The Tapestry Institute Store is now open for business!

This holiday season, buy a gift that will not only make a friend or family member happy, but will also benefit Tapestry Institute. We will be adding gifts as the season progresses. Currently, we have examples of wonderful artwork by Carol Francisco that she is now offering for sale at her Earth Mosaics Store at Zazzle.com. Come visit the Tapestry Institute Store today to learn more. And send the links to your friends, colleagues, and family members!

Wildfire Support Pages

As the wildfires continue to burn in California, Tapestry Institute has posted Wildfire Support pages on our website. Please feel free to email, post and tell people about these webpages. We know what it's like to experience a wildfire and to live with the aftermath. Our prayers and thoughts go out to everyone in California right now. We hope that our pages will help you now and in the coming days and months.

Tapestry Institute article about the horse-human relationship

As you may know, Tapestry Institute has been doing groundbreaking research into the different ways we know, learn about, and respond to the horse-human relationship. You can learn about some of the exciting issues we have been exploring by reading “Ancient Roots of Relationship,” a free, online article written by Dawn Adams, Ph.D. and myself that has just been posted at the new website Equesse.net. Equesse is a new website and magazine devoted to the special relationship between women and horses. To read the article, simply go to http://www.equesse.net and register (registration is free). Log in to the site and go to the “Life” section, where you will find the article.

Please feel free to repost this entry or send it as an email to people who you think may be interested in the article. To learn more about the work that we do, please visit our website at http://www.tapestryinstitute.org .

Urgent Plea For Help

Greetings from Tapestry Institute!

I know that you care about Tapestry's mission and work of reconnecting people with the earth. We need your help. As you may know, the last two years have been quite tumultuous for Tapestry. The catastrophic wildfire, coupled with the loss of our ranch in Nebraska and relocation to New Mexico, could easily have spelled the end of our organization. Instead, it provided a powerful impetus for our work.

Since relocating to New Mexico, we have been working on the following projects:
-- A book about wildfire, written from within Indigenous worldview, that both shares our experience in Nebraska and provides individuals with important information about wildfire;
-- The Digital Library of Indigenous Science Resources (www.dlisr.org) has begun to get a site redesign, and we are seeking partners and supporters to expand the database of resources;
-- The Voice of the Horse Project is moving forward as we have begun to analyze the results of the horse-human relationship survey and to finish our research for the book, which will include information from the Voice of the Horse Conference (held in summer 2007). In addition, Dawn Adams, Ph.D., and Joanne L. Belasco, Esq., have written several articles for publication in major equine magazines concerning our research into the horse-human relationship;
-- Carol L. Francisco, Ph.D., has begun exciting research on the different ways we know about and experience spirituality;
-- Carol has been photographing nature in New Mexico and using the photographs to create complex digital collages; and
-- We have redesigned our website (www.tapestryinstitute.org), making it easier for first-time visitors to navigate, while retaining vital information on such topics as ways of knowing, Indigenous worldview, Indigenous science, and tornadoes.

While all of this work is very exciting, we have encountered two unexpected - and unrelated - hurdles that we cannot get over without your help:
-- We must move to a new location in New Mexico by August 31; and
-- One of our computers and our external hard drive have both crashed. We already replaced one computer earlier this year and need to have the other one up and running so that we can submit grant applications to support our work.

To overcome these hurdles, all we need to raise is $7000. We know these are difficult financial times, and we would not ask for donations now if we did not absolutely need them to keep our work alive. We have not put out a call for donations since our relocation, but now we are pressed to the mat and must ask for help. All we need are 70 people who make a $100.00 donation; or 100 people who make a $70.00 donation; or 1000 people who make a $7.00 donation. Can you help us with a donation? Any amount that you can send to us will help us reach our goal by August 31. Can you ask your colleagues, friends, and family to help? Ask 10 of them for $10 each, and you have $100 right there! All donations are tax-deductible. Because of the urgency of our need, we are asking people to make donations via Paypal, if they are able. Just go to www.paypal.com and enter the email address jo@tapestryinstitute.org as the recipient. You will receive a receipt within a day of your donation. If you'd like to send a check or money order, please make it out to "Tapestry Institute," and send it to Tapestry Institute, Hc 34 Box 2c, Sapello, NM 87745. Please feel free to send this email to anyone whom you think might be able to help us out right now.

Thank you for any amount of money that you can donate to us, and thank you for spreading the word of our need. We would not be able to weather the storms that have buffeted us lately if it were not for the wonderful support of people like you!

