The Green God and the Vehicular Vatican

I’ve been thinking about trees and trucks. Green Gods and big motorized vehicles. If I didn’t know that Satan was an invention of the Pope’s umpteenth century Madison Avenue ad firm… If I didn’t know that, I would call trucks Satan.

But I like Satan better than trucks. In the first place, Satan was modeled on a guy who I actually really love, who has variously been called the Green Man, Pan, the Horned God and some other stuff depending on whether you are Celtic or Sumerian. I like the Green God. It sums up most of what is important for me about the male divine. This is a pagan thing. Well, it’s a human thing, actually, to divide our gods into male ones and female ones. The system I use gives the female part all the usual stuff: Eternity, the source of Life. Basically the ability to go on forever, which might also be called continuous multiple orgasms of creation. 

I like this in a deity. 

Then her lover/son gets to be the principle of change, growth, death and rebirth. We don’t worry about the incest that might possibly be implied here. Not because we wrote memos to the bishops saying “Cover this up asap,” (Can you say, Ratzinger?) But because the male part is, like Jesus, born at winter solstice. Unlike Jesus, every year our young green man finds himself fucking by May 1 and dying old and decrepit by Halloween. (The Green God doesn’t mind profanity, for the record.) He is all men, all women, all humans that live and die. Plus, he has horns and moss in his beard, which I also like in a deity.

But I was talking about Satan.

You see the resemblance, though, right? The horns, in charge of sex and death… Whoops, I mean “sinful temptation and punishment.” Satan’s just a rebrand of the Green God. A way to bring the locals on board– in addition to the legions, that is.

(Have I mentioned that I can get on a little bit of a rant about the Roman Catholic Church? Ratzy in particular really sets me off.)

So. Instead of associating my feelings about trucks with Satan, which would be a bum rap for the guy with the horns, let’s go ahead and say “Vatican.” It’s really not about the individual. It’s the institution. The steamroller of power and incredible collection and consumption of resources that is not always but far too often used for bullshit purposes like killing bunnies and raping little boys.

There. I said it.

Thing is, the Fox loves trucks. All vehicles actually. Given how foamy I just was about the pope, it’s probably hard to believe that what I am about to tell you is true.

I am making peace with this. The trucks, I mean. I even have a little song about it. Want to hear it? Okay, sing along to Bonnie Raitt “I can’t make you love me if you don’t”

I can’t make you hate trucks if you don’t

I can’t make your heart loathe something it won’t

Dumptrucks will bang

Diggers devour

I can show you the books

Exclaim at flowers

But I can’t make you hate trucks if you don’t.

So, I’ve decided to use the principles of positive discipline and spell-casting, which are one and the same. (Put that in your Montessori pipe and smoke it.) Basically, it boils down to focusing on manifesting what you want. Today, this looked like going to the beach at Lincoln Park.

The parking lot is next to a wooded meadow. That’s where I put Alexis, our 11 year old semi-trashed minivan – friend Michele laughs every time she says “Ella drives A-Lexis.” And before you say anything, I get that I am part of the problem with my very own vehicle. Focus, please. We park next to the meadow. And we begin by saying “Hello” to Mr. Big Leaf Maple, a ginormous, mossy representative of the Green God touchable right now. He is in bloom, which is cool. Long, lime green boas of flowers swaying from gnarly 90ft branches, kind of like a Mr. Big Leaf Maple drag queen.

Then we walk down to the beach, and throw rocks and play with clam shells and the Fox ogles the biggest, baddest Vehicular Vatican around, because the Washington State Ferries dock right there.

The he chases crows. The other day he did this really cool thing. After asking me several times to make them hold still – “Mama!” Pointing at crow, “Down! Pet! Please!” ­  – he realized I was not going to make it happen for him. So, he walked towards a particularly glossy black character, put both hands straight out and said “Be Still!" Then he whispered, "Magic trick.” 

Maurice Sendak, anyone?

My heart just about exploded.

