Lifelong learning: The third degree

Traditions

2011-08-05T13:16:00.000-05:00

Yesterday and this morning, I became part of a long-standing tradition: I chose Chinese medicine to treat a health condition.

I've ended up over the course of the last 3 months with a really bad cough. I checked with my doctor and she noted that since my allergy meds, taken regularly, have done nothing to remedy the cough, it's fair to assume it's not caused by allergies. But I also have asthma. She thought that the really hot, dry and windy conditions we're experiencing here in Austin (and that I also experienced in Colorado, at least the dry and windy part of it) exacerbate asthma symptoms. She's been hearing a lot of complaints from her patients with asthma. So, she suggested I try an asthma inhaler that reduces inflammation, which I agreed to do. I have tried them before, and they really do improve my breathing.

My asthma herbs & other healthy things
CC*BY GKH

But I also went to see Billy, my acupuncturist, got a treatment, signed up for a weekly series of them for awhile, and got three little paper bags full of Chinese herbs from the Turtle Dragon shop down the street from his office.

Billy prescribed Chinese herbs once before when I had a really bad case of bronchitis, and I recalled mainly that they tasted awful. These aren't the same ones. I brewed them up this morning and to my surprise, they tasted rather good. Well, maybe it was the three slices of fresh ginger I added to them (part of the recipe!). But in any event, the tea was very nice. I will take this medicine 30 minutes after each meal for the next 6 days. Then we'll see about that inhaler.

Chinese herb shop
CC*BY Jimmyhomeschoolmom

So, I'm not Chinese. So I've never been to China. It's still tradition. And I like tradition. And I would love for these treatments to tame this cough. If they don't, well that's ok. Best to try though, before I embrace the western approach. The inhaler contains an ingredient that, according to the mile-long insert in the box, "increases asthma-related deaths." Hmmm. I am pretty sure the inhaler will work, and I'm pretty sure that, odds are, I'm not going to suffer unreasonably with side-effects, but geez, some of them can be real doozies.

Getting a little perspective on your yard birds

2011-07-31T12:56:00.000-05:00

As I packed for my summer trip to Boulder, I planned to bring my binoculars and bird book, but at the last minute, I put them both away, recognizing that I wasn't going to have time for birding. Boulder was not a birding trip. Nonetheless, when I first arrived, I noticed right away that there were many new unfamiliar bird sounds as well as some that I knew but which were slightly different, suggesting maybe a different but related species to the ones I was familiar with at home. I just listened.

Flatirons, Chautauqua
GKH CC*BY

Little by little I got better at just listening, and on a day trip to Chautauqua, I sat in the woods along the trail into the Flatirons just listening. It truly was a musical delight. Only once or twice did my mind grab onto a label, or my eyes wander to the source of sound.

But I did find it odd that I couldn't see any of the birds.

James Good
CC*BY*NC*ND

Gradually that changed. I saw a Red-shafted Northern Flicker's flight feather on the ground on my walk home one morning and picked it up. I had heard them in the trees at the entrance to our building, Lincoln Hall, but I never saw them.

Coby Leuschke
CC*BY*NC*ND

Then one morning, a Hummingbird made an appearance, calling an alarm above the flowering plants around the trees at the entrance to Lincoln. I noticed that the leaves of the plants below her were waving in a pattern that at first suggested they were being fanned by her wingbeats. It took a few seconds for me to realize that something was on the ground at the base of those plants, hidden from view. Its movement along the ground caused the tops of the plants to wave. It had her quite riled up. I never discovered what it was, however, because I was about to be late to morning mediation, so I left the mystery unsolved when she flew away.

A few days later, a flock of Chickadees appeared in the trees visible through one of the windows of Shambhala Hall, our mediation room. I could tell that they weren't Carolinas, but unsure of what they were, I just listened and watched. Later, a female House Finch appeared on the roof of our apartments, in the courtyard.

Robins in Snow Lion Courtyard -- Liz Sloan

And then I noticed a female American Robin sitting on a nest in the courtyard. She eventually hatched and fledged three babies.

One day Crows and Ravens showed their tails in flight so I could tell them apart without binoculars, even without glasses. And then, on an afternoon walk, I heard the sound of the Flicker in a tree above me and looked up and saw him in a hole in one of the branches of the tree. These occasional sightings always made me feel happy and present. But beyond the occasional squirrel or raccoon on campus, and these few birds, the wildlife in Boulder was sparse to say the least.

Home garden -- GKH CC*BY

I guess I got used to it. When I got home to Austin, my first morning in the garden astounded me with the variety and numbers of birds, squirrels, lizards, snakes and frogs I saw and heard within the first few hours of waking up! Critters were everywhere -- on the ground, in the trees, in the sky, at the feeders, on the bird baths. Unperturbed and raucous, they went about their business as though I weren't there. It was the best welcome home I could imagine! Well, that and the fact that Dennis had kept my garden alive and thriving, the feeders filled, and the bird baths clean and inviting the whole time I'd been gone. No wonder the critters were at home.

I had to remind myself that these were the same birds, lizards and squirrels that I had been noting somewhat dismissively before I went to Boulder, as my usual yard inhabitants. What a difference a little perspective can make.

Why Meditate?

2011-07-23T13:18:00.002-05:00

From Center for Contemplative Mind in Society

Morning and afternoon meditation were a constant in our lives at Naropa University this summer. Coming to this as I did from having meditated "off and on" for roughly 40 years, the regularity (in the past I might have said "rigidity") of the Naropa schedule was challenging at first. It quickly became a comfort, however, like a base, a simple practice to return to from wherever I went spinning off.

Shambhala Sun,
Sept. 2010

One of our first readings was Matthieu Ricard's "Why Meditate?" (2010), which I read several times during the course of the semester, each time understanding it differently. By the end of the semester, I had come to appreciate meditation in a way I never had before. Ricard described its centrality with straightforward and powerful words: “If we want to observe the subtlest mechanisms of our mental functioning and have an effect on them, we absolutely must refine our powers of looking inward” and “… cultivate a way of being that is not subject to the patterns of habitual thinking” (pp. 41 and 86).

More simply put, daily practice on the cushion is necessary to sharpen the ability to notice. And noticing is the foundation of all learning, insight and wisdom. So, for example, meditation helped me better notice myself reacting in habitual ways in day-to-day activities. I noticed my thoughts while washing the dishes. I saw subtle complaints, clinging to opinions, nostalgic reminiscing, and many others. This "just noticing" allows for questioning, looking deeper into those habitual thought patterns, for "just noticing" what hides beneath the surface of things that “get me,” or take me off to the past, or into the future.

Refining my attention and practicing mindfulness enabled me to see that even within the impulse I have to help, to inform, to counsel and to solve problems (in other words, the impulse to teach and to counsel my clients) is a subtle aggression, a desire to make problems go away. This came as a real surprise. But noticing it allowed me to consider refining my approach to teaching and to counseling, to "cultivate a way of being that is not subject to the patterns of habitual thinking" (Ricard, 2010, p. 86). Sometimes problems will not go away...

And Ricard pointed out something else just as foundational about meditation -- that while we can read the words of scholars and practitioners who have devoted their lives to “observing the automatic, mechanical patterns of thought and the nature of consciousness,” ... “we cannot merely rely on their words to free ourselves ... We must discover for ourselves the value of the methods these wise people taught and confirm for ourselves the conclusions they reached. This is not purely an intellectual process. Long study of our own experience is needed to rediscover their answers and integrate them into ourselves on a deep level” (pp. 86-87). In other words, you can't think your way to everything.

My Naropa journal came to contain many examples of my noticing that it wasn't all about thinking, that things happened in the gap, in the space between thoughts, and while I wasn't thinking:

I notice coincidence, repetition, and synergy here. For example, I hear "Heart Sutra" three times over the course of two days, so I Google, 'Heart Sutra commentary,' and up comes an amazing talk by Dr. John Crook, whom I've never heard of, posted on a UK site called Western Chan Fellowship, equally unknown to me. I read a little and then I leave it alone. I read more and then I leave it alone. It takes two days to finish it. I don't think about it. I am very present while I am reading. I feel my breathing slowing down, I feel my shoulders relaxing, my back straightening, at times I feel filled with energy, other times I am more empty and open. Some of his words trigger memories. There is recognition at times. And then there is ‘I don’t know.’ Then there is Richard (our instructor) saying, "you have to find out what is there before you worry about the fact that it's not there.” The Heart Sutra is about not here, not there, not anywhere. I don't want to think about it, I just want to hear it. Today I heard (noticed) this:

‘The essential feature of this approach is to realize that it is based in meditation. Thought can raise innumerable objections and create endless metaphysical speculation. The Buddha is speaking out of his enlightenment. He is sharing it, transmitting it. To receive it one has to follow the same path’ (Crook, 1992, part 2, para. 13).

I can't think my way to this (Personal Journal Entry, July 9, 2011).

Even more to the point:

We repeated the same improv performances in Presence class today three times, focusing on the same element each time. I got bored (predictably). The third time, Lee (our instructor) added an audience, and suggested that "we" get out of the way this time ("I've done every thing I know how to do in this role with this element"). She was right. Wow.

The element was fire. I may have undervalued and diminished it's power in my life somehow. But it is there. My performance of fire came from somewhere other than thinking it up. Lee would say, it came from nothing, from space, from the ground. I discovered three things about fire by thoroughly being fire for that third time, for those six minutes.

1. It is explosive. It uses things up. It takes one thing, combines it with another, and transforms both through explosion. Nothing is the same after fire touches it.

2. It is passionate. It is heat, lust and desire. It consumes and exhausts in its uncontrolled raging energy.

3. But harnessed, it radiates warmth, life-giving energy and the spark that starts things growing and changing.

It relates the things it consumes to each other. It joins them in energetic exchange. Fire only exists through connections: fire connects the earth element of fuel and the heaven element of air. It is the dynamic connection between heaven and earth. Its hard to imagine that I am or even have that connection inside me. But I was fire today. I have fire and can call upon and use its energy (Personal Journal Entry, July 4, 2011).

Given my careers in academe and in law, where logical thought is so highly valued, Crook's and Ricard's words, and my experiences with the Naropa summer learning intensive, are stunning confirmation of the importance of intuitive understanding. The Heart Sutra presents a very esoteric understanding of the nature of reality, and it’s pretty hard for me to grasp, but I'm convinced I won't get there by just thinking my way to it. “This approach is … based in meditation. Thought can raise innumerable objections and create endless metaphysical speculation..." (emphasis mine).

Indeed.

So, it's trusting more than just that part of my being that is analytical and strictly logical. It's about giving a say to Jill Bolte Taylor's, "Stroke of Insight." Theoretically, I get this. But where the rubber meets the road, it is not easy to trust beyond what you're comfortable trusting.

That's when it's back to the basics. Seeing how dramatic a difference being present makes, and how effectively meditation is sharpening my ability to see things I simply have not seen any other way, I am very reassured. Maintaining a regular meditation practice is absolutely essential to this seeing. Trust in the process is essential.

And today I read, by a sad coincidence perhaps, that Dr. John Crook died on Saturday, the last day of our semester. I am learning to bow to and trust those who teach. They know what they're talking about.

References

Crook, J. (1992, November). The heart sutra - A commentary - Dharma talk by John Crook. Western Chan Fellowship. Retrieved July 9, 2011, from http://www.westernchanfellowship.org/heart-sutra-commentary.html

Ricard, M. (2010, September). Why meditate? (How to meditate). Shambhala Sun. Retrieved July 23, 2011, from http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3575&Itemid=0

Taylor, J. B. (2006). My stroke of insight: A brain scientist’s personal journey. Lulu.com.

Naropa summer learning intensive: Welcome to contemplative education

2011-07-20T21:22:00.002-05:00

I had little on which to base any expectations about the Summer Learning Intensive, my introduction to Contemplative Education at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. I had the overall character of the schedule (from early in the morning until late into the night, 7 days a week, for 3 1/2 weeks); some summer readings (Turning the Mind into an Ally; Sacred World, and East Meets West, an essay about the formation of Naropa in the early 70's); and a basic understanding that the program enabled teachers and others to integrate mindfulness practices into their lives at work.

Boulder Creek flooding
from snow melt

Well, that just doesn't give you much to go on. So I just went. It was like stepping into a raging river.

There's not much you can do but just hold on for the ride. And you're going to get bumped, scraped up, and if you're not careful, you'll drown. Assuming you survive, it's quite an experience.

Thursday was the first full day and it was filled with orientations, introductions, getting settled in. Friday was my first immersion experience. I went under for the first time at Amy Howard's thesis project presentation.

Tradition; trust; natural loveliness

Amy's talk was about opening to being awake, and redefining the meaning of your life. She asked us to file by two long, low tables of nicely matted photographs and just notice each one. When we returned to our seats, she asked us to think about which one had appealed the most to us, moved us in some way. We returned to the tables, took the picture that had affected us the most, and returned to our seats. I chose the one to the left. She asked us to take a moment to reflect on and write about what about that photograph had affected us.

This image reflects qualities that I wish I had -- grace, strength, comfort in your own body, and a natural beauty that seems to come from a connection to something larger than yourself, in this photograph, a tradition that probably goes back many many years. And trusting in your larger community. My feeling was one of sadness. I often feel sad when I see something so achingly beautiful. It's like my heart just breaks open and sadness flows out. I have always wondered why this happens. Why doesn't love and beauty and grace and connection bring about joy, rather than sadness (Personal Journal Entry, June 23, 2011)?

Closed enso

I didn't have to wait long to find the answer to that question, one that had puzzled me for decades. But before that question got its answer, Saturday came: Graduation for the outgoing class. The ceremony was stunning. Seven students in their turn, each creating an enso brushstroke, a circle representing everything, all at once. Poetry, storytelling, the ringing of the gong, tears and joy everywhere. This was no ordinary graduation ceremony.

The ceremony completely exceeded even my wildest imagination of what it might be like to complete this program. The level of compassion, caring, love and commitment, support, energy and passion that everyone, everyone brings to this endeavor is simply unprecedented in my experience, anywhere, for anything. I can't believe I am sitting here, a part of this process. I know it's a university. I know there will be difficulty and adversity and frustration here and there. But that's true everywhere. This love and support is not everywhere. That I recognize. Never do the challenges end. You just meet them differently. That makes all the difference (Personal Journal Entry, June 25, 2011).

Thus began my getting to know a part of myself that I had long ignored -- my heart. It wasn't a matter of "what's going on here," or "why," or of fixing anything. I just started to notice. That's all. The practice for noticing was, first and foremost, meditation. At Naropa, meditation is primarily Shamatha practice, or mindfulness of the breath. You simply, repeatedly, notice what comes up while you sit, and return to observing your breath: in.....out. Thoughts come up, you think them, you go off with them, you notice that you've gone off and you return to Shamatha. Twice each day, 50 minutes in the morning and evening.

"And how might that help?" most everyone wonders.

Shamatha is not an endurance test, nor will it suddenly solve all our problems. But it does help us see how our problems arise, because it trains us in recognizing thoughts and emotions. It also trains us in letting them pass without acting on them. Even when we’re bored, we can work with our minds. This helps us cope in daily life. Because practice has enlarged our perspective beyond identifying with our thoughts and opinions, we’re less likely to act from a tight, self-protected space. We have more patience, more tolerance. We’re more able to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. In this way, meditation matures us (Mipham, 2003, p. 83).

So meditation was the constant in our lives. Always there.

Every morning on my
way to class, I stopped by
the raspberry bushes...

But we also went to work that first week strengthening our practice of noticing through class activities of every kind. We explored our senses, our connection to the world, in fact, where we let the world in. We fine-tuned our ability to observe, and broadened it to include observing the observer, our feelings, our sensations, and our thoughts in response to what we saw, heard, felt, tasted and smelled out there.

Then we studied conceptual approaches to characterizing emotions, and discussed and experienced the different patterns of responses within ourselves that each characterization evoked. For example, Welwood (1983) notes:

In Western culture we have a history of treating emotions with suspicion and contempt, as alien, "other," separate from us. The "passions" have usually been viewed as our "lower nature," from Plato onward. Viewing the source of the passions as Freud did, as an "it" (translated in English as "id"), "a primitive chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement," makes it more difficult to befriend emotions and accept them as part of ourselves" (p. 80).

Welwood (1983) goes on to contrast the Western view with the Buddhist meditative approach, "which considers that it is precisely our alienation from emotions that makes them become so domineering and uncontrollable" (p. 80). I'm quite familiar with the first approach, and quite ready to try something else. So I embraced the practice of staying present with feelings and emotions, befriending them, as Welwood describes it. In short order I began to see this practice as the life-preserver it was. It is what keeps us afloat in the stream. You always have it. You can always just become present with what you are experiencing. Becoming present means observing your felt senses (tightening in the chest, warmth in the throat, pressure or burning in the shoulders, or whatever you sense in your body), your feelings (fear, happiness), your emotions (magnified feelings) and your thoughts. Just see them, notice them all.

Finally, we learned several key buddhist concepts describing the practice of integrating intellectual and intuitive understanding, with awareness of body, felt senses, and mind, to create insight and wisdom. We had been using this practice in our classes and as we prepared our assignments. It's called prajna. Judy Lief (2002) says of prajna,

...as soon as you enter the Buddhist path and start practicing meditation and studying the dharma, you are picking up this sword of prajna. Now that you have this sharp thing, this sword that skewers and cuts through ego trips of all sorts, you have to deal with it (para. 9).

Prajnaparamita

Prajna is represented iconographically by the feminine deity Prajnaparamita ... with four arms. Two arms are folded on her lap in the classic posture of meditation, and her two other arms hold a sword and a book. Through these gestures, she manifests three aspects of prajna: academic knowledge, cutting through deception, and direct perception of emptiness" (para. 18).

Leif (2002) says that we cultivate prajna through refined practices of hearing, contemplating, and meditating. We take what we read, listen to, discuss with others with an open mind; we analyze it, turn it over in our minds and look at it from every point of view we can, and then we sit with it for a time until it becomes something that we know deeply; finally, we live with it for awhile until it is part of our very being, no longer something that we must "recall."

Our final week put all we had been studying, discussing, and practicing to the test in two performances: the Warrior's Exam for Mindful Teacher Class, and Final Performance for our Presence in Teaching Class.

Shambhala rocks

The Warrior's Exam is a form of traditional questioning. Each of the nine of us would have our turns seated on mediation cushions in the center of a circle of witnesses to be the questioner of a student, and the student who answered the question. We had ten questions to study. We would have five minutes to respond to our single question, without notes. After a brief follow-up question of the questioner's device, we would have 2 minutes to respond. Then we would return to our place as witnesses in the circle for the other students. So, each of the nine questions we would answer were drawn from a bowl, along with the names of the questioner and responder for that question.

Prajna was perfect preparation for the exam: we had already heard, read and discussed, with our minds open and non-judging. We had had time to analyze and think about what we had read. We had begun to see how it applied to our own experiences, to begin to incorporate those parts of what we had heard that were meaningful, that were true, for us. And now we were ready to sit with it for awhile longer, to see what became part of us, our very marrow, because that is what was to be our response to our questions. Not a memorized script. Not a fainthearted attempt to explain. But what came from within us, from the place beyond "thinking it up."

It was an exhilarating experience, for all of us. We did the absolute best we could, for all of us. It was the most extended period of time for which I have been present. Not 100%, of course, but for nearly 2 hours, I returned again and again to being there. For everyone. And they were there for me.

HillyHilly trades for a horse

The Final Performance for Presence Class asked from our bodies that same experience of bringing forth form from space, the place beyond thinking. In other words, "let's do a play!" Being present in this context meant struggling with a predictable set of urges -- most notably the urge to run as far and as fast as I could up into the Rocky Mountain foothills. Once I committed to stay present instead of checking out, a myriad of other urges cropped up in the place of the big one. One by one, I faced them all down. I sang, I spoke, I waited for and gave cues, I played my parts, changing costumes, being conscious, taking and giving feedback, getting better each day, being there. I would have to say that I was there just about 100% of the time during the play. I could not let a stray thought take me off. There was absolutely no room for wandering. It was pretty cool.

MM sings HB to CB

Our play was called, Meditation Self-Evaluation, and it presented a series of vignettes representing the thoughts that meditators have as they sit on the cushion, illustrating their successful efforts to let them go (short bursts of thoughts that wander in and easily leave, sometimes of their own accord), and their not so successful efforts (the longer vignettes that spin out a storyline or indulge the meditator in a fantasy): Like a memory of parents arguing; a breakup; a childhood morality tale; a student driver experience; and Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday" to the meditator.

That one was my idea. So I played it. It was transformative. It brought up every fear, anxiety, and condemnation I could possibly harbor, and I faced them all. That's what in the Shambhala tradition they call being a warrior on this path. Never abandoning yourself.

Thomas's photo of his summer family

So, it was amazing. Practically impossible to convey in a blog post, but making an effort is a good practice. It converted two dozen people from "strangers I've never seen or heard of before" to what one participant called his "summer family." Mine too. I have arrived. I am home (Hahn, 2009).

I flew to my Austin home a day later, had Sunday to relax and readjust, and went to work on Monday. It's Wednesday now. Warrior's Exam was a week ago. I'm still impressed. This is just the first semester.

References

Hanh, T. N. (2009). Happiness: Essential mindfulness practices. Parallax Press.

Hayward, K., & Hayward, J. (1998). Sacred world: The Shambhala way to gentleness, bravery, and power (2nd ed.). Shambhala.

Lief, J. (2002, May). The sharp sword of prajna. Shambhala Sun. Retrieved July 14, 2011, from http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1675&Itemid=0

Mipham, S. (2003). Turning the mind into an ally. Riverhead Hardcover.

Welwood, J. (1983). Befriending emotions. Awakening the heart (First Edition.). Shambhala.

Spring migration

2011-05-24T12:40:00.000-05:00

Migrating Storks, by David King. CC*BY

Every year, about the middle of April, spring migration reaches a crescendo of species and numbers on the move. Birders get pretty busy too. Watching wildlife in beautiful places is a great way to spend April, much better than stressing out about end of semester papers, grades, and life transitions. I've done both, and believe me, it's no contest.

So, this year I met up with a friend from Seattle, and visited my favorite spring birding mecca, Southeast Arizona, then drove out to West Texas with birding buddies for a week that ended with a couple of days in Big Bend. And there were local trips to see Golden-cheeked warblers, participate in breeding bird surveys, and take friends' grandkids to state parks. Plus, there's always backyard birding. All kinds of surprises show up this time of year, along with the summer residents who've been wintering down south.

Having just finished up the beta test of my Zen Birding course, all this spring birding that is, by nature, quite focused on identification, presented an interesting challenge. It took me completely in the opposite direction. In Zen Birding, the challenge is to just be with the birds or whatever else I might be seeing and hearing (that is, to continually return the mind from its chattering about wing bars and eye rings, to simply being present and wordlessly observing). During these spring migration birding trips, the challenge is to bring every skill and ability I have to bear on the question of "what was that?"

Turns out that having two seemingly opposing objectives at the same time is, itself, very much a part of Buddhist seeing and understanding the nature of existence. After all, the sine qua non of insight is that everything is empty of self, and is, instead, a part of everything else. And yet, the experience of self is, well, pretty hard to just set aside. We experience ourselves as selves. We might be mistaken on some level, but in the everyday world we live in things are, as a practical matter, separated from other things in time and space. You and I are not the same thing.

Evidence of this seeming contradiction presents itself constantly, once you recognize that it exists and can't be dismissed. The question becomes, "how do I touch each understanding lightly enough that I can move easily from one to the other, as life requires?"

I am continually reminded of the Buddha's response to the first person he met on the path after he experienced enlightenment, about which I have blogged before -- the interchange in short was: "how did you wake up" -- Buddha drops his bag; "what will you do now" -- he picks the bag back up again and goes off on his way.

It's not that we don't or can't have things, but that we must be able to let them go, to drop them. But life requires that we get from here to there and take our things with us. We must do both.

So, during birding to identify, I was present, I was the birder who knew the names (often enough). But I wanted to be able to drop it instantly. And I wanted to be aware of what I was doing regardless of which approach I took. Because I will forget some day which bird is which, I must be able to let go of the bag in which I define myself as a good birder. I have a preference for the comfort of knowing who I am, but I have to be able to let it go to see what else I might be.

Maybe I am at least a little bit like the birds that probably love the warm south, but let it go to take up epic journeys across thousands of miles to arrive (many, but not all of them) here in North America, where folks like me celebrate their arrival by being here with them.

Watching the Wheels Go 'Round and 'Round

2011-03-23T12:47:00.000-05:00

A sunny Wednesday morning in Austin, Texas. Birds are singing, dozens of kinds of flowers blooming in the garden, the doors open, the air fresh and sweet with the scent of Mountain Laurel. And just a few centimeters below the flowers blooming in the beds is rich and rotting compost, dead leaves and insects and molds, all thriving. Ah, life. What we call the good and the bad, it all keeps keeping on.

It's the same eternal keeping on of the Google Book Search project. It has its blooms and sweet breezes and its rot. The cycles seem longer and slower than my garden's, but things do roll around. Another one rolled around yesterday. The NY district court rejected the parties' settlement agreement. A limb got blown off a tree, so to speak. Everyone's talking about whether to let it lie, pick it up and maybe prune it a bit and root it, or just cut the whole tree down. But there's rejoicing that at least something happened. We are so impatient for the next phase. Even though it's never the end of anything, just another step down the path of ... keeping on keeping on.

I read the court opinion rejecting the settlement. I get it. Perhaps because I don't fear Google (all companies have their trajectory, up -- and down), or the processes that allow companies and individuals in them to test the limits of what's possible, and to succeed and to fail, my main reaction was simply recalling Steve Jobs' commencement speech to Stanford grads about 6 years ago, when he used the rejections he'd received in his own life to make the point that bad things aren't necessarily bad. What may seem bad to us can make things turn a different way, and we find something that we never would have found if we hadn't had the bad turn of events making it impossible for us to do what we thought we should do. Jobs strongly urged the grads not to give up, ever, on what they believed in, even if it was not "working," in that others rejected it. Maybe that's what's going on with copyright these days. Many people believe in ideas that others keep rejecting. But the believers keep turning away from the rejections, the failures, and trying other paths, even though it just doesn't seem to ever work. Actually, you might apply this theory to either side's efforts, and it seems to hold true. Things keep breaking, one way or the other, now good for one side, now bad, over and over.

In truth, it is not an all or nothing thing. Jobs does what he does in a world where many people still vehemently reject him and his ideas. But he found a path where he can do it. And we are fortunate to live in a world that allows him to be creative, along side those who disagree and create what they want too. Something like that might happen with copyright too. Creative Commons is a good example. It exists as a result of the failure of efforts to change copyright law through legislative and judicial channels. The architect of the effort that failed didn't give up; he just invented another way. And copyright law didn't change. People just have an easy way to exercise their choice now, to keep for themselves exclusively only a subset of the whole bundle of rights.

So, will the orphans just have to be lost -- a century's worth of works that no one will ever feel safe using? I really doubt that. There is a way. No one has invented it yet, that's all. But I won't be surprised if it's not what anyone is imagining today. Things have a way of taking very strange and wonderful turns. Even if they seem bad at some point along that way.

Zen Birding

2011-03-08T18:16:00.000-06:00

Beyond names -- To see, hear, & be with birds

Blue Dacnis (Honeycreeper) by Dario Sanchez: CC*BY

“Words can express no more than a tiny fragment of human knowledge, for what we can say and think is always immeasurably less than what we experience.” --Alan Watts’ “The Way of Liberation”

Last year I decided to develop a course about Zen birding. Birding beyond naming, beyond identity. I developed a framework and the basic ideas, and then tried to practice the kind of birding that I was preparing to teach. My annual spring Arizona birding trek was the perfect outdoor laboratory, because though I know the birds in some sense, there's always a "relearning" curve because I visit only once each year. At the beginning of each trip, I always have those moments where I hear or see a bird and don't know what it is, though I think I should. The idea of Zen birding is to expand just such a moment, to lengthen and be comfortable with the time of not knowing, to just observe the bird in all its aspects. What happened in practice, however, was that my mind would race to close the gap between seeing or hearing, and naming the bird. My mind wanted so badly to identify the bird, as though that mattered more than anything in the world. Of course, the premise of Zen birding is that it does not matter more. I was there only about 4 days when the gap was down to a minuscule fraction of a second for most birds. Naming became instantaneous. I couldn't not do it. That's when I had an "ah-ha" moment. Zen birding wasn't actually about not naming. It was about observing the mind's desire to name, and letting go of the name as soon as it materialized. That's just basic meditation practice applied to birding -- watch the mind and let thoughts go. Don't grab onto any of them.

As usual, simple enough, but not easy.

It's not easy because learning requires discernment and discrimination, so naming is certainly functional. In short, the ability to name and learn serves us in everyday life. Still, this kind of learning is not necessarily the most we can achieve, the height of accomplishment. Meditation can take us beyond ordinary thinking to a wordless awareness that unites us with all phenomena in the all-encompassing process that life is. Larry Rosenberg, author of Living in the Light of Death, notes that when we cultivate what he calls comprehensive alertness, and learn to recognize a thought as just a thought, to let it go without attaching to it, we are better able to see what our experience really is. That by itself might be a very good reason to let go of naming. But Rosenberg's insight about how the self is reborn every minute out of our attachments really nails the difficulty of letting go of naming birds: it's hard because it's letting go of the self I make out of my attachment to being a knowledgeable birder. "I know this bird. I am a good birder." To not name is to give up the self that prides itself on knowing!

Letting go of words that come to mind in the midst of daily life is hard because the ego creates itself out of those thoughts, minute by minute. It's absolutely astounding how desperate the clinging is. To be, without grasping, for even a second or two, lets me glimpse that I exist as part of the process unfolding in front of me. But in the next second, the ego jumps up and names something, and I am back again to observing it grasping for its identity, creating itself every second, over and over, again, now again, and again. I want to turn everything into a static event: "That's a Wilson's Warbler. Two Wilson's, a Townsend's and an Arizona Woodpecker all flew into the tree at once." The ego makes itself up from these events -- frozen as discrete, graspable things. It just can't exist in the ocean of process; rather, it exists in the momentary repeated events that separate the birds from the air and the trees and the flowers, the soil and rain and sunshine, and of course, that separate me from all of that.