Science, Hunger, and Oil

The mix of politics and science has been troubled throughout the Bush Administration tenure, and groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists have worked with courage and diligence to prevent misappropriation, misrepresentation, censorship, and outright hijacking of scientific works by people determined to bend scientific data to their own political agendas. So it was with real anger that I read the guest editorial in the April 25 issue of the journal Science I got in the mail today.

Dr. Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State and the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, is a plant geneticist who specializes in genetic engineering. She writes, in an editorial designed to introduce a special issue of Science on plant genomics, about the existence of "perfect storm" conditions in the work of feeding the world's hungry. In this editorial, she writes: "Last December, the New York Times quoted a top United Nations food and agriculture official as saying that 'in an unforeseen and unprecedented shift, the world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to historic levels.' Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program, was quoted as saying: 'We're concerned that we are facing the perfect storm for the world's hungry.' She said that poor people were being 'priced out of the food market.' In the months since, there have been food riots in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and Central and South America."

In the lead paragraph to this editorial, Fedoroff had said that "More people, rising affluence, and expanding biofuels programs are rapidly pushing up the prices of grain and edible oil." Yet, when she finishes telling us about the honestly terrifying increase in food shortages and the food riots already breaking out as a result, she asks, "How did this happen?" and takes off in an entirely different direction: "Genetically modified (GM) cotton and corn with built-in protection from boring insects, and herbicide-resistant soybeans, have been adopted very rapidly in some countries, particularly the United States and Canada, increasing yields and decreasing the use of pesticides and herbicides. But despite a quarter-century's experience and a billion acres of GM crops grown worldwide, there are many nations that remain adamantly opposed to food from plants modified by molecular techniques. Others hesitate to adopt them for fear of losing markets in nations that reject GM technology."

I got to this point in the editorial and had to shake my head and double-check my new tri-focals. Had she said what I thought she said? Had this scientist who's in a position as science advisor to The U.S. Secretary of State actually blamed the world's hungry for their own problem? Had she said their problem was that they were afraid of genetically engineered foods (and non-foods like cotton?), so they were not making use of the foods (and fibers?) that had been so beautifully prepared for them by U.S. geneticists? And had she really implied that "despite" all the evidence, these apparently foolish souls were starving themselves because of their own ignorance?

Yeah, I think so. I really, with horror, think that's exactly what she did.

What happened to her lead statement that "expanding biofuels programs are rapidly pushing up the prices of grain and edible oil"? I sat there looking at the contradiction between the two statements she'd made in different parts of a single editorial, and felt like I'd been sucker-punched. You know, you want to believe that a good scientist is not going to play politics that way -- to use something like a brewing disaster in mass starvation to play a card for big agribusiness and its efforts to market GM (genetically-modified) seeds and related agricultural products to small farmers and mass markets.

See, you need to know (if you don't, and you might) that right now the small farmers of the world are the ones who still save their own seeds and replant them the next year. Small farms are in fact the repository of most of the world's crop biodiversity. But not if they're forced to grow genetically-modified monoculture (cloned) plants in the name of "feed your own selves, dummies." And this is apparently the bottom line on the whole editorial. The articles in the special issue are typical science: here's what we did and this is how it came out. The politics, and the move of big agribusiness agendas, is right here in the editorial.

There are well-known and exceedingly relevant facts and figures about crop biodiversity I won't go into there, that are nevertheless vitally important to this issue. There are equally well-documented and important publications on the relationship between small farms and big agribusiness on one hand, and local economics and politics in Third-World Nations on the other -- and I'm not going to go into those now either. Instead, I want to come back to Dr. Fedoroff's statements and simply rip off the trappings of "humanitarian science" with which she's wrapped herself in order to use starvation to serve the purposes of someone in our country who's got a political agenda rather than a scientific one. And I'm going to do it by showing you the unethical way in which she used the name and words of an important non-U.S. political and humanitarian authority to apparently support the argument and agenda she put forth in the editorial.

Look. She started this whole editorial by quoting Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program. She even used Ms. Sheeran's "perfect storm" reference to craft the title of her own editorial. And by the placement of Sheeran's quotes and statements, she implies that the United Nations in general, the World Food Program in specific, and all the legions of humanitarians out there trying to literally keep children from starving to death are also shaking their heads, saying, "tsk, tsk, If only these foolish uneducated people would use the GM crops we made for them, then they wouldn't be starving. What we have to do to solve the problem is get a new Green Revolution of genetically-modified food crops out to the starving masses."

