Pity the frog

Pity the frog, identified so often as either sitting on a log, making decisions, but not taking action, or being slowly boiled alive. I have a picture in my head of a frog on a log in the sun, deciding to jump into the water, but without thought, he simply stays where he is basking in the sun; it is where he wants to be. It might be reasonable to ask if the frog is even aware of making a decision. If it is, indeed, unaware, then we should hold the frog harmless and living without motivation or intention beyond the need to eat and procreate.It's much easier for me to understand the frog slowly reaching the boiling point in water, unaware that the water is getting dangerously hot. I feel like I've jumped out of the pot, which was not so much of my own doing, but a reaction to something deep.

So it is that I want to write a book. It seems clear to me today that I need a book proposal, but it is most assuredly autobiographical and my brother assures me that there is no point trying to sell book like that before it is written.  But in this case I want a co-writer, and so a book proposal is essential to starting a collaboration.

In rough outline this book would be about how it came to pass that two people came to be in a hot tub together in Whistler, British Columbia, on February 13, 2024. I hope we can give the reader a clear eyed and honest depiction of who we were at that moment, and how, by God, we had ended up there. This obviously allows for autobiography. It allows for poetry and for block prints. The list goes on.

For myself, I know that if I am able, I will be attending the international convention of alcoholics anonymous in Vancouver, Canada in early July 2025. What if we prepared to meet then, and be hopeful today that we might even be editing a first or second draft. And what if this book also covered the period from now to July 2025; we might even reflect on how the writing affects us. And just for today, continuing until then, there might be no need for an ending.

Donald Trump and the Red Letter I

Last Thursday one more of Donald Trump’s legal problems ended up before the Supreme Count and I listened to some of the oral arguments.  It is clear that the question of whether or not Donald Trump is an insurrectionist will certainly be postponed, again, as the justices are not ready to admit (nor accuse) him of being one.  Liberal and conservative justices alike are unwilling to litigate that question, though I expect they will have to at some point.  Conservatives clearly want to use their federal power to quash Colorado’s decision, upheld on public appeal to Colorado’s courts, that Trump is an insurrectionist, but they cannot do so directly.  They are loath to conduct an evidentiary hearing, on the grounds that Colorado’s evidentiary process may be flawed.  Conservative analysis of the 14th amendment is that it was meant to restrict state rights, not embolden them as Colorado has done and many other states are ready to do. Cavanaugh and others feign fear over the political and legal wars they envision should they let Colorado’s decision stand.  Justice Alito et.al. insisted that since adoption of the 14th amendment there has never been a candidate kept off the ballot for federal office due to insurrection, it follows that the amendment cannot be construed to have allowed it in federal elections.

Evidently there are no convicted insurrectionists in the United States today; we don’t charge people with insurrection to begin with.  We charge them with conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding because crimes like that are easier to prosecute and carry sufficiently high sentences as to meet the need for harsh punishment.  But nobody today is in jail because they were found guilty of insurrection.  And yet you and I know they are either insurrectionists or some kind of private militia fighting on behalf of their leader for greater glory.  To my mind, they used their strength (without many armaments) to pursue their target, identified to them by Trump as Vice President Pence, in order to overturn the results of the election.  That is an insurrection against the Constitution whether or not you believe that is a good thing or a bad thing.  Donald Trump was the leader of an insurrection; he had his armed militia at the ready.  I do not believe that a man like Trump, surrounded by the likes of Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Kash Patel, did not also have field generals and a battle plan.  Were it not for the Secret Service, Trump would have been at the Capitol demanding Pence’s fealty, not at gunpoint, but surrounded by his militia.

Donald Trump is an insurrectionist as surely as any other January 6 defendant, but will never be convicted of it.  Yet the State of Colorado applied that conclusion after a thorough judicial review and specifically cited the 14th amendment’s prohibitions, however they might be applied, in managing access to the primary ballot.  Trump was represented by counsel in a five day judicial hearing and offered no rebuttal to the underlying claim of insurrection.  The Colorado Secretary of State then won on appeal to Colorado’s highest court.  In Colorado it is legally correct to call Donald Trump an insurrectionist.  Given that the Supreme Count will not take up a review of Colorado’s legal evidence, it can only limit itself to the question of whether or not he can be on the ballot.  The fact that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist in Colorado is not in dispute before the justices.  The Colorado Attorney General encouraged the court to review all of the evidence, but they won’t, yet.  It may be that when it comes to insurrection the Justices are like frogs in a pot of water being heated, slowly.  It is most assuredly very discomforting.

This conservative court is faced with the ironic invocation of federal law over state’s rights and insist, with a straight face, that no state can be allowed to challenge federal supremacy lest many other states undertake their own objections using their own processes and rules of evidence; such an outcome would be so very unsettling.  Welcome to our world, Honorable Justices of the Supreme Court.  As unsettling as it may be, we already have an overwhelming number of such cases and this is just one more.  This Supreme Court is willing to support state's rights in other realms such as abortion and public funding of religious education.  Do they only accept division on some issues and not others?  It might even be true that the justices fear the specter of violence always present around Trump.

It has always been true over any reasonably long period of time that these battles are a normal part of human affairs.  I have faith that our political and judicial processes will adequately protect us if other states want to exclude candidates for any reason or for no reason at all.  Which is to say I accept that each state is allowed to determine the manner of selection of their electors to the Electoral College.  It was always thus whether I think it is a good idea or not.