Zen Birding is designed to help us see process and our connection with nature and the amazing diversity of plants and animals. By slowing down, by looking and listening in a very different way from how we usually do, we can actually experience our environment differently. The course is about going deeply into the space between our first awareness of a bird and the moment when we name it. It's about learning to expand the time that we don’t know by simply being with the bird, observing everything we can with our unaided senses, and letting go of names or other words that come to us while we observe. The purpose is to open up that which naming tends to shut down – our curiosity.

We actually see and hear differently when we quiet the part of our brains that analyzes, classifies and names. When we’re not analyzing, classifying and naming, we can see flux and flow, constant movement. Nothing is frozen into an “event;” nothing labeled, put in a box and dismissed; nothing judged unimportant. This way of seeing and listening presents us with a different mix of information about our environment and what’s happening in it, from the information we get when we look and listen with our analytical brain switched on.

So, there's nothing wrong with naming birds. But, it is limiting. And in Zen Birding, we go beyond that limitation. Watts describes the inherent limitation of language and naming in The Way of Liberation, like this: "Words can express no more than a tiny fragment of human knowledge for what we can say and think is always immeasurably less than what we experience. This is not only because there are no limits to the exhaustive description of an event, as there are no limits to the possible divisions of an inch; it is also because there are experiences which defy the very structure of our language, as water cannot be carried in a sieve.” I can't say it any better!

Watts: Yes, it's just that simple, and you can't get there from here

2010-11-16T15:44:00.001-06:00

One of those great library experiences, browsing the shelf, led me to check out an early essay by Alan Watts, The Way of Liberation in Zen Buddhism (1955). The Libraries' copy is one of the original publications, pretty well-worn, a pamphlet really, but it's got a great feel. You can sense its history in the marks on the cover that show that it was earlier taped,

in the inscription inside that shows that Maud gave it to Nancy in June 1955, and in the simpleness of the layout and type.

Watts wrote the essay as the first in a series of monographs published originally by the American Academy of Asian Studies, established four

years earlier in San Francisco, and, in 1954, affiliated with the College of the Pacific. He intended to "clarify the experiential content of Zen Buddhism, in view of the growing interest in the subject among Western psychologists and philosophers" (preface).

This short essay packs a lot in. It's a marvelous description of the methodology of an Eastern undertaking that we in the West can't quite fit into any of our niches -- neither religion, philosophy, nor psychology. He describes it as a way of liberation, rather than any of those other things.

Liberation from what? Well, from "an idea which crops up repeatedly in the history of philosophy and religion -- the idea that the seeming multiplicity of facts, things, and events is in reality One, or, more correctly, beyond duality" (pp. 3-4).

But can an ordinary person experience the state of non-duality, given that our normal psychological way of perceiving anything is by contrast with something else, that is, through duality? How do we get from ordinary experience to the state of non-duality?

Watt describes the four paths down which Zen masters typically send aspiring adherents, and how it is our very linguistic dependence that leads us to the realization of non-duality. In other words, our logical, language-based, linear, left brain ways of understanding non-duality lead to rejection of the question because each path to understanding non-duality leads to a nonsense dead end. For example, the first path, "all things are in reality One," leads us to try to mentally obliterate all differences, to say yes to all experience, for example, to say to ourselves that there is no difference between the Buddha and a movie star, that all is Tao, which normally makes unity seem absurd, which also is Tao...

The path, "all is Void (shunyata)," leads us to say no to all there is. Mu, the sage's "does not have" answer to the koan question of whether a dog has Buddha nature, illustrates this path. The student simply says no to everything, including the saying of no. Again, nonsense.

The path, "just accept yourself as you are and make no effort" similarly leads to collapse. Even the desire to make no effort is an effort.

The typical fourth path turns the question back on the questioner, directing him or her to look at who is questioning, who is uncomfortable, to feel what feels, to know what knows, to make an object of the subject (p. 8). But this too proves impossible. The Buddha can't seek after himself.

In short, the root of the problem is the question (p. 9). If you do not ask the question, the problem will not arise.

Ultimately, trying very hard (to exhaustion!) linguistically to understand non-duality makes clear that what we seek is impossible for us. We come to understand instead the "radical impotence of the ego." We are truly helpless. When we give ourselves up for lost -- when we surrender -- only then, paradoxically, does our desire to know Oneness, our desire for relief from separation and duality cease of its own accord.

And in the midst of this relief we see that life is going on all around us, and there is no rigid boundary between that life and the ego-less me. The breath is an effective illustration of the essential unity between our voluntary and involuntary actions. Down goes our conventional distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, between body and mind. Even our willing or deciding something, a clearly voluntary act, has an involuntary aspect (before conscious decision), or else we would have to infinitely decide to decide to decide...

From this perspective, the 'All is One' path makes sense, as do the other three. But not until we've lost ourselves first. It is an example of the, "you can't get there from here" conundrum. We really can't see the unity of all, or the void, or that we need make no effort, or that there's no self to question, with our left brain, because by nature it believes we are separate and in control.

Zen places the focus on experience always. Even the ultimate koan about whether 'the One is really it' prompts a right brain, non-linear, illogical answer: "When all dualities have been reduced to the One, what does the One reduce to?" -- the master says, "9 pounds of flax" (the weight of a linen robe). There comes a point when we must drop thinking about it and just see. For Westerners, reflection and action are another conventional duality. In Zen, they are essentially the same. We think and act, rather than get caught up in an infinite regression of standing outside our lives, reflecting upon reflections, upon reflections. "In acting just act, in thinking just think. Above all, don't wobble" (p. 15). We don't have to reflect about reflecting. "Zen is also liberation from the dualism of thought versus action, for it thinks as it acts -- with the same quality of abandon, commitment, or faith" (p. 15). The same is true of feeling.

Consider the question of when to stop thinking and to act. We can never be certain we've done enough or too much. Long story short: the only certainty is death. Other than that, all is uncertain. And that 'all,' that includes us. That uncertainty is our very nature. We, the knower, are, thus, the same as the unknown. Et voilà. "... [I]n the final analysis, we have to act and think, live and die, from a source beyond all knowledge and control" (p. 17).

From this point, when we see this, the life of the Bodhisattva begins. We need not strain to improve ourselves, for the effort to do so is just ego. Seeds lead to plants, which lead to trees, but by a process of growth and development, not of effort, or straining to improve. The tree is not an improved seed. (p. 19). Once we see clearly that it is our nature to grow in the same way, change occurs naturally.

Ok. Got that?

Mood in Zen art

2010-11-11T13:58:00.000-06:00

Reading books on Zen Buddhism, and taking a class about moving a Zen practice into moment-to-moment awareness, I came across a description of four moods in Zen art (Watts, Alan, 1957. The Way of Zen. Vintage Books, New York., pp. 181-187). I immediately recognized the descriptions in poetry I had read even many years ago, that remained with me because the mood, it turns out, was so powerful. In fact, this chapter on Zen in the arts comes at the end of The Way of Zen, and I thought the book's powerfully expressed insights more or less over, and then, whoosh. Recognition. It occurs to me that these seconds, even parts of seconds, of insight are all and everything there is. I'm reading this book again.

One of the moods is called aware, but not the English word, aware. It's a Japanese word that Watts describes as "extremely untranslatable." He characterizes the mood as "that moment of crisis between seeing the transience of the world with sorrow and regret, and seeing it as the very form of the Great Void." All there is. Transcending the duality of knowing and not-knowing.

His example, attributed to Basho, translated by Blyth (see text and footnote on p. 184):

The stream hides itself
In the grasses
Of departing autumn.

Which inspired me, having just completed another couple of hours of work in the fall garden, to express aware through Ikebana and haiku:

First frost scares no flower

First frost scares no flower
Leaves don't decide to fall
Bulbs up already.

It's not just that there will be a spring, but that it inheres in fall. And it does not care. And yet!

And the class is wonderful -- Austin Zen Center, taught by Joe Hall. He inspires us all!

Mother and me

2010-08-12T12:15:00.000-05:00

It turns out that no matter what I believe about life, it is what it is. When my mother died I wanted nothing more than for her to be released from suffering. I have to hope that she has been even though I may not be able to know for sure.

Mother and me, Thanksgiving, 2009

What I do know is that I am still alive. And life is a serious business. It matters. Nancy, the hospice nurse, said "2 hours, 2 days or 2 months" almost exactly 2 months ago. For the rest of us, we don't know how many days or weeks or months or years we have. But why waste a single minute being anything other than what you most fervently desire to be? What you are at your center. Love. All. Peace. One.

You don't have to be alone to be safe, Mother. I hope you know that now. You are never alone anyway. You are part of all that is. You always were. You just didn't see it.

The view from the bowsprit

2010-07-29T14:47:00.001-05:00

"Roaring Forties," Gordon Frickers, & at Messing About in Sailboats

The sea was dark, the waves were high, but the lurching up and down was all I thought about. I held tightly to the pulpit surrounding the bowsprit where I stood lookout, each time the boat headed up a crest and the sea crashed against the bow, throwing tons of water across the deck. I never let go. It was the one thing that mattered to survive. "Don't let go."

It was simple and easy to take wave after wave, one wave at a time. Up, through the crest, and then back down. Then the unthinkable happened. The boat did not emerge from a crest. Instead it seemed to plunge into the heart of the wave, deeper and deeper into the sea. Was it really heading down into the sea, instead of through the crest to the back side of the wave? In an instant it was clear -- "don't let go" now guaranteed my death, rather than my survival.

So I woke up.

I love having a dream that stirs you deeply, that seems to hold a truth like a golden key to a treasure chest. I dreamed that dream a long time ago, and I've thought about it many times, not because I wanted to ponder or recall the truth it held, but because I did not understand something about it. I got that it described a moment of discernment, when suddenly everything you've needed to do to live is turned upside down. All the rules seemed to change in an instant, and what was right was suddenly wrong, and what was wrong was suddenly right. But that never seemed to be everything, so I kept thinking about it. Yesterday, the missing piece came to me during a visit with my mother who continues, even to the precipice of death, to teach me about life.

For the logical mind, it's simple. We hold on and let go all the time, for different reasons. There's no one rule or way to be that "always" or "never" works in life. Constructing a rigid response, literally clinging to a rigid rule to be safe, guarantees death, because the circumstances will change. You can count on it. We're quite happy with that understanding of a dream, though we may (as I have) sense that there's something more going on.

On a different level, however, the dream suggests something quite different. That's what I glimpsed yesterday, as I watched my mom, now weakened so terribly, still intermittently struggling to act, and then letting go, over and over. I saw that in that last second of the dream, there was another way to see and another way to respond to the flip of the rules, because I saw an essential identity between life and death.

Have you ever experienced death in a dream, and realized that you were aware in death (like being aware that you are dreaming in a dream)? You're dead, or you've just died, but you're actually conscious of it? This dream speaks to that kind of awareness, an awareness that exists behind or beyond thinking, behind or beyond the idea of "me" and "my life." It suggests that the certainty that clinging would result in death, and letting go would save life, are right for one level of existence, though they are exactly wrong for another. At that other level of existence clinging to life is a kind of death, and letting go into death is letting go into the life of the formless, but life nonetheless.

The logical mind will rebel and dismiss this, but you can quiet it for a moment, assuring yourself that, yes, it's true that we have no way to think about this formless state using the word, life, because we define life as, well, not dead. But if you can just put definitions aside for a moment and try to see without them, you may see in the dream a crossing of elements, a melding of states. Perhaps life and death are somehow the same, not polar opposites, but essentially the same thing, in different forms. Clinging in the one prevents letting go into the other. Having trouble with that logical mind? Without an active meditation practice, it's nearly impossible to see any other way, so I recommend it to you. But back to the story.

Mother, my teacher, showed me peace, love, joy and life when she would let go, into death. And she showed pain, resentment, anxiety and anger when she would struggle to hold on, to life. Logical? No. Beautiful truth? Yes.

Time -- the perfect gift

2010-07-07T16:49:00.010-05:00

Traveling always awakens my senses and gets me thinking, but it also gives me time to slow down, meditate, practice yoga, read, and most importantly, reflect on the things I see, hear, read, feel and think. It's all one big messy happy process, and I feel lucky that I can catch a truth here and there and contemplate it more deeply, and maybe come out of the process a little clearer about what to do with my most treasured possession, my time.

Montreal is filled with wonderful things to experience, and because I will only be here for 10 days, I chose a little part of it to get to know better, Le Plateau. The place I rented, however, simply can't be an accident, though were I to recount how I came to find it, it would certainly seem that the process lacked intent to produce any result other than to find a place to stay. But it is too much more than that, too precisely what I need and can appreciate now, to be an accident. Photo credit: Archive for the Plateau Mont Royal category.

Verona's apartment is filled with her and others' paintings, sculpture, poetry, plants, and old repurposed furniture. Everything is placed with obvious care and attention to detail, balance and beauty. Her bookshelves are filled with books on mediation, the life of Buddha, eastern and western religions, philosophy, art and artists, travel and travelers, and knowing yourself, finding truth and experiencing love. The apartment is a gift I feel honored to be offered and to accept for the time I am here. Photo: A table and wall in Verona's apartment.

Just like life.

Everything in my environment, my body and my everyday experiences seems to be reflecting back to me just who I am at this moment and what I need to grow. So my French immersion experience has evolved into a meditation, yoga, consciousness raising, Reiki retreat. And I've got the time and the inclination to go along with it all. It reminds me of Alice's Wonderland, only it's here and now and real.

Perhaps four walls and a pallet might have been just as perfect a gift, but I don't think I would have recognized it as such at this time. That's what makes this place so special. I recognize it for the gift it is, and am taking full advantage of it. It's like the bridge that Stroke of Insight was for me last year -- just what I needed to go from where I was to where I needed to be. Photo: Bridge in the Japanese Garden, Jardin Botanique, Montreal.

In one short week I have recognized truths that seemed to elude me for more than 50 years. Topping the list is that it doesn't work to try to argue with feelings. Logic is simply ineffective. On the other hand, meeting your own feelings with acceptance, love and compassion enables you to do the same with others who are in need too. 'If you can't have compassion for the only person whose feelings you can actually experience, you won't be able to extend compassion to anyone else.' --Cheri Huber

Just as importantly, moment to moment awareness is a powerful tool to help us identify what the thoughts and feelings are that keep us stuck in patterns of self-protection. You can't meet a feeling with acceptance and love if you don't know what it is.

And every encounter with people, choices, and even things, presents us with an opportunity to listen to our hearts as well as our heads. Like a lot of people, I tend to lead with my head and talk myself out of most of my heart's inclinations. But I can see the results of that approach, and while fine by material standards, they fall pretty short on the spiritual side.

And last, I better understand the power of intention to bring energy, intuition, and opportunity together to make change.

So that question of what to do with my time? At this moment, seems pretty clear that there is nothing more important than this moment. Practicing moment to moment mindfulness is the foundation for everything else I will do in my life. I get it.

Learning from someone else's fight

2010-06-30T08:24:00.004-05:00

I saw the most interesting transition in mother's behavior over about 1 1/2 hours on her birthday last week. I arrived at the end of one dosage cycle for pain meds, and stayed through about 45 minutes into the next cycle. So, I got to see her "with pain" and without it. Or so I assume. It seemed more like with will and determination, and without them, but I am assured by the nursing staff that pain is there, but Alzheimer's causes the sufferer to be unable to identify it as such. Rather, it causes generalized agitation, anxiety and fear. Whatever was the cause, her behavior was like day and night. When I arrived she was in a bad mood. She ignored the things I brought to share with her for her birthday, refused even a single bite of cake, and spent all her time and effort trying to get out of the geri chair. She made a sweet plea to me to get me to take her away, but when I told her I couldn't take her, she turned hostile.

She would struggle to get out of the chair, pushing and pulling on the tray that keeps her in, trying to slide out, etc. After a few minutes she would give up, exasperated, and collapse back against the chair back. Then in a minute, she was at it again. This went on nonstop. At first I talked to her about her situation, the reasons for it, and how sorry I was that she was unable to do the things she used to be able to do, but eventually, I stopped. Suggesting that she would have to accept that she couldn't walk or talk well enough to be out of the chair and effective in communicating her needs seemed pointless, because she clearly wanted none of that. Her behavior indicated that she did not know or believe either of those abilities was impaired. And yet, they are.

Then she got her pain meds.

Over the next 30 minutes the physical struggling and efforts to talk slowed down and then stopped. She became a relaxed, calm, serene, and seemingly happy person. She accepted my offer for some birthday cake and responded with a beautiful smile at hearing happy birthday wishes.

I can take away many things from this experience. Pain meds reduce the desire to escape from your situation, whatever it is. Alzheimer's makes it harder to remember that you can't do things. But in an odd twist on logic (which I can handle now that I realize there are ways of seeing for which logic is not well suited), I also take away that failure to accept what is true is painful.

"I can't" -- The loss of control and who we are at heart

2010-06-06T15:15:00.004-05:00

She started with an, "I have a problem" preface, after which she explained in a string of words that sounded like actual words but for the most part made no sense, except for these: "I can't do anything; I can't do anything right; I can't do anything at all." That was last Wednesday. It was also the first time since her move to assisted living, and now to skilled nursing care, that she admitted that there was something she couldn't do. Until Wednesday, the monumental struggle was always to explain to her why people were interfering in her life ("to help you" I always said), to which she always responded, " but I can do all that -- I do all that myself." You just can't argue with her logic, and the facts, well, her facts and mine just don't exist in the same universe.

And indeed, it was quite evident that she couldn't do anything. Her hands were shaking so badly that I had to feed her. By evening (after I had gone home) she had fallen 3 times and the next morning, she fell again. So, she had lost the ability to walk and to feed herself in, literally, a day. I'll make the long story short here: I got a referral to hospice and I am so glad I did. It's not clear whether she's got 2 hours, 2 weeks or 2 months to live, but it is clear that the disease has taken a serious turn for the worse. It is so good to have hospice nurses and assistants involved, who are focused on managing pain, anxiety and frustration, as the body passes through the phases it must when life comes to an end.

But that's not all she lost. Today when I visited, she was in the dining room in her "geri" chair, asleep. It took awhile for her to wake up, but when she did, she ate about half her lunch. But the whole time I was there, talking to her and feeding her, she was irritated, angry and hostile. She yelled at me for touching her arm ("Goddamn-it -- leave it alone"), and again when I asked her at one point if she wanted more of anything to eat ("NO! I don't want anything!" as she slammed both her hands on the table).

I always announce myself when I come to see her because, for awhile now, she has taken a few seconds to recognize me. She always does recognize me eventually, and she consistently acts towards me in a very loving way -- not at all like she acted today. So, though I had already said that it was me when I first sat down, and had talked about my brother and when we would both be by to see her next, I asked her if she knew who I was and as I expected, she answered angrily, "no."

Maybe it's just the disease. I've heard that it can exacerbate personality traits. And this was my mom toute crachée when I was a little girl, before she divorced my dad, whom she came to hate during their 9 years of marriage. Talk about a walk down memory lane, or perhaps I should call it, nightmare alley. This experience sheds a little more light on the questions I've been exploring regarding who we "really" are, and change. We can control our presentation to and interaction with others to some degree, but when control dissolves, who we are at center is revealed. Superficial change is not real change -- not good enough.

Fire in the Chiricahuas

2010-05-31T09:19:00.016-05:00

One of the places I love most in the Sky Islands of Southeast Arizona is on fire. Horseshoe Canyon in the Chiricahuas is burning -- around 1200 acres so far -- and threatens what most call the "jewel" of the Chiricahuas, South Fork Cave Creek Canyon.
I was just there a few weeks ago with my friend, Kirsti.
We birded South Fork and drove Forest Road 42 from Cave Creek to the Onion Saddle, on into Rustler Park where it was cool and quiet and very, very shady.

In August a few years ago, we visited the same spots and were drenched with rain and chilled by cold and mist. And now there are temperatures in the upper 90's, predicted to hit 100 by Friday, and the place is on fire.

One more in a constant stream of reminders that it's all process.
I certainly need these reminders, because we don't typically see our lives as process.
We tend, instead, to freeze our experience into discreet events that we either like or don't like, or perhaps feel neutral towards. The photos I have posted here are the quintessential freezing of a process into an event. And, like our memories of the time we spend in a place, our events seem so real to us, so solid. That's how we speak of things: South Fork Cave Creek is (and we like to think, always will be) the jewel of the Chiricahuas, "the single most desirable hike in the Chiricahuas," writes Richard Taylor in the 2005 edition of A Birder's Guide to Southeast Arizona (p. 171). Until it is destroyed by fire, that is. Taylor also refers to other fires that have ravaged the Sky Islands in the past, as discreet events: the 1994 Rattlesnake Fire that burned 27,000 acres in this very area; the 1977 Carr Fire that blackened 9,000 acres at the tops of Miller and Carr Canyons.
But Dr. Bill McCormick quotes Leonard Taylor's, "Hiker's Guide to the Huachuca Mountains," in describing the Carr Canyon fire, acknowledging that it is a process:

In June of 1977, some careless people left a fire unattended; it quickly grew into a forest fire, and destroyed 9,000 acres of trees; most of Upper Carr and Miller Canyons. Heavy rains followed, causing severe erosion, and most of the top soil was washed down the mountain. Where once a shaded trail led through towering pines and flower-filled meadows, now a rocky path winds among charred stumps.

The mountain is recovering, however, and after the monsoons start the Carr Peak Trail is one of the most flowered trails in the range. Also, magnificent views abound, as they are no longer obstructed by trees.

Nevertheless, the description still reflects a distinctly human perspective, a dislike of what happened. The author describes "careless people," "severe erosion," and "charred stumps." The fire caused him and others pain and regret, and probably anger, at those who caused it.

On the other hand, I heard a fellow hiker in Miller Canyon comment just last month about a "lovely meadow" that she came to at the top of Miller Canyon. And from my cabin I could see a spot high up near the top of the canyon, that was filled with beautiful, bright, spring green, though relatively smallish, trees. Their color contrasted vividly with the darker greens of the surrounding mountainside habitat. And it occurred to me that perhaps her beautiful meadow and the spring-green young trees I saw both resulted from the Carr fire, now 33 years old.
Our firefighters are hard at work trying to stop the event they're calling the Horseshoe Fire. And those of us who love these mountains and their canyons, and wish to hold them as they are, however futile that wish may be, will worry all the way through to the rainy season about the fire's consequences, the homes it might burn, the many other things we value that it will destroy, the loss of life, the loss of beauty, the loss of habitat. But fire, or more generally what it embodies -- dramatic and drastic change, loss, even destruction, devastation, and death, followed by (surprise!) re-growth and renewal -- shows us a simple truth about our lives here. As does all the life that exists in Cave Creek and Miller Canyons, human life is a cyclical process encompassing everything that's part of the cycle, not just the parts that we like. Letting go of our wish that what we call the good will stay and what we term the bad will never come or quickly disappear, we're left with acceptance.
And after that, on we go to fight the fire because we're not dead yet and neither is South Fork Cave Creek. But with awareness and acceptance, we see the fire for what it is, and ourselves and our actions in a broader context.

The end of time

2010-04-09T08:20:00.010-05:00

My friend Dana died this week. Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS). I wrote about her struggle with the decision whether to go on life support nearly two years ago, when, to my utter shock, as I thought I knew Dana well enough to know she would not want to live like that, she decided to have the tubes implanted. She had tubes for everything. I won't recall that Dana, I'm afraid, because I never went down to see her. We chatted on IM and Facebook. Because ALS paralyzes everything, she had some kind of visual pointer that allowed her to type. We watched the returns come in the night Obama was elected. We shared the awe and wonder of the scene in Chicago -- all remotely. Remote. That's what Dana became for me.

But that's not what she was, or what I'll remember. Last night as Dennis and I sat at one of our favorite bars in Austin, the Eastside Showroom, I ordered an Anejo tequila shot, and I raised it in memory of my friend Dana, the one who celebrated my 27th birthday with me on a beach in Mexico many years ago, passing a bottle of mescal around a big circle of friends until I was so out of it that when I stood up, my legs just collapsed under me and fell back into the sand! Not that it's a proud moment or anything, but rather, because Dana and I had a whole lot of fun together when we were young and a lot of our best times together were in Mexico. She spoke much better spanish than I did (until that year I spent in Central and South America -- I caught up with her then!), and could get us into, and out of, all kinds of situations I wouldn't have managed so well on my own.

Our friendship went on through her move to San Antonio after she graduated college, her first marriage which ended in divorce, her move to Los Angeles, Dennis' and my marriage and move to Los Gatos. One of my favorite memories is of Dennis' and my drive from Los Gatos to LA for thanksgiving with Dana when we both were in California. Jesus. It took us 14 hours to make what should have been about a 6 hour drive because the traffic on the highway was a complete parking lot for most of the way. I have never seen anything like it. We ended up at 2 in the morning crashing in some whore house hotel for a few hours before getting up and making our way to Dana's for a lovely dinner.

Then she moved to Houston, got married again, divorced, and married a third time, this time to Doug Plette, whom she knew was in fact the love of her life. He is the one who has been with her through her journey through ALS. She was diagnosed shortly after their wedding.

I can't even begin to fathom what those two and their families have been through these last four years. I got only brief glimpses of their lives as we visited a few times back and forth (they lived a bit north of Houston). But it has been the kind of challenge most of us hope we're up to, but privately believe we probably are not. Perhaps I'm projecting here. I believe I am not. But Dana surprised me to no end, with what she put up with and what she would not put up with. Maybe I will surprise myself.

About 6 weeks or so ago, I got a note from Dana. All it said was, "How are you?" I didn't respond. Truth was, I was in the middle of what was a very sad, very depressed period, and you just don't whine to someone with ALS who's enthusiastically living on life support. I had decided in January that this would be the year I came fully to terms with not only my mom's decline and eventual death, but my own, and that has meant going down a few levels into what's pretty aversive, accepting it, and eventually coming back up to greater heights than possible when you're simply turning away from the realities of life. And when she wrote, I just couldn't see how I could talk to Dana about death. I was wrong. I'm wrong a lot.

Today is Friday. In a few minutes I head out to the Assisted Living where my mom is staying, and I move her to the nursing home. It's been a very hard week. She had a bad fall last week, on one of our walks together, and it catalyzed a lot of things for me. It is time for her to move. She needs a lot more help than she's getting now. Death is on her shoulder. It was on Dana's shoulder. It is on my shoulder.

I can see out the front door the sunlight streaming across the front garden, lighting up the new spring growth with a brilliant green that must be seen to be believed. Life is good. Very good. Tears may stream down my face, but I have to say, I am so happy to be alive right now.

End of a year off; now to the hardest task

2010-01-01T09:45:00.005-06:00

I dreamed I was traveling on a train with lots of friends. Everyone was happy and talking with each other and visiting around, from seat to seat. Scenery whizzed by, and gaiety reigned inside. We were one, big, happy group all together on a trip -- of some kind. Rather suddenly, however, the train reached its destination and in an instant, everyone was off the train except for me. I went back to my seat where I saw at least 6 bags of different shapes and sizes in a pile, all made of that army drab grayish green canvas, with buckles, straps, and outside pockets. The pile was a mess. I knew I had to consolidate the bags somehow, in order to carry them all, and I started trying to figure that out when my kitty wandered into view and I realized that I would never be able to get her to stay with me when we got off the train. Indeed, she had been wandering around the train the whole time we'd been on the journey, just like we all were doing. It was not a problem before, but now that I had to get off and keep all my stuff together, wherever we were, I knew I would not be able to manage her. She would be uncontrollable. She'd have to go inside one of the bags and I knew she would never stand for that. I realized that I could not get off the train with all my stuff.

When I woke up, this dream reminded me of the conversation between the Buddha and the first person to encounter him after his enlightenment, to whom it was clear that the Buddha was a remarkable being:

Who or what are you? -- Buddha answered, I am awake.
How did you wake up? -- Buddha simply dropped his bags.
What will you do now? -- Buddha picked up his bags and was on his way.

There's a lot there. Dropping bags sounds simple, but it's not easy. Nevertheless, I know what will happen if I don't. I visited my mother yesterday and learned something new from the endless repetition of her complaints: we take with us into whatever comes next what's in our hearts. We may "forget" many things, but we don't forget how we feel. And if we've carried fear, hurt, anger and resentment with us, that's what's left when everything else is gone. With all she has lost, with all the things that have dropped from her repertoire, you'd think, you'd hope, that anger and hurt would be among them. But they are not. I guess clinging occurs at some very deep level. Maybe it's simply a function of repetition. I don't want to get that good at it. I'm dropping the bags and getting off the train. Now.

To B (or not to PhD)

2009-11-15T16:36:00.012-06:00

School.

What does that conjure up for you?

It shouldn't be an easy question. We spend many, many years in school, and very important things happen to us there. Some of my most enduring memories are of events and people from schools. Second grade teacher. A walk down the hallway that was a transfer to a different class. The six weeks my brother and I attended school in Kansas while we lived with my grandparents. Sixth grade "split" class (high sixth and low sixth all in the same room). My best friend, Cindy. I could go on. You have your own list of memories. Some good. Some bad.

But when we dream of school, it all gets very simple. Fear, anxiety, forgetfulness, failure. You've got to have had these dreams before -- you've totally forgotten to prepare for a test; you've forgotten to attend a class for the entire semester; you've arrived at school in PJ's.

I was looking for an image to illustrate this post, an image of a dream of school, and found an interesting one (see left) Adam posted with a discussion of these dreams and what they might mean to us once we're out of school. Ok. But I've been dreaming of school in a different way lately.

