mangolandia

Humans! In India when speaking of our dead, the people say “she left the body” rather than “she died”. That is, there is a deep clarity — for me our subconscious patterns of speech reveal deeply the structure of how we think — about what death is, or as it has sometimes occurred to me, “the unreality of death”.

Krishna and Jesus are both pretty into this idea –

“For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.”

“He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.”

I’ll let you figure out the who’s whom, but the point is that many tribes and cultures have come up with elaborate rituals around the Leaving of the Body. Some are to gather together, some are to forcibly extract grief (mandatory wailing), and some are in the spirit of pure celebration.

In Mexico, Dia de Los Muertos is celebrated every year, on November 1st and 2nd, to pray for and remember our dead. I’ve been working with a group in Sequim for the past few years, to put on a Dia de Los Muertos fundraising dinner for the last few years. Last year, we served enchiladas.

Now it’s all beginning to come together. You see?

Fellow and erstwhile tripper and professional Reed Aubin recently informed me he is working with a group of students from El Colegio to build Day of the Dead altars for the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. In the spirit of inspiration, I suggest to everybody in the family that we do the same. Maybe we could work on it over the next few weeks, or maybe we could have a party the day before Halloween, make some enchiladas, build offerings together, remember, laugh, and cry over our dead.

You’ve got to do this thing. This idea of memory and creation: the holding and releasing. It happens one way or another. There’s no other way. The skeletons and enchiladas and dioramas are just a tool to help you get on with it.

I think it’s important for those of us still in the body. Ask you family floating around you. They know.

And if you do, or don’t, you might want to try these awesome enchiladas I made for my mom today:

PUMPKIN ENCHILADAS

woke up to 22 degree frost on the grass i scythed this morning and it’s very clear that fall just ended. probably can still get some more blackberries before the rain returns, but it’s basically time to turn towards that pumpkin.

* filling

double-hands-full of chantrelles we picked last week, brushed lightly to remove dirt, and sliced into quarters, or until each piece achieved the volume of a baby carrot.
1 small leek, chopped into thin rings, up to the beginning of the light green section.

saute the chantrelles on low heat until they sweat out a little water. ours have been pretty dry so not much comes out. and, really, you can use any mushroom. they don’t have to be chantrelles and you didn’t have to pick them. but you’ll enjoy it more, likely, if you did. add the chantrelles to the bowl with the leeks, squirt some olive oil (from your fancy ex-relish bottle full of olive oil you keep next to the stove to be cool), and return the shrooms with the leeks to the pan. saute on low head until the leeks are sweet and tender enough to eat. the mushrooms should be plump and tender. if you’re worried about difference in cooking times between your mushrooms and the leeks, you can do them separately and combine at the end.

(salt)

* rice

i did plain white rice today. it was sweet and delicious.

* sauce

i used half of a pumpkin about 2/3 the size of my head. try to measure that. hah. you can cut it roughly into slices and steam it until the peel comes off easily, then (you guessed it) easily take the peel off and boil it with an inch of water and some of the tougher green tops from your leek. you can also add an old carrot, some celery, half an onion, and a clove or two of garlic. basically, you’re making a sort of pumpkin soup, but a watery, lame pumpkin soup. the reason it doesn’t matter if it’s slightly lame is that you’re going to blend it and it’s going to be awesome.

while you’re heating up the pan for the filling but the mushrooms aren’t clean and chopped yet, deposit enough pumpkin seeds to cover the bottom of the pan and let them toast on medium heat until they tell you (really, they will speak) they are done. trade the seeds out for the shrooms, and add the seeds (“pepitas”) to the blender. blend. add the pumpkin soup after everything in the broth is tender, and a bit of salt. blend again. check the consistency. the goal here is to be able to pour the sauce into a pan, grab a tortillas, and dip the tortilla into the hot sauce so it coats the tortilla as it slips off. if it’s too thin, you’ll just be reducing the sauce on the stove again as your friends chop cilantro and avocados, impatiently, receding into the distance. if it’s too thick, you add water, stock, a little cream, white wine, whatever.

taste, add salt, taste, question the salt, taste.

