Day

Dear Reader,

I have been learning to tell time.

For our D&D games, I have been researching how the heathen Anglo-Saxons told time. They used two calendars in parallel: the Julian calendar, which was an early draft of ours, and their own lunar calendar. Learning about them in enough detail to use them in our games has taught me how much I took for granted about how we tell time today.

Designing a calendar system is not easy. The different units by which we measure time do not divide into one another evenly, and we have no fixed frame of reference for measurement.

For example, what is a day?

One naive answer is twenty-four hours, but that turns out to be circular reasoning because an hour is defined as a fraction of a day, and has no other natural meaning. The day is the natural unit, but what is it?

A second naive answer is that it is the span of time from midnight one day to midnight the next, but this turns out to be the first answer in disguise. After all, when is midnight? It is a repeating point in time spaced out every twenty-four hours, which takes us back to an hour being an arbitrary fraction of a day, and back to the original question, what is a day?

A third naive answer is that it is the time from sunset one day to sunset the next, or from sunrise to sunrise. This captures an important element of the definition of a day, but not all of it. We do know the sun rising and setting is involved, but the time of sunrise and sunset ebbs and flows through the seasons, with the daylight longer in the summer and shorter in the winter. Yet we know the answer we are looking for describes something of approximately constant length throughout the year. This answer does not satisfy that criterion, but it does correctly identify that our definition is related to the relationship between the sun and the earth, particularly to the cycles of day and night. Any definition of a day that runs out of sync with the cycles of day and night cannot be right. So again I ask what is a day?

A fourth answer, a more astronomical answer, is one complete rotation of the planet Earth, but this turns out to be subtly inaccurate. What counts as a full rotation? If we watch the second hand move from 12 around back to 12 on a clock, we can see that we are thinking about a complete rotation as returning to the starting point on a fixed reference. We have no fixed reference for the Earth's rotation, but if we approximated one, say by using the stars, or by projecting an imaginary frame of reference on space around us, the answer is still wrong. The result of doing this would be that over the course of a year, midnight would rotate around through the day as the earth revolves around the sun. Midnight would sometimes be at night, sometimes at sunrise or sunset, sometimes during the day, gradually shifting with the seasons. This seemingly reasonable answer, which is the one given by all the people I know who think they are smart people, is mathematical and astronomical but false.

A more correct answer (but no promises) is that a day is slightly more than one complete rotation of the planet Earth. The line of the Earth's orbit around the sun is our guide to the length of a day. In the almost-day it takes for the Earth to spin completely around, the Earth has also moved just under one degree around its orbit line, changing the sun's position with respect to the Earth by one degree. For the times of day to stay stable, for example for midnight to remain in the middle of the night and noon to remain in the middle of the day, the start and end of each day must remain oriented toward the sun. Since during the course of one day the Earth's revolution around the sun changes its orientation by almost one degree, the Earth must rotate just a little bit more (almost one degree) than one complete rotation to compensate, to line back up with the orbit line and with the sun. That way, noon stays mid-day and midnight stays...well, you get the picture.

If this explanation does not make sense to you, ask me in the comments and I will explain it differently.

It is easy to explain what a day is with a picture but even with words it is pretty easy to explain. So why do we not explain it this way in first grade? Everyone should know what a day is. Why do even most intelligent people define it incorrectly?

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Extra credit: Explain why a day is a about a degree more than one complete rotation instead of about a degree less. What would have to be different for a day to be about a degree less than a complete rotation?

Thirteenth Dose

Dear Reader,

Enough with the silence! This year has not been about depression, about silence, withdrawal. It has been a good year so far. I started strength training at the start of the year. Beverly and I started scheduling free time at the same time. I started taking a nutritional supplement called EMPowerPlus on February 7th (and if you suffer from depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia, you must check out the TrueHope website). I now keep a daily log and chart my sleep, exercise, eating habits, hours worked, and so on. Whether it has been one or more of these things, or all of them together, I have not felt depressed since last year.

My blog silence for the past three weeks has been due not to depression but to ambition. I was trying too hard, delaying my posts until I could devote real time to them, with the result that I sketched or outlined four blog entries to every one I posted. I have decided to change the character of my blog to be less formal, more personal, and especially more regular. The quality of composition will go down, but I hope the increased frequency and personal emphasis will increase the blog's value overall. I will try to post more or less daily, but I make no promise.

I have had a sore throat on and off since I wrote last, and continuously since Monday of last week. Today it finally turned into bronchitis. There are two remarkable things about this. First, for the last two decades whenever I get a sore throat I get full bronchitis the very next day; to hold it at bay for a week before succumbing shows real improvement. Second, I am not depressed; I always get depressed when I get sick, but not this time. My mood and programming productivity are carrying on right through the illness. It is weird, but good.

My WorldVistA work is going very well lately. I am programming, updating the website, writing policy documents, keeping up with email, making and answering phone calls, reading books on how to professionalize our corporation, and more.

The weekend of February 18th, Jerry and I camped and hiked at Olympic National Park. We camped at Lake Ozette in his VW Bus, right on the shore of the lake. We hiked west through the rainforest to the coast, then south along the coast from Cape Alava to Sand Point, and then back east through the rainforest. We saw eagles and ravens, black-tailed deer, sea stacks among the crashing waves, miles of gorgeous coastline, and more. What we did not see was a single cloud the whole time. Bizarre but wonderful!

Because of the sore throat, Beverly, Kathy and I have only played Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) once during this time, on Wednesday, February 23rd, but it was a great session. It was our forty-seventh session playing together with these characters. Rhonwen, played by Kathy, and Mireldis, played by Beverly, along with their companions, played by me, are searching the Summerlands for a lost sacred spring. Their anticipated showdown with a malicious woman they had not seen since the fourth session was interrupted when the Summerlands were rocked by devastating earthquakes that preceded the eruption of a dragon from underground. The dragon was powerful but feral, grabbing characters and demanding to know where the sacred spring is, claiming it can smell the spring on them. In the end, the dragon released them but decided to follow them, convinced that they will find the spring for him. When next we play together, the players are concerned about how they will find the spring without revealing its location to the dragon, who the characters sense means the spring ill. It promises to be fun, but it will have to wait until I am over the bronchitis. Game mastering (GMing) is fun, but more tiring than work. It's like writing a script for a play, but then when the curtain goes up having to improvise instead based on highly creative but willful actors. I love it, but I have to go into it with physical and emotional energy and clarity of mind, as well as good notes on the characters, setting, and what I thought might happen. I just cannot do that when my body is fighting off an illness.

I have been reading The Lost Gods of England by Brian Branston and Anglo Saxon Herb Garden by Peter C Horn (for my D&D game), Guidebook for Directors of Nonprofit Corporations by the American Bar Association (for WorldVistA), A Vision of a Living World by the revelatory Christopher Alexander (for wisdom), The Constitution by Page Smith and Cracks in the Constitution by Ferdinand Lundberg (for my duty to my country), Collapse by Jared Diamond (for my duty to humanity), and A Gift of Sanctuary by Candace Robb (partly for D&D, partly for fun). I rotate from book to book with my mood, and during this time only finished the first two on the list, though I will refer back to them over and over over the months ahead to help prepare stories for our game.

