Kids Deconstruct Super Bowl Commercials in School

  

In 1996, while teaching at Santa Fe Indian School, my Native American students  told me their story of Jesus: Jesus, they told me, continues to fight an ongoing battle with Murosuyo, a Native American god. They duke it out in the sky and on the ground. The stakes are the fate of the earth. Just as Jesus seems to deliver the final death blow, Murosuyo tackles him in the heavens, and they fall together through the clouds and into a lake, and so it continues. I found it fascinating that their culture and environment is still hanging on today through Murosuyo’s efforts. My teaching became an exchange of ideas.

I played Super Bowl commercials in the classroom, and together my Native American students and I “deconstructed” them. This was, in part, an idea encouraged by the state of New Mexico. The Green Party, powered by thousands of off-the-griders like those I’d befriended in Dixon — who lived in pockets throughout the state — had increased their power in the state legislature and had worked with citizens’ groups to pass mandatory “media literacy” for all New Mexico schools. I went through the in-service training and then explored, with my twelve-year-olds from the Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo reservations, the ways marketers manipulate us by linking their brands to emotions like love, belonging, freedom, sexuality, and fear.

I showed a commercial with an SUV conquering a mountain, and my Apache student, Monique, correctly labeled the lie: “Freedom!” she cried out.
“Love and belonging,” another student suggested, noting that the male driver was accompanied by a beautiful woman and rosy-cheeked children.

      
A Hopi student raised his hand. Frowning, his anger grew as he spoke. His point, eloquently delivered, was that “crossing our sacred grounds with that noisy thing” did not mean love or belonging. He said that, to be more truthful, the gas-guzzler should be driving past the retreating glacier that its greenhouse gasses were melting.

I found these media literacy sessions as deliciously subversive as the chatter in Stan’s fields. Thanks to citizen pressure, the very nation that produced more global-warming gasses than any other was arming a million New Mexico students with the intellectual tools to reject consumerism.

Autumn arrived. On one of my last days working on Stan’s garlic farm (see previous blog!), before the tractor was oiled and tools stored for the winter, a half dozen of us harvested a fall crop of squash and basil for the farmers market. Stan and Rosemary cut basil on either side of me. I could hear the brook whenever the gentle wind stalled; the sky was a powder-puff blue, the mesas a ridiculous paste of orange, and I felt whole and alive, cutting wrinkly basil leaves, placing them in my wooden crate, the lively smell.
      
Stan seemed elsewhere, “Kind of Blue” on the breeze, perhaps already in his next novel. Clip-clip went his shears. How many basil sprigs had he chopped in his thirty years of farming? Clip. The breeze picked up and I couldn’t hear the brook, just the swaying trees above, and the smell of chemise and sage mixed with the basil. Stan stood up to his full, lanky height and ran an earth-covered set of long fingers through his beard, looking out into the direction of the wind as if for a sign. Then he sighed, almost imperceptibly and went back to clipping.
      
In Stan’s fields an idea germinated in me that would much later coalesce into a kind of general principle: be in Empire, but not of it. As the years went on, even as a Yankee pragmatism kept me cinched to Empire, I’d try to follow this, walking up to the edge of radicalism. I wouldn’t jump over, but the heat of the flaming edge, in Dixon, in Chiapas, Mexico, in Bolivia, in Liberia, and especially on the banks of No Name Creek, kept alive the embers of noncooperation, a healthy maladjustment to ecocide.
      
The long workday ended. Stan went to the till to fish out my wages. Wages that I could certainly use with my low teacher salary and high Santa Fe rent. But wages I couldn’t accept for the community of this fall day. “Stan, I won’t take your money for this work,” I said, in twenty-four-year-old earnestness. “There’s nothing I would have rather been doing today.”
      
Stan looked at me from his heights, his blue eyes suddenly animated, and he pat me on the shoulder and invited me to a late lunch of foods from his farm. I’d later realize that this, more than anything else, is what Stanley Crawford cultivated at El Bosque: an awakened, generous human spirit and, therefore, a new earth.

Stan Crawford’s Garlic Farm (II): Stay "maladjusted to empire"

Stan writes in A Garlic Testament about “the pound weight of the real,” the actual wrinkled dollars that are exchanged over a box of organic garlic at a farmers market. I’d weigh a pound, hand that weight to a customer, and accept the greenbacks that would pay my wage and Stan and Rose Mary’s farm expenses. They were constantly “snatching from the cash flow,” as Stan put it, living without savings right on the edge of subsistence like most of humanity. Yet that’s exactly what bound them with others. A kind of barter system existed in the area — I shear your sheep, you midwife for me — as well as a traditional communal relationship over irrigation that centered around maintaining tiny dirt canals called acequias. This wasn’t just pragmatism; I sensed a real passion and spirit that comes from subsistence. I saw it again all over the Global South, where living along the contours of enough, without much surplus, keeps you on your entrepreneurial toes and linked to others through reciprocity.