I had a dream near the end of May: I was a student at school in a building that seemed to remind me of every school I have attended and schools I have seen in other cities and countries. The classes were big and there was a big courtyard. There were a few people from the iSchool PhD program and a host of others whom I didn't know. It was formal education. The dream's emotional tenor was of anxiety, competition and a strange feeling of disconnection, even in the midst of a clearly social milieu. It was structured. Bells rang and classes started. I left my books out in the rain at one point. Two guys were fighting in the courtyard. It was like that -- unrelated scenes, vignettes and feelings just happened, all around me.

I headed towards a class that I wanted to attend, but not actually sign up for (i.e., audit), and sat down at the back of the class, but the professor refused to permit anyone to attend without registering. The refusal woke me from the dream.

I thought about the dream all the next day. And I keep coming back to it, again and again. Now that I am just 6 weeks from the end of the year I've taken off to mull things over, it's time to evaluate, and time to decide. Although I have always treasured learning, firmly believing that to live is to learn, somehow or another, the learning that we box up into chunks we call grades (K-16 plus graduate degrees), with classes and teachers who judge whether we learned what they thought we should, and degrees we are to acquire to enter different types of work we want to do, this learning does not appeal to me now.

Instead, the 11 months of my almost completed year off (to say nothing of the many other decades I've spent on this earth) make clear that learning goes on every minute of every day of our lives. The degree to which we seek it out, independently of formal education, characterizes us. We are adventurous, open to new ideas, explorers, curious, avid readers, eager to talk to people about what we have observed and thought about, or we are mired in routine, resistant to change, comfortable only with what we already know, averse to travel and uninterested in people who are different from us. It's a continuum of course. I'm somewhere on the end with those who like to learn, but I know that my interest in formal education is over. That presents a challenge, aside from the challenge that I'm actually in a PhD program at the moment. Formal education's packaged degree program provides a structure that learning in the wild doesn't. In the wild, there's no degree; no slate of courses; no forms to fill out; no templates for your progress reports; and no template for your terminal qualifying paper and dissertation. In fact, learning in the wild never ends. The journey is the destination. Sort of like life.

But more than this, learning in the wild makes no demand that you learn any particular thing at all (beyond what it takes to survive). You can learn that it's not worth it to sift through the granite gravel that got washed into the pebbled stream in your front yard by yesterday's wonderfully torrential rains, by actually trying to sift it and realizing that the effort outweighs the benefit, or you can sit on your deck and watch birds. You can construct detailed experiments and test hypotheses and write up your results and submit them to the public for comment, and learn even more about your results from those comments, or you can try a new recipe and see whether your childhood aversion to beets stems from their having been canned or whether beets just taste bad. You can delve into botany and learn about all the plants in the area where you live, or you can see what difference it makes to your garden to fertilize it every other week with fish emulsion and seaweed throughout the summer.

The question, "what is the point of this or that learning," gets you thinking about priorities, where to invest your time. But the question eventually collapses into "what is the point of this life," when one feels, as I do, that life and learning are one. "What do I want to learn in the next 20 years" becomes "what do I want to do with my life?" I still don't know what I want to do, but these 11 months have shown me that I don't have to know what I want to do to know that I am through with school.

I can see more clearly every day that teaching, research and service (education-style), or more simply, making a difference by sharing knowledge with others, in the hopes that either directly or indirectly, it will help them or their circumstances, is not the only way to make a difference. One can also make a difference by being a source of encouragement, a smile when its needed, or just an ear or shoulder to lean on. Indeed, one can make a difference by tending a garden. Someone no doubt tended the garden that Boris Vian stood in as a wind rushed through it. Many years later I can read his lovely observation that "[t]he wind cleared a path for itself through the leaves, and emerged from the trees filled with the scent of buds and flowers" (a rough translation from the french poem, L'Ecume des jours). The gardener probably never knew, but c'est la vie.

I have begun to see that the roles of teacher and student are, for me, part of being on autopilot. Being a teacher pervades my identity -- I have always taught, I think of myself as a teacher and I really enjoy it. Those sound like reasons to continue teaching. But I teach every minute of the day! In paying close attention to mental chatter this year, I find myself narrating my present moment experience, as though I am passing on what I know and observe to some invisible student, rapt student. I'm like on Twitter on steroids. What a revelation! Maybe the point for me isn't to pass things along right now. I am not expert at what I want to learn, so how could I teach it? And I don't want to spend any more time passing along the things I know already. It seems like the wrong choice right now. I'm not sure why. It just does. It will be a good exercise to stop teaching, both in my head, and in the real world.

I sense more clearly every day that the path I'm on will lead to recognition and acceptance that everything ceases. I visited my mom today and felt, once again, desperate sadness at how it is when you can't think straight, don't remember much of anything, can't make your hands carry out your wishes, can't see that well, and can't say what's on your mind, what's left of it. I still have a long, long way to go on the journey to come to terms with the loss that a disease like dementia inflicts. But if it weren't dementia, it would be something else. That is life in all its dimensions. Growth, expansion, exploration, creativity, and then contraction, decline, loss and eventually, death. Not regrettable. Just the way it is. Life and death are one and the same thing. Annie Dillard's splendid, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek explores this phenomenal contradiction -- how can our world be so beautiful, and so filled with violent death? But no! It's no mystery. They are one and the same. Every week I get a little closer to accepting this, to not wishing it were other than how it is. I haven't managed to surrender entirely, yet. I guess I fear that I would scream out loud, or die of the pain if I actually totally accepted what is happening to her and what will happen to me and everyone I know and love, eventually. Who in their right mind would accept this if they didn't have to? Ah, but we do have to.

Two months after the "no doing school half-way" dream described above, I had another school dream, this one quite different .....

It started out being about other things (I was in a store, trying to find things that I wasn't able to find), but then I ran into a professor who asked me point blank whether I was going to continue in the PhD program. I hesitated and the professor quickly added, "We have other students that we would like to accept into the program to take your place." I answered that I had an appointment scheduled with a member of my committee. The professor responded: "Before you go, I want you to know that no matter what you decide, I love you." The professor embraced me very sincerely, very warmly and very affectionately. It was a very pure embrace, devoid of role, of selfishness and of ego. I just felt loved and accepted. The roles we had assumed as guide and student, and which had, to some degree, interfered with our relationship as friends and colleagues, dissolved. We were simply friends again, warm, loving, supportive friends.

I see the professor in these dreams as a projection of that part of myself that fears failure, rejection and loss. In the first dream, I feel that I must do what others want me to do, though I react out of conflict, emotionally, with resistance to their expectations. In the second dream, I accept unconditionally whatever I choose to do. I rest in unconditional love. Wow. I must say, it was a fabulous feeling. You know how strongly you can feel a feeling in a dream, well, the truth is, you can feel that feeling awake too. We all have our fears. We have our aims, our resistances, our anger and determination -- all driven by our egos. But we also have, at the center of our being, total, complete and unconditional acceptance and love. I can relate from that, rather than from the ego on the surface.

I have learned so much from school that it's impossible to value it all. It's priceless, in other words. But I simply could not have learned any of what I've learned this year from a book or in a class. There is no degree in this kind of thing. There is no graduation. And it won't get me a job. The knowledge just grows and deepens and expands, affecting in the end everything I know, do and say. What more could I want?

Memory cold as ice

2009-09-24T15:09:00.003-05:00

"Erickson was born the first summer Dennis brought me to Santa Fe, so I know he was there when she was born. He was about a year old or so."
"No, my kids are both older than him."
"But I was only invited to her birth to take care of the kids, your first, and Erickson, so I know he was born before her."

"Do you remember where MaryAnne did her readings? Was it on the second floor landing, or the third?"
"It was the second. Our wedding party was on the third."
"oh, yeah. That's right."

"After that boat ride when Gary ran into the dock, I never got in the boat with him again."
"When was that?"
"Oh, it must have been around 1969. I know he's more careful now, but I just never get in with him."
"It's 2009. It's been 40 years. You know, I never actually heard anything about that wreck. I thought I knew everything about them during that time."
Thinks to himself, "I lived with them during that time. I'm not so sure that wreck you remember actually happened at all. Maybe it did, but why didn't I know about it?"

I've always thought of memory as a utility, a tool that I need to do my work, to be creative, to carry on an intelligent conversation. Comes in real handy when you need to read 20 books on a subject and synthesize their authors' points of view on a related subject. Fairly important if you need to draft a legal opinion. In fact, all integrative, analytic and synthetic thinking depends on a good memory. Learning from our mistakes requires memory too.

In August and early September I took some trips* that brought some of memory's other functions forward from the places where it works, often unexamined and even unappreciated. Memory is a utility, yes, but it's also the basis of who we think we are. We become our past, or rather, we develop an ego identified with our actions and feelings from the past. My friends could say about themselves, "I was a smart-ass in high school," or, "I opened a head shop in the late 60's." Their past is part of who they are today. *The photo above is of the sky over Ocate, New Mexico, a place where Dennis and many of his New Mexico friends hung out a long time ago.

But I also saw, over and over again, how shot through with holes our memories are, and even how absolutely wrong they can be. We make up things that didn't happen when we remember them "wrong." And we forget so much of what happened, inventing a past that never existed. In this fractured process, we invent a "me" that doesn't exist, except in our minds.

And there may come a point for some of us when we remember little of our own past. Not where we grew up, not where we lived when we were 30. Not who our relatives are, our friends, not even the name of the nice guy who lives in the room next door, with whom we take three meals a day, and who helps us with every aspect of those meals because we "remind him of his wife." Who are we then, when we have no memory as utility, no memory as who we are, when accuracy and details are no longer the issue, but simply whether we remember anything at all. Who are we then?

Why do we remember some details vividly but wrongly? Why do we forget some things that others who were there with us remember clearly? Why do our memories fail as we age? Good questions, but curiosity about those matters isn't enough anymore to take me away from the day-to-day of simply experiencing life and being in the present with everything that comes up, especially when what's coming up is how fundamental our memories are to who we think we are and how memory's functions are all connected by that thread of our remembered conception of ourselves, our thoughts and feelings that constitute our egos. We have a good memory; then we have a not so good memory; then we have no memory at all. We remember ourselves as helpless and afraid; we remember ourselves as wild and crazy; we remember ourselves as compassionate and loving; we remember ourselves not at all. We recall how we were in the 70's (maybe, if our memories can be trusted); we recall how we were in the 90's (again, maybe); sometime in the future, we won't remember any of this at all. If we identify with our memories, whether as utility or more fundamentally, as who we are or even who we think we should be, who are we when we don't remember anything?

A memory-less emptiness resides just one step away from annihilation, non-existence, or so it seems to me as I watch my mother's expression as she listens to music from the 40's. If it's clear that "I am this or that" ends with death, whether the death of memory, that is, mind itself, or the death of the body, when both mind and physical form die, there is reason to think long and hard about whether Buddha might have been right when he said it was a mistake to identify with ego, with what our minds construct out of our past experiences, our versions of "I am this or that." But it's one thing to recognize the natural consequences of identifying with something that dies. It's quite another to know that what dies is not really me, that "I am" is something distinct from "I am this or that."

So, when I saw and accepted that I remembered an event wrong, I was in that moment free to give up identity with "me," the whole constructed set of events, actions, thoughts and feelings. Knowing that my memory was wrong even once, and likely wrong a lot of the time, I could accept that I didn't really know what happened when. If I don't know the past and I am my past, I don't know me. But that realization only sets me on the doorstep of not knowing anything, Buddha's not knowing. Buddha accepts much more than the mere fact that the "I" of constructed memories does not exist: the "I am" that transcends the ego's limited view of "I am this" accepts as well, every moment, without judgment and without identifying with it or the events that take place in it. It may be too big a leap for me at the moment, but at least I can see the way one maybe gets there. I can imagine it.

Slower than slow -- July in drought, heat, and recovery

2009-08-14T15:22:00.005-05:00

So, July was pretty much slo-mo. Body just said no to everything. And who was I to disagree. I ceded all authority to natural intelligence. And here I am safe, sound, sane and fully recovered 7 weeks later, so clearly, it was the right thing to do.

And I thought it gave me a pretty good perspective on how lucky I am, usually, to be in good health. But then I got this note today from a friend who reported on a mutual friend's post-op recovery following her 5th recurrence of cancer (4 times brain cancer; 1 time breast cancer). "Count your blessings," she said in closing her note. Indeed.

I am finally ok with not knowing what will come next, not just not knowing, but not caring (ie ,not worrying). It's more exciting that way. I take some comfort in recalling the year I took off to travel in Mexico, Central and South America, followed a short time later by 2 years of sailing around the Gulf and the Caribbean. And then I took another year to apply to and get into law school. So, things happen, directions shift, without constant effort towards them, oh, yeah, let's see, I saved a little fortune cookie thing that hit this nail on the head: You don't have to know where a road leads to know that you're on the right one.

Just as our Austin gardens are in survival mode this time of year, especially this summer when we are in a drought that has gone on nearly 2 years, and have experienced more than 55 days of triple-digit afternoons, so the critters are, so the woods and fields are, so am I. Just being.

View from the mid-point

2009-07-12T07:56:00.004-05:00

I am halfway through a year of stepping back, of contemplation, of slowing down, asking questions, and being willing to hear the answers. I've had lots of help, of course -- the many people who have shared their insights about these questions by writing books and essays, and the friends with whom I've discussed it all, especially my friend Peg, who has been grappling with her own challenges without taking a year off, and is a source of inspiration. These six months have been nothing short of miraculous, in that slowing down has allowed me to drop the excuses that always cut short this kind of exploration in the past. I never have the excuse of not having enough time. I have plenty of time. (Photo CC licensed; credit: Photoantique)

But though I am encouraged about getting past old excuses, I haven't found what I ostensibly came looking for in the first place: motivation to pursue with passion some path I could roughly characterize as "my third career," or in more immediate terms, motivation to throw myself into some specific dissertation topic. Not that I didn't give that a good try. I had already focused on that for seven months before I decided that want of a topic wasn't the real problem -- want of something more general was.

Once I made the field of inquiry both broader, and more personal, I discovered many things that could contribute to my lack of interest in anything and everything. I was very surprised to find that one of those stumbling blocks could be self-discipline. It is very hard to imagine that I might lack it, because I've accomplished many things that sure do seem to require it, but as I examine those accomplishments more closely, I see that jobs, school and social obligations structured my time for me. I really didn't have to. Of course, I prioritized, and prioritizing is certainly a type of self-discipline, but it seems that my priorities were always, at least in significant part, about meeting others' expectations of me. Even when I push myself, that is, exercise self-discipline to accomplish more than I really think I can, it's at least partly to please, or more precisely, avoid disappointing, others.

Where, exactly, does this motivation to please others come from? And is there self-motivation unrelated to the desire to please?

Addressing the second question first, meditation can be self-discipline at the most elementary level. The only desire is to be awake, aware in the present moment. On the other hand, if I practice meditation to cultivate kindness and compassion or for any other purpose, am I not back to, at bottom again, pleasing others? Can one really have no other goal than to be awake at every moment? Actually, it's true that many Buddhist writers indicate precisely that: having any other goal besides moment-to-moment awareness is simply more ego involvement, more delusion, and ultimately destructive of the very effort one makes to be present. It's quite nuanced, this non-goal-setting. If you simply have as your purpose to be awake, everything else will follow. But if you have as your goal all the stuff that is supposed to follow, you fail the goal of desiring to be no more than awake. Almost like you must fool yourself into thinking you don't really have goals, while all the while having them hiding behind the "be awake" goal.

Ah, but that's where knowledge of the differing perspectives from which you can see come into play (books I read earlier this spring and commented on in earlier posts). The logical, linear mind identifies as goals things like enhancement of some skill or ability, or some aspect of self identified with the form of the body ("I want to be more [whatever]"). The mind that is simply aware sees those enhancements as illusory, temporary, and destined to be unsatisfactory in any event, in short, of no consequence. Before I learned there was another way to see besides the logical and linear, I always became disillusioned when I came to this seeming contradiction (don't wish for the result, just be here now and the result will occur) and gave the whole enterprise of meditation up. It just made no sense. Indeed. It makes no sense, to the ego, to the logical mind. It makes perfect sense to awareness, to consciousness.

I really want to know whether I can accomplish anything significant outside of school, work and social obligations, that is, outside of external motivations to please or avoid disappointing others. I developed bilateral pneumonia at the end of June, so I have even more time to think about where the motivation to please others comes from, in answer to the second question. No surprises here: fear is at its heart -- fear of failure, hell, fear of being anything short of perfect, because at bottom, the fear is that those who love and take care of us only do so so long we meet their expectations. When no one contradicts that interpretation of reality (easy enough if it's never expressed), it can become very firmly entrenched in one's psyche. Maybe this is normal socialization; it certainly was a logical conclusion for this child to draw, given my particular family, but it's not the only possible interpretation of the basis for love and caring. And adults do revise their childish views of the world and how it works. It's not that there isn't contingent love. It's all around us. But there is also unconditional love. As it turns out, seeing the difference is one of those consequences of building moment-to-moment awareness. So meditation helps to answer this question too.

Pneumonia is a secondary lung infection caused by failure to clear congested bronchial passageways. Things like excessive suppression of coughs, asthma, allergies, and taxing one's body when it's least able to handle it -- these contribute to the conditions that allow pneumonia to get started and take hold. The cure is antibiotics, and for an asthmatic, regular use of bronchodilators and other inhaled medications that reduce the accumulation of fluid in the lungs. And lots of rest. Takes four - six weeks to get back to normal. Peg dragged me to the ER. I never would have gone on my own. I had to give a talk, that's why I was there in DC, that and to visit with Peg. I ended up staying in the hospital three days. No talk. My husband had to come to take me back home, and the trip back took every ounce of strength I could muster. Now it's just rest and recover. And think about how I got myself into that hospital in DC, because I am in no hurry to repeat that performance.

I have another six months to continue practicing moment-to-moment awareness, observing the nature of reality, seeing what's important, what's not, and to see where it leads. No goals other than to be awake in every moment, or as many of the days' moments as I can. Certainly more than before, though that's not saying much. And focusing on the breath has a much more profound meaning for me now than it used to. If I learn nothing else this year, I am grateful for that.

Change: Only here, only now

2009-06-18T16:21:00.005-05:00

Change is everywhere, at the center of every life process. The earth itself, like the universe, is inherently process and change. We celebrate changes: the seasons, the beginning of a new day, even the end of the day, milestones in our own and others' lives, learning accomplishments, completing processes, and going on to new things. We love the new and unusual. Our eyes pick out that which is different from the mass of same. We eagerly await new arrivals. New, new new. Up to a point. When changes begin to diminish us, ah, there we draw the line. Embrace turns to resistance. So it’s easy to accept some changes and almost impossible to accept others. The closer we get to changes within ourselves that we don’t like, the more complicated the whole picture gets.

We can change. Sure we can. We cut loose with a moment of spontaneity in an otherwise ordered existence, or we straighten up and take something seriously, we make new friends, strike up new relationships, and deliberately change for change's sake sometimes (rearranging the furniture). We make changes on our surface (I'll buy a new sweater today), we change our surroundings for awhile (I'll spend 6 weeks in France), we even change our careers. But try to change 'the way I am,' essentially, and you’ll more than likely find that "I" always seems to reassert itself, even if nudged from the center of our being occasionally. So why is it so hard to change ourselves? Or put another way, why do we cling so desperately to certain things, even when we don’t want to and know we shouldn’t, or even know that we can’t?

This spring I read several books on the brain, books about how we decide, how the various parts of our brains are different and how adaptable the brain is, about its chemical interactions with the cells of our bodies, the glands, and how all of that affects our health and the quality of our lives:

"How We Decide," by Jonah Lehrer (reporting on the relative value of using different approaches to knowing and deciding, in different situations)
"Predictably Irrational," by Dan Ariely (a behavioral economist who studies how emotions, and not logic, affect our choices much of the time)
"Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain," by Sharon Begley (about a meeting among scientists, philosophers and the Dalai Lama in India in 2004, in which the scientists explained their latest research findings regarding how what we do, including thinking, changes the brain)
"Evolve Your Brain," by Joe Dispenza (another of the plasticity books, this one nearly a textbook on the brain -- maybe a bit more than I bargained for)
“Stroke of Insight,” by Jill Taylor (detailing the effects on her perspective of having had a stroke at age 37 that killed parts of the left hemisphere of her brain)
"A New Earth," by Eckhart Tolle (connecting all this up with Buddhism, or spirituality more generally)

Each author seemed to be saying roughly the same things from different perspectives, with different emphases, and to differing degrees of complexity and detail. They explained and reinforced in a fascinating way the wisdom of "just noticing," that one practices in meditation. Overall, their perspectives and insights suggested that my experiences of sometimes resisting change, relishing other changes, and of trying unsuccessfully to change myself are pretty ho hum, that questioning the attitudes and beliefs which I may feel quite certain are "me" is essential and that, far from immutable, “me” is just thoughts, conditioned on past experiences, which I can turn on and off at will. I can think different thoughts, about different things, from different perspectives about the nature of being, and doing. The authors explained both why accepting some changes that happen to us whether we like it or not, and making other changes we’d like to make, can be so hard. But more fundamentally, they provided the motivation to do something about old, repetitive, and sometimes destructive thought patterns, and the certain knowledge that one can do something, that we’re not stuck with the neural connections with which we’ve saddled ourselves (and those around us) perhaps for a very long time.

You want change? You gotta be here now.

Topping the list of lessons learned is that being in the present moment is essential — both for accepting that which can’t be changed, and for change itself. The present moment is the only place anything occurs, so it's the only place change can occur. Being present quiets the thoughts that perpetuate habits, attitudes, beliefs, feelings, and the other effects of our brain/body interaction that we take as ourselves, that we literally accept as immutable. We can't change if we can't be here now. So, that, apparently, must be the top priority: being here now. One must return to being here now a million times each day. It is not a steady state, at least not for those of us who spend nearly every waking minute being somewhere other than here now -- mostly in our heads, lost in thoughts about the past and the future. Meditation is simply practicing the skill of returning to the moment. Like practicing scales for pianists, practicing a serve, for tennis players, strength training, for those who need powerful muscles to perform some task. The real payoff is when you use the skill in the day-to-day of living your life. The pianist plays the piano; the tennis player plays a few games with a friend; the rock-climber pulls herself up a sheer rock face and sees that spectacular 360 degree view. Similarly, the person in the midst of simply living life recognizes that she is not here now: maybe she’s engaging in habitual behaviors, thoughts or emotions, tied to memories of events gone by or anticipation of things yet to come, but, once aware, she returns to the now. It’s that simple. Whatever physiological effects might accompany the thoughts, a surge of feeling, a bath of chemicals within the body, the tightening of muscles, a knot in the stomach, a change in heart rate, all dissipate and the body and mind return to resting state, to now. Thoughts cause physiological experiences. Not "your" thoughts. Just thoughts. Not you. Just thoughts.

The overlap of the authors' ideas with Buddhist principles enhanced my understanding of the concepts of our universal connectedness, our essential natures as parts of the whole, as not separate from others, from the earth we live upon, from the air we breathe. From this perspective it is possible to stop identifying with the thoughts, behaviors and feelings that we may feel are rock-solidly us, and immutable. That there is something in us that can simply be aware, that can observe the chemical and biological nature of thoughts, behaviors and feelings, suggests we transcend our transitory thoughts, our chemicals and our feelings.

The insight I gained into the dual perspectives through which all of us are able to see the world, resident right within our brains, the left and right hemispheric perspectives as one author describes them, makes the task of suspending judgment, linear thought and logic possible. And quieting judging, thought and logic and the voice that constantly rehearses, expresses and reinforces them is, as noted above, essential for seeing ourselves as connected, essential for accepting the present moment, and essential for change. It's the nuts and bolts of being here now.

The chemical, biological perspective shows what anger, resentment, fear, anxiety, depression and hatred do to our bodies and our brains. That certainly provides plenty of motivation to take on the task of dis-identifying, the possibility of accepting, and of changing. It is worth the effort.

And effort it is. No one says it is easy. But coming back to the present a million times each day is surely simple. It's not like you can screw it up. This piece of advice is repeated by all the authors I read this spring. And of course, Buddha said it 2500 years ago. Taylor's example of practicing the skills she wanted to relearn to regain her left-brain functioning illustrates the principle. It's at the heart of everything Tolle expresses. Dispenza's advice echoes the same point: we can change patterned thinking, including resistance, but it takes discipline and determination. One must return to the the task, to the present moment, again and again.

Ok, but how exactly does one be here now?

So, I read a lot of stuff. Poof, and it’s all gone. Memory falters. I need reminders that I can return to each morning, to help me wake up minute by minute throughout the day, to see the world through the right-brain perspective as well as the left, for example, to be able to choose compassion, forgiveness and love instead of fear, anger or rejection. It sure would be nice to be able to carry out my intentions, move beyond the resistance that interferes with accepting what is and taking appropriate action, to change counterproductive attitudes and behaviors, to be more compassionate, open, forgiving, and accepting, and less judgmental and attached to transient material objects and my preferred outcomes. Seems to me like a very tall order.

Practice, practice, practice: Formal, informal and real-life

Every author I read says be here now and accept, without judgment, what is in the present moment. Putting that into practice requires establishing new habits of seeing and being. You can't just expect that ideas, simply read, will take root and manifest in new behaviors by themselves. You literally have to practice seeing what’s happening from a different perspective. Lucky for us, life gives us different types of opportunities to practice: informal moment-to-moment awareness; formal practice (meditation); and show time -- when you are deep in the midst of some difficulty! The third is the hardest, but ultimately, achieving awareness within a challenging circumstance is the whole point, and doing so is easier if you have practiced informally and formally.

Formal practice

One can obtain staggering amounts of advice about how to practice formally, so I won't dwell on that here. Tolle provides six short audio meditations to get you started. Scroll down about 3/4 of the way on the page, Exercises for Your Awakening. But keep in mind what Tolle notes: formal practice is no substitute for moment-to-moment awareness. It's like practicing your serve, or scales, or strength training. It's a tool to improve real-life functioning, not an end in itself.

Informal practice: Moment-to-moment awareness

Moment-to-moment awareness is just what it says: being totally present in the moment regardless of what you are doing. In fact, it’s not about what you are doing, but how you do it. You can peel a potato and be there for it, or be a million miles away. You can take a walk and be completely present, noticing every sensory impression, registering how each footfall feels, how you are breathing, what you’re hearing, or you can be oblivious to it all and lost in thoughts. Taylor calls the state of moment-to-moment awareness "seeing from the right-brain perspective" because that's how she experienced that awareness -- only after certain parts of her left hemisphere were destroyed by a stroke. She gives the following advice for informal practice, moment-to-moment awareness, or, in her terms, seeing from a right-brain perspective:

When you feel you are out of touch with the right-brain perspective (consciousness or awareness), you can always return to it simply by being in the moment. There are many ways to facilitate being in the moment. You can ask yourself, "how does it feel to be here doing this?" In other words, get into your body. Feel your sense impressions, feel your life force, look around, take in the big picture, listen, taste, smell, identify what information is coming in through your skin, have fun with your senses. All sensory input registers as feeling. If you focus on how you feel, you are being aware; you are being mindful; you are here and now, in the present.

You can also consciously relax tense muscles to bring your attention to how you feel in the present moment.

You can walk in nature, sing, and dance to get yourself into the here and now.

To experience compassion, one can loosen attachment to our ego's inclination for superiority. This allows us to be more generous of spirit (compassionate). We tend to be compassionate with equals. Being compassionate is seeing another's circumstances with love (an open heart) instead of judgment (and its attendant emotional states, disgust, rejection, fear, anger, etc.).

To experience the joy of being alive, one need only be present. But your desire to be present must be stronger than your attachment to your misery, your ego and your need to be right. "Do you want to be happy or do you want to be right?"

Tolle characterizes the same moment-to-moment awareness Taylor calls "right-brain" as simply awareness, consciousness, or Presence (being fully present in the moment). He has advice for informal moment-to-moment practice too, in addition to the advice on the page referenced above, keyed to the chapters of his book:

Cultivate awareness: While you look at a flower, can you sense yourself as the perceiving entity, as Presence? If so, you are being conscious of being conscious. You are being aware of yourself as perceiving.

Accept the present moment: Clinging and fear represent a rejection of what is, a failure to accept that things pass away. Sadness occurs when we lose things or people we love, and can't accept their impermanence or allow change to happen. There is a continuous coming and going of events, people, etc., and knowing that nothing will last helps you to enjoy the moment. Accepting, not judging, and not being attached to outcomes place you completely in the Present.

Your everyday life can pull you into unconsciousness. You have to invite a different state of consciousness into the daily routine, a state of Presence. Even things that you usually do as a means to an end, especially if you do a lot of such things, can be done with Presence, making them, as much as possible, into an end in themselves. The goal is to be absolutely present every moment. You are present if you can look at things around you and not label, that is, perceive without naming. Everyday events can be your vehicle for waking up. You can also focus on your body's reactions: inhabit your body. Being conscious of your body anchors you in the present.

Take as your purpose simply being where you are, doing what you are doing, fully aligned with the present moment. Thus, your purpose is not about what you do, but rather being conscious, being awake, true to now, aligned with the power of the present moment. From this alignment, you can achieve whatever goal you pursue.

Practice in small ways, all the time (look out the window without judging), and then when you confront a negative situation, ask yourself, "am I able to accept this moment just as it is?" If you can, you grow in Presence power. Acceptance is Presence power.

Accept; enjoy; be enthusiastic: If you are deeply ok with the present moment, you will find your power to deal with whatever it brings you. Do everything you do with at least acceptance. Ideally, acceptance becomes enjoyment and even enthusiasm. You start simply with being Present and noticing your feelings and reactions that are not actually serving any goal or objective you may have, but are merely making you unhappy.

If you have to do something and you can't even summon acceptance, you have to recognize that you will bring suffering to yourself and those around you if you continue to do that activity without at minimum, acceptance. On the other hand, when you are either accepting, enjoying or enthusiastic, your actions can bring harmony and happiness to your life and those around you.