At the end of February, with the help of Mike Ryan (who loaned us the DVDs and tapes) I introduced Beverly to the new Battlestar Galactica TV series, which we both enjoy. We have also been watching Veronica Mars, House, The West Wing, Desperate Housewives, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Queer Eye for the Straight Girl. In addition, I have been watching some fun Anime shows recommended by Jerry Goodnough and Brian Lord, along with some truly dreadful horror movies off the SciFi channel.

Musically, my taste lately has run back to classical. I was listening to a lot of Vivaldi last year, but so far this year it is Beethoven's piano sonatas, one after another. I never knew more than Moonlight (#14 in C sharp minor, which I still love) well growing up, so this has been a series of discoveries for me, fixating on a single sonata for weeks after I finally get it and fall in love with it, then moving on to another. At the moment my love is for Pastorale (#15 in D major). I love how it sounds like it begins in the middle of the performance, how quietly it starts, how the main melody has an odd cadence as though it were improvised, as though the pianist were hesitating and then choosing to play something unexpected but beautiful. I love how the first movement develops from this quiet but sweet melody up to a compelling climax before working its way back home. I like the odd mood of the second movement, its strange and slightly mischievous walking theme making it sound like the perfect music for a caper film. The third movement is fine, but does not yet move me as much as the first two, and the fourth movement I do not yet know as well. Other Beethoven sonatas I previously discovered and frequently bounce back to include Tempest (#16 in G major) and Pathetique (#8 in C minor, which I got hooked on after hearing it at The Secret Garden bed and breakfast in Eugene, Oregon when we stayed there last October for Jerry's thirtieth birthday). When I'm not exploring his sonatas, it's back to his Fifth or Ninth symphony (the latter of which just might be my favorite single work of music), or his incomparable violin concerto. These days, it's all Beethoven all the time, and usually just the piano sonatas.

Today, I spent several hours at the office unpacking boxes of books, magazines, and binders full of notes, sorting them, and filing some in bookcases. My brother Rob spent an hour helping me out (thanks!), and after he left I finished. Linda gave me a lift to and from the office so I could bring our vacuum cleaner and get rid of sawdust, pine needles, gravel, and other detritus. Now it's clean and pretty in there, and with the phone line working, the phone recharged, the desk assembled, and my crucial references found and unpacked, I'm ready for business. While I was there, Linda drove my car down to the Toyota dealership in Renton for a much-needed servicing, and she will pick it up for me again tomorrow.

This evening I canceled gaming again due to the bronchitis (and I called Jerry to cancel our Oregon backpacking trip this weekend, and James to cancel strength training tomorrow morning). Instead, Kathy came over and with Beverly we watched the end of second season of Gilmore Girls, and I saw my first Marilyn Monroe movie--Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. We ate Indian food from Chutneys, and I drank pot after pot of herbal tea. Now Beverly has gone to bed and I am staying up long enough to finish typing up this blog entry.

Overall, this has been a good three weeks for me. I hope things are well with you, too, Dear Reader.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Silence

Dear Reader,

I used to believe friendly, sincere communication could bring people together, could overcome prejudice and misunderstanding to resolve our problems.

I was naive. Not everyone can truly communicate.

I have known people who want to understand each other, want to learn from each other, are willing to change their beliefs in response to new information. I love people like that. They teach me, learn from me, explore ideas with me, and give me hope. Such people have characters with strong doses of humility, curiosity, playfulness, and wonder. They remain interested in other people and new ideas, and want to learn more, believe they should grow beyond their present limits. They seek the truth.

Unfortunately, I have known too many people who do not seek the truth, who believe they already know the truth. To the self-righteous, other opinions can only be wrong or irrelevant, sometimes threats. These people think of themselves as pragmatic, as not wasting time in pointless self-questioning. They get things done. They make things happen. And in their satisfaction with their own beliefs, they repel the truth. As a result, the things they make happen are often the wrong things.

When I can reach out to people and communicate, it is because humanity feels to me like the first kind of person, the open-minded, the engaged, and I feel hope. When I cannot, humanity is feeling to me like the second kind, the closed-minded, the arrogant, and I despair.

As my friends and relatives know, there are many periods in my life when I do not return calls or emails, when I am silent. It is as though my presence in their lives ebbs and flows, as if I appear and disappear like a haunting. So, too, does my hope for humanity ebb and flow, my sense of hopeful purpose. Too often, as was the case in July and August of last year, disappointing attempts to communicate with people or prolonged exposure to closed-minded people trigger an ebb, erode my hope for us all, and I retreat back into silence.

I am a flawed person, but I do have some gifts that I want to put at the disposal of humanity. I want to engage with my species, to leave the world better than I found it, and I am willing to sacrifice my own interests to do so. The only thing I ask is that humanity inspire me to give myself to its cause, that my species be worthy of such sacrifice.

When I feel hopeful about us, when our future seems golden, my hope draws me out into laughter and song, into dialog with friends and family, into working for the common good.

At other times, only silence seems golden.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Strength Training

Dear Reader,

Twenty years of sitting on my butt programming in an office have taken their toll, so I have embarked on a first for me: strength training. I train for an hour Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 7:15 a.m. at Urban Kinetics on Capital Hill. James Park, who I met through our mutual hair stylist, is my patient and supportive instructor. This is my fifth week, and I have initially committed to ten weeks. James is moving south to attend UCLA, and I will probably extend my ten weeks to include as much time as he has left in Seattle. The only variable is whether my current work contract produces funds in time, as I am stone broke at the moment. Fortunately, I paid in advance for the ten weeks.

In my life, my longest lasting sports passions have been karate, running, and hiking. I have done a little yoga off and on in the last few years (and I want to do more), likewise a little jazzercise five years ago. I bicycled everywhere as a kid, and for ninth-grade physical education I joined the swim team. I played basketball in middle school. For the last two decades I would go through brief periods of dedication to getting back into shape, but they never lasted. Walking Green Lake has been my exercise staple starting a year after we moved into our new house, but I did not keep it up consistently. Monthly backpacking trips with Jerry have been more reliable, and for about six months I was going on weekly hikes in the Cascades with my brother Rob. (I very much want to resume those hikes.)

Strength training offers me something new, a balanced, muscle-centered approach to fitness. Balance is important to me because with a lifetime of walking, off and on, my lower body has always been in better shape than my upper body. Muscle-centering is important because years of comparative inactivity led to muscle atrophy. My body image was set during the years I practiced karate, and my loss of strength over the last two decades has led me to feel at times as though I am inhabiting a stranger's body. Strength training is for me a way to jump-start my return to form, to take a short-cut back home. And that is exactly what my recovering strength feels like to me--returning home. Although I have not yet recovered to where I was at my peak, I have recovered a lot, and I am starting to look and feel myself again. What a relief!

My body image has always been the martial-arts build, not the weight-lifting build, so I was never interested in strength training per se before. My new interest came from struggling against depression. I have been reading about naturopathic approaches to treating depression and came across references to weight training as especially effective against it. I knew my life was out of balance, and I recognized that here in something I had never tried was likely to be an untapped vein of health, the restoration of some balance. When what we are doing is not working for us, the sane thing to do is to try something different, so I have.

