On Trees

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” ― Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen ind Gedichte

Marquesia macroura in Northwestern Province, Zambia

Pseudotsuga menziesii in Montana, USA

I loved that passage about trees by Hermann Hesse. It sort of reminds me of Rupert Sheldrake's ideas about morphic resonance. It's like my monkey body has relic form due to millions of years of close interaction with trees like opposable thumbs and eyes that see many shades of green. Trees have dangling fruits, provide shade, have fire adaptation, and protection from exposure that they evolved in their forms by having a symbiotic relationship with primates. You see this in bold red print in Africa. There is so much information in a tree. It is a living record that emanates wisdom. Our ability as humans to evolve is in a lot of ways connected to the way we interact with trees. We have forgotten that we are children of the old mother nature and that evolutionary forces made us into what we are. That's exactly what nature says to me every day. That I am supposed to be challenging myself physically and spiritually the same way that a tree does because I have a partnership with that tree. It is a part of me, and I am a part of it. We are essential to each other, respectful of each other, and responsible for each other. It tells me that if I kill something, I am responsible for its life. How can we expect that we will be able to overcome the challenges of the future if we ignore the millions of years of our symbiotic relationship with other organisms that undoubtedly made us human?!! We cannot overcome this fact, we just can't! We have sure tried to deny it though!! We will never overcome our own chemical makeup and the fact that we are made of cells, and DNA, and atoms, and that all of this is at the mercy of nature. How can a few thousand years of dominator culture suppress or make us unconscious of what happened for many millions of years before that? The knowledge of what happened for many millions of years before dominator culture oozes out of nature. It screams, begging to be heard. Once you hear it, you can't deny it is there. It strikes the deepest fear and opens a terrifying black hole the size of the universe. It shows you that nothing can be measured. It forces you to wholly submit. It is maternal. But if it is frightening, it must be worth exploring. It is still in the subconscious of every human being, but we have to learn to deconstruct culture, especially culture that preaches fear as a motivating force. Across the entirety of humanity, this is the ONLY idea that is constant. It is omnipresent. It is the thing that makes us Homo sapiens.

Road Sharing, taking back the streets

I really have to take some time to talk about what is in my opinion, the only environmental issue that really matters. The issue that is the root cause of nearly all of our environmental and public health problems across the world. Yes, it's CAR CULTURE!!!

Nine of the ten largest corporations on our planet are either oil/energy companies or auto manufacturers. The other one, which is sitting at number two behind Royal Dutch Shell, is Walmart, which is where you drive to in your car you just filled up with gasoline to go to in order to buy things to fill up your house. There is an incoceivably massive amount of power behind these corporations. They invest billions selling consumer/dominator/car (whatever you want to call it) culture to consumers, and are recording record profit even in times of worldwide economic despair. It's pretty obvious that car culture was invented by corporations for the engineering of their own profit at the expense of other living things and deepening the dominator culture that exists because of the monumental chasm of ignorance and disconnect that has been inserted between consumers and the realities of industrial production. The other industries that are intimately associated with car culture are also recording record profits since 2008; especially fast food, pharmaceuticals, and banks. If you want more examples or evidence of this, send me a message.

There is now a serious movement in Manila to release the grip that car culture has on the city. The car culture is much different here, than in the United States because only two percent of Filipinos own vehicles, compared to 89% in the United States. Far fewer people actually depend on car culture in the Philippines, but just as many people buy into it. Most people use public or shared transportation conveyances in Manila, jeepneys, shared taxis, taxis, and tricycles. The roads in Manila are not designed for the extremely heavy use they get. It is generally extremely unsafe to walk or ride a bicycle in Manila because there is little infrastructure that is dedicated for those methods of transportation. Bad air quality along main streets and the heat also make people unwilling to walk or cycle.

I urge anyone, not just Filipinos, to think about the lifestyle benefits that would come from allocating more of the roads to bicycle and pedestrian traffic. This isn't about painting lines and slogans on the streets and sidewalks. This is about actually participating in a shedding of the de facto car culture. Manila is a densely populated city, so this cultural transformation, if anything, makes MORE sense here than in most of the other larger cities in the world.  Lack of exercise and bad air quality are contributing to many of the health issues that people are experiencing in the Philippines.

       The cities of the present must be designed more thoughtfully and take into account what we now understand about the requirements for sustainable human life. People are discovering the errors of the unchecked globalized industrial models of the past and a technological revolution is being awakened that combines "archaic" values and a democratic technic. This is about retraining ourselves about how we can have civilization without dependence on profit, greed, car culture, or on oil period. It's all about what actually happens on the streets, not what we talk about on the internet. There is no new information involved here. The information has been consciously and intentionally suppressed by those who stand to profit from its suppression. I realize the irony, and you could even argue hypocrisy, of me using a computer and the internet, which both implements of globalization that require electricity, to make this argument, but we are going to have to figure out how to de-globalize our technology systems to be more sustainable. We just have to actually do it. We already know how to do it. It's not impossible. I really urge people to give this movement a shot and see what it can do for their lives. The benefits outweigh the sacrifices. Start small. Be thoughtful. Be intentional.

http://greenphils.com/2014/02/12/road-revolution/

http://www.environmentphilippines.com/2011/12/green-living-road-revolution-making.html

Spider fighting season almost here

I knew already about the national passion for cockfighting in the Philippines. In seemingly every available open space in Manila, including highway medians, there is a rooster tied to a rope or in a small cage. You see men carrying roosters around, pointing and grooming their roosters, and shops dedicated entirely to supplying feed, medicine, and equipment for cockfighting. But I just discovered yesterday that spider fighting is also a national sport. I really didn't believe it until I saw it. Apparently spider fighting occurs in the Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and China.

In the Philippines, it seems to be mostly done by children, but adults also participate. Two female spiders of the genus Araneus are placed on a stick. The spiders are aggressive toward one another, so they will try to remove the challenger. The spider that falls to the ground first loses the round, and the first spider to win three rounds wins the match. People collect the spiders in the forest, so this activity is only conducted in the summer months. (March - September) It's also more popular in the summer because children are out of school. The best spiders can be sold for 100 pesos or more ($2), and people bet as much as they want on the matches.

Gambling is very popular in the Philippines and throughout Southeast Asia. I've been told that people in the Philippines fight chickens, spiders, dogs, and even horses. In the U.S., fighting of animals is illegal and there is a big cultural stigma associated with it. The case of NFL football player Michael Vick, convicted of dog fighting in 2008, brought the issue of dog fighting into the national spotlight in the U.S.. I see many people lined up at OTBs and lottery ticket dealers on pay day here in the Philippines.

As easy as it is to label animal fighting as brutal and cruel, there are several legitimate arguments to made that it is no more cruel or brutal than modern animal husbandry. A for-profit industrialized agricultural model requires the disconnection of the process and the consumer. Large-scale industrial animal husbandry operations are arguably much more cruel and brutal than fighting, and have a vested interest in hiding this from the consumer. There is also the argument that the willingness to fight is in the genetics of these animals, and that animal fighting has occurred in the wild for millions of years outside of human control or observation. Arguably, the consumers and producers that participate in the for-profit industrialized agricultural model are no less guilty of cruelty to animals than people who fight animals.