* goodies
avocado
finely diced onions
cilantro

* assemblage

dip the tortilla in the sauce
Almost burn yourself
Jump in excitement!
Flick the soaked tortilla on a ceramic plate
Have someone spoon the filling,
then the rice,
then the avocado,
And roll it yourself to seam-side-down.

Repeat twice, drizzle more sauce on top,
paint with cilantro and chopped onions
if feeling artistic.

Note that these enchiladas were described as “absolutely delicious blend of delicate with spicy with warm and savory.” by a human thousands of miles away. So they must be good. And they are.

delight,
ankurbhai

p.s. if you do this offering thing, as i will, send me a note or picture about it. i think that will be good.

83 lost meadow
sequim, wa 98382

to commemorate the 15 flights i have taken to date this year

just when i thought i was getting ready to

(famously)

“settle down”

i painted the following picture for my stewardess

from newark to seattle

and then failed

to give it to

her,

because i liked it.

- ankurbhai

Well, it’s been a long time coming. Home.

And here I am, in the early fall sunshine, snowless mountains towering over this little valley, baskets of mushrooms and carrots in the cold room, and a suite of tottering laptops with which to do my holy work.

Of course to be home you have to leave, and to have left you must have had a home in the first place, which is uncertain, to say the least. And in some ways I feel I’ve come home to India once again, a recurring theme in the last four years of my life. Note that if India were indeed my third collegiate experience, temporally, I would have just graduated, to enter that familiar limbo of ‘now what’ that Dustin Hoffman and I once shared so intimately. But no, here I am again, picked up by my mother from SeaTac airport and taken a mere 10 minutes (drive, not walk) away to one in a row of endless identical townhouses (is that what they’re called, skinny and tan with a berm of soil behind it so you don’t remember there’s another row of houses just over there, and there, and there, ad nauseum?) and a terribly sweet Indian-Tanzanian-(and now)-American couple.

The best and most Indian thing about the whole delectable lunch, beating the chickpea-potato curry (in an earnest red tomato gravy) was Kirin-auntie forcing my mom to eat, relentlessly. It got to the point where my mother, on her heels, was justifying not having more by recounting what she had eaten for breakfast five hours ago to prove she couldn’t have another dal-filled-ghee-covered roti. Meanwhile, I’m happily munching away, unpressured, slow, with ghee-less rotlis and no botheration. Talk about a graduation ceremony. Eventually Kirin auntie gives up and the argument subsides to the hum of the microwave. It beeps. We continue chewing.

Two minutes later she gets up, opens the microwave, in which she had been heating more of the delicious chickpea-potato curry, and expresses _with genuine innocent surprise_ “Oh Bharti, here’s some more curry and rotli! You should have some”.

The beauty and gentleness is quite obviously insane.

Then Jitu-uncle begins a story about a traveling holy man (back in the day) who would walk from village to village performing whatever rituals needed to be done. I guess it was a gift economy service, no fixed price, including whatever food they wanted. So the traveling priest sits down to have some Ladoos (sweet balls of grain and jaggery and ghee) and pops down five of them in one go. These are about the size of racquetballs mind you, and I can’t stomach more than a half of one before looking around shiftily for a child to pawn away the rest… So he eats five of the blessed (literally) things and burps in agreement, is about to go when the host asks, would you like anymore?

The story apparently is to inspire guests to eat more, because the next episode involves him sitting back down and have 10-12 more ladoos with dal (lentil soup / mental fruit) in addition to the 5 he had already put away. At this point the villagers are exasperated and rather than asking if he wants more, they put their palms together in sincere respect for his holiness and appetite, and ask him to leave:

“Please now you just go.”

This to me is a genius part of the hospitality system. You’re supposed to give away everything you have (knowing full well if you can do it selflessly you’ll be rewarded with all the glitz in the universe) and when you’ve played your part as a good host, you are totally licensed and comfortable in telling your guest “I lose” which translates as “You leave”.

At which point the moral seemed to become: be careful whom you have to dinner, they could eat you out of house and home.