And that, more than anything else, is what made me so furious I had to write this.

It doesn't take much to look up public speeches and statements made by Josette Sheeran. Even if Fedoroff had only seen the words published in the Times, she could have easily done the research to find out more for herself. The website for the U.N. World Food Program has them online as downloadable PDFs. When you read her most recent (April 18) speech (“The New Face of Hunger”; Keynote address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC), you will discover that Sheeran talks about the impact of war on delivering food through pipelines to starving people, and the courage of the truck drivers who die doing it. She talks about the world's poorest people being unable to afford seed and fertilizer -- basic seed, and basic fertilizer -- to plant at the very time that they most need to plant in order to simply survive. And you will read cogent, solid, well-supported statements that summarize the five factors most responsible for the current crisis in food world-wide at this time:
• the economic boom in some parts of the developing world, that has caused people in some "emerging economies, including in China, India, Brazil and more than ten growth leaders in Africa" to increase the amounts of meat and dairy products in their diets, thereby diverting grains from human consumption to less efficient livestock-then-human consumption;
• the price of oil: "as the head of WFP, I look to the price of oil every day to determine how much hunger there will be in the world. It has reached record highs this week at $115 a barrel. This drives up costs across the entire value chain of food production – from fertilizer, to diesel for tilling, planting and harvesting, to storage and shipping. High oil prices also make food a financially attractive input for industrial use."
• "global linking of food and fuel markets. As farmers all over the world know, advanced production techniques for biofuels and biodeisel, combined with the high price of oil make feedstock an increasingly attractive input for industrialized use. This is a global phenomenon, affecting markets for wheat, maize, sugar, oil seeds, cassava, palm oil and beyond."
• "increasingly severe weather. According to USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, the total number of disasters worldwide on average is now 400-500 a year, up from an average of 125 in the 1980s. This has affected WFP. In the 1980s, 80 percent of WFP’s work was developmental and 20 percent emergency. We have now reversed that rate – 80 percent of our work is emergency, often responding to natural disasters.
• "The dramatic increase in futures markets and hedging on agricultural products is increasing the price volatility and reactive policies are creating even tighter supplies by shutting down exports. Today, one third of the globe's wheat suppliers, have banned exports."

That's it. Do you see GM foods on that list anywhere? In fact, the final item listed is that a key problem is suppliers who shut down exports, not importers who turn up their noses at genetically-modified foods or seeds. And, lest you think (as I wondered, and so was careful to search for) that the GM-foods concern is somehow hidden in Sheeran's agenda somewhere (maybe in the catastrophic loss of crops to natural disaster?), she had this to say at the end of her speech: "Defeating hunger is achievable; it requires no new scientific breakthrough. We know how to do it."

That's most definitely not what Fedoroff says in her editorial. Beneath the banner of Sheeran's own words, co-opting the tragic consequences of rising oil prices, the use of grains as biofuels and for industry, and increasingly violent weather powered by global warming, Fedoroff had the nerve to say the solution to the world's hunger problem is worldwide support for the distribution and use of genetically-engineered crop plants: "A new Green Revolution demands a global commitment to creating a modern agricultural infrastructure everywhere, adequate investment in training and modern laboratory facilities, and progress toward simplified regulatory approaches that are responsive to accumulating evidence of safety. Do we have the will and the wisdom to make it happen?"

"Simplified regulatory approaches that are responsive to accumulating evidence of safety." That's what she said. The government wants to use the crisis of world hunger to lower regulations on genetically-modified crops and literally shove them down the throats of people everywhere. And what about the fact that these people could eat the corn that's being sent to make plastics or ethanol? Ahem. What about the fact that the world's hungry could eat the crops being used to make fuels and plastics as oil supplies dwindle? What about the fact that they could afford the crops being sent to them if the prices hadn't been driven up by lowered availability due to diversion of grains to fuel and industry? The solution isn't genetically-engineered foods and it isn't using a world crisis of starving children to force countries that have so far resisted U.S. agribusiness pressures to give up their resistance. The solution lies in places our current administration does not want to discuss or even consider:

1. We have to reduce our use of oil.
a. Reduce demand, prices go down -- which means the poor will be better able to afford gas for their tractors, fertilizers for their fields, and transportation costs to distribute foodstuffs to their communities.
b. Reduce demand, and we won't need ethanol from grains -- so the corn and other grains can be consumed by human beings instead of by cars.
2. We have to pay attention to climate change, especially the rapidly increasing conditions of climatic instability and drought worldwide.
a. We need to reduce our use of all fossil fuels to cut down the amount of Carbon in our atmosphere.
b. We need to preserve the genetic diversity of the world's crops so that especially the poor will have "genes in the bank" for conditions we can't even foresee at this time.