So far the results have been encouraging. My mood has improved and proven more resilient in the face of bad days than it has been for years. My creativity is returning; playing Dungeons and Dragons is becoming easier by the week, as is writing. My interest in communicating with people has resurfaced. My endurance is returning, and my strength, and we are working on my flexibility. If we can stretch out my hamstrings and other tight leg muscles enough for me to do the splits, we will have surpassed my old fitness level and achieved something brand new for me. That may still be a long way off, but for the first time in years I feel real hope about it.

I feel hope.

Yours truly,
Rick

Brevity Is the Soul

Dear Reader,

I forgot a bill. I ate a banana. My cat says "yow." Ow.

Yours truly,
Rick

Dirt

Dear Reader,

Dumb as Dirt. Dirt-poor. Dirt-cheap. Dirty.

Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition, defines "dirt" as:

1. Foul or dirty matter: filth, grime, muck. Slang : crud. See CLEAN.

2. Something that is offensive to accepted standards of decency: bawdry, filth, obscenity, profanity, ribaldry, scatology, smut, vulgarity. Slang : raunch. See DECENT.

Oxford English Dictionary Online doesn't get around to defining dirt as soil until the third definition, preceded by excrement and filth, and followed by foulness, metaphorical foulness, and demeaning phrases.

We despise soil, whether we realize it or not. It is one rung above excrement in our repertory of insults, the baseline of worthlessness.

Yet in the funeral expression "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" survives the ancient recognition of the soil as the source of all life, including our own.

Soil, water, air, and sunlight are the main ingredients seeds need to become the plants that support the animal kingdom. Of these, soil is by far the most complex, the most directly responsible in terms of raw materials for the complexity of plants. Seeds provide the blueprint for the adult plant's complexity, air and water provide most of the bulk elements (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and in the case of a few plants nitrogen), and sunlight the energy, but for most plants (those that do not extract nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil) the crucial ingredient for building proteins (nitrogen) and for all plants the majority of the elements they need (calcium, silicon, selenium, zinc, and so on) come from the dirt and only from the dirt. When we eat plants, we are eating transformed air, water, sunlight, and dirt. Since animals eat plants or other animals, the same is true when we eat animals.

We are what we eat. Whether through our umbilical cords from our mothers' bloodstreams, through our mothers' milk after birth, or more directly as we grow older, we eat transformed dirt, and we could not exist unless we did. We are circulating systems of muddy water, air, and light, and all of these ingredients flow into us from the world around us, through us, and back out into the world. Our dependence on dirt is complete and continuous. There are few things upon which our lives are so completely dependent.

Loath as we are to recognize our dependence on dirt, its value to us, not surprisingly we do not understand it very well. Dirt is extremely complex and varied, and we are still learning embarrassingly basic things about it.

For example, only recently did we learn that the vast network of fungus in forest soil is not a parasite, that it is essential for the forest to survive. Filaments of fungi, called hyphae, are fungi's equivalent to plant roots. They are much finer and more numerous than roots, and are much much more efficient at extracting water and nutrients from the soil. Plants and fungi team up to survive. Fungi send out their hyphae to actually penetrate the cell walls of plant roots, creating a single system of roots and hyphae. The fungi can then share their water and nutrients with the plants, and the plants share their sugars with the fungi. Most plants cannot thrive, or in many cases even survive, without the fungi to help them work the soil. We only figured this out recently.

Forest soil is packed with hyphae, an unbelievably complex network of tiny tubes. A single teaspoon of forest soil contains 100 miles of hyphae. Think about that. Go get yourself a teaspoon of sugar. Look at it. Then think about how far away 100 miles of hyphae can reach from where you are right now. Then pack all that distance into the teaspoon you have in your hand. All that complexity, all that capacity to absorb and transport water and nutrients, is just a fraction of what is in that teaspoonful of forest soil. The visible complexity of a forest exists only because of the invisible complexity in its soil.

Inoculation of seedlings with hyphae to help them grow is becoming part of forestry management, but is not yet a regular part of other forms of agriculture. Introduction of this practice is recent and still ongoing, because until very recently we had no idea plants need fungi to thrive. We spent decades trying to exterminate fungi, dosing crops, forests, and gardens liberally with fungicides, not realizing that a healthy hyphae network also produces its own specialized fungicides to kill off hostile fungi. We still know little about the many varieties of fungi in the world and their hyphae networks, but at least now we have a hint about the complexity of the soils they inhabit and thereby create.

What other rudimentary but essential information do we not yet know about soil? If we are still tripping over things as basic as this, we must assume there is more we do not yet even suspect.

What we do know is that we are running out of soil. Our agricultural, grazing, forestry, mining, landscaping, and sewage management practices have accelerated soil erosion to incredible levels. Our hopes for the future--artificial intelligence, curing cancer and poverty, traveling to the stars--will prove futile mirages if we run out of fertile soil first, which should happen within the next hundred years at this accelerating pace.

Our current, soil-wasteful practices are extremely profitable, so we are unlikely to change anything, except perhaps to begin selling the little remaining soil to each other at obscene prices when it becomes scarce, and then to go to war with each other over fertile land after that. China, which has aggressively adopted American farming practices, is consequently running out of soil faster than any other country. What do you suppose a billion people will do when they cannot feed themselves from their own land?

If this seems pessimistic, if you imagine technology will offer a magic fix to this problem, consider that soil building is a very slow process, taking many centuries to recreate a deep, fertile soil bed. Moving soil from place to place, though difficult and expensive, is doable with current technology, but creating new soil from scratch is another matter. Any soil we did mix up from more primitive materials would be missing the many things we do not yet realize are necessary for sustainable agriculture, the other things besides hyphae that we do not yet understand.

Meanwhile, the agricultural soil we do have is increasingly contaminated by salts and poisons as side effects of how intensively we pump resources (like pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers) into the soil to extract crops from it, and by side effects of industrialization (like perchlorate contamination of California's farmland from the leaky Kerr-McGee rocket-fuel factory in Nevada). The quality of the soil we are losing today is inferior to that of our parents and grandparents.

It would be both ironic and typical of our species if we exterminated ourselves by using up a resource that we held in contempt, used as a metaphor for worthlessness. Dirt is worth more than gold, because gold is optional, and dirt is not.

Where is the dirt going? To the oceans. Erosion by wind and water blow and wash much of it off the land. We extract nutrients from agricultural lands when we harvest and ship away the crops to market. Animals that feed off plants do so locally, and they defecate locally, thereby rebuilding the soil near the plants they feed upon. We, however, dump our sewage into the oceans, creating great rivers of soil nutrients that flow from agricultural lands to the bottom of the oceans, via our bodies.

As far as I know, there is little we can do to reverse the soil erosion that has already occurred. Dredging the oceans is impractical, given the amount of fossil fuels we have left, and would doubtless do incredible damage to ocean ecosystems that are already reeling from our unsustainable harvesting of fish, shellfish, and other ocean resources.