Speaking of which, the sun has arced around enough to the south where it’s just beginning to shine on the dining table, indicating to me that my morning juice has been digested enough for me to prepare lunch. Inspired by Matt Coffman‘s dedicated to raw goodness, I’ve been making local/organic/fresh/raw/dope juice every morning. It’s nothing compared to the glory of the raw food cult’s concoctions of frozen mango, tender thai coconuts, and cacao beans, but my unpatented Move To Florida line of smoothies are still pretty damn good

Have your mom juice:
two handfuls of carrots
two apples
one finger of ginger

and then use that as the liquid to blend in your fancy blender:
half a dozen stalks of parsley
half a dozen small leaves of lettuce
1 burly stalk of kale
1/2 pint of blackberries.

I’ll tell you right now the color will be, well, intense. Almost nightmarish. We can call it Kafka Out of Florida or something. But that’s what you get = purple + orange + green.

Anyhow, Move to Florida. Somehow, it’s the future.

But mainly, this is to say, I’m back in Washington. I can be reached at 360 683 5398. I can receive letters at 83 Lost Meadow / Sequim, WA 98382. I can catch up on my email, fulfill orders for books and CDs, work on computer projects, and further train with the scythe.

Please visit. The sanctuary is open and full of beds, vegetables, soft fabric, and firm mountains.

you’re very welcome,
ankurbhai

also: some pictures

i am in india, new delhi, headed for the himalayas once again for a 10 day retreat with no access to mid-technology (telecom) and developing what they tell me is the true high-technology (mindcom). so we’ll see.

but the point is that at 7pm on august 9th, which is a sunday

in new york city

at bluestockings bookstore in the lower east side

i will be doing a reading of

sometimes we walk alone: notes from a pilgrimage

it’s a book i wrote about walking rich and pennniless through

with some of the spirit and footsteps of gandhi

76 years later and a whole lot younger.

it took 26 days to walk and a few years to read my handwriting

but there’s a book full of stories and i want you

to come hear us talk about it.

thank you.

ankur

heading out of mangoland early in the morning and i finally got around to taking some pictures of the nursery, mango hut, etc. im absconding with two kinds of pickle — one spicy and one a shredded jam — and a few kilos of rice, which some of you may get to joy if the goods make it over the border. also have seeds for three kinds of holy medicinal indian basil (ocimum santum) which i’m very excited to plant in the western hemisphere.

but the point is i helped start a nursery for vegetables and trees, and worked for the second year on a permanent vegetable garden, and, most importantly, all the little cowpea (it’s a bean) guys i direct seeded into the field last week sprouted, grew, and ARE ALIVE! all of them. this is no less than a miracle — a little plant in every place i buried (“sowed”) the seeds, sometimes two (there were two seeds in every hole), and — in one hole — THREE. truly a miracle since i diligently put two seeds in every hole. but then again the plant kingdom works in mysterious ways.

so, you know, i win. one day, getting closer all the time, i will actually stay in one place long enough to eat those dang beans and save seed for my friends. it’s coming.

on to ahmedabad tomorrow, to meditate with mukeshbhai, my friend and teacher, the guiding light in my life to return me to the focus on the One Love in the Amazon, though he wouldn’t quite say it like that. during our last chat he gave me new instructions (instead of the mountaintop, i just have to answer the little matrix phone these days)

“Ankur, no meditation: Only Love. You are made of Love.”

by which I think he means, meditate as much as you can, and when you do so, just feel the love in your heart. but really, what do I know of what he means. that’s why i continue to sit with him as often as I let myself.

travels ahead, troubles behind, pickle recipes on the way, and praying that the photos uploaded. there are also some other, older, smaller pictures Butter sent me that finally got up to the server, from our couple of weeks together in delhi and uttarkhand. the address is

http://www.somethingconstructive.net/photos/ghee

(what else would you call Butter in india? obviously.)

and the pictures of my mango hut, to which I said goodbye just hours ago, are at

http://www.somethingconstructive.net/photos/futane

and some posts I wrote last week but did not publicize are here:

http://www.mangolandia.org/archives/269

http://www.mangolandia.org/archives/268

and I am giving a reading at Bluestockings Book Store in NYC on August 9th, at 7pm. Teleport in and we’ll have a powwow.