The symbol of the U.N.'s World Food Program is a red cup. Such a cup is literally used to feed children in schools around the world, where the rice or other grain put in that cup is the only food that child receives to eat for that entire day. But studies have shown that most of the children who receive that small portion of food take part of it home -- to share with siblings too young to go to school, who have literally nothing to eat. It costs 25 cents to fill a red cup for a child. If you go to the website, you can do it.

Now let's go back, one last time, to the second sentence in that entire editorial. It reads: "More people, rising affluence, and expanding biofuels programs are rapidly pushing up the prices of grain and edible oil." Edible oil. I presume that you, like I, know what the other term is for this, right?

It's "burnable food." While millions starve.

Dr. Fedoroff, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Dawn Adrian Adams, Ph.D.

"Behavior Outside of Awareness"

Lately I've been watching videos of a great kobudo master named Shihan Mikio Nishiuchi. As I watch him do truly impressive lunges and blocks with the Okinawa-style fighting stick called a bo, my muscles tense in ways that mirror his movement even if I'm sitting in a chair at the time. This kind of thing happens fairly commonly: you watch a baseball game on TV and so feel like shagging balls with your kid, or you imagine throwing a discus and then do it exactly the way you imagined it. The link between physical activity as it is seen in the real world (witnessed) or in the mind's eye (imagination) has been established by researchers in everything from neurophysiology to sports psychology. But as I twitched and flinched while watching Shihan Nishiuchi last month, my mind turned to a research study I'd just read about in the journal Science.

Three scientists from Utrecht University in the Netherlands reported in "Preparing and Motivating Behavior Outside of Awareness" that they were able to demonstrate the presence of subliminal influence of even just the idea of physical activity on the speed and force of muscles. Notice both the words I italicized.
• It isn't just that someone watched a basketball game and it made them go play basketball, too. In that case, they would at least know that they'd seen people playing ball and it had made them think maybe they'd like to as well. But in this case, someone's body -- in fact, the bodies of 42 test subject someones -- responded to a cue of which they were not consciously aware. It was as if they went to a noisy bar where a basketball game was being played on a television that was not visible from their bar stool and not audible in the hum of conversation and clanking glassware -- and then, without realizing they'd heard a basketball game, decided, "Hey, I think I'll go shoot some hoops."
• More amazing, in this case it's as if what was on the bar's TV wasn't even a game, but merely a couple of commentators talking about jump shots and free throws, so that only the idea or concept of basketball, as words, was floating around in the person's subconscious to stimulate the going-out-and-playing of basketball.

OK, so now imagine that scenario: two game commentators are talking about basketball on a TV in a bar where you are sitting, and the TV is outside your vision and you can't consciously hear because of the noise in the bar. Could that situation really make you want to go play basketball? And if it did might it make you play better than you usually do? The research these guys at Utrecht did strongly suggest the answers are yes, and -- surprisingly -- yes.

Here's what they did in their study. They plopped someone down in front of a computer screen, gave him or her a gripper that measures how hard you squeeze it, and told them to squeeze it as hard as they could when they saw the word "squeeze" appear on their screen, then let go when the word vanished. And then they recorded what happened: Squish, release, wait. Squish, release, wait.

It takes a moment for a person's body to respond when you decide to move; there's a tiny lag time that can be important if you're trying to catch a cup that's slipping out of your fingers, for instance. Then, once your body responds, it can respond in an all-holds-barred kind of way, a lackadaisical "oh what the heck" kind of way, or any sort of way in between. Someone in the Dutch study with great reflexes and really strong hand and forearm muscles would have a shorter lag time after seeing the word "squeeze" and they would probably squish the daylights out of the gripper handle. So if you looked at a plot of their response (hypothetical in this case, just to show you how it works), it would be something like this:




