Children and Oak Trees

Imagine the courage it takes these days to have a child. Or to plant a tree: I saw a baby white oak today, in it's one-inch trunk and tiny hat of leaves blithely oblivious to imminent climate change and to the lucky century it's going to need to become monumental enough to be reasonably safe from being peremptorily cut down for landscaping or housebuilding convenience.

Turn, turn, turn: the Composting Cycle

You have a bit of yard, a bit of garden, and what seems like a whole lot of organic matter going in the trash? And you have thought about composting, but the books and web sites seem to imply that successful composting is a mysterious mix of meditation and mountains of the "right kind" of green matter? Well, take heart: it isn't all that hard.

First thing: relax, because composting does take a while. I hate to haul in nature here, but did you ever notice the leisurely way a fallen tree rots back into the ground? You can step over it for years before it finally crumbles away into that soil-enriching stuff we've heard so much about.

Of course, if you grind that tree to sawdust it will swiftly decay, since so much more of it is getting attacked at once by those helpful little munchers and rotters that actually do the composting. Likewise, if you have a home compost pile or bin, chopping and turning the tasty contents will speed the process. However, what's time to a microbe? Do essentially (ah, that weasel word!) nothing, and they will take care of things in their own good time. Anyway, when I finally put compost in my garden beds, the oldest stuff in the batch has been rotting for three years, the youngest for two.

I use a three-batch system: two Smith and Hawkin Biostack composters plus a hole in the ground right behind them. I switch everything around once a year, in late October or early November (sometimes later if I'm lazy), when the garden is just about done. First, I shovel the finished (but slightly funky) compost from the hole out onto the beds, then refill the hole from the BioStack that has been sitting full but unused for a year, and cover the now-heaped hole with a bit of soil or a small leaf bin. Then I shut down the current BioStack and switch to the just-emptied one as the destination for my kitchen and garden matter for the year to come. Four or five months later, when I come back to the garden, the compost I added in the fall is sweet and ready.

That's the system in outline. There are a couple more points I'll discuss later. Watch this space!

(If three-and-a-half years seems like too much lead time for a bit of soil additive, think of it like bonsai: something—once the full cycle gets going—for your children to enjoy.)

fall'n into the sere

In The Atlantic this month the lead article is What Makes Us Happy?. Using a 72-year-long (and counting) study of a couple hundred young men from the Harvard classes of '42, '43, and '44, the writer purports to answer this question.

But what does the question mean, exactly? From the Declaration on down, happiness seems central to this nation. And while we may think we know a happy person when we see one, he or she may not feel that way about himself or herself. After all, a man with a lovely wife and a fine job has a lot to lose, and anxiety at the precariousness of his good fortune may actually counter it. Meanwhile, there could be someone much lower in all the status measures who feels just fine: he enjoys his prole food and no-account friends, and even the challenges of his 'dead-end' job. Annoyingly, he may actually be happy.

Moreover, there seems a confusion in this article, as in most other discussions of happiness. Is a person accounted happy because he scores high on several measures over a lifetime? That is, is happiness a game where the highest cumulative score wins? One can imagine two old men (check out Salman Rusdie's story In the South in the May 18th New Yorker), one of whom had a "happy" life, and the other not, who become companions. At this point their former lives have fallen away, and who is to say which is the happier. Happiness is what is happening right now.

As far as that goes, in the life-well-lived school of happiness, what is one to say about the soldier who meets his death ecstatically, knowing he is dying heroically for the people and country he loves, at the height of his powers, his life now completely solved? Isn't he better off than the great man who devolves into senility, and sees himself doing it, before death finally takes him?

Smile, it's all hopeless ...

There once was just nothing but One
(no stars, no bananas, no Sun)
whose multiplication
became all Creation,
since Many is so much more fun.

A Sudden Attack of Mindfulness

At the 2008 TED conference, a neuroscientist named Jill Bolte Taylor gave a remarkable talk about the severe stroke she had suffered, and what she had learned from it. Most strokes don't teach their victims much, except perhaps how near the precipice always is, but Taylor got lucky (as it were) in that hers disabled her left brain hemisphere only, allowing her right hemisphere full play. And when that happened the logical, driven, planful scientist vanished, leaving an addled hippie on a mind trip, but one more pure than any LSD or peyote could deliver.

The right brain is the destination for all sensory input. It does some organizing, but is not really in the judgment business, rather revels in the "blooming, buzzing confusion" coming in. So it's up to the sober grown-up left brain to prune, block, and mute most of right-brain's offerings so that it can Get Something Done.

I had never heard of Dr. Taylor until a week ago when my wife directed me to a youtube copy of the TED talk. (Thanks, Google, for everything...) The talk was fun and inspiring, and also suspenseful. After all, if someone is vigorously prowling the stage and talking a mile-a-minute without notes about her recent disabling stroke, one can't but think...

But TED is nothing if not upbeat, so this talk was not going to end in a tragic pratfall. Reassured by that reflection, I relaxed into it and came away both ways enlightened.

Western, I learned about the division of labor of the brain: left hemisphere, planning, language; right hemisphere, sensory data. (This corresponds roughly to the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy used in popular classifications of logical/intuitive, but I suspect the popular view mixes up functions more than the (current) scientific view.)

Eastern, I saw she achieved the kind of insight that the great sages and mystics allude to, and which has been heretofore so elusive. (But apparently now all you have to do is arrange a properly-placed massive but temporary injury to "your" left brain hemisphere.) While "disabled" she saw that everything is connected: our bodies extend into all the space around them; we interpenetrate each other; individuals are no big deal. (These are my words, but one of her points is that words fail one—or more precisely that the verbal facility is shut off.) The insight, of course, is that egoism is a lie, a giant con played on each and every one of us (yes, I know...) by our busy little left brains.

And since egoism is the source of so much of the world's pain, and of so much suffering in each of us, wouldn't it be wonderful if it could be...well, if not eradicated, at least cooled down a bit by a periodic washing in this vision of Oneness?

But how? It could be that Zen masters and such already have kind of a leaky connection between halves, which just requires enlarging. For most of us, though, absent the lucky hemorrhage, it's drugs and drugs alone that will let us really see the unum in pluribus.

It is true that to one of a philosophic bent the inner whisperings that drive us to feed our needy egos become increasingly unconvincing, so that by middle age such a person must see the self-talk we all engage in as pathetic delusion. And yet, what is such a person—and I count myself as one—to do?

First, this grim insight is just the left brain at bay, rather than the right brain reveling. And, as everyone knows, a negative attitude—even if right—is no basis for a happy life. So, it's drugs then.

But gee, Mr. Natural, they're illegal...

More on this later, but I note with a mixture of amusement and discomfort how my second-to-last post specifically and many of them tacitly celebrate logic, the glory of the left brain...