under the stars,
ankur-la

june 9th. almost noon and i’m finished with the morning labor, appropriately enough. i’m been steadily waking up earlier each day, trying to get to a placetime where i can follow the advice of the himalayan swamis (all so caring, all so dedicated to my learning) who advised me to wake up at 3:30 every morning, so i could have 90 minutes of sadhana (from 4:00 to 5:30) every morning before beginning by day. by sadhana they mean ‘practice’, spiritual practice. it can take any form, as long as the intention is clear, selfless, focused, and dedicated. in my case i usually see sadhana as sitting meditation, flute practice, writing, or painting, but as the days get filled with farm operations, i am learning to intend my repetitive work in the nursery or the field as sadhana as well.

by 6:30 i’m planting pumpkin, melon, and ash gourd in pits along an irrigation canal denali and i dug last week, and carving three short beds for cucumber and planting those as well. by 8:30 i’ve finished weeding the perennial eggplant beds and preparing the soil for companion planting of cowpea and cluster bean later today. and by 9:30 i’m in out of the heat, having prepared 20 plastic bags with nursery soil and sowed seeds of bael (aegle marmelos, grapefruit meets coconut) in them.

there is a feeling of nativity, of place, that accompanies everything we do. all the handles of all the (iron) tools I use are made from bamboo, from here. the sieve i use to screen the nursery soil was made here as well, and even the vines hanging from the mango tree can be used to lash posts together. all the paddy straw we use to incubate the mangos as they ripen upstairs was harvested last fall, and tomorrow — the mangos going out of season like they’re going out of style — i’ll take it downstairs once more, and mulch around the cucumber and eggplant with it. the gober (cow dung) we use to refurbish the floors and front porch comes from the cows 20 meters away, who i visit many times a day with plates of mango skins and kitchen scraps, whose yogurt i eat at lunch, whose milk we make into kheer (rice pudding), whose urine we use to make fertilizer for our seedlings.

as the shower room is busy when i’m back and there’s no sense in eating mangos while i’m still sweating, i pick up the hoevel (shovel? hoe? somewhere in between) and head to the back yard to teach myself a permaculture lesson: for whom are you planting? if it’s meghali (brother’s wife) and ai (mom, karuna) who do most of the cooking, why are vasantji (dad) and i deciding where the kitchen garden (far from the kitchen) goes and what to plant in it? so i ask ai and she says coriander leaves and maybe it’s too sunny and the wrong season but dammit she’s making the breakfast each morning and i’m going to give her what she wants. or try to.

earlier, back when i had friends, malavika and i decided to clean up the back yard. the backyard is a 25′ by 50′ plot between the house and the road, dry as ice, full of trees, shrubs, weeds, and hidden root crops. i recognize bael (aegle marmelos), mango, sitaphal (custard apple / cherimoya), various invasives, banana, papaya, and teak. many more i do not.

there is no concept of garbage collection here at Samvad (the official name of this mangoed farm, and there is a sincere attempt to reduce consumption as much as possible, and to sort what little garbage does enter our private world. but not everyone knows or cares enough to sort, and there are windstorms, so there are bits of paper and plastic, detritus and anthropology, all over the backyard. there are blue coconut hair oil contairs and matchboxes and old student id cards and newspapers and whatnot: a record of what, over the years, my family here decided they could not or would not produce for themselves.

so mali and i spent a sweaty hour picking up trash and sorting it, weighing it down in the appropriate drums and baskets so it won’y blow away again, raking the forst litter and making little paths through the jungle. after an hours work in the grueling son, denali and his stomachproblem come out to say hello. we give him the ‘what do you think’ expression as we lean contendently on our hoevels and tree trunks and he shruggs and tells us\

“it looks about the same.”

which just goes to show. which just goes to show no matter how clever and liberated and free you think you are, it’s still nice to get praise after hard (unnecessary) work in the 120 F heat, and how attached we are to such minutae.

when i saw ai a couple of hours later, she asked me if i was planning a kitchen garden in the back yard. i was not.