What we could conceivably do, though, is drastically reduce soil erosion. We would need to change our industrial practices. We would also need to eliminate poisons from our diet and environment to make our sewage fit to compost back into soil; that would have the added benefit of making us healthier. We would then need to overhaul our sewage management practices to return it to the agricultural lands as fertilizer. Taken together, these changes would help conserve the soil we have left.

Although we will not survive without these changes, none of it is profitable in a market economy, so we will not do it. There are powerful economic incentives for us to argue that it is too soon to tell whether soil loss is a serious enough problem, right up until it is too late to do anything about it. I am betting we will remain too self-involved and short-sighted to register the meaning of soil loss until most of it is gone. After, all, it is just dirt, right?

If we did, though, if by some miracle we made whatever changes are needed to make it possible for our society to value and act on stopping soil erosion, we could then build up the fertility of the soil we have left. A few older cultures were able to conserve and enrich even the faint scraps of soil on steep mountain slopes, farming the same thin soils successfully for centuries. The organic farming movement has helped us relearn old lessons about soil conservation and development. If we applied those practices, we could survive the loss of soil we have sustained to date, and eventually, over the centuries, we could slowly deepen our fertile soil beds, maybe even back to their pre-industrial levels.

We have already damaged the soil so deeply that we have left what will probably be a permanent record in the Earth's geology to show we were here and what we did. If we keep on as we have, our future is rocky. Literally. If we reverse our wasteful soil practices and spend the next few millennia deepening the soil, that too will be writ in the geological record. As a species, we still have time to leave behind us a life-promoting legacy, but we will have to change profoundly to want to do that. We will have to unite around this common goal as a species for millennia, something we have never done.

If we imagine uniting our species around a shared set of core values, if we imagine ten commandments in a sustainable worldwide culture, one of those ten will have to be something like this:

Protect the soil; it is your food, your body, and mother to us all.

When faced with essential but seemingly impossible tasks, I find wisdom in a bumper sticker, of all things, that I see all over Seattle: "Think globally. Act locally." Or as Gandhi said, we must be the change we want to see in the world. Lead by example. Learn about dirt, and slowly change your life by what you learn.

For my part, I have begun with composting, with building up the soil in my own gardens and yard. I also buy organic farm products whenever I can, because organic practices protect the soil more than conventional farming, and few actions we can take match the political impact of changing to whom we give our money; when we buy groceries we vote with our dollars. With the help of our friend Linda, we have begun growing some of our own fruits, vegetables, and herbs. These small steps are only a start, but they are something, and as I learn more about soil I will make more changes.

Dear Reader, let us aspire to become dirt-rich.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Postscript: I am indebted to my uncle, Don Baldwin, for leading by example, for growing his own fruits and vegetables, for nurturing and improving the soil in his gardens year by year, and for showing me what a real cucumber is supposed to taste like. I had no idea what I was missing. Thank you, Uncle Don.

Kaze no Tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind)

Dear Reader,

I recently re-read Kaze no Tani no Naushika (www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/manga/nausicaa.html), translated into English as Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind, by Hayao Miyazaki. It is one of my favorite books, a vast manga (Japanese graphic novel).

Kaze no Tani no Naushika is set in the far future, when in the face of an environmental apocalypse the two largest remaining human kingdoms, the Torumekian Empire and the Dorok Principalities, embark on a self-destructive war over the little remaining habitable land. Our hero is Nausicaä, the daughter of the old king of The Valley of the Wind, a small border kingdom; she is an ecologist who studies the poisonous forests that have covered the Earth. She searches for a way for humanity to survive, but she is drawn reluctantly into the war when Torumekia commandeers her tiny kingdom's last flying gunship and her with it to fight the Doroks.

This only hints at the intricate plot, only the first few chapters of a massive, multi-volume epic, yet the elaborate weave of the plot stays true to a simple, moving, elegant story arc. Like some of my favorite stories, the true significance of the story is revealed in layers as the plot progresses; as more history is revealed, it changes our understanding of everything that has happened. The complex ecology, cultures, and politics eclipse even Frank Herbert's fine work on Dune, and setting the story on Earth gives it a far greater urgency and sting.

I find Kaze no Tani no Naushika more compelling than most science fiction. Miyazaki's dystopian future is the result not just of ecological collapse, but also worldwide nuclear war, both of which occur before our story with the ecological collapse nearing completion as we begin. Then he stirs into this mix venal and corrupt power politics to set the nihilistic wars for dwindling territory in motion. Astonishingly, though, Miyazaki pairs this dark setting and backstory with a bright protagonist who is brilliant, hopeful, earnest, and compassionate. Thus unlike so many dystopias, the tone of this story is not despair but serious hope, the search for morality and life amid war and death. Given our own bleak future and our need to find reason for hope, this combination moves me more than most science fiction stories I have read.

The huge cast of characters is as nuanced and morally sophisticated as in all Miyazaki's stories, yet this subtlety and complexity does not wash them out; the motivation, feelings, and beliefs of even the most minor characters are strong, believable, and deeply involving. Protagonists, antagonists, and background characters alike--Miyazaki draws out their personalities and feelings to make you understand and care about everyone. There is nothing generic about anyone in this story; everyone clearly comes from one of the many cultures he created for this world, yet none of them is a simple cliche rendering of that culture. Nausicaä herself is just a touch super-heroic, a skilled scientist, pilot, and warrior, but her youth, vulnerability, guilelessness, and compassion bring her back within reach, keep her human and keep us involved with her.

I was first introduced to an extremely abridged version of the story in the anime (Japanese animation) movie of the same name (www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/nausicaa/), which was one of the first anime movies I saw. I will always be grateful to my friend Danny Barer for introducing me to this and other anime films in the mid 1980s. In America Miyazaki is better known for his more recent films, such as Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away), Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke), and Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro).

Although I loved the anime from my first viewing of it, its story is so amputated in comparison with the manga that it is less like an adaptation and more like amputating a hand and keeping just the hand. This is not Miyazaki's fault, although both the manga and the anime are his work, aided by Studio Ghibli; adapting the entire story to film would require a movie at least twice as long as Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, perhaps much more. The nature of the conflict and especially the character of Princess Kushana are drastically different, though the setting, initial main characters, and backstory are the same. Like all Miyazaki films, it is visually lush, beautiful, and striking. Abbreviated though it is, I still love it as the closest we are ever likely to come to a film adaptation of the manga.

The black-and-white artwork of this book is gorgeous--crisp, clear, detailed, and supple. Miyazaki uses that clarity to conjure a fantastic world: jungles of enormous fungi, giant insects, armadas of flying ships, ceramic armor, swords, guns, and cannons, striking religious art and costume, convincing foreign script, vast fortresses and cities, swarms of refugees, cavalry clashing among ruins, dogfights between airships amid thunderstorms, children flying kites, old women telling stories, gardens, oases in a desert, windmills, greenhouse laboratories, flightless birds cooing over their eggs, and a fiercely loyal squirrel-fox. Every panel is packed with well-chosen, telling details that fill in Miyazaki's vision of the future, make it feel real and tangible. This is not a comic to be read quickly but studied; you must take the time to let the full impact of each panel be felt. Many of the panels are so beautiful they could be framed and hung on your wall.