After the beach, we go back up the trail to Mr. Big Leaf. We sit on the mossy armchair his roots have created just for us and I get out the surprise, which is whatever dead crab, string of seaweed or cool rock I managed to sneak into my pocket down on the beach. This started out as a way to lure the Fox into running back to the tree because he weighs about as much as five bowling balls and I don’t want to carry his ass up the hill. But now it’s a little ritual. He sits in my lap, we talk about what we saw at the beach. I mention diving mergansers more than motorized boats and we soak up tree love and watch the grass daisies whiten the meadow like almost-May magic snow. I don’t know. I’m just not fighting the vehicle thing anymore. Ferries, trucks and buses. The arm of the Vehicle Vatican is long. But the reach of the tree love, the mossy, bossy smell of spring is right here, right now. This is older, wiser and stronger. This is magic that I don’t have to fight for. I just have to show him where the wild things are.

Bad Hair Color and Smoked Chickadees

Part One

The other night, I went to see mythologist Michael Meade give a talk, wherein he said that the job of every caring person is to go out and get into the “right kind of trouble.”

This made me think of bad hair color and smoked chickadees.

I was in church full of Vashon Island hippies, the bearded and the flowy. Maybe that’s why I had hair on my mind. Even though I’m pretty sure this wasn’t what Meade had in mind, I couldn’t help but think of the night I said to myself the words no woman should ever say:

“I’m not too drunk to color my own hair.”

I had been on the way to Safeway, to buy a box of hair color. I had been stalking that box for weeks. I wanted a dark, but distinctly red brown. I was sick of my light brown highlighted hair. I wanted it to be just the slightest bit edgy, you know, but still tolerable at work the next morning at my big presentation. Somehow be the up-and-coming PR girl who seems like she has a secret life as a punk rock jazz singer. As I turned the corner to walk up to Safeway, my friend Ward pulled up to the stoplight in his battered, scary-looking, robin’s egg blue van and said, “Hey, gorgeous. Whatcha doin’?” And I said “Having a pint with you.” And hopped in.

Well. One pint turned into three. But it was the height of summer. When he dropped me off that night, it was still light outside and I always find it hard to believe I’m drunk when there’s still daylight. So I said those fated words, bought my box of cherry cola hair color and went home to pour chemicals on my scalp.

When I woke up the next morning, Monday morning, I hoped it wasn’t as bad as I remembered, but really, it was worse. I had a halo of hot pink, saturating the roots of my hair from my scalp to out about two inches. Then the pink continued in splotches, long streaks and stripes that smeared through the rest of my hair. I looked like a flamingo that had gotten stuck in a superfund site. I decided to fake it. “A French twist,” I said to myself “can fix anything.”

I got five seconds into what was supposed to be my big moment at the firm. My description of my first big press conference: coverage in the Times, the P-I, the Daily Journal of Commerce. I’m talking above the fold. It was a room full of press whores and not one of those jerks was listening. They were staring, a little slack-jawed. I think they were waiting for me to explain. Then Tim, the labor union guy, raised his hand. “Yes, Tim?” I said. “What the hell happened to your hair?” he said.

But, I don’t think that this is the “right kind of trouble” Meade was talking about. I mean, I believe in playing a part. I believe in Halloween everyday as a proactive approach to creating the story of your life. I do in my better times. But, in my worse times, when the plug has fallen out of the wall and I don’t feel the current any more, when that happens, I do shit even stupider than saying those fateful, flamingo-hair-producing words at 8 o’clock a summer night. When I’m out of the rush and I can’t feel it anymore, I start multi-tasking and not paying attention and living too fast.

I start smoking chickadees.

I put the nest box up four years ago. It’s on the north side of a fence post, above the gate into the backyard. My book said it should be at least six feet off the ground, in partial sun. It’s basically a honeymoon timeshare for chickadees without the scam meeting: a box about 10” tall, maybe 4” wide and 5” deep. A round entry hole just larger than a quarter. You hang it up and it gives the chickadees a substitute for their ordinary habitat: a hole in a standing dead tree. I can see the box from my kitchen window. Looked down on it for two years. Nothing. February and March came and went without a single shopper. And then it happened. They started checking it out. Landed on the little roof. Started going in, coming back out again. Checking it out from all vantage points. Is this a safe place to raise my kids? I bet it never occurred to them to worry about the cement pad just inside the gate. Not until July. Barbecue season.

