Lessons in Sustainable Living from the Grapes of Wrath: A Reading and Writing Journal (Entry 2: On Transport Trucks, Patsy Cline, Turtles, Weeds, Permaculture, Sepp Holzer, the Dalai Lama and Worms)

It's only been a day since the last storm and the haze is back.  It use to take at least a week, and then a few days.  Even with the oak and maple along the canyon slope, the cottonwood rising from the stony creek bed, and the wall of loose stone and ceder on the ridge beyond, it's hard to be here fully in the moment. Quite simply, winter moments here are no longer the same.  For now, spring and fall are still crisp, but pollution is eroding away our days, our weeks, our months, our seasons.  Maybe some don't notice.  Maybe some don't care. But to me the sky is everything: my connection to light, and through that light, my connection to the world around me.  It's not just about global warming; it's not just about public health.  It's about being in a world that sheds light on the sacred.  Pollution dims our connection with creation.

This morning I read Chapter 2 and 3 of The Grapes of Wrath.  Chapter 2 doesn't necessarily provide any lessons in sustainable living, but the writing is spot-on and made me long for simpler times.  Obviously, not better times.  I've tried not to be pulled into ubi sunt, or the unnatural glow of the past, where we long for a rose-colored yesteryear.  I'm not Ronald Reagan.  I'm aware the good ol' days included lynching and constant insinuation that your wife and daughters were inferior.  But, there was a directness to living that has vanished even since I was a child, and that had already faded compared to my parents' generation. Steinbeck captures so well that period when people were fewer and even strangers were more connected:

A huge transport truck stood in front of the little roadside restaurant.  The vertical exhaust pipe muttering softly, and an almost invisible haze of steel blue smoke hovered over its end...  Inside the screened restaurant a radio played, quiet dance music turned low the way it is when no one is listening.  A small outlet fan turned silently in its circular hole over the entrance, and flies buzzed excitedly about the doors and windows, butting the screens.  Inside, one man, the truck driver, sat on a stool and rested his elbows on the counter and looked over his coffee at the lean and lonely waitress...

When I lived in Dallas, I longed for such scenes.  As a student at a nearby university, I'd drive home each weekend on the back road, the old highway, instead of the interstate, because it was lined with barely surviving cafes from better days--left overs from the forties and fifties.  I longed for that slower life, the one I'd grown up with.  I'd take great road trips in search of an America lost, an America I was almost too young to know, but not quite.

Once I found it in Terlinqua, Texas with a girlfriend from Germany.  We sat in a small cafe and stared out at the white stone desert listening to Patsy Cline over a small radio while drinking Blue Sky soda and I thought I was in heaven.  I could almost see a bright red truck pull up with OKLAHOMA CITY TRANSPORT COMPANY in twelve-inch letters on the side.

True, the time periods did't line up--Grapes of Wrath predating Patsy Cline--but for me, it was close enough.  Ceiling fans whirled overhead.  Patsy sang "I Fall to Pieces" and my beautiful biologist friend went on about symbiotic relationships, while I looked out the window into a distant time.

Chapter 3, my favorite one of the book, does provide a couple of lessons in Sustainable living.  It's the turtle chapter that serves as a metaphor for the struggle the Joad family will endure.  As Steinbeck was good friends with marine biologist Ed Ricketts, he had a deep understanding of nature, which bubbles up in his writing:

THE CONCRETE HIGHWAY was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse’s fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep’s wool; sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny thorns, and all waiting for animals and for the wind, for a man’s trouser cuff or the hem of a woman’s skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement.

The first sustainable living lesson from this chapter is that nature is designed to take care of itself.  In many ways, industrial farming treats nature as the enemy of agriculture.  Weeds are wicked.  They are plowed up. Bare soil is the birth of life.  But it isn't.  Steinbeck seemed to sense this.  Foxtails, unpleasant, weedy and thorny shit, are the pioneers of life.  After the turtle finally crosses the road, he inadvertently plants the seeds to repair the soil disturbed by the drought and wind:

The wild oat head fell out and three of the spearhead seeds stuck in the ground. And as the turtle crawled on down the embankment, its shell dragged dirt over the seeds. The turtle entered a dust road and jerked itself along, drawing a wavy shallow trench in the dust with its shell. The old humorous eyes looked ahead, and the horny beak opened a little. His yellow toe nails slipped a fraction in the dust.