The blue line shows you the reading on the squeeze-measuring thing after the word "squeeze" shows up on the screen in front of Mr. or Ms. Atlas (I was going to write "Mr. or Ms. Universe" because Mr. Universe is a bodybuilder type who would probably pride himself on being able to bust the gripper thingie in under a microsecond flat. But then I realized Ms. Universe (is there a "Ms." U?) is, well, something entirely different. Which is food for thought of a whole different nature…). At 0 (zero) seconds of time, when the experiment begins, s/he's not squeezing the gripper yet and the word's not on the screen yet. That's the point in the lower left corner of the graph where everything is zero (0). As time begins to tick past and the word "squeeze" shows up, M/M Atlas squishes the gripper, which automatically measures how hard s/he squeezes it and therefore how strongly or fully his/her muscle fibers are responding to the command to "squeeze." So in very short order, the gripper registers that about 40 Newtons of force are being exerted by those muscles. (A Newton is the amount of force required to grab a little matchbox car weighing about half a pound -- ok, so not such a little matchbox car at that -- and shove it hard enough that it accelerates at about 3 feet per second per second. Go shove a big apple across the floor and you'll get the general idea. Two extra points if you can figure out why they named this unit a "Newton". And if your mind wandered automatically to cookies during this paragraph, we are no doubt related.)

So where was I? Oh yes, the graph. You will see on the graph that after the initial burst of power, the strength of the person's grip actually goes down a little, but steadily. That's not intentional, but just has to do with the way muscle fibers work. Anyway, then at the end the word "squeeze" goes off the screen and -- again with a bit of lag time, during which period the person's muscles start relaxing (as you can see by the precipitous drop in force) -- the person lets go and the force reading on the grip drops to zero again.

Now consider, just so you can see how phenomenal the results are that I'm going to share with you in a moment, what this grip might look like for someone who really doesn't care much about the experiment and furthermore wants to go have lunch instead of squeeze a little gripper thingie in a laboratory. That person's graph of hand-force is in red on this chart (where the blue one is that of M/M Atlas from before, so you can compare them):




Notice it took longer for Mr./Ms. I'd-Really-Rather-Be-Eating-Lunch to notice the screen says "Squeeze" and to care enough to respond. And he/she doesn't give it much of a go, so the amount of force they exert is never as high as it is for M/M Atlas (who is trying to break the machine so s/he has boasting privileges in the gym).

Now I can show you what Drs. Aarts, Custers, and Marien did. Their 42 testees were paying attention, trying their best, but normal people rather than career weight-lifters. The Dutch scientists sometimes did the experiment exactly as we've just described it: "squeeze when the word appears on the screen and stop when it vanishes." But sometimes they also put a word on the screen that relates to the effort of squeezing, words like "exert" or "vigorous." And sometimes they also put words on the screeen that have positive or pleasant "reward" connotations, words like "good" or "pleasant." Mind you, the screen was set up so that there were various randomized words present no matter what was going on -- the visual equivalent of the noise in the bar with the TV I mentioned earlier. But I'm not going to go into all that. The point is, sometimes there were words related to squeezing itself, as an effort, simply present to the subconscious mind of the person doing the squeezing. And sometimes, in addition, there were positive rewarding-type words present as well, again for perusal by the subconscious mind. The only thing the conscious mind registered was the instructional word "squeeze" when it appeared and then disappeared. And here are the results.




The black line shows you what happened when these normal people just normally squeezed the gripper, with normal kinds of thoughts in their conscious and subconscious minds. You see the normal lag time it took them to generate full gripping power, the peak at about 35 Newtons, the slow diminishing of grip strength after the peak, and then the drop after "squeeze" left the screen and they let go. Now look at the blue line and the red line.

The blue line shows you what happened when people were "primed" first -- when they were shown, subliminally, a word relating to grip strength like "exert". Notice, they were not seeing people grabbing things or a movie of a gripping hand with tendons standing up with effort; nor were they being given words in a way they were consciously aware of. No one said, "Listen here, Hans: exert yourself." No. But they might as well have, because that's exactly what their bodies heard. The blue line shows a much faster response to the initial appearance of the word "squeeze" on the screen -- look how quickly the curve rises. The person who had been primed by the word "exert" (for example) was ready to go when "squeeze" showed up, so they went right at it with a fast grip. They squeezed harder, too -- up to 50 Newtons before their grip began to relax. The only difference between these people's efforts and the ones shown by the black line are that they'd been subliminally exposed to one of five effort-related words before "squeeze" showed up on-screen. As a result, they reacted more quickly and with greater strength.