We were past nest-building by then. No more sticks and grass, no more flying a spring relay-race of homemaking. We were past the brooding phase, where one parent is on the nest at all times and the other is flying to the supermarket to buy ice cream and pickles, or, if she was anything like me, lemons and raw pineapple. Now, it was feeding time. There was at least one chick in there. Every time a parent left the screaming started: chirp!chirp!chirp!chirp!chirp! They both ran ragged, beaks full of bugs. I watched from my window. Greedy for all signs. I’d pinned my hopes to those chickadees. I’d left my PR job far behind, as disillusioned with environmental politics as I was with home hair color, but no less concerned about the future. Like a woman trying to get over a bad buzz cut, I retreated while things grew out. I stayed home, became a mother and tried to make up for not being politically active for mother nature by helping nature be a mother in my own garden. A nest box. Finally occupied! Hope in my own backyard. My own backyard, where, overtasking, strung out, sleepless me grilled two steaks on the barbie on the cement pad. The plume of smoke rose like a hot pink chemical flume, killing every bird in the nest.

High-Heeled Hope and Clean Cars

I got some good news this week. The last campaign I worked on, which passed cleaner auto emission standards for Washington state, that campaign just went national. Obama announced that he is adopting the Washington, Oregon and California standards for the country. This is good news, people. This makes me think of reggae legend Jimmy Cliff who breaks down politics in the following way: “Poli means people. And a tick is a bloodsucking parasite. So politics is the people’s ticks.”

 And I think Jimmy’s right some of the time. But today, and I hope tomorrow, I think he is wrong. I think we can have democracy and business and wildness and deep green ethics at the very same time. I didn’t always feel this way. Once upon a time, I was pretty firm about the divide. You can put your wild, perfect nature over here and your dirty, inherently evil technology over there. It’s the hobbits vs. Saruman’s tree-eating pits. Although Tolkien always maintained that that was not what he meant. And, anyway, I was never as bad as my ex-roommate Bob, who wouldn’t allow the use of electricity in our San Francisco flat. He wanted everything to be candlelit. But he also shaved off all the hair on his body and walked around moaning the lyrics to his band’s songs, along the lines of “I am walking backward down the spiral staircase of deaaaaaaaath.

So, Bob had other problems.

Anyway, today, I’m feeling pretty darnn giddy. Mix it up! We can do this! Combining the wild with industry can, no must be part of the solution. And there is good reason to hope that our deepest wildest selves, our very genetic programming, can combine with market forces to become a powerful and good thing. More reason than just the new emission standards, I mean. Take, for example, the fact that very bendy ankles made our female ape ancestors super sexy. Did you know that? It’s true. Major turn-on. Female apes with more extendable ankles could forage and leap from tree to tree that much better, provide better for their ape kiddies, Darwin, etc, Darwin. And look, we’ve still got that good old-fashioned feeling! Maybe I’ve just watched too many episodes of “Sex and the City,” but the fact that our ancient bendy ankle lust can become an industry that employs many, many makers of high-heeled shoes…

Well, that makes me downright optimistic.

Thanks, President Obama.! Way to go Clean Car team! More power to you, Manolo!

Pointing to "Yes."

Like so many other things, parenting turns out to be about tickling my own underbelly first, finding the hollow in my own dragon skin. A hollow like answering “What do you want?” instead of “What do you want to stop?”

Witness the poop scoop. I won’t get too detailed here. But owning dogs involves a certain amount of fecal maintenance and it kept building up because I was trying to get it done in the nap hours, which list of things to-do also included: shower, get dressed, put away laundry, feed self and write. And, if the night was nasty, take a nap. (This list reveals some of the awesome pajama-time perks of working at home. ) So, I decided that what I wanted, – see, I learn, – that what I wanted was to take care of these things with the Fox during the waking hours. So, I took the Fox down into the backyard one day with my own little positive discipline plan.

I figured I had reason to be optimistic. I was thinking of last fall when we gathered fallen chestnuts. He took to it like he had been waiting for it all his short life: he loved the hunting and the way I clapped when he found one and just being outside together.  His hand slipped the chestnuts into my pocket one by one like a little warm animals. 

I figured scooping would be almost the same thing. You probably see this coming.