Permaculture, like Steinbeck, recognizes the weed as the first cultivator of life. Rather than being the devil, the weed is the heart and soul of Eden.  One starts ones garden the way nature does--with weeds--and then, by studying the natural processes, works with nature rather than against to achieve a desired outcome.  

The second lesson we learn from Chapter 3 is a Buddhist principle, which is the practice of loving kindness.  It's slightly different than the Christian principle of brotherhood, in that it recognizes that every living thing has its own purpose, its own journey to complete.  Instead of being thy brother's keeper, one steps lightly, so as not to cause undo harm to life around you, which is demonstrated by the two drivers in the chapter:

Now the going was easy, and all the legs worked, and the shell boosted along, waggling from side to side. A sedan driven by a forty-year-old woman approached. She saw the turtle and swung to the right, off the highway, the wheels screamed and a cloud of dust boiled up. Two wheels lifted for a moment and then settled. The car skidded back onto the road, and went on, but more slowly. The turtle had jerked into its shell, but now it hurried on, for the highway was burning hot.

And now a light truck approached, and as it came near, the driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it. His front wheel struck the edge of the shell, flipped the turtle like a tiddly-wink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway. The truck went back to its course along the right side. Lying on its back, the turtle was tight in its shell for a long time.


I believe that both Christ and the Buddha had it right.  With people, there are times, we are our brother's keepers, and must offer others the grace offered us when we lose our way.  With nature, we must at least practice loving kindness--harming no life unnecessarily, to allow each creature to fulfill the measure of its creation.

With this thought process, the grasshopper becomes as meaningful to the garden as the hummingbird or butterfly.  The workings of man develop habitat rather than destroy it.

I remember one beautiful afternoon I spent watching a wasp drag a dead tarantula from one end of my garden to the other.  I was amazed at how quick he was, how diligent, and the obstacles he overcame.  At the borders of my pond, he encountered what to him were enormous boulders.  I was sure his home was there in a crevice between two rocks, and was surprised when he toiled on.

It gave me strength to toil on with an infection I had experienced for months.  It brought peace.  It is in these small noticings, these small acts of loving kindness, these steps back with humility, observing rather than participating, that we find the true measure and purpose of our creation.  If you kill the little birds (or the wasp), you can't learn from the the little birds (or the wasp).  You're aligned with the wrong energy.    

My favorite scene in Seven Years of Tibet is where Heinrich is asked to save the worms when building a movie theater for the young Dalai Lama.  Whether that really happened or not isn't significant.  It's taking the time to do that sort of thing that would lead to a kinder, more sustainable civilization.

 

Lessons in Sustainable Living from the Grapes of Wrath: A Reading and Writing Journal (Entry 1: This Valley is Me)

This valley is me, and I am this valley.  Lately, it hasn't been doing so well and neither have I.  Skies have been gritty, a haze of humidity and grime smudging the horizon, rust-tinted snowy peaks rising out of the smoke.  Inversion, they call it.  They treat it as a natural phenomenon, but my history here goes back far too long to buy that.  Skies once were clear, and it was not unusual to be able to see peaks 75 miles away. Now the haze hangs around for days, even weeks, between storms.  It's like living along the Wasatch Front without the city.  Spill over--that's what it is--like the rust colored air that hangs over the Mojave because of Los Angeles.