Stanley Crawford: Farmer and Novelist

Sometimes other laborers joined us. On summer solstice day, twenty of us gathered at Stan’s to harvest garlic. (Garlic is planted in fall and harvested in spring.) It was one of those Ansel Adams days in New Mexico, with the lines of the mesas carving a sharp edge into the sky. Stan himself stooped a little, squinting out into all that beauty with an artist’s eye, a gently discerning gaze. Then he shrugged and bent down to pull the first garlic bulb out of the ground. We followed his lead. Pollen floated in the chilly air as we pulled up garlic all morning. At one point I threw a bunch of garlic a little roughly into the crate, and Stan mused, “Careful with my babies.” We stopped at ten; Rose Mary and their daughter Katya brought a pot of miso soup into the fields, and we drank it out of cups. The picking conversation was often revolutionary. During a discussion about a proposed hazardous waste dump in the area: “Gandhi didn’t just talk about nonviolence in an evil system,” a salt-and-pepper grandma farmer said while pulling up garlic beside me. “He was all about noncooperation.”

Another friend of Stan’s, an artist from Santa Fe, talked about cultivating a posture of “maladjustment with Empire” in yourself.

“But everything is tainted,” someone else said, wiping dirt and sweat from their brow. “We’re feeding nuclear Los Alamos.”

“Right,” the artist said, “but you stay maladjusted to the general evil. That’s true noncooperation: not letting Empire inside you.”

Stan hardly participated in such discussions. He hovered a little over every situation, Miles Davis’ “So What” coming off the mesas; a softer, clearer place. But he wasn’t aloof; after all, he was touching the earth right there beside us. I reached down and touched it, too. When pulling lettuce from my own acres beside the vineyard, I reached down through the lettuce leaves, the lower part of the plant smooth like a lover’s inner thigh. Sliding my fingers deeper, to where the lettuce met the moist earth, I sunk them a bit into those depths, and then coaxed the whole plant loose. Made a salad out of it; took it inside. “Don’t let the Empire inside you. Stay maladjusted to civilization,” someone would say, and Stan nodded, or didn’t, pulling up another top-setting garlic plant, placing it into a pile, the pound weight of the real. I think Stan took pleasure growing dissent in his fields, along with garlic, chilies, and statis flowers. His life was so obviously maladjusted to Empire — why talk about it? His very presence, such a wise, well-known intellectual and novelist, hoeing a row right beside you, elevated everything in our midst.

The summer was coming to an end, and a new semester awaited me back at Santa Fe Indian School. I harvested the first of my squash, zucchinis, and blue corn and packed my little Nissan hatchback with them, driving it into the school parking lot and giving it out to the other teachers. They oohed and aahed, joking that they knew what I’d done with my summer. Teaching during the week, I continued to work at Stan’s on the weekends. I found that the experience with Stan and the anticivilization Dixon crew blended easily into my teaching. I was no longer the Ivy League expert here to impart knowledge; I was student to these young Native Americans.
Continues in the next Texture blog....

Beyond the Russian Grain Ban—Stan Crawford’s Garlic Farm (Part I)

Is there a better way?

Russia, crippled by intense drought that has withered millions of acres of Russian wheat, moved today to ban exports of its grain. This is a fifth of the world’s market, and comes at a time when grain prices are already up 90%.

This dangerous mix of global warming (this is Russia’s worst heat wave since record-keeping started there 130 years back), the precariousness of chemical-industrial agriculture, and the fickleness of world trade flows got me thinking, once again: Is there a better way?

There is. It’s bioregional production. Less fossil fuel intensive, closer to market, organic and healthy, and supporting small farmers. We could talk all day about the “wildcrafters” I discuss in Twelve by Twelve, the permaculturalists, the thousands of people beginning to craft their livlihoods around respect for nature. But it’s more vivid to talk about a single person with a different vision. That person is Stan Crawford.

If the flattening world of corporate-led globalization sometimes sounds like really bad Musak turned up high, Stanley Crawford sounds like John Coltrane playing to a room full of friends.