Our back yard has a good set up, if poor upkeep. On the outside, fenced beds with fruit trees, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. In the middle, play chips, which are eminently scoopable. So, I say to the Fox, “Can you help mama find the poop?” He is about three feet closer to the target than I am. This has advantages and disadvantages. Advantages are: He sees stuff I don’t.  I’ve got implements with handles and a pail, so that’s all right. But here comes the disadvantage to him being closer than I. It sounds like this: 

“Good job, honey! Point, don’t touch. Point, don’t touch. Stop. Stop! StopstopSTOPSTOPSTOP!”

And then we go inside and wash hands.

See, he gets “Point.” And he gets “Touch.” He doesn’t get “Don’t”

Now, he does gets a tiny bit better at holding back, and I get a lot faster. (He also gets a violent, purgative stomach flu a couple days after, one time, when implementation of the plan had been pretty darn good, we got distracted by kicking the ball, and I missed a hand washing, and I forgot to tell his dad and found the two of them in the kitchen, eating with their hands. But, probably, this is a coincidence. Probably not a reason for mommy jail, as some of his other friends got sick the same week. Right?)

Anyway, this got me thinking. Right here, and so many times, “Don’t” is the problem. Well, "Don't" and bacteria. But I am trying to talk about Pointing to Yes. This idea is upheld by many old and new traditions, from  Christianity to the teachings of Joseph Campbell to Oprah’s followers of “The Secret.” It's not "Ask not and you shall receive not." It's not "Follow your distaste." It's the hard, hard work of being able to truthfully answer the question, What do you want? And for me, mothering is the hard, hard work of figuring out the "Yes." 

Plus handwashing.

At this point, let me just say for the record: I do believe in the power of an appropriate "No.” Parents who can’t say "No" are not employing positive discipline. They are limp. There is a difference, people.  But “No,” is a lousy compass for a child or a life, though it is a surprisingly easy one. I tried it for a few years, back when I was doing environmental work. “No” to everything from cars to computer parts. “No” to much of modern life.

Living with that kind of focus put the “mental” in environmental. 

So these days, I’m saying “Yes” all the time. “Yes” to city gardening for wildlife. “Yes” to local food. And since, with the Fox, “Yes” has to be physical, I’m asking the Fox to point to things all the time. When he sees a cigarette butt on the sidewalk, and he bends to touch it, I say, “Point with your finger and touch with your shoe.” And he does. When I am trying to dress him, and he’s got a yen for legos instead, I say, “Honey, can you point to your pants?”  And it works. He settles. Maybe you’ve caught me in an overly optimistic moment, but I believe that I am teaching him that he can choose his focus. He can live a "Yes" life.

 And isn’t that what makes happiness.? Isn’t that a life skill that a mama could be proud of?

(I’m still working on a "Yes" for the scooping. There is a metaphor in this, I know. )

So, dear friend, do you know? What do you want? What are you saying “yes” to?

City Mouse, Country Mouse

The truth is that I want to live in “the country.” I fantasize about it all the time. I believe in fantasizing; I think it is a powerful and positive tool for all kinds of things... But sometimes it’s also a little bit of a distraction from the fact that the Fox has taken to hollering “help me!” and then whispering “please!” over and over while I am trying to fix, for example, his rice and beans with cheddar and salsa and avocados. (Sounds good, right? I’m eating it too. All praise brown rice and black beans.) Anyway, it’s a little like trying to cook with a schizophrenic car alarm going off five feet away. So I picture us in a little cabin, way out in the woods and I fantasize:

How my dogs would be perfectly behaved because exhausted from running through endless waves of grain.

How time with the wild animals would make me peaceful crunchy earth mama, imparting to the Fox wisdom and empowerment each and every day.

How we would find all this for about $1,000 less a month than our current mortgage, allowing us to continue this one income family experiment while eating out from time to time. And eat rice and beans anyway, but only because we actually do love it.

And really, don’t it look pretty?

Thing is, there are no restaurants way out in the woods.

Also, M points out that you can’t just walk up to the pub or coffee shop in the country. So where the fuck will I go when my peaceful mama self hits the cabin fever wall and I need to just go be a woman in a bar?

You see what the problem is. So, we stay.

And, there is something to be said for staying. One of the wisest people I know, an amazing climate warrior priest named KC Golden told me once that so much of the climate problem comes from all of us moving around all the time. “Trees teach us to stay,” KC said.