Now look at the red line on the graph. The people whose responses are recorded by this line also saw a subliminal word related to exertion before "squeeze" showed up -- and, in addition, they saw a subliminal word like "good" or "pleasant" that has positive, reward-type connotations. That's all. Both words were subliminal, and both were merely the breath of an idea floating around this whole moment in time. Their response time was as fast as that of the blue-line people who'd been "primed" without the reward-added word, but their grips were much stronger: 70 Newtons of force -- twice the grip strength that was recorded during their "normal" efforts!

So what, you may ask? Well, so this. I mentioned the crowded, noisy bar at the beginning of this musing for a reason: it's a common environment these days. Whether you're waiting for a plane in an airport terminal or putting one of those paper thimbles of cream into a cup of "Continental Breakfast" coffee in a hotel lobby, there's likely a TV playing in the background. People are talking, elevators are dinging, ticket agents are announcing delays on the PA -- and people are shooting each other, making their carpets smell fresher, and accusing their spouses of infidelity in the background at the same time. It's a constant subliminal stimulus -- one might even say the sound track of modern life. What's in it, related to our bodies and the efforts in which we may engage? Do we receive stimuli that make us respond more quickly to things in our environments, with more force?

"Priming" a pump means running a small amount of already-on-hand water through it to create a path by which underground water can come up faster and more easily. If you want someone to squeeze a gripper, you can prime their gripping muscles by running certain words past their subconscious mind; it makes the response you want faster and stronger. That's why the scientists who did the Dutch study referred to the people who'd been given subliminal cues as "primed". But emotions, as well as physiological processes such as heart rate and muscle contraction, are controlled at a base level by our neuro-endocrine system of nerves and hormones, too. The research paper was about "Preparing and Motivating Behavior Outside of Awareness", where the "behavior" was squeezing a gripper device. It doesn't take much imagination to see how their results might be applied to a much wider range of human behaviors, including their attendant (physically connected-through-the-limbic-system) emotions.

What does it mean about the ways we react in our "normal" lives, given that we are being subliminally primed for all sorts of physiological and emotional responses, pretty much constantly? Do we tend to see someone sitting down next to us in the airplane as a hot date or a terrorist based on what happened to be playing on the lounge television before we boarded? Do we respond more strongly and insistently, either way, if that television program linked the landing of a hot date or apprehension of a terrorist with "good" or "pleasant" things?

Advertisers and the psychologists who work Hollywood audiences assume so, though with presumably less data. (That's why the Dutch study got published in Science, a prestigious journal with a lot of competition for space, is that the data are so solid.) But advertisers and Hollywood types probably think what a lot of us think: that when we're primed, we somehow know it. We find ourselves humming the commercial jingle in the cereal aisle, so at least it's not like we're being brain-washed. We know when we're responding to stimuli that pair up "good" with "Corn Flakes" or "Cheerios". Right? Wrong.

One of the most distressing parts of the Dutch study is the fact that "Participants were also asked to indicate how hard they tried to squeeze into the hand-grip. Crucially, no significant differences emerged. This finding indicates that the subliminal priming of the concept of exertion did not lead to an increase in conscious awareness of exerting effort, thus supporting the claim that differences in behavior are due to largely nonconscious mental processes." In other words, the testees thought they squeezed the gripper the same way, equally hard, every time. They not only didn't know they'd been primed differently at different times, they didn't know they'd responded any differently at different times. Unless someone measured their grip and told them the reading, they would not and did not know it was stronger on the occasions when it was. They figured it was all of it -- all of it -- "normal."

I leave it to you, what you want to do with this information. For myself, I think I'll go sit in the main dining room the next time, if the TV is on in the bar.

Dawn Adrian Adams, Ph.D.

A Letter to You: Hope for your Children

NOTE: This letter was written in response to someone’s despair over the coming oil crisis, the possible collapse of society because of that, and the affect all of it will have on the person’s children and their future.

I understand where you live at the moment. I want to be sure you know that what I am about to say to you is not offered from a position of ignorance or denial. I know exactly what you’re talking about and what you see when you talk about the impending oil crisis and possible collapse of western culture because of it.

The hope you seek does not lie in “solutions.” The idea that one should or can “find” “solutions” to “problems” is a deep expression of the worldview that one might call western or modern or just contemporary. The thing is, that’s the worldview that got us into this mess to begin with. You can’t get out of it by staying in it. Hope does not reside there. It resides elsewhere.

In other words, it’s not about giving up oil. It’s about giving up a worldview.

It’s not about running out of oil. It’s about running out of road. This road is the path that constitutes this “western” worldview: a way of thinking about and responding to the natural world that doesn’t go any farther. Just like oil doesn’t.

