Just Leave(s)

     Surf's up, someone would yell; but it meant little to my ears since I wasn't a surfer.  A body surfer, for sure, but not really good enough to be called that since back in the day, foam boards and "fins" were unheard of.  When a wave came, you just swam, bare footed, and hoped that you would catch the wave.  But more importantly, "surf's up" made me think of the late Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys.  Their album of the same name still had the tight harmonies the group was known for, but gone were the boppity sounds of reckless youth (I Get Around) and blossoming love (God Only Knows).  This was an album about what was happening to our planet.  And it was a song from that album that came to mind as I watched yet another neighbor take down his trees, baring his yard to the sun.  Sang part of A Day in the Life of a Tree: For years my limbs stretched to the sky, a nest for birds to sit and sing.  But now my branches suffer, and my leaves don't bear the glow they did so long ago...my leaves don't offer poetry to men of song.  The sound of chainsaws whining and the cracking of large branches tore at the hearts of my wife and I, those massive arms of life now cut down so, as one of the neighbors told me, "people can see the front of my house" (within a year, both neighbors had planted small saplings in their yards).  With their lawns no longer shaded, the neighbors had to water and run their air much more as their homes faced west.  Said one, "I may have made a mistake."  Two other homes sold nearby and among the first things we noticed were the new owners also cutting down their trees.  But it was another song on the album that seemed to capture Wilson's sense of loss and wonder: I'm a leaf on a windy day; pretty soon I'll be blown away.  How long will the wind blow?...It kills my soul.  Wilson allegedly said in a biography now considered questionable: Lately, I’d been depressed and preoccupied with death…Looking out toward the ocean, my mind, as it did almost every hour of every day, worked to explain the inconsistencies that dominated my life; the pain, torment, and confusion and the beautiful music I was able to make…The ocean was so incredibly vast, the universe was so large, and suddenly I saw myself in proportion to that, a little pebble of sand, a jellyfish floating on top of the water; traveling with the current.  I felt dwarfed, temporary.  And then came Vera Rubin...

     The 10-year completion of the new telescope in Chile is stunning scientists around the world.  Named after the famed astronomer (her study of galaxy rotation led many to accept that dark matter existed) the telescope has just begun to release its first images, showing not only millions of galaxies, but thousands of new asteroids in just hours.  And as mentioned in many earlier posts, these millions of galaxies (bear in mind that our own Milky Way galaxy is considered little more than a medium-sized galaxy) are being seen in the tiniest sliver of space (imagine a pie cut into a thousand or more slices; just one of those slices is what is being partially captured).  So keeping that thought, and if you're open to other life being out there, who or what would you expect to find?  The sci-fi ET version of aliens with large eyes and massive brains/heads?  A collection of Star Wars figures, all with a variety of languages and shapes?  Whatever we can imagine, it is miniscule since we can only picture life based on how we live, our senses basically limited to sight and sound, our legs for movement, our brains for "advanced" thinking, our lungs for oxygen.  But Cambridge zoologist Dr. Arik Kershenbaum pictured something entirely different, if science and our version of physics held true.  The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, basically read like a text book but the cover jacket summed up its message: Might there be an alien planet with supersonic animals?  A moon where creatures have a language composed of smells?  Will aliens scream with fear, act honestly, or have technology?  Added the author: Perhaps life on other planets did not use DNA for its genetic material, or maybe alien biochemistry is utterly different -- based on a solvent other than water, for example.  This is particularly important as many planets (including some in our solar system) are too cold or too hot for liquid water to exist...Our attempts to understand the nature of alien life are perhaps embryonic, but they have an inorganic role to play in the development of astrobiology as a discipline, in the understanding of the science of life in general, and in the preparation for the time when humanity will have to come to terms with the fact that we are not alone in the universe. 