But, if I am going to stay, I want animals around. I want trees and flowers. I want frogs.

Enter: Gardening for wildlife.

Look, I realize that I can’t solve all the environ-mental problems my little old self. But having the Fox has made it so important to know that I do something, every day, which makes things better. Something that, if everyone did it, would make things a lot better. Cities are part of the solution. And I say, what if cities were truly beautiful for us and for the beasts? What if that were possible?

And, actually, it’s happening already. I mean, I’ve been working on my own experiment here, including this nice little pond. I’ve got about 300 square feet of front yard that I’ve been cultivating for only a few years, and it is a wildlife condominium. If the hummingbirds and ground beetles (and even tanagers!) get any thicker on the ground, they are going to need a condo association agreement and next thing you know, it’s monthly meetings and consensus process and it’s all downhill from there.

But I mean, it’s happening on a bigger scale. Yesterday, I found out that the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) certified Alki beach, a neighborhood northwest of me, as a “Community Wildlife Habitat” just last fall. Here’s a quote from an NWF article:

"For animals that roam, contiguous yards and common areas that provide habitat help them survive and ultimately reproduce to maintain their numbers," says Roxanne Paul, who coordinates the Federation's habitat programs. For the humans who create those oases, the benefit is a close, everyday connection to animals they would otherwise have to seek out.

Hot damn. They did it. The Alki neighborhood made hundreds of yards and several public spaces wildlife welcome.

This gives me hope that I can be a country mouse and a city mouse.

Okay, I’d still have to exercise my own dogs. Okay, I still have to tell the Fox: “You can wait for your rice and beans in the kitchen quietly, or you can cool your heels in the living room” and deal with the ensuing tantrum. But let me tell you something: his favorite books these days? My field guides. I kid you not. We are spending bunches of time, looking at photos of dragonflies and dark-eyed juncos. And, we are looking out the window at our front yard, seeing the wild. And it’s just one yard. What if, instead of having to choose between all the perks of density – from pubs to transit – and the deep, soul fulfillment of living among the birds and the bees, what if we could have both? And what if it didn’t have to start with an election or a new policy? What if we could transform our cities into a place where the wild was welcome, one backyard at a time? Isn’t that a dream worth dreaming?

And isn’t that dream worth a toast? Say, at the local, walkable pub?

Resources:

Number one most and best resource: "Landscaping for Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest" by Russell Link. I love this book: it's got the wildlife photos that the Fox loves, plus plans for everything from which native plants attract birds and which common garden flowers attract butterflies to detailed plans for a wildlife pond. This book is the bomb, so much so, that you can click right through and get it your hot little self. Everyone should own it, in my opinion. 

Another great resource for us out here in WA: the Washington Native Plant Society.  Their site has lots of plant porn. But more importantly, it has the data on their upcoming sales: the central Puget Sound one is on May 8 in Bellevue and it is an AWESOME event and a great way to get hard to find native plants, cheap!

National Wildlife Federation Backyard Habitat Program gives you more on the four basics: Providing wildlife with food, water, shelter and a place to raise their young. As a mom, when you read that, doesn't it sound so reasonable? Hint: a wildlife pond, even a few inches deep, does all four.  But if that is not your idea of fun, don't despair. A native bush like mock orange provides seed and cover, plus an amazing perfume in oh, about three weeks from now. Throw in a bird bath and a thicket of beautiful roses and you are good. Refer back to resource one. Russell Link is your man, really.

Also, big fun for kids: Nest boxes. The Seattle Audubon Nature Center in Maple Leaf sells good ones. Russell Link (have I mentioned him, yet?) tells you where to put them to create the appropriate romantic conditions for each species. If you are so DIY, Link's book also has plans for building your own nest boxes. And Wild Birds Unlimited sells them on the Web.

And tell me what you think!

Three Reasons I Feel Hopeful

1. Health care reform has passed.

2. The Fox is now saying both “broken” and “sorry.”

3. I saw what looked like great sex in my front yard.

As I write this, a pair of crows is engaged in foreplay in my neighbor’s evergreen. And, this weekend, I saw a pair of ground beetles in the aforementioned act, (wasn't that what you were hoping for?) which was amazing for two reasons. One, the top beetle – I think it was the lady– had a huge scalloped wafer protruding from her shell. Glistening, if you will pardon the word.