Enjoyment is appreciation of all that exists in the present moment. This explains why wanting is unfulfilling -- its focus is on pleasure and happiness in the future when you obtain whatever it is you want. This leaves you unsatisfied with the present moment, which is the only place you can ever be happy, joyful and alive.

Enthusiasm brings creative energy to what you do and to the world. It is the desire for growth and expansion connected to the Source. If you bring positive energy to what you do, you can move from acceptance, to joy to enthusiasm!

Real-life

So, you can practice being here now anytime, all the time, moment-to-moment. It’s like choosing to walk up the stairs instead of taking the elevator. After awhile it becomes a habit, and little-by-little, you become more fit, more able to endure, able to carry a heavier load. Same with being aware. If awareness becomes a habit, you can bring it to more difficult circumstances, not just the easy ones. Both Taylor and Tolle have strikingly similar advice for dealing with challenging moments, experiences we don’t like, wish wouldn’t happen, but can’t avoid. The same advice applies to situations we relish, however. Standing back in the midst of those is just as important, but our need to do so is not so acute.

First Tolle:

When you recognize negativity within yourself, you can choose to step outside it, by simply being the awareness observing the negativity.

Some of the negativity in life is our reliving (giving new life to) old pains. You can reduce the incidence of arguments motivated by old emotional pain by not identifying with positions ("my point"). You can catch yourself relating to someone or something in the present out of identification with old emotional pains from the past when you notice that you are reacting with an emotion that is out of proportion to the triggering event. If you notice these over-reactive emotions quickly, you can prevent them from triggering a cascade of thoughts that relate what's happening in the present to these old hurts (“this always happens...”), thus intensifying your emotional state and causing you to react to the present event from those past perspectives, instead of from seeing what is actually happening in the present. If you recognize this pattern early, you bring consciousness into the body -- you feel the emotion, the physiological sensations, etc. -- but you recognize it as a reaction to an old pain, being played out yet another time, in the present. That awareness is the beginning of dissolving the power of old hurts to perpetuate themselves in the present. You contain them through awareness.

He says that there is a common misunderstanding that acceptance precludes effective action, that if one accepts what is, one automatically concludes that it's alright, so there's nothing we can or should do about it. On the contrary, he counsels that complete acceptance generates positive energy, a certainty, that flows into the doing of whatever it is you choose to do in response to a situation. Your action comes out of the strength of acceptance, not the emotional weakness of neediness, resistance, anger, denial, frustration, or struggling. If you are listening and observing in the Present moment with an attitude of “I don't know,” in other words, you have silenced the chatter, stopped judging, and are just observing, seeing what is, you make a very different kind of decision about what to do.

Here's Taylor's advice for practicing mindfulness, or as she says, centering in the right-brain, in the midst of a negative thought pattern or negative reaction to an event:

Be aware of when you have become mired in a negative thought loop. This is, in essence, putting your moment-to-moment awareness practice to work on a real-life problem.
Focus on how the loop feels physiologically inside your body. How is your breathing, do you feel tightness anywhere, do you feel lightness in your head, is your stomach in a knot, are you shaking?
Wait for about 90 seconds while you accept the physiological effects of this loop fully; it takes about 90 seconds for the judgmental, counter-productive, out of control, emotional and physiological response to dissipate.
Consciously acknowledge the value of having a brain with the ability to think thoughts and cause emotions, but confirm to yourself that you are not interested in this loop anymore. Tell your brain to stop bringing this kind of thing up.

You aim for a balance between observing your neural, chemical, body circuitry and engaging in it. You surrender to it for a minute or so, then you let it drop.

Summing it up: Notice when you’re not here -- when you are in the past or the future -- and just come back to now

Basically both are saying, "wake up" in the midst of strong emotional reactions. Recognize that they are just thoughts, that they are not immutable ("oh, that's just me -- I'm that way"), that you have a choice about how you react to events in your life, and that you can choose to react from a much calmer and more nuanced perspective, the present. If you have practiced taking that perspective, that is, practiced silencing mental chatter, practiced seeing and accepting what is at this moment in everyday actions and in formal practice, rather than listening to the chatter in your mind translate what is through the filter of your past, your hurts, your attachments, your fears, your demands that things be other than as they are, you will be able to step to the right, as Taylor says, or become the awareness observing the negativity, as Tolle says, and decide what to do from a more conscious, less autopilot-reactive perspective.

For example, something might happen, you could think, “Here we go again... You always blah, blah, blah,” which will likely trigger an emotional reaction of some kind, anger, or resignation, or resentment. Normally, we totally identify with that kind of reaction: I am angry, or I am resigned, or I resent that.” But if we are able to notice the disproportion in the reaction to the event, this simple observation enables us to consider whether the thoughts and emotions might have been triggered by something old and deep, not by what actually happened in the present moment. You can walk away, focus on how your body is reacting, feel what the thoughts cause physiologically, acknowledge the ability to put 2 and 2 together and come up with ... way, way more than 4, but let the conclusion go. You can be in the present instead of the past.

Here’s another example: Have you ever noticed how someone you’ve known for a long, long time can say something in a group of people who don’t know him, that charms or amuses all of them but just makes you cringe? Is your reaction a little out of proportion to what was said? That’s it! You can ask yourself whether you might be reacting to old stuff, not in the moment, not here now. Want to change? Stop doing that. Notice when you do, then stop.

Vacation

2009-05-22T07:49:00.007-05:00

In french and spanish, vacation is plural: Les grandes vacances; las vacaciones. The word, vacation, might seem odd if you think about it. Vacating. Emptying. What is the essence of these vacations? From the way we all talk about them, and the traditions we have of pressing upon each other our mementos of them (our photos and slides, in the old days; our Flickr streams now), and how we remember them (specific scenes, incidents, people we met, things we ate), no one could be blamed for believing that they are in essence what we do to have fun, experience new places, relax, and meet new people. But that word, vacate, reveals their essence more deeply. What the grand vacancies are really about is what we leave behind when we take off.

I experienced this acutely this year as I planned my own grandes vacances. I have made a trip to Southeast Arizona at least in the spring, and for about 10 years, in the spring and fall each year, first to visit my Dad when he retired to Tucson, and then just to bird the incredible environments of the Sky Islands -- the Santa Ritas, the Huachucas, and the Chiricahuas. Google them. They are amazing extensions of the Mexican Sierra into the U.S. Sonoran desert. I typically stayed from 3 to 6 days, and, once the visits became centered on birding, I planned them with my girlfriend birding buddies. I always wanted to stay longer to experience the little mountain towns as places where people lived and worked, not just birding stops. But I never felt that I had time. Spring is so full of wonderful things to do at home, as April and May are two of our most beautiful months in Austin, before it starts to warm up so much that one wants to get away. And of course, there were the demands of my work, and later my school, schedules. But this year of "taking time off," this year of reflection, of stepping back, of Being more than doing -- this year seemed like the one to take the plunge and spend more time in the Sky Islands. Not just to bird. So I made a reservation at Casita Frontera in Patagonia for two weeks in the middle of April. (Photo credit: cobalt123; CC*BY*NC*SA; visit cobalt's wonderful flickr stream to see more photos of SE Arizona.)

I second-guessed that decision a hundred times as the departure date approached. What was I thinking? Two weeks in Patagonia in April? What was I going to do there for two weeks? But I didn't back out. I kept the date and continued to prepare to vacate. Then the day came and I left my cat and all the things I must do every day to accommodate her needs and desires and keep her out of trouble. And I left her as companion, soft fuzzy fur ball, cute kitten, warm snuggly thing. I left my garden in its mid-spring transition from bulbs to the perennials and annuals of summer, its need for constant monitoring, weeding, replanting, watering against the gradual heating up of the soil and the air, fertilizing, pruning and loving attention every morning as I have a cup of coffee and stroll around looking at everything that has changed overnight. And I left the garden as place of rest, relaxation, rejuvenation, contemplation and immense enjoyment of the wonders of nature. I left my job with its neat little projects, to-do lists and phone calls to return and emails to answer. And I left my job as identity, "what I do" when people ask, my life as a copyright attorney, my sense of being of use and of value. I left my house with its myriad chores that require constant attention to keep them from piling up and turning my house into a sloppy place I couldn't abide. And I left my house as nurturing space arranged to my liking and cool and warm and inviting. I left my kitchen where I bake, cook and brew up tea and coffee, stock the shelves and refrigerator, and deplete them in a breathing in and breathing out that never stops. I left my friends, well, most of them. A few were planning to join me in Arizona for several days at a stretch. I left my husband, who was busy with his two spring installations in Houston anyway and needed to focus on them, so it was just as well that I was off doing something else. And I left my mom, whom I hadn't left alone for two weeks in years, though she is now living in Assisted Living and ostensibly, has enough help to get by just fine without my coming by all that often and "checking on her."

In short, I left everything that I do routinely, almost without thinking, sometimes literally without thinking, on autopilot, not really in the present moment. Everything that keeps me doing all day long, the things that leave little if any time to just be. And I took off for Arizona where my time would be almost entirely unstructured, without established routine, and certainly no autopilot. I would decide how to be and what to do each moment, each hour, each day, as I went along. That's what the grandes vacances would be: a big vacancy in the daily doing.

Such a big vacancy could present itself as a gaping hole to be filled up with a million things that I think I have to "do" while I am "on vacation" or simply as space, not to be filled up at all, but left vacant, open for things like observation, breathing, walking and being present with the body and the senses -- really seeing the where and what of each experience, minute to minute -- being present and no more and no less. Les grandes vacances indeed.

It was incredible. It was so easy to meditate every morning, to exercise, to walk, to climb mountains, to practice french, to read and reflect upon books and videos I wanted to learn from, to spend time talking to my friends on the phone or in email, to eat simple wholesome meals I prepared myself, to take good care of myself (in the ultra-dry air of the desert), to listen to my body's wisdom about stretching and balance. Oh it was wonderful to be unplugged from all the things that demand my time and attention at home in Austin, to establish that I could actually drop unhealthy habits, institute healthy new ones, and most importantly, be present moment to moment at least sometime, a lot more of the time than I've ever managed before or since. And I had enough time with my friends who came to bird to practice being present in relationships, practice what I was reading about in A New Earth, My Stroke of Insight and other books about the brain and the power of our thoughts. It was sweet.

Then it was time to go home. It took only about a week for me to give up hope of integrating any of these new ways of being into my real life. The day-to-day just took me by the hand and off we flew through day, after day, after day. Autopilot reigned supreme. No time to be -- only time to do, do, do. It got worse when Dennis came home from three years of living in another city a week later. Very tricky, this re-integrating two lives into a shared existence, so it makes perfect sense that I might not have as much time for meditating and yoga. But there's nothing in the two-person day-to-day that precludes being present every minute. It's just that one so easily gets swept away by doing and gets lost in thoughts, worries, plans, actions and emotions, and forgets entirely to be here now, to be the observer of the experience.

But after a while I realized it was not hopeless, really. Two weeks turned into three, and then four, as I thought about how exactly vacating had helped me be present. Vacating's essential element was the absence of routine. The absence of routine seems to open your eyes, enliven your senses, and call you to experience your life in the present. What is extremely difficult in your normal environment, looking around you and just seeing, without labeling, categorizing, judging, planning, comparing, and riding off into a haze of chatter, is easy when everything around you is all new.

Vacating is not the only way to step outside routine and open to the richness of your life. I saw that I could start each day with a reminder to be present! If I got off on the right foot first thing in the morning, I wouldn't be so likely to find that the whole day had gone by and I had been on autopilot all day, that is, I hadn't been present a single minute. Changing life-long habits of unawareness and unconsciousness is challenging, even when you really, really want to. It requires patience and practice, practice, practice to recognize that you are not present. It's ironic: one must be present to recognize that one is not present. Or more positively, one remedies being unaware by simply noticing that one has been unaware. It really is quite simple. But not easy.

I reread summaries of what I had learned from the reading I had done earlier this spring, and began to apply what I had learned in the midst of the full catastrophe that life tends to be. I began to just be present, every once in a while, in doing *whatever* it was I was doing. That's all it takes. Being present is simply being the observer of your experience, your state of being, of interacting, of thinking, of feeling. Instead of merely being the experience, you are the experiencer. Instead of feeling anxious about a challenging chore or task, for example, being present is just noticing that you are anxious, noticing how it feels in your body, what it does to you, how you actually experience anxiety -- in short, grounding your awareness in your body, rather than in the thoughts that chatter incessantly in your left brain, the stream of chatter that is, quite literally, cranking out the chemicals that cause anxiety. It is the same with being present in the garden: noticing the myriad objects that exist in the garden in the early morning, slowly, mindfully sipping a cup of coffee, while you walk around and just notice all that is. That is being present for a walk in the garden. Presence is also not getting caught up in naming everything, describing it all, thinking through what you plan to do with it later today, what you did with it yesterday, or a conversation you had while sitting in the garden many years ago.

So, for now I'm using the experience of my day-to-day life, in which I am often caught up in mental chatter, planning, worrying, reacting, fear, anger or frustration, to wake up little by little. I count it a successful day if I woke up from unawareness (from identification with the chatter) a handful of times. I would be jubilant if I could snap to awareness in the midst of a powerful emotional reaction.

That is the ultimate goal of moment-to-moment awareness: to be able to act in the world out of a more balanced, centered sense of what needs to be done. Looking around the garden without labeling, judging and reacting (in other words, silencing mental chatter) is practice for the real-life challenges of looking at your options for action in any given moment with the benefit of the perspectives of all parts of your brain, not just your reactive, emotional mental chatter perspective. The more balanced perspectives bring to decision-making a sense of calmness that transcends "understanding." Sort of like a vacation without having to leave home.

No barriers

2009-04-14T15:46:00.003-05:00

Dennis and I have had a debate for about 8 years (since he started his formal art education). It involves the question of whether, if anything and everything could be in the circle that defines "what is art," would the circle have any meaning. In other words, doesn't the distinction between what is and isn't art disappear if you can't say that there is something outside the circle? Thus, the conundrum: can there be art without no-art? This weekend that whole argument, that whole perspective dissolved -- just disappeared into thin air.

Two friends and I drove to Houston for Dennis' thesis show at the Blaffer on the University of Houston campus. After the show, he, BethLynn, Stephen and I had a wonderful evening talking and talking and talking about what the gist or meaning of each student's work was, how it had come out of the three years of experience in the program, the types of critique each had received from the group and the faculty, and how effectively the artist conveyed what he or she meant to convey. But all the time the conundrum lurked beneath the surface for me. I had this nagging doubt that art had any meaning anymore if there were no definition, no logically constructed circle defining what is and isn't art (what's in and what's out of the circle). When we got home that night Dennis gave me a book to read, actually, he gave me an essay to read in a book called, Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art. The essay, beginning on page 75 (and just amazingly coincidentally, available as a preview of the book in Google Book Search) was "No Title," by Marcia Tucker. And then I saw. And I kept reading.

Buddha Mind documents two years of meetings among a group of curators, art critics, educators, and Buddhist commentators in psychology, literature, and cognitive science, on the subject of the growing presence of Buddhist perspectives in contemporary culture. The essays simply explain that the same perspective I have begun to adopt, as best as I can, to view everyday life, each thing that happens around me, to me, within me, from a perspective of non-judgment, acceptance, no labeling, just seeing what is at this moment -- well, wouldn't you know it, that's the perspective contemporary art adopts. It embodies the artist's expression of that perspective. It takes as a premise that there are no barriers between what is life and what is art. In other words, there is no circle. There is no definition. And I stopped insisting that there had to be one.

My, BethLynn's and Stephen's consternation over Kristin's paintings illustrate the two perspectives: the logical, analytical, language-based perspective that seeks to understand art through labels, through critique, and through comparison and value judgment, and the silent, reflective, meditative perspective that seeks to understand the work through its subtle suggestion of truth, its reflection of an observation about existence, life, being, doing, even non-doing or non-being. Kristin had painted one large purplish canvas on a wall by itself and four moderately sized canvasses that hung in a straight line across another wall in the first gallery we entered at the Blaffer. They caught our attention right away. The four smaller ones were simply different shades of blue, each one. We all reacted the same way: Is this her thesis work? Three years of graduate school and this is what she feels best represents her accomplishment? Wow. Discussion of her work at dinner helped a lot, of course. Dennis explained what she had wanted to convey, how she worked, and even that one of his critiques of her work had been that perhaps she hadn't chosen the right medium to express what she wanted to express. But the bottom line was that there was no way to appreciate her work except through slow, non-judgmental contemplation and *seeing* what was there, what appeared after awhile that you hadn't noticed before, and what it "was" after all, as opposed to what you thought about it after a glance across the room crowded with people. Geez, we could not have been farther from the essence of her work if we had been viewing it from across town or from another state. We just didn't see it as the invitation to contemplation that it was, because it was "not art" to us and we had dismissed it before we even really gave it our attention at all.

Marcia Tucker's, "No Title" connected our dinner conversation to Buddhist contemplation more firmly, and other essays elaborated the connection further. Her paintings are (again) simply (it's always "simply") a reflection of the state of the sky as indication of the state of life in its totality. The work is a way to recognize the transience, the ephemera, the no boundaries, no barriers, no self, in all phenomena. How could I have missed this? It's that I dismissed it so quickly.

It's that the purpose of art has evolved from self-expression (which itself was an evolution from earlier purposes) to expression of the formless, the timeless, the selfless, the Buddha mind: not knowing. You can't really experience her work with labels though. You can talk *about* it. Just like you can read *about* swimming. But reading about it or talking about it is not experiencing it. Reading about swimming is not swimming. And talking about Kristin's art is not Kristin's art or experiencing Kristin's art.

Marcia Tucker noted that we don't spend enough time actually looking at artworks. We want them to grab us and tell us what they are about. We want the label beside the piece to explain it. We don't want to slow down enough to see "through" the lens of the work, rather than just see the work as a physical manifestation. But art is a window, a perspective, a way of seeing. Artworks are not an end in themselves. How could I have missed that?

I missed it because I was seeing from my (left-brain) analytical, logical, definitional, labelled and labeling perspective, and it just doesn't "get" contemporary art (like it didn't get compassion and oneness and peace and non-judging). Until recently I didn't even know that I had another perspective from which to view this world, and the expressive works in it. Not that another perspective exists "out there" somewhere, but that I *have* another perspective, residing in my own brain, and always have had. I just needed to access it. And I have. Actually, just having been convinced that it's there opened the door. It is very hard to see what we don't know exists. But if we know it exists, it's easier to relax enough to see it, or through it, in this case. So, I see Kristin's art now, even though I am on a plane flying at 500 miles/hour from Dallas to Tucson. I see it vividly and can't stop seeing it. But I don't think about it so much. I don't label it. I just "see" it and know what it says to me about the timeless, formless and impermanent.

March -- incredible month

2009-04-08T09:20:00.003-05:00

What a windy, sunny, rainy, warm, cold, but always fabulously beautiful month March was this year, so filled with insights! I hit my stride in March, taking full advantage of this year off. I dropped entirely the pursuit of anything other than knowing myself better. And I completely, totally, and thoroughly slowed down. That has been the real key to enabling a state of openness to seeing things differently, and seeing beyond the perspective that I have adopted over 57 years of life. Reading, discussion with others, and reflection play an important role, but it's catalytic. It is on the surface, relative to other efforts I have made this month. Remembering, writing down and analyzing my dreams, formal meditation, recognizing the fleeting nature of resistance to doing certain things, paying attention to the physiological aspects of emotional states I experience, and just being present more of the time, moment-to-moment -- these are more deeply satisfying and mark a real departure from intellectual understanding, towards knowing and accepting reality.

I discovered a tool and learned how to use it: the utility of recognizing and respecting my right-brain perspectives on reality, while maintaining respect for the importance of left-brain functioning. In a healthy mind, neither can be dismissed or even discounted. I put this tool to work and experienced amazing insights.

For example, this month I remembered how fearful I was as a child of doing anything wrong because I could see pretty plainly how people related to my brother, who in fact did do, just about everything, wrong. But more importantly, I connected a subtle tendency to hold my breath once I begin to do just about anything, to this little fear of failing to do it right. This leads inevitably (and quickly) to panic, which makes me want to stop doing whatever it is I am doing. It only registers consciously as resistance to the task. It takes a lot of energy to keep up the task (fighting the panic) while not breathing. Until recently, I was unaware of what was going on, registering only the resistance. Now, seeing the process clearly, I see that it's much simpler just to breathe. The panic goes away, the urge to abandon the task goes away, and all that's left is the task and me, and no resistance whatsoever. I get a lot more done with a lot less energy.

Love is contingent. Think about that. That is simple and irrefutable in our world. We see evidence of the truth of this everywhere. But it's also irrefutable that we are the potential for unconditional love. Just as we are the potential for compassion and forgiveness. Can fear keep us from participating in the flow of unconditional love? Fear of losing it? Wow.

Which brings me to attachment. Grasping hurts. Trying to hold on to something, anything, attaching to an outcome or result, believing that we are what we do -- all of these are a source of great pain for us. So, whenever I feel pain now, I look for the source of it in attachment, and gently let that go, if I can. You have to start small here. I'm not trying this with my mother's care, except in small ways. I haven't gotten to the biggest attachments (to life going on forever in perfect health), but it's very clear to me that the same exercise that applies to the little attachments applies to the big ones too.

Anger, frustration, anxiety all get the same gentle observation. When I experience them, I look for the source in an attachment of some kind, either to things being a certain way, or to things not being a certain way (attachment or aversion).

Basically, every little thing that happens, every feeling I experience, all day long, offers an opportunity to explore the truth of the assertions I've been exploring in others' writings, that the life we lead, the normal life, is not the best way to find peace, satisfaction, fulfillment, love, or to know the truth.

But, I began to branch out a bit from the fundamental left-brain, right-brain distinction that Dr. Taylor describes to learn more about brain anatomy and functioning, and the connection between what we think, how we feel and the parts of our brain that function when we do. I'm reading or have just read "How We Decide," by Jonah Lehrer (reporting on the relative value of using different approaches to knowing and deciding, in different situations), "Predictably Irrational," by Dan Ariely (a behavioral economist who studies how emotions, and not logic, affect our choices much of the time), "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain," by Sharon Begley (about a meeting of scientists, philosophers and the Dalai Lama in India in 2004, in which the scientists explained their latest research findings regarding how what we do, including thinking, changes the brain), and "Evolve Your Brain," by Joe Dispenza (another of the plasticity books, this one nearly a textbook on the brain -- maybe a bit more than I bargained for). Connecting all this up with Buddhism (or spirituality more generally) is "A New Earth," by Eckhart Tolle. This is really a fairly plain-English account of what Buddhist writers explain in more esoteric terms, though Tolle is careful to emphasize that the principles he's explaining have their correlates in all the world's "religions." But, to the extent that they are in fact religions, he notes that they have sort of lost the main point and become rigid and self-serving, "egoistic" in his terms. Buddhism in particular does not claim to be a religion, but it too can be seen as having become rigid or at least some sects may have. All of these books are extremely interesting and I can't imagine how I could ever have read them if I hadn't taken some time off. They are just not like anything I've ever explored before.

I am reminded every day, especially since both March and April have given us such fabulous weather this year, how special a gift to oneself some time off can be. Time off, to, among other things, slow down, is absolutely essential to growth and change, at times. But for me it is not sufficient. I also need latitude to explore that which has been, for whatever reason, outside the limits of my life so far. These new worlds (for me, they have included traveling for a year in Mexico, Central America, and South America, sailing for 2 years around the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, and now, exploring aspects of being other than intellect) open new realms of inquiry and new realms of wonder. It's like life is fine, putting one foot in front of the other, doing what everyone else is doing, being a part of normal daily life -- but not always, and certainly not forever.

Just like that; perspective shifts to the right

2009-03-05T20:35:00.002-06:00

"Time's up. Put down your pencils."

You remember the feeling, don't you? You're in 5th grade; you are taking a school-wide standardized test; all the instructions are delivered, wooden, word for word as the test dictates. The pressure is on; you must perform; you must do your best. And then, just like that, it's over. You go out and play.

And just like that, my intellectual pursuit is over and I'm going out to play. Indeed, 20 years is quite a long time to devote to the cultivation of a particular type of thinking, a certain point of view, a certain understanding of the world and my place in it. Now I feel free to cultivate a new type of mental, emotional and psychological functioning, an alternative point of view and a different understanding of the world and my place in it. The need to change perspectives crystalized for me as I read Dr. Jill Taylor's, "My Stoke of Insight." Dr. Taylor experienced over the course of a few hours what she described as the equivalent of Buddhist Nirvana, because she suffered (at 37) a left-brain hemorrhage that left her unable to speak, to understand speech, to understand anything about numbers or math, to move, to recognize where she ended and everything else started, even to know who she was or anything about her past. This was "quieting the mind" all at once and completely. But while those functions shut down, her right-brain continued to function perfectly and, in fact, treated her, for the first time ever, to the perception of herself as a fluid, connected to the universe, and to an experience of absolute joy and non-judgmental acceptance of everything and everyone. Upon reading about her experience of the stroke and her effort to reintegrate her left-brain functioning (which took nearly a decade) without losing her right-brain point of view, I realized that the awareness, peace and tranquility, the compassion and openness the Buddhist texts speak about are all simply a perspective on the world, on life, and on living that is present within me, a perception I can experience at any time because it's actually how my right-brain perceives things, at this very moment and at every moment. It is just that the dominance of my left-brain reduces the right's expression of this perspective to a subtle nagging sense of dis-ease with the analytical point of view that dominates my thinking and my actions. The right-brain is the little voice that says, "be more generous," "listen, just listen," "it's not good or bad; it just is," and that I routinely ignore as I let other thoughts and feelings, including ego, fear, anger and resentment, manage my decision-making. I hear the right-brain, or I sense it, but I turn away from it. Starting a little over a week ago I stopped ignoring it. I found myself instantly able to see the world, my place in it, my relationships to friends and family and my tasks and chores, even my conflicts and challenges, in a completely different way.

For example, this right-brain point of view has changed how I see my mother and myself as we walk together down the path with Alzheimer's. It changed how I felt about making a trip to Houston to deliver Dennis' motorcycle to his studio (an arduous and expensive process we have undertaken four times now, as we move the motorcycle sculpture to locations for shows). Suddenly it was just 'what we were doing' that Wednesday. It had no aversive quality. I was freed of any kind of resistance, and full of energy and happiness all day.

And most amazingly, it helped me to articulate for myself at a much more basic level than I had imagined, the choice I have been gradually edging towards, without realizing it, since last summer. The inability to find any dissertation topic for inquiry that interested me enough to devote two years to it, and more recently, any topic that interests me enough to devote an hour to it, to say nothing of the rest of my life, was merely the reluctance to continue to intellectualize, period. It is just time to turn away from that. I took up law to challenge myself intellectually, to earn enough to have choices later in life, and to join a respected profession. I accomplished and enjoyed that. It is now time to turn to what has been missing from intellectual pursuits -- emotion, open-heartedness, connection, compassion and love. It's simply time to turn to other things. How could I be so fortunate as to come across this book that perfectly framed the problem, and the solution I have been seeking below the level of verbal articulation? My friend Peg says that its my personal dawning of the age of Aquarius: Jupiter and Mars are aligned and I can expect these kinds of insights. I think it is, as well, that Dr. Taylor's explanation of her experience was understandable to my left-brain in a way that Buddhist texts have never been. It's as though Buddhism's explanations were too far beyond my understanding for me to bridge the gap. Taylor's explanation was the bridge.

When a Buddhist writer says that we are one, we are all, and we are peace, the left-brain entertains those assertions as statements of fact and quickly discredits them. "We most certainly are not one. What does 'we are all' actually mean? And we are peace? Please." Taylor set the stage right from the start to allow us to step around this reflexive negation of her experience. She does not assert that the left-brain must accept what it can never perceive. Rather, she asserts that the right-brain ordinarily perceives the world this way, by nature. It is not possible for the left-brain to see us as one, whole, all, and peace. But the right brain sees nothing else. The challenge is no longer to convince your left-brain its life-long perceptions are wrong -- merely to convince it to take a break so you can see your right-brain's perception for yourself.

Caring for my mother, for Dennis, for myself, my friends, cultivating openness, compassion and a loving heart, doing what I know is the right thing to do with my time and my energy, these may well take hard, hard work over a long time, but at least I am convinced now, in a way I have never been before, that they do not represent a state of mind to "achieve" or "develop" at the high cost of the typically futile effort to break habitual patterns of understanding, but merely a state of mind existing in my right brain, right now, to recognize and to listen to, to let express itself in my days, weeks -- in my life. The perspective is already there and functioning. It requires only that it be recognized and released from left-brain's dominance. It needs a chance to at least be part of the view, maybe even to dominate at times.

All this is not to say that intellectualizing has no place in a healthy, happy, effective life or that I will never pursue intellectual life again. Far from it. I place immense value on my intellect and can't imagine not having and relying on it a million times each day. But I have put so much effort into nurturing my intellect for so many years, that my right-brain has simply stagnated by comparison. The left-brain can take a rest, chill out for awhile, so that I can nurture right-brain perspectives and begin to see what I've been missing. Balance is ultimately what I'd like to have. Dr. Taylor worked long and hard to regain her left-brain functioning, but she determined from the start of that process that she would not attempt it at all if it meant losing what she had gained from experiencing her right-brain's perspective while the left shut down. She had recognized in a deeply profound way that despite her brain's having shut down important functions, she was undamaged. I paraphrase here her description: In the absence of my left hemisphere's negative judgment, I was simply a being of light radiating life into the world -- a cellular masterpiece -- perfect, whole and beautiful, just the way I was. (Ch.6)

This was not a platitude or cynical consolation. She saw herself this way, at the core of her being. Who would want to lose such absolute certainty about the nature of who and what you were? Who would not want to gain it? Similarly, I have no desire to cultivate right-brain functioning at the cost of left. I'm convinced, however, that it's time to shift focus and go from there.

Nursing home

2009-02-22T06:36:00.004-06:00

Stop it. Stop putting this off. Just get in the car and go on over there.

