EMPTY BOXES

Sometimes we don't realize how much something has changed until we look through someone else's eyes and discover we're seeing a different world.

I was recently at a presentation on racism at a conference. It was a setup. We were told we were racist because we had white skin. The speaker didn't know us. It wasn't that we were white, it was that she was focusing on a surface distinction that she (with reason) was paying attention to. Which may be what racism is. And sex-ism, and class-ism, and religion-ism, and culture-ism.

Those are all just symptoms, to me, of a culture that makes people insecure and needing to magnify small distinctions between themselves and others to feel in some way superior and thus secure. All those things vanish when we connect deeply with others and love, or are grated by, their way-bigger individual inner weirdnesses.

It's hard to reach out and connect with "different" people. I get real shy where I can't even say hello in their heart-language, or have some common culture. But it's also incredibly more interesting after we break through and get to know our real differentnesses and also the samenesses we share.

Interestingly, I don't seem to live much in that "ism" culture anymore. We may occupy the same space, but what is central to that culture is peripheral and insignificant in my world. I don't care that much about "outsides" or surfaces. What people wear, the color of their hair or skin; their religion or culture or class. What interests me, what I remember, is their energy, joys, passions, experiences and capabilities.

On the Tracks

There's a walk I like to take along the railroad tracks just on the edge of this small Oregon town where I find myself. Undistracted by traffic whizzing by, or the neighborhood rosebushes, I can walk and let my imagination picture what this landscape along the railroad will be like in six or eight years. The inevitable reality of James Howard Kuntsler's Long Emergency will be upon us. Here will be gardens resplendent with beds of bok choy and red-and-green lettuce; flowing over with flowers. People of all ages are tending the abundance now in high summer, weeding, harvesting, watering the crops and enjoying each others' company.

With diesel fuel at $16 a gallon, we can forget about strawberries from Chile in January; the notion of local food—trendy in 2007—will be the stark reality and these waste spaces along the tracks will all be gardens. And we will all be gardeners, mostly.

Nevermind if you are also a publisher, or technical person, or clerk…you will very likely also be a gardener, or you will buy your veggies directly from the person who grew them. You will have learned to enjoy seasonal food: lots of salad greens spring and fall, dig those root crops in winter [parsnips…yeah!]. In summer, stifle not your love for sweet corn. It will be gone in a few weeks.