“no, i was not.”

“oh, because it looks so nice, now!”

thank you, mission accomplished. ego fed, clothed, housed, comfortable, and sedated.

“well, not nice exactly, but Swachha.”

“swachha? not nice?”

so she explains the distinction vinobaji makes, relevant, i think, to spaces and to objects. first there is “sahya”, tolerable. we must first make the situation tolerable. she tells me that before our work this morning, the backyard was intolerable. next is “swaccha”, clean. that is the basis for being able to live and appreciate there. then comes “sundar”, beautiful, a pleasant place to be. and highest of course (remember, this india) is “pavitra”, holy, when we have sufficiently put work and intention (“work is love in action” – findhorn) there that even the gods would come down (up?) and chill.

so, not yet sundaram, but through sahya and swaccha. not bad.

and this, now, my friends, this touches my point about growth, desire, hard work, stress, and beauty. which, given household duties (samsara) whcih have once again bugan crying my name, will have to wait for another day. but just so you know, that’s where i’m going with all this — trying to figure out why we are so busy sometimes, even busy doing beautiful things, that we allow ourselves to get into intolerable states where really, truly, everything we do and touch should be beautiful, if not holy.

until then i rest comfortably in the midday heat with my body’s feedback of contentment: my fading muscles from our himalayan pilgrimage and the growing callouses on my hands from all the digging and hoeveling. these signs are not merely physical, they indicate to me i deserve to rest mentally as well, i can go easy and be content and proud in the knowledge i am living, that i am alive.

the best of course is removing the splinters each night from my hands. i sit alone with a needle, lancing through my own skin, huting for thorns. it’s a sort of easter, a hunt for evidence that i did something day, a review of action and satisfaction, a moment of silence.

june 9th.

some culinary notes and quotations

1. from an art book on sujata bajaj

is there something secretly written inside each of us?
or is each of us a tiny fragment of the vast script which tells the story of the world?

2. breakfast:

poha. poha is a sort of pounded rice. i think it’s been processed in some way because it requires virtually no cooking, and thus is perfect for breakfast when people are heading to the fields at 6 in the morning and need something they can snack on at 9. all you have to do is (go to the indian store and) soak it in water for a few minutes, drain it, and have it next to your wok/frypan. to make it spicy (as all breakfast here is, apparently) you do a typically “vagar” (spices-in-hot-oil): heating oil in a pan (we get local peanut oil here) and popping mustard seeds and curry leaves and (i would use) green chiles. when they pop you can add vegetables (potatoes you’ve steamed and cut in small pieces work well) but here there’s nothing else to it — the spices, oil, and the poha. a little turmeric paints the whole dish an attractive yellow and if there’s coriander leaf in the kitchen garden you can run and get some to put on top with the juice of a fresh (green, still immature, but still sour) lemon.

but today meghali served me the poha covered and i do mean covered with thin filets of sweet orange mango, layered so thickly and everywhere that i could only get hints of the sunny poha below. i am learning there is no indian food — sweet or savory — that does not go well with mango.

3. lunch:

meghali interrupts my writing to hand me b owl of small green oblong cucumber-type creatures and a knife, then runs back to her crying six-month-young baby in the kitchen, closing the screen door bewtween us against the constant threat of kittens and puppies. a moment later, above the baby’s cries, i hear

“samsara, ankurji. samsara.”

samsara being the notion that all this world is an endless circle of petty happiness and misery, and as along as we’re involved and attached to it, we continue to earn our place. forever. it’s often used “popularly” to refer to the demands of the material world, and particular, it seems, the life of a “householder” or parent.

“samsara, ankurji. samsara.”

i begin cutting and eventually cut enough of the gourd-let in the wrong direction that it’s only appropriate for me to take over the operation, cutting potatoes (too big pieces) and onions and running out in the heat with a wet shirt wrapped like a shield around me to get lemon basil, ajwain (an oregano relative), and mint from the herb plot a full 350 meters (who plans this?) away.

so i make lunch, a provencal interpreation of whatever vegetable i have been honored to receive, without the garlic, of course, because ai (mom) is not fond of it, and without the tomato, of course, because it’s not in season. which is to say, there’s nothing really provencal about it except my memories of tartes bruno and i would make eight years ago, but i did successfully

a) invent a low heat setting for the (biogas) stove so i could lightly sautee instead of Fry the onions
b) refuse to overcook the vegetables
c) input some ground black mustard seeds (though ubiquitious on the supercontinent, it seems they are always fried or used in halves (for pickle) and seldom ground).