     Mentioning all of this is not meant to shatter the belief in our uniqueness but rather to show that sometimes looking outward allows us to also look inward.  Orion featured a panel of scientists, artists, and scholars, including fantasy author Jeff Vandermeer and biologist Merlin Sheldrake, each adding their perspective to the connected world of mushrooms and other fungi.  Said Vandermeer: The thing that excites me about it is, you know, in fiction or not, the metaphysical, metaphorical, and reality of what you might call “contamination.”  The way that studying fungi, for me at least, reveals how nonseparate we are from the world, and how we are ourselves inhabited by other organisms.  And I think this is a really powerful expression.  It’s a narrative that shows just how important biodiversity is in and of itself, but also to human beings.  Added Sheldrake: I think there are so many levels to this, and it’s a question that fascinates me endlessly.  I spend a lot of time enjoying the confusion that it presents.  There are so many reasons why disrupting a neat notion of individuality is important.  That illusion of separation, I think, has led us into great trouble.  There are good reasons to try and find other perspectives.  One is that we are always engaged in symbiotic relations.  We might think about the microbes that live in and on us, and without which we couldn’t grow and behave as we do.  But we might also think about all the other organisms that don’t share a body with us, but that we depend on, either by consuming their bodies in the form of plants we eat or in the ways that they produce things we need like the oxygen produced by photosynthetic creatures.  So, this living with, the being with-ness, I think is a hugely exciting and powerful thought; it certainly enhances my perspective of what it means to be alive on this planet, leading me to turn outward and feel part of something bigger.  On the whole, these feelings are healthy and inspire me, and make me feel more responsible for my actions.  Given how difficult it is to draw the line around any individual, I think more important is to think about a co-creative relational field between relating organisms.

     That interconnectivity can continue into yet another world as noted when native American Alastair Lee Bitsóí visited Canyon de Chelly.  As noted in Smithsonian: For the Diné, the canyon was a stronghold against the westward expansion of the U.S. government in the early and mid-1800s.  Then, in the 1860s, one of the most tragic episodes in Diné history occurred here, when the American government successfully besieged the Diné right where I stood with Bass and her team.  Some historians describe this siege as the defining moment in a genocidal campaign that forced thousands of Diné people to march hundreds of miles, at gunpoint, from their homelands here in Arizona to Hweeldi, or Fort Sumner, in present-day New Mexico.  Along the way, hundreds died; government forces, meanwhile, destroyed our cornfields and peach orchards and slaughtered our livestock.  We Diné refer to this forced relocation as the “The Long Walk.”  Though around 40 families live within the limits of the monument today, for many, the displacement remains an open wound.  hough the Navajo Nation government now oversees this sacred area in collaboration with the NPS, some Diné families consider the ancestral sites to be tainted ground.  For those families, and indeed for me as a Diné writer, these lands are filled with spirits, not all of them benign.  As a result, I did not undertake this reporting lightly: To walk on this land, and particularly to enter any rooms of the cave complex, requires extreme caution—because to enter is, in essence, to disturb the home of ancient spirit energies, and that can bring dangers.  Afterward, it is wise to offer songs or prayers for safe passage.  In the end, I decided that I must respect these spirits’ homes—that I would not, and should not, climb to the holiest parts of the complex.  Instead, I watched the team work from below, and when I left the canyon, feeling conflicted about the whole experience, I wondered whether simply visiting had violated a sacred code.  Later, somewhat shaken from my visit, I got in touch with Joseph Pablo, a Diné cultural practitioner based in Naschitti in the Navajo Nation.  Pablo pointed out that even though I did not go up to the heart of the site, as the researchers did each day, I did share meals with the team, and they may have exposed me to the energy of the dead.  “You will get sick from it,” Pablo warned me.  “You will get dizzy; you will get cramps.”  He said it is common practice among Native peoples to avoid touching the remains of pottery at the site, or even to eat food within view of Tse Yaa Kin.  He added that if I spent too much time on this type of reporting, it could harm my being more deeply in the future.