So, I get in the car and go on over to The Gardens. Trying not to be so distracted on the way that I wreck my car, I focus on driving, which I can still do. I think of everything like that now. I think, "Wow! I can still do this! I can type. Wow! I can see. I recognize letters and I can spell."

I arrive and walk unassisted into the building after entering the code (which I remember) at the front door. I turn left at the hall 10 and walk down to my mother's room. I knock and enter. It's dark. She keeps the blinds closed all the time. I hate that. Why do old people keep things all closed up? She used to always open the drapes and curtains in the morning. Not anymore.

The rooms smell funny. It's hard to describe, hard to characterize. I hate that smell. I look around for what might be causing it but can't find anything obvious. It's just, maybe it's just the way old people smell.

She's always there. She's either asleep on the couch under the down comforter (she's always cold, she says), or in the little kitchen or in the bedroom trying to do something that she can't really do. Her hair is never combed anymore. She always looks like she just woke up. I try to comb it but it's winter and the static electricity just makes it impossible to manage. It just flies out in fine, straight flight from her little head. She is really skinny now, like she was when I was a little girl. Probably 95 pounds, if that; 5 feet tall. Very petite.

We chat a little while and then I start looking around for what needs to be done. There are always lots of things all messed up. There are clothes in the wrong places -- dirty clothes in the trash can or laying on the chair, rarely in the clothes hamper. There are clothes in the bottom of the closet. She can't hang things up anymore. She's got little snacks that she can't open so I put some of the contents out on a plate for her by the couch. I water her plant, the one the church sent over for Great Grandma George back in 1956 when she had a stroke. I check to see that the bed linens and towels are clean. I straighten the rug; straighten the paintings; arrange the chair, the basket, the side table.

I check to see that the clothes she has on are right for the weather; that they are right-side out; front in the front, that they are clean; that she's had her shower; no scratches or bruises. If necessary, I help her get her shower or get her into clean clothes. It's almost always a very frustrating struggle. She hates to be confronted with what she can't do, even obliquely.

We chat a bit. I tell her some news. She tells me some news. I hear the complaints; I hear about what she's given up on lately because she doesn't care about it anymore. The truth is usually that she can't do it anymore. I love her so much. I love who she is, what she's been through, that she's a survivor, a teacher, pragmatic. But I hate this.

"I'm ready to go. I would like to walk out in the parking lot and be hit by a car," she says.

"Mother, what are you talking about?"

"I don't really like it here. I wish I could just die. I'm ready to die."

"But Mother..."

"You don't know what it's like to have no hope that anything good will happen to you."

I just stare at her, incredulous. "But Mother, you are dead. We both are. We're waiting for next life."

"Oh, I didn't realize that," she says with a smile, that "oh, now it makes sense" knowing smile.

"Well, you used to realize it. You just forgot."

"Oh."

"It's so cold here," she says again, her voice trailing off.

Politics, economics and lightbulbs

2009-02-07T16:59:00.005-06:00

Nearly finished with Friedman's Flat, Hot and Crowded, and I was amazed to see that near the end he actually says that we need to be China for a day, so that we can dictate certain things (like China dictated an end to thin-film plastic bags) and then be America the next day to implement and enforce our China-esque dictates. He is just as pessimistic as I am about the effect of the entrenched dirty fuels industries on our ability to do what needs doing -- those things will take many decades, rather than many years. We may not have many decades to make the changes we need to make.

I also reread Law, Economics and Torture, by James Boyd White, soon to be released as a book, along with the other conference proceedings with which it was presented about 2 years ago in Ann Arbor. It is an excellent and very thought-provoking essay. Although he doesn't talk in terms of Congressional inability to get things done that are clearly and unambiguously in the public interest (like ameliorating the worst effects of a global melt-down), he identifies handing over of governmental power to "the market," that is, to market actors, these same entrenched legacy dirty fuels industries who will slow down our dealing with the problems described in Friedman's book, as fundamentally undermining democracy. Lessig would say, "you think?"

These two men present interesting perspectives from which to consider the debates this weekend over the competing versions of the stimulus package making its way towards signature by the President in a little over a week (if he gets his wish). The House version does not profess the current wisdom: that government is the enemy; that tax cuts (ie, disempowering the government) are the answer to everything; that businesses given more money to do what they do best will "save" the economy and our country from this current economic crisis. Of course, those who firmly, sincerely believe this, do not accept that these ideas are responsible for getting us into this mess to begin with and cannot get us out of it.

The Senate version is cleaned out of all manner of spending and beefed up with tax cuts to take spending's place, but it will get the 60 votes needed to pass without a filibuster. And we all presume there would be a filibuster if there were not 60 votes. Some, maybe many, Republican Senators would be more than happy to use whatever power they have to push their belief that government spending is bad. McCain, having been beaten badly in the Presidential election, nevertheless unabashedly introduced a 400 billion dollar alternative, more than likely mostly comprised of tax cuts, which Republicans unanimously endorsed. Nothing more clearly demonstrates the battle of ideas that is going on in Washington this weekend. How can it be that not a single Republican has the slightest doubt in the truth of their vision when their policy choices (diminishing government as much as possible; handing over as much control as possible to the economic sphere, to executives who have no responsibility to do anything other than show a good next quarter) are so heavily implicated in our current debacle? White might suggest that the reason is that they are the direct beneficiaries, each and every one of them, of that transfer of power to economic actors. It has or soon will make every one of them very, very rich. And rich is the height of achievement in America now.

Well, there's little I can do about my old-school Republican Senators, Hutchison and Cornyn. I've sent emails to both of them. They are quite vocally opposed to the plan. So, not to shift gears too quickly, but, back at the casita, in a tiny effort to walk the walk, I signed up for Austin's GreenChoice energy plan, increasing demand for renewables and locking in a voluntarily higher price for our fuel for electricity for the next 5 years. Should have gone for 10 but I had a hard time explaining even 5 to my husband (D: "Can we get out of it?" G: "I don't want to get out of it!" D: "Did you even see a contract?"...), who, as our fiscal conservative, sees any additional expenditure (no matter how much of an "investment" it is) as a bad thing when we, along with everyone else, are nervous about our financial futures.

And I bought 20 new compact flourescents to change out the bulbs we use the most. I didn't change them all out yet because I wanted to experiment with the soft-bright-daylight varieties of bulbs. Each of these gives a different "color" of light and a different amount of lumens at the same watts, so they are not interchangeable. I want to test them out for a week or so and see which works best for overhead, for reading, and for indirect room lighting. Then I'll buy more and finish the job. I got a great deal on them. At Home Depot they were all on sale, on average a little over $2.00 each (buying 4 and 2 to a package, depending on the watt size), but with City of Austin rebates for EnergyStar items, the price for 20 came down to just under $1.50 each, including tax.

Already I'm finding that the "soft white" is the best for just about everything. I don't like daylight (very blue, very weird looking). I don't know about the one in the middle yet (bright white). I am trying it in a lamp beside the kitchen table where I do some, but not much, reading. At 60 watts equivalent, it may be too little for reading, but the color is not as weird as the daylight variety.

Next, on to the big-ticket items: AC, heating and laundry.

Try being conscious for one whole day... it's harder than you think

2009-02-03T10:35:00.004-06:00

I am reading Flat, Hot and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman, his follow-up to The World is Flat. I'm reading it on a Kindle, as an experiment, and I posted a little review of that experience on Scholar's Space. I'm only 1/3 of the way through it, but the book already has me fired up. It focuses on the relationship between our politics, our addiction to oil and the environmental consequences. It's as much a follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth as to his own World is Flat. It's probably less effective than Truth in that it's a book, not a movie, it's Friedman not Gore, and Gore already settled the issue of whether we can afford to act like there's a debate over the reality of climate change (we can't). But it's quite effective for me personally, because it makes clear that policy change at the highest levels is job one -- individual action alone will never pull us out of this tailspin. And besides, I think the heart of the book is yet to come, in his proposals for what to do about it all, which Truth didn't really tackle.

Policy change and political leadership is vital. I'm on board. Obama makes me hopeful that the world has a chance. But individual and small group (one might say fringe group) action has been the only option for decades now and there's no reason to slack off. Tree-huggers and recyclers (when recycling wasn't a curb service), vegetarians and natural and organic foods producers, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, Natural Resources Defense Council, etc., all have played their parts in bringing the nature of the environment consequences of our actions to public attention. So have lawsuits to stop ill-advised governmental action. But the time for environmentalism as the opposition has long passed. Friedman believes that national, international, indeed global environmentalism is the only way we're going to save everything else -- our religions, our politics, our economies, our philosophies, in other words, ourselves -- because we're quickly approaching the point where the changes we've already set in motion will become unmanageable. Adapting to the magnitude of change we'll see will be impossible, not just for polar bears, but for us, the masters of adaptation.

But governments usually won't act when action requires tough choices that will not go over with an electorate, because getting re-elected is the politicians' job one. So, is failure "baked into the system" as Friedman describes inevitabilities? Wouldn't a benign king be better able to reorient the American people than a democratically elected government? Perhaps. But it's also true that if the governed themselves demand the actions and are willing to do what's necessary, because they understand the consequences of failure to do so, not just for themselves, but for their children and grandchildren, there's hope.

At this point, in month two of my extremely cool year off, I can easily devote a day to environmental consciousness, to see what it means to be unconscious about energy use and the consequence of my choices for the environment. I can note all the ways my choices waste resources, exacerbate environmental degradation, ignore my responsibility to future generations. I can see where I don't even have choices to be responsible. I think you have know where you are before you can map your route to somewhere else.

So that's what I did yesterday.

I'm still reeling from what I learned. I should have held a clicker and clicked every time I noted that something I did could have been done more consciously or not at all. The number would have shocked. And I think of myself as fairly aware and conscientious. I'm almost ashamed to put this stuff down on paper, er, I mean, in digits (ah, digits instead of paper -- another unconscious choice?). But I will.

Lights on when there's plenty of natural light in my house.
Lights left on when no one is in the room.
Blow-drying my hair when it dries just fine by itself.
Devices left on when I'm not using them (Kindle, for example).
Charging a device longer than it needs to be charged.
Backing up my MacBook every hour instead of every day or even every week. Is anything I do that important that it needs backing up every hour?
Leaving the heat on for my cat when I leave to go to work.
Going to work.

Ok. I need to explain that last one. I telecommute most of the time. Everything I do for the Libraries, just about, can be done remotely. I only work 10 hours a week. But I think it's important to go to the office at least once each week for 4 or 5 (ie, almost half) of my hours. Here are the extra things I consumed because I did not work at home:

Approximately 1 hour spent in the bathroom and bedroom getting ready (lights, hot water, extra heat), 8 mile commute in car that gets 24 miles/gallon, parking on campus (increasing demand for land used for parking), turning on 3 lights in my interior, windowless office, 8 mile commute back home, opening and closing electric garage door. We could quibble about some of these things, around the margins, but really, I wouldn't have done most of this if I had just thrown on some clothes, come downstairs and sat down at my computer and did the same thing I did in the office. I would have dressed warmly and kept the heat at the same temp I left it at while I was gone (65). On the other hand, I got to see people I attended a meeting at the iSchool; I bought some Girl Scout Cookies; I went up and down 4 flights of stairs about 6 times (I did not take the elevator!!!). Face to face is a good thing. But it costs a lot and we don't think much about that.

Things I wondered about as the day wore on, but don't know the answers to: What kind of fuel was Austin Energy (and UT?) burning to give me my electricity? Where did it come from? Do I have a choice to ask for clean energy? Can I pay more for it if it costs more to produce and deliver? Is eating a Lean Cuisine for lunch more or less destructive than heating a can of soup or making a salad of veggies from California, Mexico and Florida? What about my breakfast? How is my yogurt made? My granola? My honey? Where did my computer come from? Where will it go when I don't want it anymore? What about our new "single stream" recycling service? Is it really recycling everything we put in that nice big blue recycling can?

Enough consciousness for one day. Now it's day two. I decided to continue for the whole week, maybe the whole month. That will give me time to investigate the answers to some of the questions my actions raised yesterday.

It's so fabulous to have a year off. It gives me time to start small in the search for an effective use of my time. There is an awful lot I don't know about environmental conservation and how it fits into the global economy, and into domestic and international politics. Friedman's book makes clear that we need action at the highest levels, but I know in my bones that you can't expect support for that action from people who have no idea what you're talking about. We don't understand how or why we use energy, or even why we should care. I'll focus on that this month.

Trying to change the way our government thinks about our willingness to make sacrifices for the children of the future or trying to change the way we think about those sacrifices so that we can elect people who will make the tough choices -- it's all indirect. Everything is indirect. There is no direct path to environmental salvation. The political web is like the environmental web - extremely complex. No matter what I do over the next 20 years, it's only going to be a small thing, a tiny thing, but so long as I am engaged, that's the most I can do."Every difference makes a difference." I just don't want to be a part of the problem. Or, I want to minimize the extent to which I am a part of the problem.

Somebody pinch me

2009-01-25T12:54:00.003-06:00

I just read the President's Energy and the Environment Agenda over at the new whitehouse.gov. Granted, it's just an agenda, just a plan, but to see these words, "Make the U.S. a Leader on Climate Change," on a government website made me think for a moment that I might have slipped into some strange parallel universe, or might simply be in a dream. Other than not believing there is such a thing as "clean coal," unless one means it in the sense of "clean the top of this mountain off so we can get to the coal," I found the agenda a welcomed change from the years and years of denial and profiteering by the entrenched energy players. I really hope Obama's 'take the bull by the horns and get moving' approach will score some major victories, quickly, and affirm that this is real -- it's not just an agenda, not just a plan, but a process that is going to change America. Can't wait to see it!

Nothing like girlfriends on a roadtrip to clear your mind about what to do with your life

2009-01-23T20:25:00.006-06:00

Girlfriends fleeing the everyday -- we all love our lives, but our lives trap us and before we know it, another year is gone. It's January. We're caravanning to the Valley, headed for Betty's ranch north of Mission. She has a guest house where we'll all sleep. We'll cook and socialize in the house her mother stayed in when she came out regularly. We'll sit in a circle around the fire under the stars. We'll bird (that's us to the right, in a bird blind in Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge). We'll canoe the Rio Grand. We'll see the Wall. We'll talk.

I'm riding down with Kirsti and Rose. I'm wearing the ethnographer's hat this weekend (it's invisible), planning to participate in and observe birding. What I really want is to ask my friends what they think I should do with my life. They know me, and they know conservation and environmentalism in Texas. So, we talk about who birds, the continuum of birding experiences, from a few hours at Bright Leaf to 3 weeks in New Guinea, from listers to naturalists who only get 5 yards down the path before they're lured off by some plant. Eventually, we come to it: birding is about other things besides birding.

It's Zen. The process is enough. Rose recommends I read Stroke of Insight. She says she learned about left and right brain integration sitting on Hawk Mountain where 3 hours would go by and she lost track. Some of birding is left brain (hunting, focusing, calculating, etc.) and part is being in and a part of nature in a deep way. We all get this immediately. It's central to why we bird.

Discussion is great, but it's not the thick of things. I got that the next day when we birded Bentsen Rio Grand State Park and the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. I took notes for about 30 minutes. Yep. That's all it took. I'm not writing about birding.

I wonder about things I don't know. I wonder about people like the Ayers and how they came to be interested in leaving part of the ranch land they have acquired to the public. How or why have they chosen to share what they have. I want to know that story. And I want to know the stories that others might tell about why and how they decided to give back. Or should I call it giving forward? They see themselves in relation to the land differently from the person who only possesses it as property.

I doubt that birding has much to do with conservation directly. It probably indirectly affects it, through stimulating the economies of birding areas, encouraging preservation of high-quality habitat to attract eco-tourism dollars. And birders contribute membership dues and donations to organizations that conserve and preserve (Audubon, Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club). Even that seems tenuous. But I'm clear now. I don't want to know more about birding as an activity.

You know, it's funny. I just want to be in the zone, be out there. I love the left brain/right brain integration birding instantly accomplishes without the least effort. But that is separate from my interest in the commons.

I want to learn how to promote and protect the commons. All kinds of commons: the copyright commons; the commons of public lands and land trusts; the commons of trusts and foundations. Peter Barnes mentioned in Capitalism 3.0 that we would have a regulatory window of opportunity some day, and that we'd have to take quick advantage of it because it wouldn't last long. I think we have it right now after the bank meltdown, in the midst of world-wide recession. I want to fly through that window. I'll choose a commons, learn more about it, read as much as I can, and then get involved in an organization and see where it takes me.

Terri says Bob Ayers would be happy to talk to me about how his family got into land trusts for the Shield Ranch. And Valarie mentioned the Pedernales and Devil's River projects, both of which could offer case studies in the well-done land trust/conservation easement. "Good intentions: Ensuring a boom time for legacy" still holds appeal, 3 weeks later. That's a good sign.

Evil librarians

2009-01-14T10:01:00.005-06:00

It's little wonder libraries are in trouble today. Oh, there's the digital revolution and all that, but libraries have bigger problems. Some librarians are evil. Not all of them, I admit, but I tangled with one who was and it scarred me for life. I was seven. That's me in the school photo.

My teacher, Mrs. Cloud, handed me a small slip of paper, folded in half. I opened it, read it, and must have surprised her a little as I gradually acquired several blotchy red patches on my neck. "I turned that book in last week," I mumbled, staring at the paper. "Well, go see the librarian," Mrs. Cloud replied. She probably wondered why I was so dejected. The paper only said I owed a dime because my book was late.

"I already returned this," I said, as I handed the slip to the tall, thin, gray-haired librarian whose name I don't recall, though I knew it at the time. "Well, I have your card right here telling me that you still have it. If you had turned it in, I would have pulled this card and put it in the book pocket and re-shelved it."

"But I know I returned it."

"There's no reason to lie about it. Just pay the dime and bring it in tomorrow."

"Lie about it! Over a dime, you think I'd lie about it?" Now I was furious. I had instantly gone from a bit embarrassed, accused of being late returning a book and owing ten cents, to enraged, accused of lying on top of it all. Next thing I knew I was being marched to the principal's office and my mother was on her way to school!

Once my mother arrived, the principal explained to her that I had not turned in my book, I owed a dime, and I was lying about having returned it. My mother was shocked. This was not what she expected when she got calls from school. "There must be a mistake. Georgie doesn't lie. My son is the liar, so I know lying when I hear it." The principle, in a bind, punted. "Let's go see the librarian."

So off we went, the three of us. When we arrived at her desk, the librarian told the same story about the check-out cards. "Well, if Georgie says she returned it, she returned it. Let's check the shelf," Mother suggested. This was perfect. The librarian and I probably both believed that the shelf would support our conflicting stories. She confidently called out the call letters on the check-out card, and we all marched over to the shelf where the book would be if it had been checked in.

There it was. The librarian snatched it from it's little thin space, opened the cover and there, inside the pocket ... she found the wrong check-out card.

The librarian had pulled the wrong card and placed it in the pocket of my book. I was so relieved and looked to my mother, took her hand, happily noted the obvious, "see, I did return it," and turned to leave. But to my utter astonishment, the librarian accused me a third time: "Why didn't you check to be sure I pulled your card and checked your book in correctly before you left?" I simply could not stop myself. I blurted out, "Well, it never occurred to me that you could make a mistake," with more than enough sarcasm to get into big trouble for being disrespectful.

The whole incident became a referendum on my deportment in the face of provocation. The librarian's reaction to a child who contradicted her had been swift -- mistrust and accusation -- but I was to overcome this. That was a hard lesson. I was a good student, I didn't lie, I was well-behaved, and I enjoyed in return that people believed what I said. I worked hard to earn trust. This lesson seemed to reneg on the deal: Someone may accuse me of lying rather than consider other possibilities, and I am to tiptoe around the obvious and say nothing to offend the accuser. I don't think I ever got the "be polite to adults no matter what" thing. But I did learn a lesson. Don't be like the librarian. Things work out much better if you recognize early in any conflict that you may be wrong.

And better late than never -- today I'm turning in my "thank you" to the evil librarian.

Ethnographic field notes & live-blogging

2009-01-12T19:55:00.005-06:00

This week I prepare for a trip to the Valley, a birding trip, a trip to the WALL, the big border wall, a meeting of the State Sierra Club, in other words, a big mashup of opportunity to be observer, blogger, processor, participant. All at once.

I'm taking my digital journal, my Macbook Evernote ap. I'm writing down everything all the time. I'm taking photos. I'm thinking about angles and possibilities. I'm reviewing birdsongs and calls. I'm birding. I'm cooking and helping feed cattle. Attending a potluck dinner and tracking down a Pine Flycatcher, a bird I hear is on this side of the WALL for the first time ever -- to observe the dark side of birding. To tell on my friends.

Oh boy! I'm an ethnographic storyteller. In 10 years. When I realize that at some point I have to stop observing and writing everything down and start reading and analyzing what I've been writing. Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. I am just trying on the ethnographic storyteller outfit for a long weekend. See if it fits.

Soliciting stories door to door

2009-01-11T13:16:00.004-06:00

I was reading in the newspaper this morning about a new book on the rich and how they got that way. I wasn’t interested in what the author had to say about that. His book interested me for another reason: his process. He trekked across the country, literally knocking on doors in the 20 most wealthy zip codes to ask people to tell their stories. As the reviewer noted, the author had reasoned that those people who would talk to him would likely be worthy of reading about, “[b]ecause close-minded, unadventurous, uninteresting people wouldn’t invite a stranger into their homes and share their life stories with him.” Maybe. But the reviewer says the stories were boring and trite. Still, the author got published...

Process interests me more than results. I attended a fellow PhD student’s dissertation proposal defense Friday and I found that all the questions that popped into my head were about process. He must be interested in what will come of his analysis (he's been working on it for quite awhile now), but I was more curious about the mechanics of everything he had done. At one point he told a little story about how he ended up buying an island in Second Life, how it was not at all what he intended to do initially. So he’s going to study the development of a learning community in a virtual world. Ok. How he came to that, now that was interesting. I love how the totally unexpected can emerge at your feet where you've just buried your latest dream.

One of the first articles I read after beginning doctoral study explained how little of the experience of being a graduate student ever makes it into a paper. Papers report results. In fact, their authors intentionally strip out all the process because that’s where all the failure, frustration and disappointment are (and maybe doubt and depression and self-recrimination). Students don’t talk about how they screwed up 50 times before they finally got the experiment to work. For whatever reason, that process interests me a lot more than the results of the experiment. I think it always has. I need to keep this in mind as I think about what to write about.

And on writing -- I'm on my third book about writing since realizing just before Christmas that I am a writer who needs to improve her writing. Deciding what to write about isn't nearly so hard as it seemed when I defined the result as a dissertation. When you focus on process, the difficulty just evaporates like rain that never hits the ground.

Siva interviews Google's Vint Cerf -- the magic of thinking you can do it

2009-01-03T12:42:00.005-06:00

Siva posted the text of an interview he conducted with Vint Cerf at Google earlier this year, on Googlization. Interesting post and I enjoyed reading it, but this caught my eye as it is a timely reminder that the problem with getting into the nitty gritty of various research ideas I wrote about in my last post might be simple cynicism (eek!).

Siva: What aspects of Google have made it such a success?
Vint: Well, we have hired some awfully smart people. And most of them have the benefit of being young. So they don't know "you can't do that." So they just do it.

Plus, the company gives its employees the time to explore new ideas - 20 percent of their time.

The management structure is very flat. And the company has very particular hiring practices and standards. We hire people who are both smart and responsible. They all have a "how can I help" attitude. So you can learn something from almost anyone in the company. You will notice an almost collegial atmosphere here.

I can sure vouch for the collegial atmosphere. It's energizing just to be in the company of that creative, positive vibe. Got to visit once soon after UT joined Google Book Search.

So it seems that life's lessons are quite valuable ... up to a point. Once they convince you that you know how everything works, and how it doesn't work, the balance goes negative. They become a stock to dump, not worth the drag on your potential. Ah, but when does experience carry you across the line? As always, the real issue will be finding the balance between naivete and cynicism. An open mind but not an empty one.

Of big pictures and little details

2008-12-29T07:10:00.005-06:00

I'm on my one year break -- my lost year as they call it at the iSchool. Or in my case, my lost 18 months. And I am plagued by superficiality. I can't seem to get below a very surface interest in anything.

I read, I think, I write, I talk with people about a subject (any subject) and quite quickly I find, almost like magic, that I've connected up this dot with that dot, drawn this parallel, identified this or that recurring theme, and before I know it, I've drifted up like smoke out of whatever depths I might yet pursue if I would stay with the idea for awhile, to some lofty mesa where I "see" the big picture and lose all interest in the subject. It's a kind of fatalistic, "oh, yeah, well this is just another example of that" and it's pointless to think about it any further. This pattern is getting to be a real pain in the ass.

At its best, this big picture thing is a tremendous asset. It provides unique perspective. I learn by associating unlikely events, by seeing beyond the immediate details to more remote implications. I've always thought of it as a good thing. But it seems now to lead inexorably towards a false belief that I already know enough when in fact, that's absurd. I lose curiousity. I draw conclusions too quickly. I cut off exploration and discovery. It's not always the best thing, to see the big picture or to "instantly get it." Without enough pieces in the puzzle, I see the wrong picture, I see the same picture in every puzzle.

So, though I entertain all sorts of ideas about what I might pursue next, it seems none will ultimately sustain my interest until I take some time to adjust my approach to entertaining ideas.

You know, it feels like I am a car out of gear. Nothing works but gravity and the brake. So maybe I need to have a look under the hood (is that where the gears are?). What on earth am I doing with a car analogy?

I need to study in detail why I can't study detail.

Will Retirement Slow Your Personal Growth?

2008-12-10T09:04:00.008-06:00

My statistics class wraps up today with turning in my final paper. Final. Who knows what that really means at this point. But here it is, my first go at statistical analysis.

I decided to write the paper as a blog post and that's how I'm turning it in (I'm not doing two versions, one for public consumption and one for "publication"). Admittedly, that's pushing things a bit. People don't blog about statistical analysis and final papers aren't usually blog posts. But you know, I firmly believe that anything can be made interesting to a wider audience than the narrowly defined scholarly research audience that we typically prepare our work for. The writing just has to tell a story that's reasonably interesting to real people in a language they can understand -- mainly that means avoiding throwing unusual terms at the reader without explaining what they mean.

So I have to explain certain of the parentheticals here, the ones like this: (b=.759; t=-4.96; p=.000). This is statistics codespeak. It truly is a foreign language, more difficult to interpret even than legalese in the sense that normal people can't understand what it means. Even if you translate it from symbols and numbers to plain English, it still does not make ordinary sense (the slope is .759; the t-score is 4.96; the p-value is .000). No, it takes a lot more words to explain it than that. But, that's what the text is all about. It explains what the code shows without specific reference to the code. The parentheticals are for the statistically-inclined only, those for whom the raw data speaks volumes of "backup" for the statements in the text. They are similar to the citations in legal writing. So feel free to ignore them if you don't want to delve into the supporting authority. I couldn't leave them out. They matter, just not to everyone.

Writing so that unusual terms are explained is good writing anyway, for scholars or for anyone. The difference between scholar-speak and blog post mainly comes down to style. What is it about scholar-style that so quickly brings on the glaze-over for most people? Maybe I'll write about that some day. And, I am sure I probably don't have the style right. But I'll keep working on that. In the mean time, here's the stats paper:

Will retirement slow your personal growth?
Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
So, a funny thing happened the other day as I was looking over some data from the 1993-1994 wave of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), you know, the study where researchers repeatedly ask a random sample of more than 10,000 Wisconsin high school grads, their parents, and later their siblings or widows, tons of questions about just about everything. I found a negative relationship between retirement and personal growth! Analyzing the respondents’ answers using a mathematical “model,” you can roughly predict a person’s responses regarding personal growth if you know his or her retirement status: those who are retired will have lower scores for personal growth, on average .76 lower, than those who are not retired. This is pretty depressing. I just retired two years ago. So, shall I just say, ‘so long’ to personal growth?

Well maybe I don’t need to worry. These differences between growth scores for the retired and the employed are not alarmingly large (even though the difference is statistically significant), and folks responding to the surveys administered by the WLS graduated from high school in 1957, which means they were born roughly between 1939 and 1941. I, on the other hand, am a boomer, a member of the generation born between 1946 and 1964, estimated at near 80 million. We’ll be retiring over the next 10 to 20 years. As we have in every other phase of our lives, we will affect the understanding of this phenomenon if for no other reason than that our numbers challenge social structures and facilities designed to handle much smaller volumes of individuals at a given time. But more fundamentally, we’ll likely challenge and ultimately change even the very definition of what it means to retire (AFP, 2007).

Leonard Steinhorn, an American University professor and author of "The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy," says the generation often wrongly maligned as latte-sipping Yuppies has transformed most of American society.

He wrote that boomers have led or sustained most of "the great citizen movements that have advanced American values and freedoms -- the environmental movement, the consumer movement, the women's movement, the civil rights movement, the diversity movement, the human rights movement, the openness in government movement."

He told AFP he expects this transformation to continue as boomers age. "It's not going to be a generation that's going to go off to the golf courses and do nothing."

As reported at a world gathering of statisticians in 2007, a Canadian researcher reached a similar conclusion about the likely change in definitions for retirement and noted a lack of statistics about this phenomenon (Bowlby, 2007):

Even though this wave [of boomers] will have significant labour market consequences over the next 20 years, no regular statistics are produced on the retired population.

There are some reasons for this. Only recently has the need for retirement data grown. Secondly, the concept of retirement is fuzzy, to say the least. Retirement can mean different things to different people, and measuring it is difficult for national statistical organizations. Having an international standard would assist in deciding what data or range of data should be produced.

It seems implausible to me that a generation that likes to characterize itself as active, engaged, lifelong learners will just let growth slide upon retirement. There really must be more to this story. Maybe there are other factors that explain the connection between retirement and reduced personal growth for the generation that precedes the boomers into retirement, factors that can help predict whether boomers’ growth will stagnate.