All of which drum the dish out of the standard indian cuisine category.

Which is to say, there’s a low chance people will like it, but I’m pretty much over being attached to my actions, at least in that respect, these days, when the watchword is gratitude and nothing on this farm escapes tasting divine.

4. from pema chodron, a gentle buddhist teacher

renunciation is the realization that nostalgia for samsara is bullshit.

- ankurbhai

An article by Derrick Jensen, I’d like to share. I think it’s very very good.

I say it’s very good and also, I think you will see, I think it’s a direct attack of my entire style (read: joie) of living.

But I don’t disagree, per se. Indeed, I cannot, but rather, I think his comments and criticisms are entirely accurate from a material (in the Marxist, not mall-ist sense) perspective. That is, if this beautiful world of love and (the rest is just) poetry is all we have and all we are, than Derrick is right. But if the marching saints and Gandhi’s were right, it’s that there is more than this material beauty and starving suffering in front of us: there is Spirit.

That spirituality, to me, does not mean tarot cards and crystals and hoping for the best, but rather, the simple notions that:

1. Death isn’t real, and we should start acting like it (ie ahimsa, love without mortal fear).
2. Coincidence is not.
3. Time and space are ideas we deeply hold and cherish.

There’s probably more and less and different ways of phrasing it, but that’s the general level of understanding I’m talking about when I say “spiritual”. So if Derrick is right and what matters is how our next seven generations of children are able to survive on this floating orb, then yes, I think the words below are the most powerful and relevant I’ve read in a long time. But if he’s not, then I still think that one honest smile from Dick Cheney could potentially change everything for all of us,

right now.

[ Derrick Jensen from Orion Magaine, May/June 2009 ]

A FEW MONTHS AGO at a gathering of activist friends someone asked, “If our world is really looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?”

The question stuck with me for a few reasons. The first is that it’s the world, not our world. The notion that the world belongs to us—instead of us belonging to the world—is a good part of the problem.

The second is that this is pretty much the only question that’s asked in mainstream media (and even among some environmentalists) about the state of the world and our response to it. The phrase “green living” brings up 7,250,000 Google hits, or more than Mick Jagger and Keith Richards combined (or, to look at it another way, more than a thousand times more than the crucial environmental philosophers John A. Livingston and Neil Evernden combined). If you click on the websites that come up, you find just what you’d expect, stuff like “The Green Guide: Shop, Save, Conserve,” “Personal Solutions for All of Us,” and “Tissue Paper Guide for Consumers.”

The third and most important reason the question stuck with me is that it’s precisely the wrong question. By looking at how it’s the wrong question, we can start looking for some of the right questions. This is terribly important, because coming up with right answers to wrong questions isn’t particularly helpful.

So, part of the problem is that “looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe” makes it seem as though environmental catastrophe is the problem. But it’s not. It’s a symptom—an effect, not a cause. Think about global warming and attempts to “solve” or “stop” or “mitigate” it. Global warming (or global climate catastrophe, as some rightly call it), as terrifying as it is, isn’t first and foremost a threat. It’s a consequence. I’m not saying pikas aren’t going extinct, or the ice caps aren’t melting, or weather patterns aren’t changing, but to blame global warming for those disasters is like blaming the lead projectile for the death of someone who got shot. I’m also not saying we shouldn’t work to solve, stop, or mitigate global climate catastrophe; I’m merely saying we’ll have a better chance of succeeding if we recognize it as a predictable (at this point) result of burning oil and gas, of deforestation, of dam construction, of industrial agriculture, and so on. The real threat is all of these.