The glory of the art is not just in its vivid illustration of setting and character, but in Miyazaki's exciting evocation of passion, movement, and energy. In so much art faces are mere masks, but Miyazaki makes the faces of every character radiate with humanity, move with hopes and worries, moods and thoughts. And physical movement itself is so well rendered--running, flying, leaping, fighting, climbing, falling--that before we know it we feel our hearts pounding and feel the kind of adrenaline we normally only associate with real life or at least moving pictures. Miyazaki even draws raw energy well--wind blowing, explosions, flares, sharp gunshots, low rumbles, sunlight through clouds, wood buckling under pressure, air currents, stench and miasma, cheers of soldiers rising up from towers, a tow cable snapping, the charge of giant insects crashing through city walls, plants sprouting before your eyes. All this passion, movement, and energy, from delicate to overwhelming, courses through the panels, infusing the beautiful static art with vitality. The story's rhythm balances that power with scenes of beauty and quiet contemplation, strengthening both by the contrast.

Miyazaki's work has always shown a surprisingly sophisticated appreciation of the subtle moral and ecological qualities of nature. I say surprising because humans, even the most ecologically-minded, usually flatten and mechanize nature when they try to describe or represent it. I make the same mistake, even though I know enough that I shouldn't, but we are poorly adapted to understanding organic systems and so tend to read the world in terms of objects and linear forces. We imagine the cosmos to be a mere machine, perhaps a relativistic one, perhaps a quantum one, but little more. By contrast, Miyazaki depicts nature's unexpectedly delicate weave of death within life, the total but subtle interdependence of seemingly independent individuals and species upon one another for even basic survival, and the sometimes shocking but life-affirming morality of living systems.

Dear Reader, I hope more of us learn to see the cosmos like that. It is our best hope for survival.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Things Are Not What They Seem

Dear Reader,

Heraclitus wrote "Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears." Polybius, a later Greek writer, summarized this as meaning that vision is the more reliable sense. Modern readers are likely to interpret it the same way. It seems trivial.

Information out of context is noise. The problem is our own lack of context. When we read the rest of Heraclitus and study the culture of other Greek philosophers, we begin to find patterns that cause us to reinterpret what seemed obvious to us.

Two crucial pieces of context change the meaning of this entirely.

First, Heraclitus wrote in paradoxes, riddles, and double entendres. Little he wrote means only what it says on the surface. Heraclitus was later called "The Dark" or "The Obscure" because of this. With experience, we begin to learn to look for what he has encoded. The hidden meaning in his work is often the more important part.

Second, Heraclitus was aristocratic, and like most Greek philosophers deeply distrusted doxa--popular opinion. Numerous other fragments from his On Nature revolve around this theme more explicitly. Popular opinion in ancient Greece was transmitted by speech, which we hear with our ears.

In this fragment he advises us to look with our own eyes for the truth, not to trust to received opinion. He is also saying that the pursuit of truth is a lonely and difficult activity. There are no shortcuts to the truth. You cannot let other people interpret the truth for you. The pursuit of the truth is serious business, too serious to trust to others. Further, he did not say the eyes are accurate, only more accurate. Sometimes you will be wrong about things you investigate yourself directly, just as sometimes received opinion may be right.

This brings us to another crucial layer of meaning--the relationship of his original meaning to our own context today. Two ideas are readily apparent.

First, were he writing today, in our increasingly visual information age, he could not express these ideas in this way, because we are more likely to be exposed to popular or official opinions with our eyes and ears. This succinct statement does not work as well for us. In fact, it would be a challenge to come up with so concise a formulation of these ideas today, given the structure of modern culture.

Second, this implies a distrust of news media at a scale beyond what most modern people are willing to accept. In ancient Greece, speech was the primary mechanism of distributing news and propaganda throughout the culture, as well as gossip and popular opinion. Today, we have corporate media to do the equivalent job. Most moderns assume they are reasonably well informed because they are immersed in such media. Radio, television, books, magazines--Heraclitus advises us not to trust any of this. No matter how it is packaged, the content of our information media remains glorified gossip. This does not mean that we should cut ourselves off from these information sources, only that we should take it for the formalized gossip it is--a witness, but an unreliable one--and investigate for ourselves anything that really matters to us.

Seven words in English, five in the original ancient Greek--their meaning seems obvious and trivial, but the truth of it is hidden and important. The Greek term doxa comes from doke moi, meaning "it seems to me." Encoded within the Greek philosophical disdain for popular opinion is a further distrust of appearances and assumptions, of how things seem to us.

In short, Dear Reader, in this fragment of On Nature, Heraclitus both advises us and also demonstrates that things are rarely what they seem and that the popular interpretations of things are not trustworthy.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Postscript: In my remedial explorations of ancient Greek philosophy to date, Heraclitus emerges easily as my favorite. He is not an easy philosopher to read, as I hope this exploration of a single fragment reveals, and this is among the clearer fragments. Some are perhaps impossible to fully resolve given how little of On Nature is left to us and how unreliable even ancient interpreters of his work prove to be. Nevertheless, many of the remaining fragments eventually reveal themselves to be both profound and poetic, intense concentrations of meaning like philosophical poetry.

I can particularly recommend Philip Wheelwright's book Heraclitus for its interpretations; although even a few of his interpretations miss the original meanings, he nevertheless fully appreciates the philosopher's style and always works to unfold the intended meaning. Likewise, Brooks Haxton wrote a fine translation in Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, which I am reading now.

In the second comment on my previous blog entry, "Logos and Cosmos," my friend David Whitten added this url to a site with translations of Heraclitus's fragments by G. W. T. Patrick: classicpersuasion.org/pw/heraclitus/herpatu.htm. Thanks Dave! I appreciate that each fragment includes English and Greek, as well as the sources. The translations are not as finely tuned as those used in Wheelwright's book, but they at least convey his obscurity and some of his flavor. Unfortunately, for anyone not already deeply familiar with On Nature, reading the fragments can be an unpleasant and misleading experience, so venture on your own with due warning. As I hope this blog entry made clear, with Heraclitus the meanings of things are often not what they seem.

From time to time in future entries I will work to untangle the meaning of other fragments. Dear Reader, you may also ask for my help with specific fragments in comments on this entry and I will gladly do my best to make sense of them for you. Nevertheless, take this fragment to heart and do not overly trust my interpretations either.

Logos and Cosmos

Dear Reader,

Though I do not believe in an afterlife or reincarnation, or God, or Heaven or Hell, neither do I believe in science's empty world, the accidental, meaningless universe. I believe in the cosmos and my place in it.

To make sense of this requires that we delve back to the deeper meanings of a few words.

"Universe" denotes the scientific concept of everything (alternate universes aside). Science's universe is governed by natural laws, but has no intrinsic meaning. What we mean by "universe" fits uncomfortably closely what the ancient Greeks meant by "chaos."

The structure of science, its base assumptions, only permit it to investigate reality in limited ways, heavily slanted toward mechanical analysis of finite, measurable topics. Through the processes of experimentation and analysis, science splits apart reality into tiny pieces, sorts and catalogs them, stitches them back together into a kind of Frankenstein's monster, and calls the results knowledge. This kind of understanding of reality the Greeks called technae, mere use-knowledge, and so our understanding of reality is expressed in terms of how we do or can imagine using reality for our purposes. The purposes themselves, as well as all non-technae aspects of reality, science has little to say about.