To find out, I examined the interactions of these two variables with three others from the WLS to try to explain reduced personal growth at retirement: I investigated how the negative relationship between retirement and growth is affected by one’s sense of purpose; whether the relationship depends on gender; and how educational levels affect post-retirement growth.

Background
Bowlby may be concerned about the lack of research on retirement and the labor force, but there is definitely plenty of research on retirement and health, summarized by Phyllis Moen in her 1996 article, “A Life Course Perspective on Retirement, Gender and Well-being.” As she reports (p. 132), “there is some evidence that being retired affects psychological symptoms” (citations omitted). She also notes that “from the perspective of social integration, individuals are better off both physically and psychologically when they have a greater number of roles, leading to a sense of purpose, identity, and community (citations omitted). Thus, older individuals who delay retirement or take on subsequent paid work or unpaid volunteer work following their retirement from their career jobs would be better off than those who retire from work without compensating roles and relationships” (p, 133). Hardly surprising, is it?

But Moen also noted significant holes in the research, areas ripe for future study. She cites as examples “[t]he effects of gender … as a variable moderating the retirement and well-being link” (p. 132) and “research on the employment-health linkage [that] consider[s] postretirement employment, and … the effects of retirement on women's life patterns and health (citation omitted)” (p. 139).

“Moreover,” she says, “scholars are only beginning to investigate the health consequences of involvement in unpaid volunteer activities (citations omitted)” (p. 139).

Clearly, there is much we do not know about how boomers will retire, what they’ll make of it, and how retirement will affect their psychological health and well-being.

Methods
Sample
As I noted, the WLS surveys more than 10,000 randomly selected 1957 high school graduates, or those able to provide information about them (parents, spouses, siblings), at intervals ranging from one to 15 years. The survey questions are designed to provide information about participants’ “relationships, family functioning, physical and mental health and well-being, and morbidity and mortality from late adolescence through middle age” as well as “social background, youthful aspirations, schooling, military service, labor market experiences, family characteristics and events, social participation, psychological characteristics, and retirement” (WLS, 2008).

Variables
Response variable

I want to know more about personal growth. The WLS measures personal growth with the following questions:

To what extent do you agree that

you are not interested in activities that will expand your horizons?
you have the sense that you have developed a lot as a person over time?
when you think about it you haven't really improved much as a person over the years?
you think it is important to have new experiences that challenge how you think about yourself and the world?
you don't want to try new ways of doing things -- your life is fine the way it is?
you do not enjoy being in new situations that require you to change your old familiar ways of doing things?
there is truth to the saying you can't teach an old dog new tricks?Respondents chose their answers from a 6-item scale. They strongly, moderately or slightly agreed or they slightly, moderately or strongly disagreed. Total scores ranged from 1 to 42. The average for respondents’ scores was 32.69.

Does retirement affect growth: The explanatory variable

Initially I wanted to know how retirement affected personal growth. WLS respondents indicated whether they were retired by choosing among five possibilities: partly retired, completely retired, working and not retired, not working and not retired, and don’t know. These five had been collapsed into two categories of retired or not retired for the dataset that I examined. Only 18% of respondents indicated that they were retired.

Other variables that may explain the relationship between retirement and personal growth

Theoretically, retirement could be a time of exploration, of branching out, of trying new things and taking on projects one never had time for before. The WLS data suggests that may be wishful thinking. When I learned that, far from spurring personal growth, retirement seemed to squelch it, I wanted to know more. I decided to look at sense of purpose in life, gender, and educational attainment to see what I could learn about their possible roles in this negative trend in growth after retirement.

Purpose. Sense of purpose is measured with the same 6-item scale described above for personal growth, but, of course, the questions are different:

To what extent do you agree that

you enjoy making plans for the future and working to make them a reality?
your daily activities often seem trivial and unimportant to you?
you are an active person in carrying out the plans you set for yourself?
you tend to focus on the present, because the future nearly always brings you problems?
you don't have a good sense of what it is you are trying to accomplish in life?
you sometimes feel as if you've done all there is to do in life?
you used to set goals for yourself, but that now seems like a waste of time?

Scores for this variable also range from 1 to 42; the average of all the scores is 33.37.

Gender. Gender is, of course, either male or female. There were slightly more women than men respondents.

Educational attainment. Education is measured in years of attainment. Respondents completing 12 years (a rough estimate for those graduating high school) constituted 54.1% of the total. Another 13.5% completed 16 years (likely graduating college) and 13.2% finished between 17 and 21 years of formal education. The overall mean number of years completed was 13.6.

Analytic Plan and Results
So, my purpose was simply to explore whether that negative association between retirement and personal growth persists if we take other things into account, or “control” for other variables. The analysis proceeded through several steps as I’ll explain in more detail below. First, of course, I figured out exactly what the relationship between retirement and personal growth was by looking at correlations between a number of the variables from the Study. These correlations show which variables change in associated patterns, either negative (if one goes up the other goes down) or positive (if one goes up the other goes up or if one goes down the other goes down), and how strong the associations are (how likely or unlikely they are to occur just by chance). These associational clues enabled me to think about which of the many variables might have effects on the relationship between retirement and growth. I also examined detailed descriptions of many of the survey responses. For example, I looked at how many people were men, how many were women, how many were retired, how many completed 12, 16 and more years of education, what were average scores for growth and purpose, were growth scores on average higher or lower for the retired, for women, for men, etc. Finally I chose three variables to examine more closely. I looked at what happened if I took the respondents’ sense of purpose in life into account. Next, I examined how the relationship changed depending on gender. And then I evaluated how educational achievements affected the relationship.

Analyzing the Main Relationship: The Bivariate Analysis

As I reported in the introduction above, I found that those who were retired had scores for personal growth .76 lower than those who were not retired. For example, the average personal growth score for those who were not retired was 32.96; the average for those who were retired was 32.12. I discovered the dimensions of this relationship by analyzing all respondents’ scores for the two variables, retired and growth, to see how much personal growth scores changed, on average, with a one-unit change (that is, from 0 to 1, from not retired to retired) in retirement status. In technical terms, I conducted an ordinary least squares bivariate analysis, or OLS regression, on the two variables (bivariate!). This analysis told me that they changed together, and that the way they changed together was extremely unlikely to happen just by chance (that is, it was highly statistically significant (b=.759; t=-4.96; p=.000). But it also showed that the relationship was not likely to be of much practical importance because retirement only explained ¼ of 1% of the variability in respondents’ personal growth scores, and as indicated above, there is only an average difference of .76 between the growth scores for the retired and the employed. Clearly, there were a lot of other things that explained personal growth in addition to retirement. Nevertheless, I still wanted to find out more about this negative association.

Considering Additional Variables: The Multivariate Analyses
Controlling for purpose

I ran the same analysis (OLS regression) again, but this time I added purpose in life to my model for predicting growth scores (“controlled for” purpose). This allowed me, in effect, to look at the relationship between retirement and growth for groups of the respondents who all had the same scores for purpose in life. I found that the negative relationship I first observed practically disappeared -- it diminished by 99.5%! The association between the two, controlled for purpose, could easily occur by random chance (that is, it lost all statistical significance (b=.004; t=-.03; p=.97)). Interestingly, retirement and sense of purpose together explained almost 45% of the variability in personal growth, an increase over what retirement explains by itself of over 180%.

It seemed a bit too convenient that the drop in personal growth might not really be associated with retirement at all, but with a loss of one’s sense of purpose. Voila! End of inquiry! But this wasn’t very satisfying. It seemed like I still faced the same question –why? On the other hand, this did make some sense: maybe retirement leaves people without a sense of purpose. “I am [my career], so when that is over, what am I after that, and what’s my purpose for getting up every day?”

I checked with my instructor. She was not surprised at all by my finding. She pointed out that many people believe that one’s sense of purpose and one’s personal growth reflect the same underlying dimension of psychological well-being. They might be “interchangeable,” so to speak.

I looked at the questions the WLS uses to evaluate these two variables (that’s why I repeated them above, so you could see them too). I couldn’t really tell for sure if they were getting at the same thing, though it seems possible, so I tested that idea by reversing the analyses: If I were measuring the relationship between retirement and purpose in life, would controlling for growth explain away the (presumed negative) association?

Well, there was a negative relationship but growth didn’t completely explain it away. Controlling for growth reduced the relationship between retirement and purpose by 46% (b=-1.17; b=-.63), but it remained statistically significant (t=-5.4; p=.000). So purpose and growth were not exactly interchangeable, but it does appear that they are very closely related. As one goes up (or down) the other changes in the same direction at about 2/3 the value of the first (Pearson r = .68). Perhaps retirement has a more direct effect on purpose, and only an indirect effect on growth, as suggested above, but the strong association of these two makes them a poor choice for a beginning statistics student, so I’ll move on.

Controlling for gender

Next I turned to gender to see what effect it might have on the relationship I had observed between retirement and growth. But this time, controlling for gender in the same way I had earlier controlled for purpose (running a multivariate OLS regression) nudged the negative effect of retirement on growth up 9% (b=-.859; t=-5.62; p=.000). This finding, along with the fact that employed women’s scores for growth were, on average, 1.05 points higher than employed men’s scores, suggests that gender suppresses the effect of retirement on growth. The effect is too small to conclude that gender can explain away the effect of retirement on growth, but it does show that men and women experience personal growth and retirement differently.

Controlling for educational attainment
Next I asked whether the relationship I had observed might be affected by the level of formal education completed by the respondent. Controlling for education (running a multivariate OLS regression) resulted in a 42% reduction in the negative effect of retirement on growth (b=-.76; b=-.44). The relationship was still negative and still statistically significant (t=-2.9; p=.004), but not nearly so bad as it first seemed. Of course, education was positively related to growth: for every additional year of education, the growth scores for the employed rose .5, and this correlation was highly significant (t=21.38), but who would be surprised by that? It does suggest that the main relationship may be spurious in that almost half the effect of retirement on growth is really due to education. Still, we have to keep in mind that education and retirement together account for only about 4.7% of the variability in growth scores.

I decided to have a closer look at the effect of education on the relationship between retirement and growth. As I had earlier noticed in the correlations, higher levels of education are associated with lower values for retirement (that is, the more educated tend not to be retired) and higher values for growth (r=-.1; p=.0000; r=.22; p=.0000), so it looks like the three-way relationship is probably complex.

I created a new variable that would allow me to compare the growth scores for retired and employed who had a high school diploma (12 years of education), with scores for those who had a college degree (16 years of education), and with scores for those who had considerable post-graduate education (20 years) – an “interaction term” that would show how retirement and education are likely to interact in their effects on growth.

By running another OLS regression including the education and retirement variables from the WLS Study plus this new interaction term, I found that, indeed, the effect of retirement on growth was significantly different depending on how many years of education one has (b=.16; t=2.42; p=.015). Retirement was still significantly negatively related to growth for those with average education, but by considerably less than before taking education and its interaction effects into account (b=-.39; t=-2.59; p=.01): Growth scores for those with average education were only .39 smaller for the retired (recall that average education is 13.6 years). The effect of education on growth for those who are employed was still highly significantly and positively related, as one would expect (b=.49; t=18.55; p=.000): One additional year of education will raise growth scores for the employed by about .49 points.

Now let’s look at growth scores for the employed and the retired who had less or more than “average” years of education.

A post-graduate degree will raise growth scores for the retired slightly more than 6 points above scores for those who only finish high school. That degree will only boost scores for the employed by just under 4 points above the scores of the high school grads.

But the employed who only graduated high school start out with higher growth scores than their retired respondents. At 20 years of education, the tables have turned and the growth scores of the employed lag behind the retired! And as you can see, at 16 years of education, retirement status is irrelevant -- whether you are retired or working, your growth score will likely be the same.

The gaps between the employed and the retired at the extremes of education I examined are not large, but there is a bit of a difference between the high school grad gap and the advanced degree gap. The gap at 12 years is almost 2 points (1.7); at 20 years, the gap is just a little more than half a point (.6).

In summary, growth scores for the retired really only lag behind those of the employed for those with less than a college degree. Thereafter, additional years of education are correlated with higher growth scores for the retired than for the employed.

Conclusion
Discussion
Life changes when we retire. Retirement can be a time of freedom from the exigencies of earning a living and raising a family, giving us time for renewed curiosity and exploration; or it can be a time of uselessness, boredom and resignation. Of course, it’s more likely to be something in between. Either way, some characteristics of our lives before retirement might give us clues as to how we will likely behave or feel after we retire.

It appears that the better educated among us are not so eager to retire, and once they do, they’ll be more likely than their less educated peers to continue to grow in retirement. Women may have a slight edge over men in the degree to which they continue to grow after retirement, but education is more helpful than gender in explaining what might keep us curious and learning after we retire. It would seem that the same things that prompt some of us to pursue more years of formal education before we retire may continue to drive us to learn and grow afterwards.

Limitations and Future Directions
The 1993-1994 wave of the Study surveyed these Wisconsin graduates in their mid- to late-50’s – not quite retirement age by most standards, though according to Bowlby, at least in Canada, retirement age had been trending lower through the last half of the 20th Century (para. 6). He observes that the trend has begun to turn around in the fifteen years since. The Study data show that only 18% of respondents identified themselves as retired. Moen’s summary of research conducted during the same part of the 20th Century indicates that early retirement is often caused by declines in health; early retirement does not itself cause declines in health). This suggests that it’s at least possible that the leading edge of retirees from this generation was in retirement at that time because of poor health, which could certainly affect responses to questions about personal growth and sense of purpose as much or more than retirement status. And indeed, the average response for self-rated health for the group of retirees is lower than the average response for those who were not retired (means of 3.96 and 4.18, respectively). This difference in scores is only .22, but it is highly statistically significant (t=12.8; p=.000). It certainly suggests that we ought to review the findings about retirement and growth based on the 1993 – 1994 wave when a larger percentage of participants has retired.

References
AFP: US braces for baby boom retirement wave. (2007, December 24). Agence France-Presse. Retrieved November 23, 2008, from http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g-W4yeMsbNpknzofffLTFxOgKI2A.

Bowlby, G. (2007, February). Perspectives on Labour and Income - Defining retirement. Retrieved November 24, 2008, from http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-001-x/10207/9584-eng.htm.

Moen, Phyllis. (1996). A Life-Course Perspective on Retirement, Gender and Well-Being, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 131-144.

Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS). (2008, November). University of Wisconsin-Madison. Retrieved November 26, 2008, from http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/wlsresearch/.

Joni Mitchell's Urge for Going; Jamie Boyle's Public Domain

2008-11-30T10:50:00.014-06:00

It's a beautiful sunny, cool fall day in Austin. The fall color is the most spectacular it has been in decades -- no exaggeration. The weather folks said it would be windy today but by 10:00 it was still calm and clear. Then, just now, a gust whistled through the windowsills, leaves fell all around like big snowflakes, and I heard (in my head) "the warriors of winter give a cold triumphant shout; all that stays is dying, all that lives is getting out."

I hear the singer, I hear the guitar notes. Who wrote that? Who sang it? What were the rest of the lyrics? I always think of that song this time of year.

So I Googled it: warriors winter give cold triumphant shout

Up popped 61,000 pages satisfying my search terms. The first one contained the entire set of lyrics, author (Joni Mitchell). The rest of that verse, the last in the song goes like this:

Now the warriors of winter give a cold triumphant shout
All that stays is dying, all that lives is getting out
See the geese in chevron flight
Flapping and a-racing off before the snow
They got the urge for going and they've got the wings to go ...
And I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
And the summertime is falling down
And winter's closing in

But the first couple of pages say it was performed by Crosby and Nash. Not as I recall. It was a single male voice and acoustic guitar. A little deeper into the list, below the fold, let's see... Tom Rush. That sounds more like it. Let's see if I can listen to a bit of a recording of him playing and singing it... Ah, yes, iTunes has it playing within a few seconds of entering the store. From an album released a long time ago, recently remastered and re-released. That's it. Wow.

My husband thinks I am so stupid for being constantly amazed at the Internet. "I just did that yesterday, so what?" he says when I tell him about this little foray into the information treasure-trove we have at our fingertips, 24/7. THIS IS INCREDIBLE. No it isn't. It's just normal day-to-day. Ah, yes. That's why it's incredible.

So, all this in the middle of reading Jamie Boyle's new book, The Public Domain -- Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Fantastic read. God he is so clever and witty and has such a great sense of humor. And he is not giving up and he is making a difference. Go, Jamie.

He says early on in Ch. 1, p. 13 to be exact, that the Internet is an "existence proof" that for a lot of information (a lot as in billions and billions of pages of information), copyright isn't necessary to its production. In his words:

The Internet is an existence proof of the remarkable information processing power of a decentralized network of hobbyists, amateurs, universities, businesses, volunteer groups, professionals, and retired experts and who knows what else. It is a network that produces useful information and services. Frequently, it does so at no cost to the user and without anyone guiding it. Imagine that energy, that decentralized and idiosyncratically dispersed pattern of interests, turned loose on the cultural artifacts of the twentieth century. Then imagine it coupled to the efforts of the great state archives and private museums who themselves would be free to do the same thing. Think of the people who would work on Buster Keaton, or the literary classics of the 1930s, or the films of the Second World War, or footage on the daily lives of African-Americans during segregation, or the music of the Great Depression, or theremin recordings, or the best of vaudeville. Imagine your Google search in such a world. Imagine that Library of Congress.

Theremin recordings? Was that a typo? No. Google it.

Any other word in Jamie's incredibly rich vocabulary you don't know? Google it. Ah, I hear Phil's admonition to stay away from general-purpose dictionaries in graduate school, to use only specialized dictionaries for the field of study. Some day, maybe.

So, I am reading his book in both Adobe Acrobat and in Stanza, my nifty screen reader that works on the iPhone as well as on the Mac. An experiment to compare functionalities. So, really, any word, I'm already at the computer, I just Google it. I came across one earlier today: p. 38, "a tessellated map." Now, granted, I understood the meaning from the context within a few seconds, but honestly, I don't think I have ever heard that word before (thank you Jamie). Instead of just glossing over it, I Googled it: 198,000 pages respond to "what is tessellated." Top of the list? You guessed it: Wikipedia. You know, this is a word I really ought to know. But I ask Dennis. He doesn't know either and he's an artist and the word comes from the Latin tessella, a small cubical clay, stone or glass piece used to make mosaics. Well, after that very interesting adventure, I don't think I'll forget what tessellated means.

Well, I have to say, I love this book. It is really readable, brings together many of his past writings with other authors I've read (many thanks to Phil), but focuses on the dire implications of our current trajectory. He is determined that the law has to change. As I've said many times, I've given up on that. I want to hope, but the underlying process seems so irretrievably lost to money, or so I believe. He, and I have to admit, lots and lots of other people along with him, are not convinced lawmakers can't be persuaded to turn things around. What evidence is there that anyone other than the Disneys and RIAAs have any ability to persuade? Does he imagine that his arguments will persuade them to back off their demands for more and longer and stronger? I have never thought that was possible. They are like programmed robots whose programming can't be changed. And their programming includes paying whatever it takes to lawmakers to be sure the lawmakers don't threaten the status quo. (Keep in mind that whether this assertion is true or not, the very fact that I believe it is true is the basis for mine and many other people's loss of confidence in the Congressional part of our democratic system of governance, so, it matters even that we think it is so!) So where does this hope come from?

I'm going to keep reading. Maybe he explains his hope as well as he explains history, economics and philosophy. I could use some encouragement about now.

So, putting the PhD on hold -- a year to reassess

2008-11-27T06:48:00.005-06:00

At the start of this semester I had as my objective to figure out by December what I wanted to do next. Well, it's almost December and I have figured out many things, but not that. And it's official. I submitted my request for a leave of absence Monday, for spring through fall '09. My real projects for the next year are: figure out what I want to do next; take care of my mom and come to grips with what she is experiencing. Today is Thanksgiving and, among many other things for which I am extremely grateful, I am quite thankful to have more time to figure out what I want to do next.

So many times in my life I've thought I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, not just "next." I have been right in some ways, not always the ways I thought I was right, and I have been very, very wrong in some ways. The constant seems to be that I always ran through whatever it was that interested me about an endeavor, and soured on the realities of it, long before I thought I would or really wanted to. I always got to take comfort though, in being a member of the biggest generation ever, the boomers, because no matter what I was experiencing and no matter how different it was from my expectations built upon the experiences of my parents' and grandparents' generations, there were always lots of us having the same 'different experiences.' So we changed careers every 10 to 15 years. Well, that was just the new way it was. So we threw ourselves into our work and burned ourselves out in record time. Well, that was just the way we were. I now understand a bit more about statistics than I did before, thanks to my fabulous teacher, Tetyana, so I know that "we" could be a very small part of that 77 million, and still feel that we were in substantial good company. So I just didn't question whether it was really a good thing or a bad thing. This jumping from thing to thing just was.

Admittedly, when I cashed in my chips from my first career, teaching, and went off on a 2 year sailing adventure with my then boyfriend, now my husband, Dennis, I felt like I had "wasted" my 6 years of college education and my 8 years of building up expertise and confidence as a teacher of handicapped young adults and normal pre-schoolers. But staying on was not an option. Teaching had become torture. I remember my strongest aversion at that time: I didn't want to have to make anyone other than myself do anything, anymore. Compelling others to do things was at the heart of a teaching job, much to my surprise. Foolishly, I thought it was actually teaching. Instead it was police work. Apparently, without police work, one can't teach young children anything. Of course, that's ridiculous. Young children are learning machines like sharks are killing machines. It's the environment in which we want them to learn that makes the job a job at all. But, whatever. I quit and went off sailing and thinking and talking to everyone I met about what they did for a living and what it was like and how they liked it and what they didn't like about it and where the satisfaction lay, and on and on. I didn't want to "make the same mistake again" -- the mistake of spending all the time and money and effort to prepare for, learn and become good at a new profession only to abandon it after a few years and "waste" all that time, etc., again. Well, I learned a thing or two in the pursuit and accomplishment of my second career: my first career was far, far from over (I teach about copyright almost as much as I actually practice copyright law), and I would still run through the second before my productive life ended, whether I wanted to or not.

So, law became my second career. I had matched its characteristics as a profession to my own personal strengths and weaknesses, my desires to challenge myself in new ways and to earn enough to get beyond the marginal financial security that a teaching career offered. Sorry to say that money mattered, but it did. At least with a law career, there would be a clear relationship between effort, excellence and reward. After 3 years in the private sector, I moved to public service lawyering. And I was so lucky to have support from my four general counsels over the years to lecture, teach and write as well. But, though I didn't want it to, my law career came to that point where I no longer wanted it -- at least not full-time. The satisfaction from personal service to others has never flagged, ever, but the daily work of confronting the same issues, over and over and over, and recognizing that the dynamics that keep resolution from ever being possible are not going to change, that has gotten really old. Copyright law is held hostage to fear among those with something to lose if it changes. I just got weary of the insanity of it.

But there was something else too: As I began to see my mom's health deteriorate, and recognized what could happen in the last years of one's life, maybe of my life, I realized that in the grand scheme of things, copyright law really was not all that important. Fundamental creativity will survive the crippling effects of our current law whether it changes or not. The benefits of digital networked communication just become too obvious to deny at some point. And there are other things that matter a whole lot more to me.

So it was time to choose a third career. This hasn't been easy. At first it was just that I didn't actually have time to figure it out because I was still working full time. And then, things seemed to come together in January, 2006, when my friend Lolly suggested I get a Master's of Science in Information Studies and find an expanded role (beyond just lawyering) in libraries. Libraries and librarians had been my favorite clients, always, and it seemed like the perfect idea. Most importantly, it felt right. I applied to graduate school, just under the wire, got in, retired from OGC on August 31, 2006, and began classes on August 29. Yes, that's right. I started classes 2 days before I retired. Perfect.

So, I thought I had it figured out. And, indeed, I was on cloud nine, absolutely loved school, for about 20 months, right up until last April, when things came rather unceremonious crashing down. Two years after starting classes, in August of 2008, I came to a very tough conclusion. I was wrong. I didn't have it figured out. Researching the intersection of copyright and libraries is not it, as I have explained in other entries over this semester.

So for now I am certain of two things: I'm a teacher. So I'll teach something at some point. I just don't know what, where, when or how. And I'm a lawyer. Not in the same way that I'm a teacher, however. Teacher is who I am. Lawyer is what I do to earn money. I love the actual service of lawyering; I am very weary of the politics of copyright. You do what you can do (you know, "God give me the wisdom to know the difference..."). Thanks for insight.

When managing fades

2008-11-20T05:51:00.007-06:00

I arrived at my mom's assisted living facility, The Gardens, a few days ago to find the place swarming with the members of a film crew with all their equipment, and the actors and extras playing the very people who live and work there. The people who live and work there, however, were instructed to stay out of the way, in their rooms, or in the cordoned-off areas of the halls and the dining room. Ok, filming happens. Not too big a deal. A minor inconvenience for a few days. And a story gets told. Like Driving Miss Daisy (image credit, and a little bonus story on US auto industry and Madison Avenue).

But the irony of it all really got to me. Actors managing carefully scripted parts, presenting a picture of what it's like in this place, for these people, our parents, our spouses, our brothers and sisters. The criteria we have for what makes a good story requires that we make most of it up. The story has to have certain aesthetic qualities, and it can't be too real or it will scare the living daylights out of everyone and no one will come to see it. Dying and death are not aesthetically pleasing. In fact, they are horrifying and you'd give anything in the world not to have to confront them. One of the most common experiences there is (i.e., everyone has it), dying and death, and we have no clue until it happens to someone we love and are privileged to care for, and then...

Just like everyone else before us, our instinct is to cover up the worst parts, gloss over the worst feelings, fail to come to grips with the central meaning of this sometimes long and horribly painful passage. Our complicity in the "great hiding" helps everyone else to continue their own great hiding from the truth of what life is really like, because death is an inescapable part of it.

And do we really want it any other way? Is there any pent-up societal desire to live more comfortably with the realities of what dying and death are and what they mean for how we live our lives? No.

So I was in Providence last week and, coincidentally, the front page of the paper featured a story about a study of nursing homes in Rhode Island, and how awful even the best among them were, and how all that had to be fixed before the boomers begin to find themselves there because we sure aren't going to put up with all those indignities. Maybe not in our current states of mind and health, but those are not the states of mind and health that land you in a nursing home. Power dwindles. Judgment disappears. Hands shake. Eyes stop seeing. "Managing" the thousands of little things we manage so easily, so adroitly, almost without being aware that we are managing, becomes impossible. And then other people have to start managing for us. And the struggle begins, intensifies, comes to its crescendo, and then stops. This can take years.

Well, I'm not up to it. I attended a caregiver support group last night. Twelve people, each with a different story, but these folks did not gloss over. Thank God that somewhere it is possible to say what's really happening, say how it makes you feel, see how others nod in affirmation, hear what they are experiencing, how they struggle with the same feelings of guilt, fear, pain, frustration, and relief that it ends.

The Armadillo Journal, Volume 1, Issue 3: Results analysis

2008-11-08T16:28:00.007-06:00

Six weeks have passed. I hesitate to say that the effort has been successful, for fear of bringing the wrath of the God of the Vengeful Armadillo down upon my garden again, but plugging up that hole seems to have done the trick. It's just like old times ('old times' shall mean the time since Dennis built the fence for me in fall '05).

Six weeks without an armadillo is positively correlated with plugging up a second hole in the fence, and highly statistically significant. Plugging up the second hole under the fence is also practically significant, as my thriving garden demonstrates.

Plugging up one hole but not the other was totally ineffective to stop armadillo adventures as the two variables are completely unrelated. Fussing about the cliff and hypothesizing how an armadillo could scale it was also a big waste of time, uh, I mean, an unrelated variable, so long as a second hole under the fence remained accessible. But, if the first hole had not been found and plugged (the one just below the level of the first cliff edge), and the second hole had been found and plugged (up at the level of the garden proper), then the fussing about the cliff and hypothesizing how an armadillo could scale it would not have been a big waste of time, but plugging up a hole under the fence is a lot easier than building up a cliff with lots of heavy rocks to make scaling it difficult to impossible for an armadillo.

So, lessons learned: find the damned holes. Check really carefully. The fence does its job so long as it goes down to the ground and just a bit below and doesn't suggest to an armadillo going along its edge that there's a spot here that looks a little weak, and let's see what's on the other side...

A funny thing happened on the way to the third degree

2008-11-01T14:49:00.005-05:00

Summer's over, fall's in full swing, I'm taking statistics and, surprisingly to me, enjoying it. But, it's the only class I'm taking and I think that's a lot of why. The other part of why is that I have a great professor who is taking it nice and slow, step by step, explains everything well, uses lots of examples from real life research she's been doing (sociologist). But --

It's a really, really good thing I'm only taking one class this semester because lifelong learning is coming fast and furious from an entirely different sector of life right now, and I sure do need the time I have freed up to submerge myself in what these lessons have to show me. My mom is teaching me, as she always has, how to struggle to keep going, how to adjust to changes, how to keep your independence, and, ultimately, how to let go of things too. How on earth does she manage this? She's got alzheimer's, diagnosed 3 years ago and on meds for 2 years now, slowly, but steadily declining. Yesterday I worked from 9 in the morning until 10 at night packing up the things that she convinced me (only after much painful effort on her part, because I really didn't want to believe it), that she didn't want or need -- about 95% of what she had in her apartment when I moved her into assisted living last weekend. To her it was just clutter, confusing her efforts to learn her new routines (where light switches are, how to turn them on and off, etc.). So, that was a bit of a shock.

Then the nitty-gritty of packing up for the second hand store was as grueling a task as I ever expect to undertake the rest of my life. Every little thing, from pouring out old spice container contents (to recycle the containers), to wrapping up little crystal vases and gold-plated soap dishes, just put me in hysterics, all day long. This is the person who taught me how to cook, how to walk around the block, how to deal with adversity, how to do the right thing when you're tempted not to. There were just a million little reminders that she was giving up all those things. I saw them as *her.* She was the collection of little crystal sugar bowls. She was the makeup containers all organized in little plastic bins in the bathroom drawers. She was the neatly stacked towels and sheets. She was the myriad lazy susans that organized everything in nearly every cabinet or closet where one could fit.