     So back from space, back from the underground, back from ancestral spirits.  What is happening now, and likely to happen just ahead?  For one, while Congress dithers on the budget bill (one which would also grant Trump immunity from past, present, and future corruption charges), subsidies for the Affordable Care Act --often labeled Obama Care by the extreme right-- are set to expire at the end of the year.  By doing nothing, those subsidies will not renew.  No big deal, you say, except that Barron's reported that monthly premiums for most people would jump by an average of $700 per year.  Older adults would face even bigger premium hikes since insurers are allowed to charge them more for coverage.  A typical 60-year-old couple making $82,000 would see monthly marketplace premiums triple, from $580 to $2,111 -- an annual increase of $18,400, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.  Another part of that bill was looked at by The Washington Spectator: Every major tax cut bill has been sold as good for the economy.  Since Ronald Reagan, they even have promotional titles—The Economic Recovery Act; Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act; Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act; Tax Cut and Jobs Act— there to tell us that politicians who pass them are actually well-intentioned and to convince us that these bills will be good for all of us...the fundamental sequence. Tax cuts at the top.  Boom in finance.  Bubble.  Crash.  Massive bank failures.  Depression or Recession.   The big, beautiful bill (Republicans in the Senate may resort to Reconciliation to pass the bill and avoid a majority vote, wrote The Converstion).  When the market crashed with Bush, Jr., the bailout amounted to trillions (not biillions) of dollars (the federal webpage detailing the cost has been removed under Trump's orders).  Why so much?  Wrote the author: They saved the banks.  They saved the top executives at those banks.  They even saved the bonuses of the people at those banks who’d led the economy over the cliff.  A recession followed.  Next up? (according to what the author predicts)...crypto.  It isn't real, and yet money is pouring into it, even from banks whose regulations may again be eased...and as the author noted, we're likely about to repeat the sequence: bubble, crash, bailout, recession (wrote Bloomberg, "alt" coins, a term for crypto coins in general, have already lost $300 billion this year).  As singer Jack Johnson wrote: Who's going to try to fix this?  Won't somebody please stop the car?  Who's gonna give me some good news?  And who's gonna take it too far?

Our backyard trees...

       Diego Luna joked about all that we fought for, all that we celebrate, on this upcoming 4th of July.  The end of tyranny, the end of monarchy, the end of military troops in the streets.  Perhaps, he joked, now an end to humor and free speech.  But if these times seem insurmountable, go back in history to Grover Cleveland who won the popular vote 3 times, but lost the industrial states that swayed the Electoral College.  In 1888, he lost to Benjamin Harrison who almost immediately imposed higher tariffs on other countries' goods (Cleveland and the Democrats supported free trade).  Crash, boom, bang.  Four years later Cleveland was President.  But that's politics, always swinging back and forth.  And our planet has been patient enough to watch it all happen, even as we continue to load it with plastics and strip its oceans and lands.  There are only so many forests and animals, only a certain amount of fresh water, only a certain amount of time...and space.  We are not alone, at least not as a planet, as the new observatory shows.  But we appear to be special in our environment, in our blue waters and our green forests.  Hannah Gersen wrote in The Sun:  When a large tree falls, it upends the earth with it; I was amazed at the amount of soil this tree had ripped away: a wall of dirt and stone, as tall as a house, chunks of rock and mud clinging to its roots.  I stared at the roots more than at the tree itself, in awe of all that’s unseen beneath the surface...Tears came as I realized that elm had been a metaphor for how my life had felt then -- my mother’s death followed so quickly by 9/11.  Everything uprooted, then cleared away...I finally saw the reality of loss -- it doesn’t go away quickly.  You can clean it up, you can repair the sidewalks, you can put on a pearl necklace and pretend you’re an adult --and maybe even become one-- but the person is still missing.

     My wife and I have no control over our neighbors and their trees; but in our 30+ years here in our home, our backyard trees have passed the 60-foot mark.  Our backyard has become a sanctuary for us, protected and protecting.  Perhaps if each of us could zoom out and look at life differently, all life, we could recognize that some things take time, decades or centuries to grow, but can be cut down quickly...even forms of government.  We are all floating leaves in this world, briefly here and then, if we're lucky, aware that life is/has been beautiful.  But we need to be aware that life is also a cycle and that eventually it will be our time to fall and to be blown onto/into something new (maybe).  We may not ever know what's ahead, but if things continue as they are, many of us may find that Iran might not be alone in expecting its aging leaders (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will be 87, Trump will be 80, and Netanyahu 76) to give way to a new regime.