The reasons we investigate reality inevitably determine the techniques we use, which in turn inescapably determine the kinds of information generated, and thus determine how reality seems to make sense to us. Because scientific research is funded overwhelmingly by corporations or by government agencies that long ago became dominated by corporate interests (at least in America), science as it exists in the modern world is an arm of industry, above all about investigating reality with regards to how it can be profitably manipulated. The shallow, mechanistic, empty result we call the "universe." Science's "universe" is a homunculus of the cosmos in which most of reality is amputated, and the remainder is grotesquely twisted.

I do not believe in the "universe." I believe in the "cosmos."

"Cosmos" is the opposite of "chaos," and therefore the opposite of "universe." The cosmos has something the universe and chaos lack--the logos. I do not refer to the Christian Logos--the Word of God--but to the ancient Greek logos, which is quite different. I cannot define the logos for you because we humans are too limited to do more than catch the tail of it, if we are disciplined and passionate and lucky enough, but I can write a little about it so long as you keep in mind how inadequate my description will be.

The logos is the meaning and logic of reality. Reality is not governed by it the way the universe is governed by scientific laws; rather reality is the unfolding of the logos over time. Reality expresses the logos.

The logos is like an eternal, ever-changing fire that ignites all things, including us, transforms them, and consumes them.

The logos is like the perfect work of music in a single, eternal movement, developing countless parts and refrains according to its own intrinsic meaning and logic, and all of us and everything else in reality are themes and passages in that music.

The logos is a little bit like The Force from Star Wars, except that The Force is a debased logos that is both supernatural and merely utilitarian--we cannot know the logos nor control it, and there are not dark and light sides to it.

The logos is like the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu's Tao from his masterpiece the Tao Te Ching--not the later Tao of sorcerers nor the hippie Tao of just going with the flow, but the original awesome, incomprehensible Tao to which we submit like the reed or be blown down like the willow tree.

The logos was discussed in detail by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus twenty-five hundred years ago in his book On Nature, of which we have only fragments left. Even those few fragments reveal the kindred spirits of Lao Tzu and Heraclitus, despite their alien cultures.

The logos is the secret life of reality, the invisible metabolism that processes all things. This broader concept of life is discussed in detail by architect Christopher Alexander in his four-volume series The Nature of Order. When fully grasped, life and living processes as he explores them begin to suggest part of the nature of the logos. In this broader, non-supernatural, non-organismic sense of life, the cosmos is alive and the logos is its spirit and soul.

The logos is like fate. Each thing in the cosmos has its essential nature that it cannot escape, since each expresses part but not all of the logos, and that essence drives that thing toward some ends and away from others. Where things interact their essences affect one another, weaving together the outcomes of reality. Jokes, riddles, proverbs, stories, songs, lives, cultures, civilizations, species, worlds--all have their essences that drive them toward their specific ends rather than others. The weave of the logos creates the fabric of the cosmos.

The logos is like meaning. We may try to express it as the principles that guide all things, that prioritize and shed light on things. We may try to express it as wisdom, or as compassion, or ruthlessness. It is value-laden in profound opposition to science. It puts all things in context, without which they are mere noise. Putting all things in context, it thereby reveals the uniqueness of all things, at the same time that it reveals the interrelatedness of all things. The logos makes the cosmos a profoundly, intricately meaningful universe, with strands and webs and tides of meaning flowing through all things.

Above all, the logos is beyond us. The cosmos that reveals the logos is both too vast and too minutely intricate for us to perceive it clearly. We are tiny parts or expressions or aspects of the logos, and the part cannot encompass the whole. More crucially we are crippled. We are not intellects, not angels of wisdom, not fundamentally rational. We are especially willful animals, and we can only perceive reality through so many filters of bias, appetite, ambition, and delusion that our perceptions bear only a tenuous relationship to reality. Reality to us is a great Rorschach Test. As the Bible says, we see through a glass darkly. As Heraclitus wrote, eyes make poor witness for barbarian souls, or as he summed up, "Nature loves to hide." The logos is everywhere in plain sight, but we are blind to it, so the cosmos appears to us as a mere universe.

Believing in the cosmos and its logos, I believe I have a specific place in the cosmos but do not know what it is. I must learn about the cosmos to seek insight into the logos, and I must learn about myself as well to try to learn my place, my meaning, my purpose.

In summary, Dear Reader, I am a truth seeker. The truth matters more to me than I can express. I hope by the time I die I have become at least a little bit wise.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Precious

Dear Reader,

I do not believe in God, nor an afterlife, nor reincarnation. I believe we each get just the one life, starting more or less from scratch. I believe there are no supernatural entities who will clean up after our messes, nor that there are any other worlds available to us should we render this one uninhabitable to us.

Certainly I agree with Carl Sagan the odds are great that there are many many planets with life in some form throughout our galaxy, but that life may be alien to us, as may its ecosystems, and any worlds in our galaxy that are habitable to us are out of our reach for the foreseeable future, perhaps forever. I agree with Sagan the odds are good that some of that life is intelligent, and some of it older than we are, and therefore some fraction of it must be wiser than us. Unfortunately, the galaxy is huge, so the odds are poor that we will ever have the benefit of alien wisdom.

So, in summary: no additional lives, no additional worlds, no supernatural or alien wisdom available to draw on, no one to save us from ourselves. This is it.

In the film Contact by Sagan, Palmer Joss makes a statement I have heard from several religious people I respect, that they would not want to live in a world without God. I understand. We have treated the world and each other as though it and we are disposable, as though there are second chances, as though someone wise and wonderful were waiting in the wings to make things better. If we live our lives that way, we must go on believing it to insulate ourselves from the horrors of what we are doing. If there is no second chance, then the full impact of our blunders is unmitigated, and the bleak prospect of extinction shockingly looms over our children and much of life on Earth.

Whether we treat it so or not, life is precious. This one world that is the mother of life as we know it is precious. Each of us has but a single precious life; we shall not pass this way again. Wisdom and compassion are precious.

You are precious, Dear Reader.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

"Bronchitis"

Dear Reader,

For the past week I have been teetering on the edge of a new round of "bronchitis." I have stayed home resting, getting extra sleep, keeping my stress low. I have gone out a few times, usually in the evening after a day of resting, but largely I have been canceling my plans. I was unable to help my brother Rob finish moving on Friday; after a morning spent packing boxes, we held off on the move itself until Monday, but I had to cancel that, too. I canceled gaming yesterday; we watched "Down with Love" and "Coupling" instead. I was supposed to fly to Dallas today to visit with philosopher Kenneth Smith; I just wrote to him canceling my visit.

No one knows exactly what my "bronchitis" is. I have been getting it for years, and in recent years multiple times per year. It looks like bronchitis--I often have a bronchial infection treatable by antibiotics--but it is not bronchitis--when the infection clears up the mucus production and coughing continue until I have another infection. I took years of antibiotics before we figured out it was useless. We are better off letting the secondary infection run its course, since it is not the driver in this illness anyway, and antibiotics always hurt you with their side effects even when they do not help with their primary effects. I may have incurred long-term problems from the eradication of my intestinal flora by antibiotics, but I still get the "bronchitis," now more frequently than ever.