While the justices might see a ghastly fauvist battle of states against one another, perhaps it can also be seen as a cubist’s tension-filled body pushing the rock uphill, unarmed, to depose of one more autocrat for whom “L’État, c’est moi.”. If this cannot be done before the Supreme Court very soon then the justices will have failed to do their part to advance the rock and we will roll, again, back downhill into the implied and explicit threats of violence and bedlam, for having opposed Donald Trump.

Soil and Spirit by Scott Chaskey

Scott Chaskey stimulates so many lines of thinking.  Wedded as I am to my devices, I could not but help chase down reference after reference in “Soils and Spirituality”, even after telling myself that just one or two might be sufficient to frame this review.  But which ones? Evidently any of them.

Chaskey is a writer.  Whether writing in prose or presenting us with rich poetry, he invites us, even beckons us, to broaden and deepen our understanding of what I call regenerative gardening.  And better that we should do it quickly:

“Quick, quick, as rain falls/Remember your rake! Today peasants sow the seed“

He does not deliver instructions informed by wisdom and insight, as did Rudolph Steiner in “Agriculture”, rather he succeeded in broadening and deepening my understanding of the relation of regenerative thought to ancient forms and ideas.  Both men, Steiner and Chaskey, use their skills as though working patiently in an ancient quarry and both observe their world with keen contemporary eyes.  The topics at hand are different, Steiner warning of the dangers of inorganic agriculture and Chaskey to a broader audience urgently confronted with the need to rethink and adapt.  This includes gardeners.

I want to explain that my relation to this book is that of a gardener now more or less devoted to regenerative practices and thinking of the soil regeneration movement as it might be practiced in the American community garden.  Within the regenerative movement is a sense of returning to that which we see as essential and eternal in rocks and soils, in plants and landscapes, in people and community.  I don't think a day goes by that I do not think of soil and fungi, community and sociology, science and spirituality.  This work, “Soil and Spirit”,  landed with me just as I began to approach the organizational and sociological aspects of community gardening and the ritual January practice of garden planning. I’ve recently been reading academic papers by sociologists on the tension between collective thought and organized individualism of the American community garden.  I find much work to do, carefully.

Chaskey’s book was a most welcome diversion from community gardening.  At first slightly overwhelmed by references, I soon recognized I had to try to be still and let him be a guide pointing out as many avenues of inquiry as I might later pursue.  He glides and flits, as do his poetic birds, seeding the land, offering paths I found to be fungal rather than static or merely bibliographic.  His story telling is immersive and personal.  Just long enough too hold our attention they often end with the personal and poignant as when he concludes a discussion of clay and potters

“The products I most respect and cherish come in the shape of bowls and plates and cups (formed on the wheel by potter friends in Cornwall) I hold in my hands daily”

Personal narrative on the woods of Maine, the rocks of Ireland and the heather of Scotland established a solid foundation to trust the author and know he is capable of awe, even standing in a field.  You and I do that, too, if we're lucky.  Chasky can write about it. Discussing his own observation of peasant-farming in contemporary China (a strong line of inquiry, for me) he uses quick lines of verse to hurry us toward, or back to, peasant ideas of bounty and beauty:

“A quick breath above winter grains:
the sharp-shinned hawk
dives from a locust post”

Or, discussing rock, establishing a firm hold, a strong foundation:

“I had my existence.  I was there.
Me in place and the place in me."

The book is a masterpiece for the regenerative, farmer and gardener, familiar with the language of plants, soils and single celled organisms, who seek to place regenerative thought within the context  larger universe.  Chaskey offers many journeys, whether you want to travel 6000 years to China or back as far as 2 billion years to blue green algae. There is a living connection today to those first thoughts and practices of a successful agriculture and Chaskey recognizes and describes his first hand observation of it as easily as he describes the practices and people themselves.  It sometimes seems he wants to offer us everything all at once, but this is only because he sees that every moment has its context: physical, historical, ecological, cultural, spiritual, etc. each connected to an unknowable whole.

The “Spirit” in this title is suffused throughout the book because Chaskey is telling stories of people he knows and the practices of civilizations and of tribes.  Artisans, priests, farmers and many, many writers whose passions reflect the action of spirit upon them and their work.  These spirits and their archetypes have evolved with us, and with our agriculture, since the dawn.  I was recently struck by the idea, for which I lack attribution, that all living things on earth are equally evolved.  For Chasky this is so much larger “as if syllables and stone evolved through centuries of communion”.  I have been taught that faith permits me to see the spiritual and the Devine acting in my life and I know my life is better for it.  I am also aware of some of the dangers in that thinking, but Chasky’s testimony is reassuring.

In the end, I’ve concluded this work is fundamentally and unarguably fungal; it’s a mycelial network of branching thoughts and observations, prayers and poetry, science and spirit.  Each hypha traced backward toward its source and connected forward with new growth.  I was easily drawn to a thread about Charles Perkins Marsh, a Vermont diplomat, linguist and naturalist. His work “Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action” published in 1864 is considered by some to be as seminal to agriculture, ecology and land use as Darwin’s “On the Origins of Species” had on biology and evolution, both towering contributions in their field.  Close proximity and a shared Vermont citizenship (and evidently not the knowledge that there is a building named for Marsh on the U.V.M. campus) inspires me to look closer knowing I’m entering another fungal community.

I invite you to read this book and see if something similar doesn’t happen to you, too.