The same is true of worldwide ecological collapse. Extractive forestry destroys forests. What’s the surprise when extractive forestry causes forest communities—plants and animals and mushrooms and rivers and soil and so on—to collapse? We’ve seen it once or twice before. When you think of Iraq, is the first image that comes to mind cedar forests so thick the sunlight never reaches the ground? That’s how it was prior to the beginnings of this extractive culture; one of the first written myths of this culture is of Gilgamesh deforesting the plains and hillsides of Iraq to build cities. Greece was also heavily forested; Plato complained that deforestation harmed water quality (and I’m sure Athenian water quality boards said the same thing those boards say today: we need to study the question more to make sure there’s really a correlation). It’s magical thinking to believe a culture can effectively deforest and yet expect forest communities to sustain.

It’s the same with rivers. There are 2 million dams just in the United States, with 70,000 dams over six feet tall and 60,000 dams over thirteen feet tall. And we wonder at the collapse of native fish communities? We can repeat this exercise for grasslands, even more hammered by agriculture than forests are by forestry; for oceans, where plastic outweighs phytoplankton ten to one (for forests to be equivalently plasticized, they’d be covered in Styrofoam ninety feet deep); for migratory songbirds, plagued by everything from pesticides to skyscrapers; and so on.

The point is that worldwide ecological collapse is not some external and unpredictable threat—or gun barrel—down which we face. That’s not to say we aren’t staring down the barrel of a gun; it would just be nice if we identified it properly. If we means the salmon, the sturgeon, the Columbia River, the migratory songbirds, the amphibians, then the gun is industrial civilization.

A second part of the problem is that the question presumes we’re facing a future threat—that the gun has yet to go off. But the Dreadful has already begun. Ask passenger pigeons. Ask Eskimo curlews. Ask great auks. Ask traditional indigenous peoples almost anywhere. This is not a potential threat, but rather one that long-since commenced.

The larger problem with the metaphor, and the reason for this new column in Orion, is the question at the end: “how shall I live my life right now?” Let’s take this step by step. We’ve figured out what the gun is: this entire extractive culture that has been deforesting, defishing, dewatering, desoiling, despoiling, destroying since its beginnings. We know this gun has been fired before and has killed many of those we love, from chestnut ermine moths to Carolina parakeets. It’s now aimed (and firing) at even more of those we love, from Siberian tigers to Indian gavials to entire oceans to, in fact, the entire world, which includes you and me. If we make this metaphor real, we might understand why the question—asked more often than almost any other—is so wrong. If someone were rampaging through your home, killing those you love one by one (and, for that matter, en masse), would the question burning a hole in your heart be: how should I live my life right now? I can’t speak for you, but the question I’d be asking is this: how do I disarm or dispatch these psychopaths? How do I stop them using any means necessary?

Finally we get to the point. Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped—whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the efforts of brave women and men fighting in alliance with the natural world—are not going to care how you or I lived our lives. They’re not going to care how hard we tried. They’re not going to care whether we were nice people. They’re not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent. They’re not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet. They’re not going to care whether we were enlightened or not enlightened. They’re not going to care what sorts of excuses we had to not act (e.g., “I’m too stressed to think about it” or “It’s too big and scary” or “I’m too busy” or any of the thousand other excuses we’ve all heard too many times). They’re not going to care how simply we lived. They’re not going to care how pure we were in thought or action. They’re not going to care if we became the change we wished to see.

They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books about it. They’re not going to care whether we had “compassion” for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy. They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water. They’re going to care whether the land is healthy enough to support them.

We can fantasize all we want about some great turning, and if the people (including the nonhuman people) can’t breathe, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but that we stop this culture from killing the planet. It’s embarrassing even to have to say this. The land is the source of everything. If you have no planet, you have no economic system, you have no spirituality, you can’t even ask this question. If you have no planet, nobody can ask questions.

What question would I ask instead? What if, instead of asking “How shall I live my life?” people were to ask the land where they live, the land that supports them, “What can and must I do to become your ally, to help protect you from this culture? What can we do together to stop this culture from killing you?” If you ask that question, and you listen, the land will tell you what it needs. And then the only real question is: are you willing to do it?