My primary doctor, Dr. Tom Ballard, is a naturopath, and he has helped me find ways to get healthier, so I can get this illness less often. Last year, following his advice, I managed to go a year without bronchitis. This year, slacking off his advice, I have had it twice and am skating around the edge of a third time. He is the first physician I have worked with who sought to treat the long-term problem rather than treat each case as completely separate and just try to suppress the symptoms.

My wife has an excellent ear-nose-and-throat specialist, Dr. Martin Greget, who was the first to ever take her frequent recurrences of sinus infections seriously as something more than random chance, bad luck, or bad genes. He searched for and discovered the cause for the frequency of her infections--crucial information none of her previous doctors could be bothered with--and when she has infections he takes cultures before he prescribes antibiotics to ensure he is prescribing something that will actually clear up the infection, something none of her previous doctors or mine every bothered with.

Consider that: out of two lifetimes of doctors, only one bothered to take cultures to make sure he was prescribing appropriate antibiotics. No wonder we are breeding superbugs. No wonder medical error in America is the fifth leading cause of death.

For twenty years I have made my career as a software developer and troubleshooter specializing in complex systems, specifically, the VistA medical software, and I know what responsible troubleshooting looks like. It requires scientific discipline, curiosity, investigation--in short, detective work. Martin Greget is the real thing. I could use him as a case study to teach new troubleshooters how to do it. Most of the doctors I saw before Tom Ballard I could use as examples of the converse.

Based on my experience, most doctors are rushed and sloppy, relying on habit, common industry practices, and assumptions, all of which are heavily informed by marketing copy from drug companies, which is why their first impulse nine times out of ten is to push pills. Pills promise an easy solution to suppressing symptoms, and they are the industry standard, which makes them the reflexive response to the overworked, highly stressed, overwhelmed state of mind most doctors find themselves in. The crazed working conditions begin with the hazing of internships, with sleep-deprivation and terrifying medical-school debts the norm for new doctors. The managed care movement, which is above all about extracting greater profits from healthcare, then pushes doctors away from time-consuming treatments toward quick "fixes" in a manic drive to minimize the hospital's investment needed to get the payoff from patients. A responsible, careful physician--and I refer here to practice, not intent--is resisting powerful economic and social impulses, and often pays a price for doing so. There are physicians out there like that--bless them--but you will have to search to find them, and you will have to learn a great deal about your illness and how it is treated to distinguish the good from the sloppy.

Responsible troubleshooting takes time, more time than doctors have available or than patients can sometimes afford to pay under modern market conditions, and it takes emotional reserves to embark into the unknown and question one's own responses and reflexes long enough to have any chance of finding the truth. It is emotionally taxing and time consuming to accurately troubleshoot complex software systems, but much, much more so with a complex biological system, which is profoundly more intricate than any software system. Nine out of ten software troubleshooters go for the quick fix rather than the difficult truth, and given how much harder biological troubleshooting is, you can work out for yourself how many doctors go for the quick fix.

In other words, Beverly's and my hit-and-miss ratio with the medical system and the high rate of medical error in America are not accidental; both are the logical and inevitable results of how the industry is structured.

Recently I began working with a pulmonary specialist. My counselor urged me to work with one to try to find the underlying causes of my recurring illness. Despite my frustration with corporate medicine, I agreed we should see if the best it has to offer could help find the underlying causes. On my first appointment with my pulmonologist, she wanted to send me home with sample packets of pills to try, despite having run no tests and despite my being between bouts and therefore showing no symptoms. I did manage to convince her that we should run tests first and make our prescriptive decisions based on the results, but I should not have had to be the one to argue for a scientific approach. It is easy to see how so many people wind up on unwarranted prescriptions. I hope that our tests will turn up some useful information, and that she will prove as interested in the diagnostic side of medicine as in the prescriptive side, but only time will tell.

Meanwhile, I am taking hot baths and showers, drinking tea, spending time in a sauna, getting sleep, and hoping this blows over. I will go back to following Tom Ballard's advice more assiduously and perhaps things will work out as well this winter as they did last year.

Keep your fingers crossed for me, Dear Reader.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Land Words

Dear Reader,

I enjoy that Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) as an afterthought, that he developed the cosmology and history of Middle Earth mainly to make his artificial languages more realistic. That must be one of the stranger reasons for writing a great work of fiction.

His play with language extends beyond such fantastic creations as Sindarin, Quenya, and Khuzdul to English itself. In preparation for the release of Peter Jackson's movie adaptations, I read LOTR out loud to Beverly and made a surprising (to me) discovery: this work was meant to be read out loud. Even aside from the songs and poetry, Tolkien's prose frequently slides in and out of Old English patterns of writing, with punchy rhythms, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and even occasional kennings--telltale signs of an oral tradition, qualities that make the language roll off the tongue pleasurably in ways that are not as enjoyable read silently. I never noticed this before because I only began learning Old English in the last six years, for my Dungeons and Dragons games, and I had not reread LOTR recently. I thought I knew this work that I had read so many times, that I loved and had studied so often in my youth, yet I had overlooked an essential and obvious quality.

Once The Fellowship of the Ring woke me up to his diction, I noticed he also delved into Old English for vocabulary, resurrecting or revitalizing geographical terms like coomb, dingle, dell, dale, vale, etc. I was struck by the effort he made to bring Middle Earth to life visually, with precise terms used to describe the folds and textures of the landscape.

I realized that my own grasp of these terms was slack. Influenced primarily by the thesaurus, dictionary, and fiction rather than living experience, I could not clearly define these terms, nor distinguish them from each other. I thought valley, vale, dell, and dale meant more or less the same thing. When I asked around for help, no one I knew could distinguish them clearly either. We had all thought we knew what these words meant, but it turned out all we knew was how to use them plausibly in common English sentences to "prove" our knowledge.

I was primed to notice this because I have been corresponding with a Texan philosopher, Kenneth Smith, who had alerted me to the erosion of meaning in language over time, especially during the modern era. I was ready to give up the powerful American myth of progress to consider the more equivocal changes wrought by evolution, in which we adapt to our environment, for better or for worse. Dr. Smith had explored how meaning erodes from philosophical, ethical, and religious terminology over time to make it more palatable, less confrontational for us, but I understood as well how it could apply to changes in lifestyle. We no longer live close to the land, so the language of the land becomes a foreign language to us. Like any foreign language, if not practiced it ebbs. Thus, mountaineers and rangers retain more land-language than the rest of us, but even they lack the depth of terminology a British woman had in the year 1000 C.E., a woman who lived all of her life, not just the recreational or professional part, close to the land, her fate bound to it visibly, her need to know it like a friend clear to her.