So what does goes farther? What road will lead your children into a future of hope and even joy? Be patient, as I try to explain it. Words don’t fit it as well as they fit things that lie on the “western” road, so you will have to reach out and feel for it between the lines, with your heart and your soul. But please try, for your childrens’ sake as well as your own. And please try not to jump to conclusions as you read what I say, of “Oh yes. I know exactly what you mean. I have been there and done that.” I know how easy it is for people to see the similarities in the two things and so stay exactly on the road that doesn’t go anywhere.

The road that leads to hope and joy is one of being instead of doing, of receiving instead of reaching, of relationship instead of removal.

Doing and being

The worldview you live in is active, focused on “doing.” Even people who practice yoga or meditation in this worldview “do” it as an active thing. Magazines like Yoga Journal tell people how to “go farther” with their yoga practice, how to reach out for the products and services that will help them “be better”. Notice this crucial thing: not help them “be”, but “be better.” There is a directionality there, a progression. It underwrites everything in western worldview, even the “being” practices of yoga and meditation. It turns them back into “doing” practices. I won’t talk about why this happens, as it’s not germaine to the issue of hope for your children. It’s enough for you to maybe see it.

In a world of “doing,” oil matters very much. You have to make things and you have to make them better and more inexpensively, in part so you can improve your life and/or your company’s profit margin and/or the earnings on the money you hope to retire on someday. And you can’t keep doing this if you don’t have the resources to support it. Contemporary society is living way beyond (WAY beyond) environmental carrying capacity because it’s propped it up (artificially inflated it) by oil - this is the issue. If you always have to be better, to improve, to get somewhere new, to find the next neat thing, then you have to keep moving. You can’t stop or sit still. Environmental carrying capacity is a physical phenomenon that says, “sit still.” Sure, there are mild undulations, but it’s like riding ocean swells out beyond the breakers. Western worldview doesn’t want to ride the swells. It wants to catch a breaking wave and ride it in to the shore. Directionality. It’s fun, but you run out of wave and get spit out on the beach, sooner or later. Oil isn’t going to carry us any more. The wave is grounding.

So what’s the alternative? Many people assume that there would be a retooling, an adjusting, a finding of other resources (such as nuclear power). They are talking about turning around and swimming back out to sea to find and catch and ride another breaker. The effort to swim out there takes the time they think of as the critical period we face now, that they’d like to get a bit of head start on. The problem, of course, is that whatever wave you find to ride in on (“you” in a general sense), it’s going to ground too. It’s the way of the world. And then you will have to find a new one. It’s built-in, in the worldview of doing that imparts directionality to everything. There isn’t a solution that will last forever, or even a hundred years. There are biological and physical laws that preclude it. Sooner or later, you have to decide: do you want to be on the land or be in the sea? And whichever you choose, then you realize you are going to simply be there now.

So how is “being” different? Imagine yourself bobbing up and down on those ocean swells we talked about. Just hour after hour. If what you’ve been doing is surfing, it might seem boring after a bit. It might feel like, “Well, what am I supposed to DO out here?” See, there is “doing” making a come-back. So let’s let it go and keep being. What then?

What happens is that you learn about living in the space around you. You hear things you didn’t hear before. You see things you didn’t see before. Your heart rate changes. Your blood pressure changes. And you begin to realize the sea in which you gently bob is alive in ways you never understood before. Your life changes forever in ways no one can describe to another. This is what meditation is really supposed to be, and is for some people.
When you live in “being”, not being able to “go somewhere” doesn’t matter at all. Not being able to “do it better” doesn’t matter either. It all changes. The need for oil is no longer there. It simply vanishes.

What do you need when you “be” in that gently swelling sea? You need enough warmth to keep you alive and comfortable. It turns out, that’s not very much at all. And it’s right at your fingertips.

Receiving and reaching

We are not marine animals, so what we need to stay alive isn’t available in the sea of swells. So now I want to move our imagination to shore, perhaps to a mountain habitat. Let us say now that you live there and no longer in the city. What are your real needs there? Clearly, you need wood to stay warm in the winter and on cold nights of other seasons. This is just one thing, to keep it simple. And you might say that this brings you back to oil — you need gasoline for driving to a place to buy firewood, or to run your chainsaw and splitter if you harvest wood from your own land. And you might say, if pressed to consider what western culture calls “sustainability”, that the only way to stay warm without oil is to spend an inordinate amount of time doing extremely heavy manual labor — the less oil, the more labor. And you would be right about that.