Scripture describe such times:  

And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.  (Revelation 9:2)

Whether this is smoke of biblical proportions or not doesn't matter as much to me as that it hangs around and distorts views I once saw so clearly.  Regardless of whether or not it is a sign of the second coming, it is a sign of sickness--an environment crying out for redemption, much like the landscape recorded in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath:

A gentle wind followed the rain clouds, driving them on northward, a wind that softly clashed the drying corn. A day went by and the wind increased, steady, unbroken by gusts. The dust from the roads fluffed up and spread out and fell on the weeds beside the fields, and fell into the fields a little way. Now the wind grew strong and hard and it worked at the rain crust in the corn fields. Little by little the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away. The wind grew stronger. The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke. The corn threshed the wind and made a dry, rushing sound. The finest dust did not settle back to earth now, but disappeared into the darkening sky.

Like Exodus, the Grapes of Wrath is an epic--of loss, of wandering, of survival,and of dignity.  I believe it is also a blueprint for sustainable living, and in this series of posts, I wish to explore the lessons it teaches in sustainability.  Not only is it a masterpiece of literature, it is a field guide for a better way of life.

5 Books that Changed Me: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley, Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams and Small Graces by Kent Nerburn. (Part 1: Reading Validates Interiority)

Part I:  Reading Validates Interiority

Reading was not part of my childhood.  Great Expectations was my official entry into the world of literature.  Before opening it, pop-lyrics and movies served that purpose--a place for slow, reflective dialogue between writer and audience that opens interior doors and stirs the heart to want more than what currently is.

That is, after all, why we read, isn't it?  To sip from something substantial, have a meaningful dialogue while sitting near the window, looking up now and then from the page to the snow falling in waves outside, to say, "yes, this is just how it is.  I've been looking for a long time for a way to say this."  Reading validates interiority--that the majority of our life occurs inside ourselves and that we are our own best friends, flaws and all.  I've also found, overtime, that literature alters those conversations we have with ourselves--deepens them, broadens them, and in the process makes us better people.

Marci and I have often talked about how it was always the English professors in college who were open, honest, flexible and understanding.  I actually switched majors because of this.  Growing up, I'd always wanted to be an architect and I have always loved a good structure tied to the environment.  That has never changed.  But when I entered the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington, I was confronted with a competitive, corporate philosophy designed to weed out the weak and allow access to only the great.  I'm pretty talented in most creative forms--painting, drawing, writing, film, photography--and probably could have made the cut, but competitive, I'm not.  Being told the first day, "half of you will drop out of the program within the first year," did not stir me to greatness, just hate.  Reading The Fountain Head by Ayn Rand as required by all freshman Architectural students didn't drive me to become the next Howard Roarke, it just drove me to hate.

At my core, I have always known we only become fully human when we take ourselves lightly and at the same time take humanity seriously, when our goal is to help others, not obliterate them.  I quickly found that kind people inhabited the English department and that's where I wanted to be.

English professors, overall, are special people for a reason.  Books.  Not just any books, but the right kind of books.  Books that deal honestly with interiority, who we are in between doing, behind doing, in front of doing.  What we think in the midst of surviving (or not surviving) the chaos of humanity.  You simply cannot read those types of books on a regular basis and not be changed in some way no matter what type of jerk you are by nature.  And so it is the English professor who is usually the one willing to sit down and listen, ironically, even more than the psychology or sociology professor.  I always found English professors were less professional, more casual, more human, and most importantly, more versed in human nature--something an extremely shy person like myself with lots of thinking errors, needed desperately to get me through the next day.
 
I hope, like my professors, books have developed some level of depth and understanding in me that I can pass on to others.  In particular, I want to share five books that had an impact on both my writing and myself.  These are the books that have been the most essential in my life: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley, the Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams and Small Graces by Kent Nerburn.

I know most have their own list--and that's what is so wonderful, that at certain times in our lives books are our bread.  But there are also those who don't have their own list, who are struggling desperately to find interiority, but have not yet found that slow, reflective dialogue between author and self that says, "yes, this is just how it is; I'm not alone after all."  Perhaps these will be books that open that door, or open it a little wider, as interiority is an on-going meditative process which opens us up and deepens us.  I'll start next time with Great Expectations.