She wasn't any of those things.

They're just things. And she hadn't used most of them in months, maybe for as much as the last 2 to 3 years. But as long as she was there, surrounded by them all, there was this semblance of normalcy and I could keep on ignoring what was happening. Yesterday that was no longer possible and it just killed me to have to let go of the her I have known for my entire life. But then I realized, even though she's not being explicit about it like she was when I was little, she's just showing me how to let go. Well, how to not let go, until it's time to let go.

I found so many little things that showed me how hard she struggled to keep it together as things fell apart. Her little lists, her reminders (of her name and address and phone number), the little plastic container of cut-out labels from the food boxes she wanted from the grocery store so she could match them to the boxes on the shelves in the store. And there were the notes I had made for her -- how to use the can opener, how to microwave a Lean Cuisine, when she could still read relatively well. She loved to read. Read like there was no tomorrow.

So, today I have a little better perspective on it all. Especially as I look around at my own house and my own things, and hope I'll know that it's time to let them go. Not too soon. But not to hold on too long.

Now she's got a little two room "apartment" at assisted living and the transition begins, getting used to the new place, the new people, the new routines, especially getting used to being helped a lot more than I was able to help her. She lives close to me, but until this summer and fall, I've been scheduled to the max so I wasn't "helping" that much until May. Thank God I took some time to spend with her over the last 6 months. Maybe that helped, not just helped me, but maybe it helped her to see that it was taking a lot more "support" to be independent than either of us could continue to pretend was really being independent. When I finally suggested late September that I thought it was probably time to move to assisted living, she quickly said, "ok." Then for the whole month of October she always wanted to talk about it, when she was going, what she needed to take (very, very little, from her perspective).

Well, life just doesn't quit teaching us, ever. The most valuable lessons are not learned in school, in class or in the process of getting a degree. I'll worry about the degree later. I'm going to keep it together for many years to come. I had a good teacher.

The Armadillo Journal, Volume 1, Issue 2: Rejecting assumptions, continued

2008-09-26T14:37:00.006-05:00

Ok, ok, ok. I'm really crummy at this. I should have tried to kill him when I had the chance. Oh, wait a minute. I'm crummy at that too. Well, here it is, several weeks later, and I've rocked up just about every possible access point along the ledge (amazing how many I found), from level three to level two and from level two to level one. I've crawled around under the deck to see if there are tunnels from level two to level one that open out into the yard somewhere that I can't easily see. I've inspected every inch of the greenhouse space under the deck, where the summer pots get stored until spring. No stopping the little devil. The only reason it has taken this long for me to come to my senses and reexamine all my assumptions is that most nights, he doesn't deign to visit my yard. Actually I'm quite grateful for this, but it does make the accumulation of evidence a rather slow process.

Yesterday, however, with all but certainty (3 standard deviations if this were amenable to a confidence interval), I concluded that he isn't actually coming up from the ledge. There's just no evidence to suggest that he is (no trails in any place that provides even a hint of reasonable access). So, what were all the assumptions?

Armadillos don't climb rock walls
Armadillos don't climb fences
The perimeter fence is secure
Where he went out of the yard indicates where he came into the yard
It is in fact an armadillo that we're dealing with here

So, I'm sticking with one and two. I thoroughly examined five because if it were a raccoon, I wouldn't be pursuing any of this. They are impossible to keep out. But I actually have seen the armadillo in the yard at least 4 times. So at the moment, I think assumption five is ok. I decided this afternoon to reexamine assumptions three and four. So I really went after the perimeter fence to be sure that there are no burrows under it and no tunnels from one side to the other that might come up well inside the yard, maybe under a rock or a pot or something. And what do you think I found?

A hole. Another place where the underpinning of tighter wire (about 2"x 2") that goes from the bottom board of each fence panel, into the ground, had been pushed up and into the yard, and the ground had been dug out under the bent wire, just enough to squeeze something, maybe something the size of an armadillo, through. It was behind a nice big lemongrass clump, up by the corner of the yard, by the driveway, where lots of shrubs grow and it's moderately shady, under a crepe myrtle tree. I don't know though. It's not that big of a hole. I need to fix it, obviously, but I sort of worry that if an armadillo really can get through that hole, what's keeping them from just coming right through the fence? It's one of those wire fences made from the wire with 4" square openings. My 5 year old cat squeezes through the 4" square openings. Now, she's long and thin, and has to carefully maneuver to do it (head first, then right front paw, then left front paw, then body, then back legs). If she tries to go through with head and paw together, it doesn't work. I just don't think an armadillo has the flexibility or the agility (I hesitate to say, the brains) to do it.

So, I plug up this hole tonight and see what happens next.

The Armadillo Journal, Volume 1, Issue 1, Fall 2008

2008-09-08T09:27:00.004-05:00

The armadillo is a creature of habit and it’s blind and practically deaf. What does that leave? Smell. It has a very strong sense of smell. It follows edges of things (because it’s blind) and it follows scents it picks up, of things to eat, and of where it’s been and where it’s safe to go again.

That’s the theory.

The perimeter fence is secure. The rock plug in the hole discovered over the weekend is undisturbed. All gates closed. No other point of entry exists — except the cliff face. Armadillos do not climb cliffs. Again, that’s the theory.

Ah, but when the facts rip your theory to shreds sort of like an armadillo rips a nicely tended garden to shreds, or a wire fence to shreds, well, you need to reexamine your theory.

This morning I got a really lucky break in the quest to stop one part of the garden from destroying another part of the garden. When I went out this morning to see how my theory was holding up, I was greeted immediately with the evidence: it wasn’t. There, right by the front porch, was not only a torturous path of dug-up garden soil, but the armadillo himself, wantonly having at it. Muddy-clawed, silver-backed, snout sniffing the air, there he was. I resisted my first instinct, which was to kill him. “We could do that, but it would be wrong,” I said to myself, picturing Nixon all over again. Actually, I instantly recognized that I had about as much chance of success killing him as I had of scoring a free-throw in a Laker’s game. And for whatever reason, I guess my stars and planets are aligned or something, I instantly recognized that I had right here the absolute best source of information about where he was coming in, because it was 7:00 and way past his bedtime and he was going to be headed out any moment now, especially since only a few seconds after I spotted him, he smelled me and kitty. Kitty confronted him — sort of. She was curious at best, but not hostile. He got the message though. He scooted through the garden ground covers, but as I did not wish to frighten him, I wanted him to take a leisurely route out of the garden, not the emergency escape hatch, I didn’t follow closely or make loud noises. I just watched what he did. (By the way, in that moment, I realized I could do this research scientist thing I have been contemplating, so long as it is in the service of a practical goal.)

Well, he slipped easily over the first ledge taking one of the three routes down that I had identified over the weekend as probable routes up from level two. Check. He hung out on level two for a minute, going first in one direction along the edge of the cliff face, then in the other. Check. He made no attempt to go into any of the caverns under the ledge, suggesting that none of them is his daytime abode. Check. But then he surprised me. He headed for the edge. He seemed to be searching, not digging, but sniffing the ground, zigging a little, then he quickly slipped over the edge of level two to level three right below the bird bath bed, and was gone. The fence stops at the edge of level two because the cliff face to level three is fairly daunting, too daunting, we thought, for an armadillo or even a deer to scale. Well, I think we have to rethink that. There may be a place. I have to go check later, examine where he went down from the path below that level to see what the chances are that he could have come up that way. Dennis says no way. I’m thinking, at this point, way.

One of the first tenets of science is that when you have carefully examined and rejected all the likely explanations for a phenomenon, the unlikely, and even the seemingly impossible, have to be examined next. There’s a hole in the theory, and we have to figure out what the hole is and fix it.

Stay tuned.

Image credit: Photo taken by Mike6158, turned up in Google search "armadillo jump texas" on page 5, near the bottom. Although Google image search shows the original context of the photo, the site, called Photography on the Net, does not actually show the image. I think one has to be a member and be logged in, even to see a member profile (that's why I can't show anymore than Mike's username, above -- I can't learn anything about him without being a member), let alone an image. The Armadillo Journal needs a proper credit line for images, so I'm going to get Dennis to draw me an armadillo. This tacky photo credit is temporary, I promise! It'll be better next time.

New semester, new approach to studying

2008-09-06T12:58:00.004-05:00

Fall semester got underway about 10 days ago and I'm only taking one class this semester. This leaves plenty of time for other things, like mornings spent gardening, watching birds, watching butterflies, outsmarting armadillos (you'd think that would not be much of a challenge, but you'd be wrong). And yesterday I completed discussions with all three of my committee members about what I did over the summer and where I am now. All three seemed to agree that slowing down was a good idea (at least I think they all agree on that). The fact that I mainly got comfortable with not knowing what I want to write about, rather than finding a topic over the summer came as no surprise. I guess it takes how long it takes.

I also recognized something that was rather surprising: I think I have been looking for a topic in the wrong place. Not just copyright-wrong, but library-wrong. As much as I have tried to convince myself that the dissertation can be just a big paper, and not necessarily related to what I want to do for the next 10-15 years, I don't buy it. As such, I really do have to accept that for me a dissertation topic is a choice about what I want to do for the next 10-15 years, not just what I want to study for two years. What I was finding for most of my topics was that I didn't think I could handle them (sustain interest in them) for two years. If that's true, I sure can't handle them for 10-15.

So I came up with a different approach. I decided to put aside even imagining that I am in a PhD program, trying to come up with a topic, and instead imagine that I am taking some time off to figure out what I want to spend the next 10-15 years doing. In this time off I am taking a statistics class and still working 10 hours/week at the library, but compared to full time student, this is not a stretch to imagine that I'm taking time off to contemplate my future. Of course, I also have to put aside the fact that I thought I had already figured that out. That's what I am doing in iSchool, right? I'm getting a PhD in information studies. But I was defining that rather narrowly, it seems. I was taking as my subject matter, Libraries. Libraries and the future. Libraries and the digital environment. Libraries and preservation and access. Libraries and orphan works, public domain, fair use. Whatever. It was all focused on Libraries.

Two years in the iSchool may not have clarified for me what I want to do for the next phase of my life, but it has clarified for me what I don't want to do. I don't want to try to affect Libraries. They are what they are, and they are going to be what they are going to be. They'll be fine.

So, I start with, not a clean slate, but a slate with a question on the top: "You have, let's say, 15 years to accomplish one more thing in your life. Based on what you've done so far and knowing a lot more about your strengths and weaknesses than you did when you first chose a career as a teacher (1970) and then as a lawyer (1986), and trained carefully for each of them, and rode them where they took you, what do you want to do next?" That's the question I'm going to concentrate on answering this semester. Maybe I won't have an answer by December, but at some point I will know the answer. Then, I'll see whether there's a way to pursue that that makes a PhD in information studies make sense. I am inspired by Lance Hayden's path through all of this. His subject was one of great interest to him personally (surveillance) and he managed to find a way to look at it through an information policy/content analysis lens (discussion of red-light camera surveillance analyzed for use of metaphor).

That's several bridges to cross down the road, however. Add to those two, the bridge of the PhD being valuable enough to me personally and to my achievement in my next career to make the bureaucratic aspects worth enduring. Lots of pieces to fit together here over the next couple of months. But I'm not in a hurry anymore. Now that I fully appreciate the gravity of what I'm deciding, I am going to take my time. I took two years off, bought a 32' full-keeled ocean-going sailboat (a Westsail) and sailed around the gulf and the carribbean to decide about what my second career would be. Two years! Why should it take me less time to figure this one out?

Ah, there's a rare butterfly hanging out in my garden today, a White Angled-Sulphur. He's been around about a week. I snapped his picture, above, a couple of days ago. I have time for this. This is the life.

Overcommitting: Inevitable?

2008-08-19T20:16:00.002-05:00

I just reread the post I made early this year as I approached the spring semester, totaling up all the things I had committed to do over the course of the semester, in addition to a full course load, and no wonder I nearly went insane. What on earth was I thinking? And have I done it again? Well, no. I am only taking one class. That has got to make a big difference. But here's the list of extra-curriculars -- so far:

Bring OGC and UT Austin task forces on Eres/Blackboard issues to a close (finalize reports, recommendations, etc.)
Prepare course materials for re-hosting Eres/Blackboard course for UMUC
Host course for same (in late October/early November)
Prepare and make presentation for Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala re how to decide what to digitize and provide public access to
Revise paper about Eres/Blackboard for publication in Learned Publishing
Peter Brantley's DLF fair use panel invitation in November

And there's work at the library. Google (pd determinations; orphan work determinations); the UT Press project (Lords of New Spain Website); open access issues.

And school and the dissertation topic search.

Oh, it all seems so easily manageable, compared to spring semester. But I have these ideas that I'll still be able to work in the garden over the fall (as I have over the summer), that I'll still be able to cook and bake, that I'll still have coffee with friends once in a while (there's the new coffeehouse in the conference center and Caffe Medici, my favorite place, has opened a location right on Guadalupe just a few blocks from the Library), and come spring, that I can rent a house in Patagonia for a month and take my kitty and really, truly get into the Arizona sky islands in a thorough way, as I have dreamed about for years (about 12 to be exact). Well, we will just see. NO WONDER I have a tough time settling on a dissertation topic. I have too many things I want to do other than research and writing... Maybe Kenny is right. It's not like there's something missing from my life, without the dissertation.

Not knowing is ok

2008-08-19T17:43:00.004-05:00

Only ten days or so until tuition payment is due for the fall semester. I am going to pay it. It's the last class I need to satisfy all the course requirements. Though I am not any closer to deciding what to write about, I am much more at ease with not knowing than I was at the start of the summer. I have so many ideas; it's just that the thought of two years delving into any one of them just doesn't seem right. Sometimes it occurs to me that I just don't care enough about anything to spend two years submerged in it. That is such a shock. I can't believe it.

One thing that is odd about this whole process is that I used to make relatively major decisions with very little fuss. I didn't feel compelled to take all future ramifications of them into account (as though I really knew what those might be!). I was much more comfortable with the idea of the path leading off into the woods (no way to know where it's going and that's ok). Now I seem to expect that what I decide to write about has to be the first step along a path that I know now I'll want to stay on for twenty years. I think that's asking way too much. I need to just look at it as a single topic, a single experience, like the last two years of coursework has been. It's just something I'm going to do, and then move on.

I got some good suggestions from friends in comments to last blog entry and in conversations with others on the phone. School will start next week and I will be back on campus and will have lots of opportunities to explore these ideas with others. I definitely need to stay relaxed about it, comfortable with the ambiguity of not knowing what I'm going to be doing or what difference it will make or where it will take me. Zen Mind Beginner's Mind.

Oh, and theory

2008-08-03T17:08:00.002-05:00

I was just reviewing a book I bought for Dr. Northcutt's class last summer (an overview of qualitative research methods) and it occurred to me as I prepared to review for the nth time all the various theories of social science, the philosophies of science and quantitative and qualitative methods, that maybe there's no magic theory that I have to latch onto to look into the question of the effectiveness of best practices over guidelines. Maybe it is a simple as my own intuition (my own theory?) that people have an intuitive sense of right and wrong, and an intuitive sense of what will work in their day-to-day lives, and they react positively to, are more receptive to, "norms" that don't offend their intuition. That's always been one of the most perplexing things about trying to explain copyright law to people: it confounds expectations, logic, and intuition. What a normal person expects or thinks the law must be is not what it is. It is horribly counter-intuitive. Maybe best practices are, well, they actually are, what people are doing, that is, what they believe is ok, so they are much more in line with intuition, not bent ("negotiated") to the bizarre fears of copyright maximalists.

So, theory would be that best practices, being documented practices of a representative sample of teachers or librarians or whatever, inspire confidence because they make sense at an intuitive level. This puts me squarely on the subjective/interpretive side of things. I am interested in how and what people perceive as fair, rejecting that there is some objective fairness out there to be discovered. It is subjective, what's fair. We won't all agree. But we can document what many teachers or librarians think, and put it out there for others to see, and they either will or won't feel validated in their own subjectively held beliefs about what's fair.

Feels too thin. Too easy. Too superficial. I need to talk to other grad students about this and what it is part of (I feel that it is part of a bigger picture, but I can't see the rest of it).

The search for the question

2008-08-03T14:06:00.006-05:00

I got some good advice from a fellow grad student in response to my last post (thanks, Bettie). She noted that I had failed to state any research questions in there, and was stuck on method (which I did acknowledge in the post). Excellent points. I spent quite a bit of time trying to learn how to generate research questions during the last year of classes. I never quite got beyond the point where it seemed like an artificial process because I had always been starting from the point of wanting to explore some phenomenon very generally. My "real" research question was merely, "what's up with that?" And therein lies the reason that ethnography appeals to me so much: that's precisely what it's about -- what's up with that. But she convinced me that continuing to look at research questions as an afterthought is not going to work. Merely explaining some phenomenon is not going to work. I need to start with questions, not tack them on at the end.

So, I'm going to expand on idea number 3 from the last post: Ethnography of the process of creating Best Practices for Fair Use in Education (a Berkman Center project I just learned about).

Strip out the ethnography pre-condition and I have a phenomenon, the phenomenon of generating best practices. Now I'm going to have a little talk with Bettie (a pretend talk) about this idea.

Bettie asks, "what do you want to know about generating best practices?"
Me: Well, I want to know if they work.

Bettie: What does "work" mean?
Me: Work means that they change perceptions or they change behaviors, or both.

Bettie: Whose perceptions and behaviors?
Me: For starters, the people they are created for, in the case of Harvard's Berkman Center fair use project, teachers. But second, I wonder if they change perceptions and behaviors of people who have traditionally wanted to limit or even marginalize educational fair uses, the copyright owner community. In the Center for Social Media's first set of best practices, the documentary filmmakers were on both sides of the debate, both users and owners of copyrights, so there was less a sense of imbalance, of power versus powerlessness. In educational environments, teachers, rightly I think, tend to view themselves as vulnerable and powerless in the face of possible allegations of infringement and the resulting liability that can ruin their lives.

Bettie: There are a lot of questions in there. List them out.
Me: Do teachers feel more comfortable relying on fair use after they learn about normative best practices documented by prestigious research institutions? Do teachers actually rely on fair use more after they learn about normative best practices blah, blah, blah? Do copyright owners accept and express support for statements of best practices to which they did not contribute? Ultimately, the question is, does the best practices process increase reasonable reliance on fair use when compared to guidelines?

Bettie: What are guidelines?
Me: Well, they are statements about the scope of fair use that are "negotiated" between the content owners and educators, and as such, they tend to be skewed towards the interests of the more powerful of the negotiators and thus, quite narrow in their interpretations of what is acceptable. While colleagues might disagree about how narrow and whether or to what extent they are useful, it seems that it would be possible to determine to what extent they are used and relied upon, and compare that to the extent of use and reliance on a similar best practices document that did not involve the "negotiation" among grossly unequal bargainers, by not including input from the copyright owner community at all. That seems to be the core question.

Bettie: OK. You have a question now. How would you go about answering it?
Me: EEK. It seems to require some big-time surveys of lots and lots of teachers regarding their comfort levels with relying on fair use in their teaching, whether they know about and if they do, how they use existing guidelines, and then some surveys of teachers after the best practices are published, to see if attitudes change. I wonder if it would have to be the same teachers, a longitudinal study? And the Berkman Center estimates its project will take 3-4 years. EEK again. I don't think this is doable.

Bettie: Try another question.
Me: But that's what I want to know about. Are they effective? Why put a lot of energy and time into a process that is going to be, in the end, a waste of time? Again, folks can disagree with me about this, but I would *never* become involved in a guidelines negotiation again because I think they are a huge waste of time. The whole concept of the "negotiation" is flawed. And yet, this is a common practice, not just in this context, but in life in general. We reach compromise.

But if the guidelines compromises have been on the whole not very useful (and I could find out how useful or not useful they have been), why do we think that best practices will be any better when we are leaving one side out of the discussion? What is it about this process that we think will satisfy and calm the excluded interest? Or is it that we are just giving up on caring about what they think?

I know how I reacted to the statement on a group of STM publishers' websites of what they considered best practices for researching orphan works status, which clearly did not involve any normal people (non-publishers). I thought the effort was designed for other publishers and of no relevance for regular people at all. You'd have to have a commercial motive in planning to use the orphan work, and the money to back up your plans with very expensive research to satisfy their best practice document. Sort of like the slant of the most recent orphan works bills. But I digress. But only a little.

I guess I really want to know if this is different and if it will be a more productive use of time, money and energy. Ultimately, if it is effective and productive, I would like to see best practice documents for librarians about how to select analog materials for digitizing, online materials for archiving, etc., taking the copyright caselaw and statutes into account, but relying more on actual best practices, and without undertaking the largely futile attempt we saw in the Section 108 study group, to obtain buy-in for what publisher participants seemed to feel are monstrously threatening actions, that are in reality, very important and useful library functions of archiving and providing public access (I hear the screams -- access!!!!!! oh, my god no, not that...). In truth, I don't think a substantial number of publishers will be able to accept any risk to their current business models until more of them have managed to move beyond those models, and who knows when that will be. Thankfully there is progress here, including notable efforts by many scholarly publishers to experiment with new business models. But it is very slow-going, and while the majority of publishers is figuring out that easily accessible and freely usable digital copies are their friends, libraries still need to make decisions about what to save and who to let see what. Best practices might help. Might not. Wouldn't it be useful to know something about how they are created and how they are used? Or not?

Next time: uh, oh, what about theory? Am I just too practical? Is all I care about what works, efficiency, and getting results for effort? Damn. I'll never be an academic. Must... drag... self.... to... ivory... tower... Oh, who am I kidding?

The cache of ideas and academic judgment

2008-07-16T16:16:00.005-05:00

School starts in only a little over a month. I am enjoying the big slow-down so much, it is hard to imagine gearing up for a marathon again. Here are the dissertation ideas I have grown accustomed to entertaining:

1. Ethnography of the process of building a new library.
2. Ethnography of the process of building a copyright evidence base for orphan and public domain works (OCLC's Copyright Registry).
3. Ethnography of the process of creating Best Practices for Fair Use in Education (a Berkman Center project I just learned about).
4. Ethnography of the processes involved in envisioning the future of the book (not sure of the venue for this, but it could be a really visionary scholarly publisher/library collaborative). This one is not about e-books or e-book readers. It's about entirely new ways of envisioning communication of ideas. Actually, this one could be the story of creating an innovative dissertation, but it would also have to be the story of fighting to get to communicate in innovative ways. That would be too many stories...

All of these are interesting to me, but all pose significant challenges -- not intellectually, but rather, challenges to being acceptable topics to study and write about.

Challenge 1: There's no theory. I have no theory. I want to do inductive research. I want to explore and see what's there and tell a story about how things grew, changed and evolved at this time in the history of libraries and books and the ability to access and use information.

Challenge 2: I have no clue about who among the faculty would be interested in or support my working on this kind of project. I also would have to come up with a non-iSchool committee member. Again, I'm clueless.

Challenge 3: I'm not sure any of these will sustain my interest long enough to result in a "finished" communication. I am so interested in process, that I just am not sure I'll be willing to hang in there to perfect product when I think I have communicated sufficiently what I have learned.

Challenge 4: I'm worried about my colleagues' and faculty members' judgment that an ethnography is at best a tool, a method, not a goal in and of itself. I know my interest in ethnography to tell a story, simply to tell a story, will be insufficient in others' eyes, especially those who see qualitative studies as of little or no value to the academy.

Challenge 5: I can see doing these projects without being in school, or only very tangentially associated with school. I see the work, the process of discovery, as enjoyable and likely very fruitful, but the effort to structure it to satisfy scholarly criteria as tangential and superfluous. This stems from my increasing concern that I am not really cut out to be a scholar. I'm just someone who likes to learn, likes to study, and likes to convey what I've learned to help others. I thought that university life would be a good fit, but I'm increasingly concerned that it really isn't.

As I remarked earlier this summer as I pondered my future, not needing a degree underlies all of this ambivalence. If my goal is to investigate, learn, communicate and interact with others around the learning, there are plenty of hurdles to actually doing that, plenty of challenges, without adding on top of all the intrinsic challenges, the challenge of doing it in a particular, and rather precisely defined way, to satisfy some set of criteria that I'm not at all sure are relevant to me or what I want to do. I think I need to spend some time over the next 4 weeks talking to people at the iSchool about all this. I'm fast approaching decision time.

Back to the future of the library

2008-07-06T11:13:00.004-05:00

It seems that as I mull things over, I keep returning to the idea of the future of the library. But I don't want to investigate it in the sense of running an experiment. I want to do an ethnography.

I took an ethnography class in the spring and I became fascinated with the process of writing up field notes. Actually, taking the notes is pretty fascinating too. One of the best parts of the process is that while you observe in the field you withhold judgment about what to expect, what to look for, what to see even, and you just try to see what's there. It's actually very Buddhist in that way. There's no pretense that it's objective or any bullshit like that. Clearly, two people sitting side by side taking notes while watching the exact same scene will notice different things, take different notes, and when it comes time to write them up, will see different patterns and ascribe to the events different significance. But it still puts you into the most open-minded frame of reference that it's possible for you to have.

So, here I am in Austin where our public library has obtained public support (a bond election) to build a new downtown, central library. What must they have to think about on the brink of such an undertaking? How do they imagine the Austin Public Library in 5 years and on into the middle of the 21st century (say, 25 years down the road)? How do they plan for the future of an institution that is so rooted in the physicality of the book? Can they let themselves imagine a future where a library might not exist in any form like it exists today? Could I somehow be a participant observer, or just an observer of the process of thinking through those issues, spend maybe 6 months attending planning meetings (who knows if they even have such meetings, or if they already have it all planned out) and then write up my notes. I don't know anyone who works there, only people who work for the foundation and friends group that support the library. I suppose I ought to start talking to them about this, to see if it's too late to get involved.

Ah I just checked out the Austin Public Library's Web page that describes the design process and it looks like the timing couldn't be better: the teams that desire to be considered to design the new building have just submitted their qualifications and the top 3 will make presentations to the City Council in October. This looks pretty auspicious. There's a little slide show you can access at the top of the left side-bar on the Web page that shows the Design Team Selection Process. The Library already specifies several aspects of what they want in the new building, so I better get started with some emails today. This might not be possible at all. I at least need to know what's do-able.

Thinking it all over

2008-06-28T10:19:00.003-05:00

Half-way through the summer of thinking it all over, I sort of like the idea of suspending judgment. I just float ideas around, talk with folks about them, Google this, Google that, see what's already out there on different subjects, sort of try them on, and then just let them go. A couple of things are emerging as guideposts: "stay away from copyright" and "slow down."

Going back for a third degree is really quite a different proposition than going back for a second, and certainly totally different from going for the first. I have got to be doing this for the process, not for the product. It's not a step in any direction or a prerequisite for anything. It is simply and completely what it is itself -- pure experience. It is just life happening, one day after the other. I suppose I'll go from being someone who gets a Ph.D. in record time to someone who has to be booted out the door after years of tinkering.

The urgency of the copyright issues, the urgency that comes from 20 years of dealing with it all and being quite sure about myself and my views and knowing what needs to be done, where the work will be most productive, is pretty much exactly the opposite of what I really wanted this experience to be about. The trouble is that copyright isn't just tangential to the world of libraries and information in the digital environment -- it's right there in the middle of things. So, it's not easy to avoid it. But it needn't be the focus of what I do. And that's what it was about to become.

But, because I have so much experience with it, and the players, and the theories, and the politics, and the absurdities, all that baggage comes along with exploring even a relatively new facet of copyright (new for me). I really need to just leave the subject at the door and wander around in the world if ideas that don't have copyright at the center.

That takes care of one major parameter. The other is the slowing down. I felt in a hurry because of the time sensitivity of the arguments I was developing. I'm just going to tend towards topics that aren't urgent. In a way, just by publishing here, on my blog, the ideas about how things might be more difficult when the next copyright term extension act gets proposed (because of the explosion of the free over the next 10 years), well the ideas are already out there. I have done what I wanted to do. I could spend 3 months or 6 months or 24 months expanding, polishing, refining, but in the end, the core ideas are going to be the same, and they are already out there for anyone to see and for anyone to build upon. From what everyone says, after all that polishing, refining and expanding, I'd have something so minutely pointed that only 6 people in the whole world would read it, and 4 of them would be on my committee (the others being my mother (not) and me), and already, I am pretty sure more than 6 people have read it. So I am moving on.

Ah, I can see that the idea of that polishing until it's so esoteric that no one is interested, that idea is going to give me problems. I just find that absurd. If that really is what one has to do to prove oneself worthy of the title, scholar, I am not and don't want to be a scholar. I am so much more interested in writing in such a way about subjects, so as to appeal to as broad an audience as possible -- people who really do care and would be interested but won't be able to get past the long and boring scholarly crap. The idea of purposely incorporating verbiage that makes it hard for people to understand what you are trying to say seems so sad and wasteful. I don't think I'll want to spend very precious days of my life producing something that won't help anyone do anything. Life's shortness becomes more and more a focused part of the picture as you approach its end. And that fact, life's shortness, colors just about everything I do these days.

It is much simpler when all you want is a piece of paper and a job somewhere. There is no way that I could have predicted it would be more complicated to not need or want the standard outcome of an educational experience, but just the educational experience itself.

CIP is in SL this year

2008-05-22T08:04:00.005-05:00

In just a week I am speaking at the Center for Intellectual Property's Annual Symposium, and this year it's being presented in Second Life as well as first life. I am planning to visit the NMC Conference Center where the event will take place, so I decided to dust off my avatar (Gee Susanti), make a new outfit (no spiffy $ duds, just the basics) and wander around a bit. I found this great hammock by the beach (well everything's by the beach in SL). I don't anticipate the Conference Center will have a hammock by the beach, but you never know. Anyway, maybe I'll see you there!