But let’s push it farther. How big is the area you have to heat? If it’s smaller, you need less wood. Do you know how big the dwellings were of Indigenous peoples around the world? Did you ever wonder why they weren’t larger? Do you see the answer to that? Now consider this: the cottonwood tree is sacred to Native American peoples where it lives. It drops limbs on a regular basis. It is giving humans firewood. Look at this closely: the cottonwood tree GIVES people firewood. Let that sit a moment.

Because cottonwoods grow quickly and drop limbs, people don’t want to have them around their homes. They drop limbs on things like roofs and break them. When we were located in Texas, a big ancient one dropped a gigantic limb on a playground and crushed a child. The city cut down most of the ancient cottonwoods along the river in that area after that. They are widely called “trash trees” by landscapers. BUT the very trait that people are decrying, that they see as “bad” is really the opposite. If you live where there are cottonwood trees, you don’t have to spend days and days cutting wood to heat your home and keep your children comfortable. You just wait and Cottonwood GIVES it to you. You gather it up from time to time, and there it is. All you need. And it’s even of a nature that if you bang one end of a limb on the ground, it will split into smaller sections for easier burning. Will it give you “enough” for the winter and for cooking through the summer? That depends on how big your heated area is, and on how many families are gathering the wood from the trees you depend on. THAT is what sustainability is about. It’s about living on what is GIVEN to you. The gift determines everything that follows — how big you live, and how densely. It is honorable and Right to receive a gift with thankfulness. Imagine the way you would respond to a child who, on receiving a check for $5000 from an aunt, said, “This won’t get me through Yale! I need more than this!”

Instead of receiving, people in western culture believe they must reach for and work for what they need to survive. It’s even written right into Genesis in the Christian Bible, on which western culture is based, that “from now on, you’ll have to work by the sweat of your brow to bring food from the earth.” No. The earth GIVES food. People talk about the “stock market” and “gains” and tithing 10% and so on. Investing. That comes from the way that the Earth GIVES us food. You plant seeds, and they grow (all by themselves; we only have it in our heads that we “have” to use fertilizers and pesticides and so on to “make” them grow, and it’s only required in a system of monoculture crop plants not adapted to local regions anyway). They return your initial “investment” (putting into the ground) 10 fold or 100 fold. What company stock does that? Then you take out 10% -- the best 10% of the new seeds you could eat — and you set them aside to plant next year. That’s what tithing comes from, the whole idea. Again, I am not going into the history of this but it’s there in scholarly works and oral tradition, both. The Land GIVES us what we need to live and live well. It’s up to us to be grateful and to receive it, and to stop saying, “but that’s not enough, because I want to do THIS instead.” We can’t do “this instead” unless we prop up the system with oil or uranium. So it’s a moot point, which is “better” to do. One works and has a future. One doesn’t. It’s that simple. Maybe you begin to see what I meant, that the “solution” doesn’t lie in “finding solutions.” It lies within, in how you see and respond to the world around you.

Relationship and removal

Think of the cottonwood tree that’s despised for breaking roofs or children’s bones, and of the Cottonwood that is thanked for freely gifting firewood to those who live with it. The first is a non-relationship that is about there being a gap between the human and the tree. The human does not understand the tree. It judges the tree. Judging requires (or possibly expresses) a state of removal and of distance. The second is about relationship. Relationship is the foundation of the way you live with the Cottonwood and with the soil and water and sun and rain and animals and other plants all around you. And it changes things. It means you are, in a sense, back in that bobbing sea of swells, realizing with quiet amaze that you are swimming in and part of a living thing — perhaps even one should write The Living Thing. Our ancestors knew this. It’s the reverence that informs all the world’s oldest religious traditions, that has been destroyed in some of them.

If you can think on these things and let them work around deep inside you — not seize “things you can do” to change — but let the very cells of your spirit rework and reform themselves, then something entirely new in your life will grow from it. And it will have hope. It will unroll a new road beneath you, and it will be one you can set your childrens’ feet upon and know that they can live and have joy in their own lives, and impart it to their own children in turn. But it requires real discernment and a release of your intellectual habits to do it, and then great courage to let it unfold when you feel how different it is, the way of living that grows from the seeds still preserved in your soul’s cells, there from a thousand generations ago. But it is where hope resides. It’s there for your children, if you can find it yourself first and then hold their hands as you walk them into a new world.

With genuine hope,

Dawn Adrian Adams (Choctaw), Ph.D.