I was twenty-four when I first met Stan, and when I looked up in to his clear blue eyes I could practically hear “A Love Supreme” playing in the background — bouncing off the mesas behind his adobe house, out of his El Bosque Small Farm garlic fields, and off the tip of the phallic rock pillar beside them that he jokingly called Camel Cock (a wordplay on the camel-shaped Camel Rock up the road toward Santa Fe). There he was, gray-bearded and six foot three, esteemed author of Mayordomo, Petroleum Man, and the best-selling A Garlic Testament—in a pair of dirty overalls with a hoe in his hands. I followed him out into a field, to weed some rows, in silence, the cool winds coming off the Sangre de Cristos, the gurgle of the river running in front of the field.

Stan Crawford, New Mexico organic farmer

Stan paid me six dollars an hour to work with him, two days a week. He first taught me the word “permaculture” and its basic techniques, and I applied those techniques the other five days on my own back-forty, a sprawling piece of land on the Rio Grande with a small vineyard, just a twenty-minute bike ride from Stan’s. I’d worked out a kind of sharecropper’s arrangement with the vineyard’s absentee owner. I had his singlewide trailer and an acre on which to farm my own blue corn and squash; he got a third of my crop plus two days of my time tending his vineyard.

I’d arranged both the vineyard-sitting and garlic-mentorship through the Northern New Mexico Organic Farmers Association. I was ecstatic. Never before had I cozied up this close to the earth. After the suburban Long Island childhood and college in a big East Coast city, I’d come to Santa Fe to teach seventh-grade gifted-and-talented students at a Native American boarding school. But I was again in a city. Now I was bathing in the Rio Grande each morning before planting blue corn, tomatoes, quinoa, amaranth, and nearly two dozen other native and exotic food crops under a full moon, just as my Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo farmer-neighbors did to ensure a strong harvest in fall.
After my day spent planting, night fell. My hands were calloused from the shovel and hoe, my muscles sore and spent. The full moon illuminated the empty spaces that would become my blue corn, intercropped with beans (they pole on the corn) and squash (ground cover that suppresses weeds), and my contoured vegetable and herb beds. Permaculture, as I was learning from Stan, likes natural curves instead of straight lines, intensive planting, and mixing crops intelligently, such as fruit-, nut-, and hardwood-trees. I’d put the theory into the ground, and now, under the moonlight, I just saw a blank page, an expanse of moist earth.

Stan inspired me. He’d found a playful balance in life between laboring in the open air for seven months and writing in his adobe studio for the other five. He and his Australian wife Rosemary (their two children were already through college) had purchased their acres in the late sixties, built their beautiful house brick by adobe brick by themselves, and lived, without bosses or time clocks, in creative freedom, largely outside the system.

People in the area labored with the earth and then played. Saturday nights, everyone gathered at a local tavern for an exchange of organic pest-control tips and off-color jokes and for dancing to bluegrass and indie rock. Rural Northern New Mexico couldn’t be farther from the tenured world of my parents, from the East Coast establishment. Dancing manically around me were farmers, winery owners, artists, writers, silver and turquoise jewelers, small-town teachers, and yoga instructors. “What do you do?” I asked one guy. His reply: “Water in summer, snow in winter,” referring to kayak and ski instructing.
I’d just read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and felt some of that bohemian, spontaneous energy explode as the nights stretched on at the Foxtrot. More than dropout beatniks, Dixon’s folks were cooperating with nature rather than opposing it, sculpting, growing food and wine, painting, teaching, and making a living, if barely.
Part II in the next Texture blog....

Hamlet’s Blackberry

Have you ever monitored your Twitter feed while you were in the middle of Facebooking— only to be distracted by the ping of an incoming email?  In this digital age, do you ever feel too connected?
I’m in the middle of a new book called Hamlet’s Blackberry, which seeks to teach us how to connect with wisdom.  I came across it partly because the author and I share the same name. The book looks to history for precedents into how we can reduce some of our information age anxiety.


Take Socrates. He stressed out over “the very latest communications technology, written language based on an alphabet.” Socrates thought that writing things down would make people kind of stupid, because “they wouldn’t feel the need to ‘remember it from the inside, completely on their own.’” Worse yet, writing wouldn’t “allow ideas to flow freely and change in real time, the way they do in the mind during oral exchange.”

While Powers’ forays into history are interesting, we shouldn’t forget that the 21^st century is different because the changes are far more explosively exponential than ever before.

So what are we to do? Powers suggests this: disconnect sometimes. His family, for instance, takes an "Internet Sabbath" each weekend.