I never thought I could want the month of April to be over

2008-05-09T07:17:00.004-05:00

April is the most beautiful month of the year here in Austin (my humble opinion, obviously). If it lasted all year, that would be fine with me. Well, not really, but I do enjoy spring, or rather, I used to enjoy spring. Somehow or another, being in graduate school has changed that. I'm thinking maybe that's too big a price to pay for a Ph.D. No more loving spring. No, I do not accept that.

People here joke about how awful April is: "April is the month we eat our young." I'm not kidding. This I heard here at UT. The horror of April is not just a myth. I experienced it first-hand this year. I was really on edge. Hair-trigger temper. Flare-ups were common. Old friends sharp with each other. Major decisions made as snap judgments. Geez. This is not right. This level of tension is not really conducive to a what really should be, at heart, a thoughtful process. Over 18 years of working as a lawyer, and having gone through quite a few stressful times, I must say that I don't recall very many that were as bad as this April was.

If it's this predictable, then it should be preventable, or at least manageable. But this is no more and no less than what I learned about balance this semester, this brutal academic year -- it's all in what you commit to do, what you believe you can plan to accomplish. You have to consider each commitment very carefully and recognize that you'll have to say no to some things way before you experience the pressure that results from having over-committed. You have to believe what you really don't want to believe: that you won't be able to do everything you want to, without unacceptable compromise of your sanity, your health, at some level.

I read something recently that suggested that being over-committed has become a mark of success, or something like that. We exhibit our unbelievable lists of things that we must do, of committees we are on, of multiple jobs we have, of meetings we have to shuttle our kids to, of papers we are writing, as proof that we are successes. Who can argue with the guy who can juggle five balls? He has accomplished something real. Hardly anyone can do it. And it's not killing him. In fact, he's nodding his head side to side and whistling a tune and smiling while he juggles. But he does this as an act, a short demonstration of a skill he acquired by hours and hours of repetitious practice. This is not a way of life.

So, now it's May. Things are winding down. Classes ended on the 2nd. All but one paper is finished. Three meetings in other cities are behind me. May's not a piece of cake by any means, but it's doable. UMUC's CIP is the last week. I have until then to polish my talk and think about what I really want to say (the paper is just the beginning of the process of giving a talk, for me). Then comes June, July and August. Somehow, I am going to slow down and not set myself up for a mad dash to the end of the year.

Which brings me to my research topic. I have decided to reject for now everything I concluded through the end of April. I just don't trust any conclusion I reached by participating in a process that I think is fundamentally flawed. I have felt closer to crazy during the last 6 weeks than I ever want to feel again. I'm going to take the summer to think about it, to talk to people who aren't stressed out, to explore the options at a more leisurely pace, to be more open to changing course, to venturing into terrain that's less familiar, to maybe taking more time to unfold the story. Most of my fellow Ph.D. students seem to have these trajectories that were not straight. The process is maybe all there is. Right now I am too focused on the outcome (finishing). I know better than that. But then again, that's what April was about -- not making a lot of sense.

Old friends...

2008-05-03T04:59:00.003-05:00

Time it was and what a time it was, it was...
A time of innocence
A time of confidences

Long ago it must be; I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you
-- Simon & Garfunkle, Old Friends

Dana answered an ad I had placed in the Austin American Statesman, for a roommate. I had just graduated from UT and she was still in her junior year. She said she answered the ad because I was a vegetarian. She had an Irish Setter named Mandy. I had 3 cats. We all got along just fine, though I remember our first big fight. She locked herself in her room and wouldn't talk to me. I told her through the door that if we didn't work this out we were giving up on our friendship. We didn't give up.

Dana never gives up.

Dana has been living with ALS for 2 1/2 years. This weekend she must decide for herself and her family and her friends whether to let go of her life or whether to commit to living with life-support 24 hours a day for the rest of her life, whatever that might be.

Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly
How terribly strange to be seventy

Old friends
Memory touches the same years
Silently sharing the same fears

Seventy doesn't seem so terribly strange anymore, but those fears -- we are still silently sharing those. Dana doesn't talk about that. At times it takes such incredible courage to live with unbearable pain, loss, and sadness. It takes no less an amount of courage to let go.

Dissertation Proposal -- Next draft

2008-04-12T15:17:00.005-05:00

I got a few comments, spoke with a few folks, read a little more, and turned out a second draft. But before I post it, I just have to mention this photo, showing the contents of a package I got in the mail yesterday. It was a Christmas present (and it was not late, rather, it's a gift that literally keeps giving). This is the best Christmas present I've ever gotten and it's going to the top of my list for what to give people from now on: Donorschoose.org let's you give your friends and family the power to help very deserving teachers and their students achieve their educational goals. Check it out. It's pretty neat. They give your friends tons of options to choose from. I chose a teacher who wanted to buy an iMac for her class. You donate your gift card cash value, and then you get an acknowledgment. I didn't expect what came yesterday, however. I got this great notebook full of thank you letters from the students telling me what all they had learned to do with their computer, and 3 photographs of the students and their iMac. Wow. The kids are so cute. Great gift. Thanks Google Book Search.

But now, back to the dissertation. Here's draft 2:

When you wish upon a star –
be careful what you wish for

Introduction

The copyright pendulum had been swinging towards broader, stronger and longer protection for 100 years, but it may have reached a turning point in the U.S. with the measures adopted in 1998. Those protections, including, among others, a term of life of the author plus 70 years and 95 years for works published before 1978, and the anti-circumvention measures designed to insulate the content industries from the realities of frictionless and costless reproduction and distribution in the digital environment, marked the end of the long trend.

Or so the story seemed it might go, as I began to ask what the next 10 years might bring in the development of copyright law, policy and practice. I focused initially on the effects of mass digitization projects on the health of the public domain, the deterioration of library prominence in the roles of discovery and fulfillment, and the evolution of business models in the music, publishing and film industries. I saw economic themes elaborated by Schumpeter, Christensen, Goldstein, Anderson and Boyle, among others, interwoven throughout.

While the surface story appears to be one of increasing access to and usefulness of the kinds of media that once were made artificially scarce (the purpose of copyright’s allocation of the exclusive right to copy to the copyright owner) to provide opportunities to creators to recover their investments, the deeper story is one of ever more adroit exploitation and control by copyright owners. On the surface, it appeared that if content industries (content or content industries defined herein collectively as the products and producers of the publishing, music, movie, theater, dance, two- and three-dimensional art, photography, gaming [and whatever other industries I’m leaving out] industries), and individual creators reduce reliance on copyright to exclude others from copying and distributing their works in digital forms, that is, if relatively free access to and use of such digital content becomes a normal public experience, there may not be much hew and cry in nine years when U.S. media conglomerates push for another 20 year extension to the term of copyright. More pointedly, if there were some downside of an apparent access and use utopia, proponents of the public domain would have those nine years to figure it out and be prepared with appropriate counterarguments. The counterarguments might go so far as completely rejecting any continuing need for copyright in a world where creators did not rely on exclusion to recover their investments, but even if that argument were unlikely to succeed, the full range of arguments against term extension in a milieu of much freer access to and use of others’ works in digital form warrants exploration.

As I examined the possibilities more closely, free access to digital copies only seemed like giving up control. In truth, copyright industries can potentially assert control in more subtle and nuanced ways, and in ways that could be more constraining (as I’ll describe below) than the statutory framework we have now. Jack Valenti may get his (conjectured) wish after all, if posthumously:

"So the effort [by the MPAA] to block something like the Eldred Act is not really about protecting their [motion picture industry] content. The effort to block the Eldred Act is an effort to assure that nothing more passes into the public domain. It is another step to assure that the public domain will never compete, that there will be no use of content that is not commercially controlled, and that there will be no commercial use of content that doesn’t require their permission first. The opposition to the Eldred Act reveals how extreme the other side is. The most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as its aim not the protection of “property” but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. Their aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs" (Lessig, 2004, p. 255)

I am concerned that very good news for public access to and use of digital manifestations of creative content will, in reality, effectively deflect concern about attempts to extend the broad, powerful and lengthy protection copyright offers now to new lengths, and possibly even new breadths and depths. Today we are only on the cusp of some of the changes that I think will bring into play the forces, and provide the empirical data, that could radically reconfigure the contours of copyright.

There may exist a massive corpus of freely available works, but I am not sure it will act as a sufficient counterbalance of choice against control over commercial exploitation of profitable works that approaches perpetuity. The emerging structure might remind us in some ways of our earlier U.S. copyright regime that only provided protection for works that promised some profitability, and only offered longer terms to those that were really profitable, through renewal – all the rest went into the public domain by either never getting a copyright at all or by not renewing. But in this possible future configuration, the division of works into those protected and those not protected (albeit voluntarily not protected, by refraining from enforcement) might break along a different set of lines – whether the manifestation of the work is digital or analog, where analog embodiments could enjoy near endless protection while digital versions would be freely used, reused and enjoyed for noncommercial purposes, but tightly monetized for commercial purposes, for the same long periods as analog works.

Argument

My argument consists of two propositions and three conclusions. The propositions are listed here as a, b and c; the conclusions are described in the paragraphs numbered 1, 2 and 3, followed by a paragraph that elaborates proposition b:

a. If selling, distributing, displaying and performing digital copies as a revenue generator is losing traction, causing the price of digital copies to trend to zero, and

b. if copyright owners voluntarily refrain from enforcement of the digital "copy" right, at least for nonprofit purposes, functionally (de facto) weakening it so that the strength of digital copyright trends to zero (that is, for digital copies, owners would refrain from all enforcement of their rights against nonprofit users),

1. Then, the floodgates will open on creativity in business model development, freeing content creators from dependence upon control over and sales of copies to recover their investments in creating copyright works. The corpus of digital free will explode.

2. This ubiquitous digital access can extend even to digital derivative works. It’s not clear that they will have any more monetary value than the digital originals from which they are derived. They will face the same pressures as their source materials – competition with immense amounts of free materials, which would seem to drive digital derivative prices toward zero also.

3. Sounds like a good thing from the perspective of access and use, but, as a consequence, will we need and be able effectively to argue before Congress in 9 years (2017) that we need, a vibrant and healthy public domain if there is a vast collection of digital works relatively freely available for mass nonprofit use, through voluntary non-enforcement of copyright?

The 2017 de facto digital copyright I imagine owners voluntarily creating by refraining from enforcement of their rights in digital copies against nonprofit users, might look like this:
1. [exclusive right to make and authorize others to make copies]
2. [exclusive right to create and authorize derivative works]
3. [exclusive right to publicly distribute and authorize public distribution of the work]
4. [exclusive right to publicly display and perform and authorize others to publicly display and perform the work]

Discussion

The natural rights copyright – controlling ex post investment

With a copyright that is significantly de facto weakened (at least along one parameter – digital embodiments, and for nonprofit users and uses), opponents of longer terms will have a tough argument to make because as the perceived strength of copyright weakens (trends to zero), term can lengthen towards infinity without the public experiencing a negative effect (Pollock 2008). The public domain only has perceived value in contradistinction to the protected domain. If the protected domain diminishes in scope, the perceived value of the public domain should diminish too.

Where might the value of 1) digital and 2) non-digital copyright lie nine years from now? Digital copyright may be no more than a right to control ex post investment; non-digital copyright would exist in expression in non-digital (analog and live performances and displays) goods and services:

Digital copyright: The right to control commercial exploitation of derivatives (ex post investment) that is, uses that derive monetary value from use of or association with digital embodiments;

Non-digital (analog) copyright: Exclusive right to exploit the value of things that cannot be digitized or that are embodied in a physical copy (analog copyright: original works of art; works embodied in physical form (books) or applied to physical forms such as mugs/t-shirts/games/toys/etc.; experiences like plays, movies, concerts)

Proponents of a vibrant public domain will argue that the copyright owner should only be able to control investment by licensing the right to commercial benefit associated with or derived from digital copies, or through exclusive control over analog or live-experience exploitation, for a limited time. But ex post investment as a justification for any term has no theoretical stopping point, that is, if I should have the right to control exploitation of my work not because I need the monetary incentive to create, or even to support me while I create new works, but rather, on principle (because I created it), what is the rationale for this right to ever end? Landes and Posner’s indefinitely renewable copyrights suggest one model for providing this kind of extensible right (2002). Their proposal may be quite appealing when balanced with ubiquitous unencumbered digital access. Longer terms are also advocated by proponents of competing conceptions of copyright such as Christopher Yoo, who argues that a term as long as constitutionally allowed (some might say, forever minus a day) will encourage entry into the market (2007). There will be no shortage of arguments in favor of longer terms.

Longer copyright terms will mainly affect (bind) popular cultural works, making them unavailable for commercial exploitation without a license. Disney will argue that it should be able to control commercial uses of Mickey so long as Mickey makes money, especially in light of all the free digital content Disney (by then) will be providing the public. As for less easily identified and reached copyright owners of older works, Paul Heald counters the argument that the copyright owner should control investment in his work (i.e., the derivative right) to increase use of older works, by showing that investment actually increases upon release to public domain. But his study was conducted under conditions of significant transaction costs during the term of copyright (2007). These costs will likely diminish or possibly even disappear entirely in the future. Already we see evidence of this in the combination of growing use of Creative Commons and other online licenses, both market-based and possible statutory solutions to orphan works problems, as well as the development of practical ways to identify and pay creators to use their works (development of copyright evidence bases). Additionally, much of the massive corpus that is born digital can either explicitly or implicitly be relatively freely used and reused for noncommercial purposes and its owners are often easier to contact for commercial exploitation rights if needed. Thus, the economic life of a creative work, the “long tail” of potential consumer demand for use of the derivative right, would theoretically increase with increased access and reduced transaction costs. Authors who see their newly discoverable older works potentially able to earn long tail payments for the entire life of the copyright (even if this proves somewhat illusory given the trend to zero price for digital works) will be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Disney. Theirs may be entirely a natural rights argument, but that argument tends to resonate with the public and with legislators. “I should be able to control making money from my investment of time and effort in creating my property...”

The counter argument will be one of utility, technical legality and public policy (which, as we saw in Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003), was not persuasive with the Court), that a utilitarian copyright must have a stopping point, and 95 years is long enough. This will likely be a difficult argument to win, although, in fairness, the argument was not forcefully made before Congress agreed to term extension in 1997 (see for example, Dennis Karjala’s account of the only hearing on the issue, which was not announced to the public, and only attended by supporters of the legislation). Further, the same technical and market factors that will likely enable identification of and payments to authors and publishers for uses of their older works will also likely yield data that could demonstrate the relative values to them and to the public for access to and use of both their works and public domain works. These data may show that the public benefit from use of public domain works outweighs the monetary benefit to any particular author or even all authors combined. It will be a challenge to quantify the benefit to the public, but that’s precisely the reason to get started now, because these same data may make it easier to support economic theories of copyright that suggest that the longer terms are, the better (Yoo, 2007, p. 85-86).

Countering a natural rights ex post investment right

The choice to use and enjoy free

Suppose stronger (natural rights’ based) and longer copyrights are in our future. Is the corpus of freely available content the sufficient counterweight to ever more expansive copyrights that it may seem to be? If people have a clear choice when they create to choose from source materials that cost and source materials that are free, is that all that we should ask of a market economy? One might ask the same question with respect to consumption: if one has comparable choices with respect to quality, and wants to pay for something, even if one must pay for it forever (that is, it virtually never becomes public domain), should that be the consumer’s choice?

Rejecting state support of monopolies unjustified by public necessity

On the other hand, copyright is a state-granted monopoly in the U.S., not a natural right, and it ought to bear some demonstrable relationship to the achievement of a goal that can’t be achieved without a monopoly. As creators rely less on copyright’s exclusive monopoly as an incentive to create and rely on it instead to control ex post investment forever (minus a day, or course), is there really a utilitarian justification for copyright at all? A comparison with physical building materials (manufactured and sold to the public without a government monopoly entitling the owner to control others’ investment in creative works that use and build upon the materials) suggests difficulty justifying a government granted monopoly if in fact recovery of investment is simply not problematic because it is not based on control over the sale, use and reuse of copies (the exclusive way that the Copyright Act confers its benefit on creators), but instead, derives from selling other goods and services besides the work itself. If others can earn a living from exploitation of creative works without negatively affecting the creator’s ability to make a living, and perhaps even enhancing his or her ability to make money from the works in some cases (for example, the Brazilian musicians who encourage street vendors to freely copy and distribute recordings of their works while the musicians make their own living from their live concerts), where is the need for a state-granted monopoly as an incentive, at least in digital manifestations?

Indeed, is there even a need to prevent others from performing the musician’s music live as in the Brazilian example, or selling copies of a book right alongside the creator? Often a musician’s particular nuances are what make his or her live performances unique and attractive (Vaidhyanathan, 2003). As examples of freely distributed creative content upon which others are invited to build services and additional products proliferate (for example, the body of open access scholarly literature, book reviews, blogs that post news, freely licensed images, videos and even books), the many ways one can make a living while creating content without relying on control over others’ use and reuse of that content in order to flourish would seem to undermine the argument that copyright is required to stimulate creativity. Given available alternatives to recover investment without resort to monopoly pricing (enabled by artificially preventing duplication, distribution and even public live performance), where would the justification for invoking a state-granted monopoly be?

As the benefits of a limited monopoly diminish, in copyright’s case, its intended incentive to creators, the anti-competitive costs of monopoly increase in comparison. Viewing the economics of copyright from the “innovator’s dilemma” perspective (Christensen, 1997) is helpful in this regard: economic forces that normally operate in the presence of technological opportunities to reduce costs and provide better services or goods from competition are suppressed by imposition of a limited monopoly vested in those who benefit from current cost recovery models and pricing strategies. Creative destruction does not operate within copyright industries the way it does in industries where entrenched interests cannot prevent entrepreneurs from using new technologies to explore new markets. Note that Christensen does not discuss copyright industries (1997). In contrast, in copyright industries, monopolists are able to shut down any innovation that exploits their source materials (examples abound – the string of early lawsuits against innovators in the digital sphere from mid 90’s through the present day).

But the imposition of monopoly rights to stop what would otherwise be normal economic development processes forces innovators to either absorb increased costs by licensing rights from copyright owners (in the unlikely event that the owners want to enable their more entrepreneurial competition) or wait for the development of a corpus of alternative source materials (as has developed in the last ten years), to experiment with new business models built on this freely available corpus, free from dominance by the owners of copyrighted materials for whom it is not in their perceived interests to accommodate innovation. Once a sufficient body of works exists on which experimentation can proceed, the new models can compete with the old and creative destruction resumes. This suppression of competition has significant costs that may be justified if we need the monopoly to stimulate creativity, but where creators are able effectively to reap rewards similar to those of other industries without control over copying, distribution and public display and performance of their works, what benefit does the public gain from the grant of the monopoly?

Summary

Zero is a special price (Shampinier, 2008). Consumption rates increase disproportionately when products and services are free. The future of copyright is bound up in this fact about the nature of the digital networked environment. But the digital environment does not simply encourage free; it actually impairs a creator’s ability to exact a price for digital content. But, in exchange for giving up pricing by the piece, creators are invited to sample (indeed to invent) a plethora of alternative ways to make their livings, alternatives that were never possible (or necessary) before digital networking. Once creators know that there are effective options to recover investment and make a profit that do not pit them against the strengths of the digital network, the need for a state-granted monopoly, the only legal exception to an otherwise illegal business strategy, may be seriously questioned. Long before we reach that point, however, the explosion of freely available digital content may deflect concern about the effect on the public domain of another extension to the copyright term. The opportunity to expand the term will come well before we have sorted out whether, or to what extent, we really need to grant creators a monopoly to increase production (see for example, Pollock, 2007; Yoo, 2007).

If we have not thought through and cannot easily articulate the value of a public domain in a world where the ubiquitous digital network truly recalibrates the relationships among creators, between creators and intermediaries, and between those groups and those who enjoy creative works, we will not be prepared to defend the public domain when copyright owners ask Congress for another term extension in 2017. What difference will another 20 years make? We must be prepared to answer that question effectively for a creative landscape that will be quite different from the one that existed in 1997 when we last faced the question.

Research questions

I would like to explore these problems and opportunities by researching two of the foundational propositions that I suggest, if valid, will potentially erode support for the public domain by 2017, and set the stage for a redefinition of copyright itself beyond that. While I believe there is considerable published support for both propositions generally, it will be helpful to situate the evidence within the milieu of current copyright industries in transition.

The two propositions are 1) that there are viable business models for creating and distributing creative works that do not depend on control over access to or use of digital copies and 2) that zero is a special price for intellectual works. The first proposition may depend for its full manifestation on the validity of the second, that is, it may be that only when copyright owners accept that they must give up reliance on pricing digital manifestations of their works are they likely to be able to envision alternative ways to make their livings as creators. Open access provides a good example of both propositions and their relationship to each other. Open access publishers who provide access to intellectual works without charge have been exploring new business models to recover their costs and produce return on investment for over a decade.

We normally expect that intellectual works are not fungible, and that price, therefore, is not a strong determinant of choice. But studies of rates of citation for journal articles that are freely available online (self-archived by their authors), compared to rates for articles from the same journals that are only available behind barriers of cost and inconvenience, suggest that either price or convenience, or perhaps both, do indeed disproportionately affect choice of what to read in the digital environment (Open Citation Project, 2008). Open access works are more highly cited than comparable toll access works. I would like to explore the citation phenomenon to demonstrate whether there are broader effects of zero price on choice of intellectual content. Free may be a greater determinant of choice in the digital environment than it is in the bookstore or the physical research library.

1. Where is the value in owning a copyright if the owner permits his/her copyrighted works to be digitally distributed, consumed and reused without remuneration?

a. Interview copyright owners who serve content for free, allowing reuse and derivatives, but who nonetheless cover the costs of creating their creative works, for insights into what role the exclusive rights to control copies, derivatives, distribution, public display and performance play in their business models.
i. I may approach this study using focus groups, surveys and interviews, in that order.
ii. I would choose for in-depth interviews creative professionals from industries that are both distribution- and performance-based
1. Publishing
a. Periodicals
b. Books
2. Music
3. Theater or dance

2. Is zero a special price when intellectual content, rather than chocolate or televisions, is the commodity?

a. Analyze usage statistics for a set of books from [existing commercial databases of paid and free written works] to determine if there is a relationship between price and number of downloads, specifically, if a zero price has a disproportionate effect on downloads.
i. Condition 1: free books
ii. Condition 2: very inexpensive books
iii. Condition 3: moderately expensive books
iv. Condition 4: expensive books
v. If zero has the special value here that it has in other contexts, the freely available works will be chosen at a higher rate than the paid works, even if prices for paid works are very low.
b. The four groups of works to be compared (free, low, medium and high priced) can be matched (the groups made similar) by analyzing their usage statistics across a number of libraries over a period of time, to try to assure that all were comparably used/not used when access was the same for all – visit the library and check one out (proxy-pretest quasi-experiment).

Working Bibliography

A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing | Electronic Frontier Foundation. (2004, April). Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing.

Adilov, N., & Waldman, M. (2008, February 16). Optimal copyright length and ex post investment: A Mickey Mouse approach. . Retrieved from http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1551/1/MPRA_paper_1551.pdf.

Amazon.com MP3 Downloads: Popular music, classical music, new releases and more, in MP3 format. Amazon.com. Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=163856011.

Anderson, C. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. [city], 256. Hyperion.

Anderson, C. (2008, February 5). Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. Wired Magazine. Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all.

Arrington, M. (2007, April 2). EMI, Apple To Sell DRM-Free Music for $1.29/song. TechCrunch. Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/02/emi-apple-are-announcing-sale-of-non-drm-music/.

Associated Press. (2007, November 13). Wall Street Journal Online Goes Free. ABC News. Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://abcnews.go.com/Business/IndustryInfo/story?id=3858939.

Barlow, J. P. (1994, March). The Economy of Ideas. Wired Magazine. Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html.

Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. [city], 528. Yale University Press.

Boyle, J. (2003). The second enclosure movement and the construction of the public domain. Law and Contemporary Problems, 66(Winter/Spring), 33-75.

Boyle, J. (1997). Shamans, Software and Spleens : Law and the Construction of the Information Society. [city], 288. Harvard University Press.

Breyer, S. (1970). The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs. Harvard Law Review, 84(2), 281-355.

Campbell, D., & Picciotto, S. (2008, February 16). The acceptable face of intervention: Intellectual property in Posnerian law and economics. . Retrieved from http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/262/1/Acceptable_Face_-_sub.pdf.

Christensen, C. (1997). The Innovator's Dilemma. . Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Doctorow, C. (2006, February 21). Copyright office head denounces "big mistake" of extending copyright . Boing Boing. Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/21/copyright-office-hea.html.

Doctorow, C. (2007, November 8). Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: Creative Commons. Locus Magazine. Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/11/cory-doctorow-creative-commons.html.

Fisher, W. W. I. (2004). Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment. (1). Stanford: Stanford Law and Politics.

Game theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved February 29, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory.

Geist, M. (2007, March 23). DMCA Architect Acknowledges Need For A New Approach. Michael Geist Blog. Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1826/125.

Goldstein, P. (2003). Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox. (Revised), 256. Stanford Law School.

Google News. Google News. Retrieved April 7, 2008, from http://news.google.com/news?hl=en.

Heald, P. J. (2007). Property rights and the efficient exploitation of coprighted works: An empirical analysis of the public domain and copyrighted fiction best sellers. . Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/paper=955954.

HM Treasury. (2007, June 11). Gowers Review: index. . Retrieved March 25, 2008, from http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/gowers_review_intellectual_property/gowersreview_index.cfm.

Jasco, P. Google Scholar Revisited. . Retrieved March 10, 2008, from http://www.emeraldinsight.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/Insight/viewContentItem.do?contentType=Article&contentId=1711361.

Jobs, S. (2007, February 6). Thoughts on Music. . Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/.

Kelly, K. (2008, January 31). Better than free. Kevin Kelly -- The Technium. Retrieved March 15, 2008, from http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php.

Kim, Minjeong. (2007). The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Retrieved March 2, 2008, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/kim.html.

Landes, W. M., & Posner, R. A. (1989). An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law. The Journal of Legal Studies, 18(2), 325-363.

Landes, W. M., & Posner, R. A. (2008, February 16). Indefinitely renewable copyright. . Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/paper=319321.

Lemley, M. A. (2008a, February 17). Ex ante versus ex post justifications for intellectual property. Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/paper=494424.

Lemley, M. A. (2008b, February 17). Property, intellectual property and free riding. Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/paper=582602.

Lessig, L. (2001). The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. Random House. Retrieved from http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/.

Lessig, L. (2004). Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press. Retrieved from http://www.free-culture.cc/.

Lessig, L. (2006). Code. (Version 2.0). New York: Basic Books. Retrieved from http://codev2.cc/.

Liebowitz, S. J., & Watt, R. (2006). How to best insure remuneration for creators in the market for music? Copyright and its alternatives. Journal of Economic Surveys, 20(4), 513-545. doi: doi:10.1111/j.1467-6419.2006.00259.x.

Litman, J. (2006). Digital Copyright. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books.

von Lohmann, F. (2007, October 9). Is DRM "Enabling New Business Models"? | Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF Deeplinks Blog. Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/drm-enabling-new-business-models.

von Lohmann, F. (2008, March 20). Monetizing File-Sharing: Collective Licensing Good, ISP Tax Bad | Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/03/monetizing-file-sharing-collective-licensing-good-isp-tax-bad.

Mcgowan, D. (2004). Copyright Nonconsequentialism. SSRN eLibrary. Retrieved April 12, 2008, from http://ssrn.com/paper=540243.

Mirowski, P. (1991). More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics. Cambridge University Press.

Moody, G. (2007, November 1). Interview: Mike Masnick, Techdirt's founder. Guardian Ltd. Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/nov/01/blogging.interviews.

Netanel, N. W. (2003). Impose a Noncommercial Use Levy to Allow Free Peer-to-Peer File Sharing. SSRN eLibrary. Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://ssrn.com/paper=468180.

O'Hear, S. (2007, December 20). Internet TV: 2007 Year in Review . ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved April 7, 2008, from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_tv_2007_year_in_review.php.

Open Citation Project. (2008, February). Effect of open access on citation impact: A bibliography of studies. Retrieved April 12, 2008, from http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html.

Pollock, R. (2008, February 16). Forever minus a day? Some theory and empirics of optimal copyright. . Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2451/23898.

Posner, R. (2002). The law and economics of intellectual property. Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 5(1), 5-12.

Proffitt, M., Arcolia, A., & Malpas, C. (2008, March 28). Copyright Investigation Summary Report . hangingtogether.org. Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://hangingtogether.org/?p=402.

Riley, D. (2007, September 18). The End Of The Pay For Content Model Is Nigh. TechCrunch. Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/18/the-end-of-the-pay-for-content-model-is-nigh/.

Rogers, I. (2007, October). Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends . Fistfulayen. Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://www.fistfulayen.com/blog/?p=127.

Safe Harbor Provisions for the Use of Orphan Works (Ver. 1.1). (2007, November). STM Association. Retrieved March 31, 2008, from http://www.stm-assoc.org/documents-statements-public-co/2007-documents-statements-public-correspondence/.

Sanger, D. (2006, February 22). Orphan Works IPA Analysis | David Sanger Photography. David Sanger Photography. Retrieved March 31, 2008, from http://www.davidsanger.com/copyright/orphan-works-ipa-analysis.

Shampinier, K., Mazar, N., & Ariely, D. (2008, March 3). Zero as a Special Price: The True Value of Free Products. Docuticker. Retrieved March 12, 2008, from http://www.docuticker.com/?p=19620.

Stallman, R. The Free Software Definition. GNU Operating System. Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses. Retrieved March 3, 2008, from file:///Users/gharper/Library/Application%20Support/Firefox/Profiles/qqwfvbgi.default/zotero/storage/4945/kim.html.

Vaidhyanathan, S. (2001). Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press.

Yoo, C. (2007, Spring). Copyright and Public Good Economics: A Misunderstood Relation. sScholarship Repository, Berkeley, CA. Retrieved April 10, 2008, from http://repositories.cdlib.org/berkeley_law_econ/Spring2007a/6/.