If that was her clit, I want to be a lady ground beetle.

Second, ground beetles are a really good sign. See, I’ve got this little front yard experiment going. How much of the wild can I get into my city yard? I’m not talking blackberry brambles and mosquitoes, here. I’m talking tanagers and dragonflies – which eat a mother lode of mosquitoes, by the way. And ground beetles mean that I’m doing something right, that the invisible loom of life is threaded, that the weavers are at work, that we’re getting started on a really sexy-looking tapestry. Ground beetles mean that life is good here for the wild.

After all, it’s spring. It is time for foreplay and flowers. We’re on the light side now. As of Saturday, light is longer than dark, my friends, and I am hopeful. I am hopeful because today in the playground sand pit, my little 22-month-old future world peace leader bumped another boy and said “sorry” without being asked. I am hopeful because the richest country in the world has finally taken a step toward giving health care to the poor. I am hopeful because after ground beetles, who knows what kind of wild could be on it’s way, right now, into my front yard, my life?

Maybe this is a weird weaving of the personal and the political. But I believe in Gandhi’s “being the change, ” and I’m searching for a way to live that could work for me and the wild and the world. Really work, even though I am a worn-out mom. A way to live that breaks through the plastic isolation that life in the city can sometimes be.

A way to live that makes me feel like a post-coital lady ground beetle, full of the seeds of hope, building the web of life by my acts of pleasure.

So I offer this salute, to hope and the return of the light. Happy Equinox.

Just Say "No" to Oatmeal Air Hockey

I remember the first time M turned to me with the sweet phrase, “Someday, when we are parents…”

We were spending Thanksgiving weekend at a hippy, heaven-on-earth hot springs resort in the mountains of Oregon. But our non-parent asses had landed square in the midst of a “family weekend.” The kids outnumbered the adults about two to one, which was mostly okay. Except for the rat family. Since I used the word hippy in a positive light already, I feel free to invoke its dark twin now: this family was everything wrong with hippiness. Dirty, smelly and oblivious. Six kids under the age of ten who swarmed into the mess hall to create more noise and chaos than the other 150 people combined. A totally overwhelmed mom who made more threats than she had the bandwidth to carry out, a totally checked out father who was under the impression that being a dude was being a dad.

The aforementioned sweet phrase dropped from M’s lips after we watched Dude Dad finally notice that while breast-feeding, Mom couldn’t prevent the twins from playing air hockey with their oatmeal, her screaming from across the room notwithstanding. Did Dude Dad rise and intervene? Of course not. But he did call out to the oldest, who was, like dad, chilling across the room with his peeps. “Hey little dude, could you help out your mom?” To which little dude replied, “Sorry Dad. I’m not really feeling that vibe right now? So I think I’ll just mellow here.”

Un. Believable.

And M said, “When we are parents, there are going to be some Yeses and some No’s. And the No’s will mean No.”

Which is easier said than done. But, yes Virginia, aka Jocelyn, whose LOL rant/comment on my last post inspired this one, yes, it has to be done.

(btw: We both came home from that weekend with pink eye. Plus, our luggage got sprayed by a civet cat… I don’t know why M won’t go back there with me.)

Anyway. Back to the question at hand: which is how to not be that mom. That mom who never says no, or worse, never means it. I’m there, girl. But I don’t believe it's black and white. I think you push your kids to do the best they can and hopefully you’ve got enough sense not to take a toddler who can’t sit still (like mine) out to dinner, lock him in a high chair for half an hour and then put him in a timeout for throwing his french fries. I’ve seen that one too. Saying “No” is sometimes too easy.

What’s hard is knowing what “the best” is, and setting the bar high enough. What’s hard is setting it too high, and then punishing them for failing. What’s hard is motherhood, which is threading the needle all the time.

Look, I don’t mean to get wishy-washy here. I’ve been to the wedding with the baby who screamed through the whole thing. But I think it comes down to two things:

1. When you say “No,” mean it.
2. If you can’t say “No,” and your kid is being a pain in the ass, go home.

The rest is the poetry of setting expectations, and encouraging and teaching, and loving your kids into being their best.

The rest is your business.

Unless you blog about it.