"We turn off the household modem,” he says,  “and we don't have smart phones, so therefore we can't get [in] our inboxes the whole weekend. We can't do Web surfing. We can still call, we can still text — but we're not really texting addicts. We really enter this other zone, and it's wonderful."

Do quick fixes like “internet sabbaths” go far enough to address what Powers calls “the conundrum of connectedness”? Or do we need a more truly transformational change, as, for example, the more radical wildcrafters in my new book Twelve by Twelve suggest?

Or is it not really a problem at all, as much of mainstream culture tells us? Take this, from this month’s Atlantic Monthly, on “The 14 ¾ Biggest Ideas of the Year”. One of the “biggest ideas” of 2010 is that boredom is extinct: “Thanks to Twitter, iPads, BlackBerrys, voice-activated in-dash navigation systems, and a hundred other technologies that offer distraction anywhere, anytime,” the piece argues, “boredom has loosened its grip on us at last—that once-crushing “weight” has become, for the most part, a memory. Even the worst blind dates don’t bore us now; we’re never more than a click away from freedom, from an instantaneous change of conversation partners.”

Declare Independence from Stuff

The fourth of July has come and gone, but each of us can continue to declare independence every day: independence from stuff.

Can our own personal economy and the Leisure Ethic come together as rebellion? I’m on Cape Cod now, rained in during a family vacation, and my mind is wandering back to my time in Jackie’s tiny 12 foot by 12 foot house. Her lifestyle is a twenty-first-century Boston Tea Party, but she hasn’t thrown just one product overboard; rather, she’s tossed the whole lot of planet-killing junk.

 

Today it’s not the British Empire colonizing us, but a pervasive corporate globalism. We resist through our vote, and I don’t mean for this political candidate or that, though that’s certainly part of it. We cast powerful votes for the kind of world we want to live in whenever we fish out a twenty or click BUY on the web. After Jackie’s tea party, here’s what remains on her permaculture ship: a tiny car that she runs on biodiesel; delicious local and organic food, 90 percent of it produced by herself or her neighbors; nourishing books on the shelf; fresh drinking water she collects herself at a local spring; solar flashlights (she doesn’t use disposable batteries for anything); a slight house, with building materials so minimal that the forests can live; and not a cent into federal war coffers.

She’s part of a larger rebellion that includes wildcrafters who are quietly shaping the U.S., including the slow food and farmers market movements, and the budding national renewable energy, natural foods, and national TV-turn-off subculture. There are intriguing trends like the Compact (groups of citizens who join together and buy nothing new for one year), national Buy Nothing Day (no purchases for a day); and Boulder Bucks (cities like Boulder, Colorado, who create a parallel currency that circulates only locally, therefore fostering the local economy). But even if no such efforts existed, each of us possesses an incredibly powerful tool of resistance: our household economy.

It’s been said that only little ideas need patents because the most transformative ideas are protected by public incredulity. Household economy as protest is one of those big ideas. Being at the 12 x 12 reminded me that I can examine with acute interest every single penny that goes out of our accounts. Is that penny helping create a vital farmers market or McWorld? A freeholder’s free chickens or Gold Kist’s beakless chickens? A simple elegance that coexists with Bolivia’s rainforests, or a decadence that fosters comfort but destroys a far greater beauty? Ideas like warrior presence, the Idle Majority, and the creative edge, I realized, can be crystallized in my life by becoming aware of personal economy’s radical effects — and changing the direction of pennies.

Jackie used her household economy as radical act. I have spent years exploring ways to weave a softer economy into my life, and her example pushed me further.

Declare independence from the corporate global economy, Jackie seemed to say. Doing so has two synergetic positive effects. First, by simplifying her life and working less, she creates less garbage on the planet. Second, the time and space she liberates nourishes her. We exchange something very precious for money: our life energy. Do we want to spend our time and energy earning money and contributing to a carbon-intensive economy, or fostering creative pursuits, the arts, and strengthening our relationships and community?

Influenced by these ideas, I began tracking every penny that went out of my life in an account book each evening, and I was amazed to find that some 30 percent of my expenses were on “gazingus pins” and things that, in the end, I decided weren’t worth the exchange of my life energy. I graphed it over the months, watching the line of expenses go down without any drop in the quality of my lifestyle. I paid off the debts and took a pair of scissors to my credit cards, never to live on credit again. I never made a bundle as a junior high school teacher at a Native American school, nor later as an aid worker, but I always “paid myself first” before paying the other bills, depositing 10 percent of every paycheck into investments. I taught myself financial planning for free on the helpful Motley Fool website. Over time, I found myself living well below my means with enough of a buffer to fund creativity sabbaticals, when I wrote my books.

