Iron comes from exploding stars

Iron comes from exploding stars. Not as bullets, of course, but as molecules.

The following quotation is from the Max Planck Institut in Germany:

Where does iron come from? According to astrophysicists, iron, like all other heavy elements, is created in the center of massive stars, and is expelled into space once these stars explode as supernovae at the end of their lives. The material then mixes with the interstellar matter and may form new stars and planetary systems. Our solar system was formed after several generations of stars and therefore contains enough heavy elements like iron, oxygen etc. to form Earth-like planets and to sustain life.

Cast iron. Shackles. Magnets. Cemetery fences. Cutlery. Patio furniture. And, hemoglobin. Just a few things that come to mind. Not immediately poetic imagery.

That last one, hemoglobin, gives me pause. The iron in my blood. It is once again obvious that my very being is due to stardust, intertwined in cosmic relationships.

Blood relationships. When humans amass or procreate enough units, tribes are the result. Naming, identity, is usually based on blood relationships.

Relationships also define organizations. People are attracted when there are open and welcoming relationships, or at least the promise of such. We know who we are by deciding to whom we are related. It’s what you see and sense when you enter a Sunday morning gathering of people who value relationships. Warm, expansive, non-intrusively inquisitive, multiple orbits of relationships.

What would it mean if all tribes everywhere knew, really knew, that the very stuff of life, blood, is derived from stardust? Related to stardust? Parented by stardust?

Iron as metal, forged in fire, can be formed into many items. Red blood cells are shared by all creatures with spines, except ice water fish. So, I’m pretty directly related, by blood, to all of those creatures that can bleed. And to those which use oxygen, because what hemoglobin does, carry oxygen around.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, every time someone wants to sing or preach about the redeeming blood of Jesus, for instance, if the singers or preachers were first reminded that blood is blood because of hemoglobin, which is found in red blood cells, which consists of iron that attracts oxygen, and which came from stars that burned so hot they exploded iron all over the universe?

Membership organizations focus on blood relationships and sometimes to the exclusion of others. All too often the exclusion is intensified into violence. Families, tribes, churches, ethnic groups, nations. The fault is not the blood relationships. If only we will remember to thank the stardust.

Some ancient poetry. . . I commanded your ancestors when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, from the iron-smelter (Jeremiah 11.4)

Originally posted Jan 1, 2011, slightly edited with new photo of supernova.

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Why the internet works: a parable for pre-digital humans

The photo is a tweenbot, a cardboard smiley-face on wheels with a little motor that can only move straight ahead. As you will see in the video below, it also has a little flag that explains where it wants to go. The tweenbot is one way to understand how the internet works. The world of internet communication rests on unknown and unseen people performing random acts of kindness.

The whole story is in the videos linked below. I discovered this story because I was complaining about how difficult it is to explain the internet. Members of generations who are older than credit cards seem to shy away from, or distrust, the internet. Telephones I can explain, because phone lines are easy to see, up on poles along every country road. Cell phones have towers, and most of us understand radio waves. But how does that email and file attachment get from my computer in Hong Kong to a computer on a desk in Yangon, or in a café in Caracas, or on a farmer’s laptop in a dairy barn in Wisconsin? Or even all those places at once? How does it travel, and who owns the highway? And people really send money that way? That’s pretty scary.

A friend sent me the link to this talk about the internet. I broke it into two parts to make it easier to put into this post. I’ve put a few phrases on each section as markers about the content.

The Internet as Acts of Kindness – Part One

topics include: why bumblebees can’t fly; 3 old dudes who created the web; who runs the internet and where do they live; the ‘net and human rights, political and personal

The Internet as Acts of Kindness – Part Two

topics include: hitchhiking; mosh pits; tweenbots; ride-sharing; couch-surfing, and why the worldwide web works

43 people, complete strangers, helped the bot travel this path

Sometimes we who are in a later phase of life tend to look backward through our experiences and feel that social conditions, like our joints and hairlines and various other life mechanisms, have deteriorated. Is it true that people have changed for the worse?  This video presents evidence that cheered me up immensely.  I can’t go back to the cozy telephone party-line world of my childhood. But then, it wasn’t always comfortable either.  There’s something positive to the secular anonymity that Harvey Cox wrote about in the early 1960s. Party-lines can be a little restricting! When your village knows everything that goes on, it’s hard to blaze a new trail. It can be difficult to welcome those who are not "PLU", People-Like-Us.

Manhattan is a secular, anonymous environment in most ways. People who live there seem to have perfected the art of avoiding eye contact with anyone else on the sidewalk. But the little straight-line-only cardboard robot with the smiley face traveled all the way across the park. Forty-three random strangers along its path helped it. The tweenbot is how the internet works.  And it reminds me that maybe being human has not changed that much, and a little cardboard traveler has showed us the way of the future.
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Links for those who want to know more about Jonathan Zittrain’s perception of the internet and Kacie Kinzer’s tweenbot experiment

Jonathan Zittrain’s personal blog: The Future of the Internet

Talks and blogs on TED by or about Jonathan Zittrain

Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbot Page

Final note: this post is based on talks given by Prof Zittrain in 2008. The tweenbot experiment took place in 2009. We don't know whether or how the Occupy Wall St encampments, especially in Manhattan, may relate to this insight. But it doesn't matter. It's a way to talk about the internet. It remains to be seen if Congressional legislation in late 2011 will succeed in destroying "random acts of kindness" as a stream of communication around the world.