This realization wrought a change in me. I had already come to want to re-inhabit my land, to know the trees and birds and shapes of it, but with this most recent reread of Tolkien I came to want to learn the language of it also. Underneath our clumsy "hills" and "mountains" and "valleys" runs a deeper, more agile language of the land. The meaning of words stems not from how we use them now, but also and maybe more importantly from how and why they were coined and how they have been used since. A dell is not a dale is not a valley, not even if the thesaurus says so. A callow is not a hurst is not a hill, no matter what the dictionary says. Tolkien showed the way with his revelation that in our forgotten past lies a wealth of terms for describing the exact relations of water to land to vegetation. These eroding or lost old terms can be for us the roadmap back to being able to think about the shape and character of our world, can give us the framework for thinking more clearly about our relationship to the world.

"Gnothi Seauton," read the inscription on the temple at Delphi--Know Thyself. Because information out of context is noise, we cannot know ourselves unless we know what we are bound to, where we come from. After all, though Carl Sagan is right that we are star-stuff, that is only indirectly true. Directly, we are what we eat, what we drink, and what we breathe, and these things come directly from the soil and wind and water of our world. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust is not the language of metaphor but literal truth, a truth from which modern culture insulates us, alienating us from the sources of our very lives. We come to imagine that human life is above all a human creation, and thereby we lose our understanding of how deeply our fate is tied to the fate of the natural world. We are Earthlings, children of Earth, of the soil. To know ourselves, it is necessary (though not sufficient) that we know the land from which we sprang. To get to know the land, we must relearn to speak its language.

To help me relearn, I read through thesauri and dictionaries, even the Oxford English Dictionary, looking for clues, but I have found that even our etymologists have lost track of the geographical nuances Old English once had. The Shropshire Highlands in England, for example, are full of unusual geographical names--such as Callow Hill, Bromlaw Callow, Pulverbatch, Hampton Beech, Radlith--that upon further study reveal nuances of usage and meaning lost in most recent works of linguistics. No expert is going to hand us our lost language on a platter, ready to use. We have help--and I particularly want to thank Margaret Gelling and H. D. G. Foxall for their fine reconstructive work in The Place-Names of Shropshire--but if we want to recover our lost linguistic agility, we will have to work for it, just as we must do for physical agility.

So, strange as it may sound, to help my quest to grow wiser, to know myself and my world better, I am poring over maps, reading dictionaries of Old English, and reading publications of the English Place-Name Society. I am writing a lexicon for my own use, a document that describes words not through the most concise possible summation of their meaning, as the dictionary does, nor through equation with other words, as the thesaurus does, but through paragraphs and sometimes essays on what each word means, where it came from, and how it is used, examples of its use, comparing and contrasting each with all similar words until I fully understand the nuances of their meanings. For example, while eating breakfast today I studied "fell" and "tump," began investigating "how," and looked for good examples of "hurst."

A few examples I have learned over the last couple months:

"Dales" go with hills ("over hill and dale"); they are the valleys between and among hills. England also sometimes uses "dale" to refer to long river valleys that descend from highlands.

"Dells" are forested dales.

"Hursts" are forested hills ("over hurst and dell" perhaps?).

A "callow" is a bald hill--no forest.

A "glen" is a narrow valley on a mountain.

A "gill" is a forested glen.

Now when I hike in the Cascade, Olympic, and Pacific Coast mountain ranges, I look at the land around me in a new way, running my mind over the contours of the land, the texture of vegetation, the currents of water and air, and ponder the words that best describe what I am experiencing.

Dear Reader, I love my home so much. I love the mountain forests, the river valleys, the glacial lakes, the ocean rocks and lonely islands, the waterfalls and volcanoes, the rain and wind, ferns and wildflowers, salmon and spiders and snails. I love the long gray months of drizzle and the hilly streets of the cities and towns. I am head-over-heels in love with this land.

So now at last I begin to empathize with this Oxford linguist who backed his way into the greatest epic of the English language, his passion for understanding and exploring language, and above all his deep love for his English countryside. His affection and eloquence brought his beloved land to life in new form in his novel, so vividly that millions of people around the world fell in love with it too without ever having traveled to England. His eloquent passion inspires me to study English in turn, to quest deeply for words to help me give voice to my passion for my home land, this rain-drenched coast.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Postscript: I want to thank my fourth grade teacher at Emerson Elementary School in Seattle from fall of 1975 to spring of 1976 for reading to us in class The Hobbit; The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe; and A Wrinkle in Time. She gave me my first taste of Tolkien, and I have been in love with language and literature ever since. Thank you, Mrs. Yorozu.

Chasing Big Cats

Dear Reader,

I planned to be in Washington, DC, yesterday, staying with friends, preparing to give a short presentation at a conference today, before flying home tonight. I awoke yesterday morning with a ragged throat, pounding head, and nausea. So instead, I was slumped on the aging blue couch in the warm, dark Rick-Land room in the basement of my house, laptop on my knees and TV across the room.

Over dinner last night Beverly and I watched an episode of Nature called "Chasing Big Cats" (www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/bigcats/). Jerry Goodnough, a dear friend from Eugene, Oregon, urged me to record it; he chose wisely.

This episode documents the efforts of Owen Newman and Amanda Barrett to use patience and new film-making techniques over the last fourteen years to film five species of great cats from Africa--cheetahs, leopards, servals, caracals, and lions. The show reveals the spectacular results of their innovations. These are the clearest, most fascinating, most emotionally involving films of wild cats I have ever seen.

That makes it important medicine.

We work so hard during our teens pretending to be adults, trying to be "cool," unimpressed by the world around us. We deliberately strip the wonder from ourselves for fear of being mocked as naive, and in so doing we purge ourselves of some of our love of the world, and lose some of our own loveliness. There is nothing cool about dispassion, about being tough; any sociopath can view other people or creatures as meaningless objects. To be uninterested in the world, unimpressed, jaded, cool, is to be weak, alienated, sick. It is beautiful to care, to have empathy, to feel related to other life, and it is healthy. Programs like "Chasing Big Cats" that help us re-inhabit our world are a small but important form of healing.

We need such sweet medicine.

We have many opportunities in modern life to consume, to work, and to watch and occasionally comment or vote. We have few to build our spirits--our joy, our wonder, our attachment to the world and to life. To sustainably build a better world, we must approach our work with love and hope, not fear and guilt. Dear Reader, we should give ourselves more chances to fall in love with our world all over again.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

First Dose

Dear Reader,

Welcome to my weblog. I must say a few things before I begin in earnest.

First, my friend Mike Ryan (The Fictioneer, www.michaelgryan.blogspot.com) inspired me to create it. Read his before you read mine. He is a great writer who deserves more readers, and is one of my favorite people.

Second, this is strictly personal. Nothing I write represents the views of anyone else or any organization. I am writing to be more present for my friends and family, and to give acquaintances and strangers alike the chance to engage in dialog with me, if they like.

Third, this blog will explore controversial topics. I hope we pursue a healthy dialog in the responses to my blog entries. I ask that we explore our differences with good will toward one another. Let each of us agree that when we disagree passionately, as we will at times, we will question politely rather than accuse or condemn. Well intentioned, well-informed people can and will disagree about surprising things, and none of us knows which of the things we believe is true and which false. If we are not too hasty to judge, if we take the time to listen to each other and come to understand why each of us believes as we do, we can build a friendly dialog to the benefit of everyone involved. In an increasingly angry world, Dear Reader, that is all too rare but worth the effort.

Sincerely yours,
Rick