Ironically, the more I treated my life energy as sacred and lived frugally, the more I was able to indulge; I could gush generously where it counted. I learned this during my decade among the world’s Idle Majority, the leisureologists of the Global South. Subsistence cultures have a forest instead of a supermarket; board games and guitars on stoops instead of minigolf and other paid entertainment. They aren’t materially rich, yet I found myself continually amazed by their generosity — in the form of a meal, a bed, and all the time in the world to be with you. In that spirit I support the Sierra Club and other worthy causes, especially those that spontaneously arise in my daily life. And I don’t cringe over a fifty-dollar bag of organic and local groceries because that’s the true cost of producing food in a healthy world. That same bag at Safeway is cheap because the costs to the environment — of pesticides, soil erosion, cultural erosion, and genetic modification of life forms — are not included in the price.

Einstein and the Oil Spill: A Three-Step Response— See, Be, Do

After my talk here in Montpelier, Vermont, a discussion broke out on a very big question: What in the world are we to do?

One audience member talked about feeling powerless. Her activism, she said, felt in vain. The life was sucked out of her. Indeed, do-gooding, however outwardly noble, tends to bring the do-gooder into the blight: the same level of consciousness that creates problems like the global ecological crisis. Hence, the archetypes of the burnt-out aid or social worker, the jaded inner city teacher, and the compromised activist. In my new book Twelve by Twelve, the off-grid physician (Dr. Jackie Benton, a pseudonym) suggests that there is something absolutely essential beneath the doing — and it’s the most important part. It has to do with something both Einstein and Jung said in different ways: the world’s problems can’t be solved at the same level of consciousness at which they were created.


Jackie’s philosophy is a unique approach to living authentically in today’s world. It’s not about a religion that forces you to put on blinders or accept rigid rituals; nor is it purely secular, in an overly analytical, Cartesian sense. I’ll synthesize her approach as: see, be, do.

First, see the problem. It could be anything: resentment toward a family member; a homeless woman by the curb; a government plan to fund a bigger nuclear bomb instead of better schools; stinky crude washing up in your local marsh. Often we look away — we’re busy earning a living, going to the ballgame, or depressed. But this is a core error. Every one of these so-called problems is there to teach us. Either we face it, and grow toward that higher level of consciousness, or it comes back again and again, in one form or another.

You’ve garnered the courage to see the problem. But it’s not yet time to act. First, be. This is both the simplest and hardest part: going to that solitary place of I discovered in the deepest part of the woods beyond the 12x12. Some people call this place God, but you can call it intuition, or the “still small voice” (Gandhi), or grace, or simply presence. The words don’t matter. They are merely signposts, suggesting something that you either understand through direct experience or barely at all. For example, imagine you’d never tasted honey. We could talk for days about “honey” with no real comprehension, but one taste of it would instantly tell you much more about it. When we find a way — be it meditation, music, prayer, your child’s eyes, a shooting star, it doesn’t matter what it is — to become present, we can look at problems with fearless clarity.

The final step — do — is then as natural as drawing breath. You hand the homeless woman a sandwich; forgive your loved one whatever supposed injury they’ve done to you; join a peace study group to confront the nuclear issue with others in your community; put solar panels on your home to use less fossil fuels. Or take one of a million other actions, based in what I’ve come to call warrior presence.

In twenty years of meditation and spiritual search I’ve noticed that the people who really “get it” in the sense of beautifully blending inner peace with compassionate action have something in common. It doesn’t seem to matter whether they are Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Catholic, or born-again-pagan. They have warrior presence. In other words, they face larger problems just as they face their personal problems — as Einstein and Jung suggest we do — on a different level of consciousness than the one at which the problems were created. Instead of allowing the negative forces of a flattening world to flatten them, those with warrior presence maintain beauty and control in their interior space, through being fully present in the moment.

Treehouses

As I’ve been touring the country for Twelve by Twelve, I keep meeting other people doing fascinating things with eco-architecture.

One is treehouses. Yes, you heard right. One of my cousins lived in one for a long while out in Oregon. And they can be quite luxurious. Here are some photos of swanky treehouses from today’s Daily Green

If that doesn’t do it for you, how about floating homes? Or straw homes, shipping container homes, green modular homes, or floating houses. What about natural swimming pools that don’t a lot of rubber and chlorine? Or some awe inspiring new green homes?

Check them out