Eucalyptus and Parrots and stuff

They're cutting down eucalyptus trees in California, the fragrant giants with the shreddy bark that yield those deodorizing shoots that populate people's bathrooms everywhere. Natives of Australia, they love it here. Native species are being crowded out.

Speaking of attractive invaders, I learned that there's some controversy about the two flocks of parrots living in the San Francisco area. Like the eucalyptus, the parrots are not native. The ones I found out about are the green ones with the red heads that were flying around on Fort Mason, near where I stayed. They originally came from Chile, caught wild and sold in the U.S. as pets. These feisty birds did not want to be pets. They either (a) escaped their cages, or (b) made life so miserable for their owners that the humans set them free. Now they live on Telegraph Hill and at Fort Mason, and in other scattered locations. Food and nesting sites are plentiful.

Are they displacing native species? The people who like them say no, but others say yes. Are they a more attractive version of the English sparrow -- sturdy and indefensible? We humans ourselves have certainly displaced a lot of native species. I saw the results of total logging of the redwood forests that once covered the hills of the Western edge of this part of North America. Great expanses of green pasture for dairy and beef cattle stretch out across the parts of Marin and Sonoma Counties I traveled through. The redwood has been totally defeated there, it would seem.

But here where I am staying now, in the Russian River valley, the redwoods are returning. Some of the little frame vacation houses in this neighborhood are set among younger redwood trees that tower over them. There's a feeling of strength about these trees. When I see them standing strong over the flimsy human habitations below, I sense their roots growing under the buildings to throw the little dead things off balance, trunks growing outward to push them aside, branches conspiring with the fog that rolls in from the coast to create a destructive dampness and shade. Of course, they can't win a war with humans. If they get too pushy, they'll be cut down again, unless there are enough humans that like them well enough to say they should be allowed their space.

I think we could be sharing more of "our" space with redwoods. I don't know what we should do about the wily eucalyptus invaders. I like the parrots, and I don't like English sparrows, but should it be a matter of like? I like the looks of purple loostrife, but I don't like what it does to New England wetlands. Should we be guided by who was there first? Or guilt about our own earlier negligent or destructive ways? This matter of a globalized ecosystem is not simple. For sure, we humans need to take more notice of our relationships with the other beings around us. We need to take more care of our place in the interconnected web of all existence. Easy to say, but not so easy to arrange.

UU Sunday Gatherings

Over the last three Sundays, I have visited three Unitarian Universalist congregations for their Sunday morning gatherings. All three were friendly and welcoming. At two of them, the minister was among those greeting us as we came in, and at the other, there was a team of welcomers who made sure newcomers were greeted, inquired about, and informed as to what was going on. Two had memberships in the upper two hundreds; one was in the mid-hundreds. One had a traditional UU building, dating from the 1960's and sited on a wooded suburban tract of land. One had bought and remodeled an old movie theatre from the days when "multiplex" meant two or three screening rooms (the seats were wonderfully comfortable!). The smaller one was meeting in a Masonic hall near the loosely defined downtown of the area it serves. The services differed in structure, offering varying amounts of music, participation by children, and speaking from the congregation. The "feel" of each was different: one energetic, one friendly, one contemplative, and in each, there was no doubt that this was a Unitarian Universalist gathering.

How did I know? The emphasis on human connection and openness to one another was one clue that began outside the sanctuary and continued all the way through. Two congregations had traditional sharing time; the other had people write their milestones into a book for the service leader to read. The use of silence as part of the service, a time when everyone could pray, meditate, invoke white light, or think their own thoughts in their own way, that was another clue. And the message in each case had a connection with what we could do in our lives, another way of telling we're UU. There were readings from many sources, references to but not total reliance upon the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that's a way to know we're UU. References to, but not total reliance upon the Principles and Purposes was another common thread.

I liked worshiping with the congregation that sang at every opportunity-- before the service, in hymns, and in response to everything: the offering, the sharing time, the children leaving, even the benediction had its own congregational song. I liked worshiping with the congregation that mostly kept silence, singing two very familiar hymns during the service and singing along with the show tune that ended the gathering. I liked worshiping with the congregation that sang more or less as my own congregation sings, three hymns and a familiar refrain as the children leave.

These were three gatherings for our kind of worship. There are UU gatherings that don't rise to the level of worship, and I am blessed not to have been part of any of those lately. For me, the key is to induce a kind of blending of our individual quests for meaning and our need to belong to a group. The singing together and the silence together, those things work well for me to bring that feeling of deep belonging. It's not just about the message. It's about being together, searching for meaning each in our own ways, somehow united in the searching and the finding.

Geography of Motion

Once I read that highways have a special aesthetic, required because they are places transforming themselves into other places. They need to be insulated from the normal, non-transforming places, the ones that just stay still and be themselves, because if viewed in terms of a non-moving aesthetic, highways are ugly, and if viewed in terms of the moving aesthetic, "normal" places are a confusing jumble that makes no sense. That seemed true.

For several days, I found myself living in a different kind of place transforming itself into different place, the complex hotels, restaurants, car rental facilities, and parking services that surrounds the Sea-Tac airport outside Seattle. I was there because I had things to do to the north and to the south, plus I was coming from the east, wanted a place I could find easily, and wanted easy access to the airport when it came time to leave. But there I was for several days, long enough to experience the place as itself.

There's this blob of activity in buildings and parking lots just outside the airport, which makes sense only in terms of coming and going. The hotels are clearly mostly places where people come in after a flight on their way to wherever they are "really" going, or where people come to pause for the night before getting on the plane. All of them are surrounded by extra parking lots for people who are leaving their cars during their absence. The hotels are interspersed with "park and fly" places and car rental agencies. The "better" hotels have their own restaurants, so the traveler need not leave the premises; hotels like the one where I stayed are content to offer an efficient shuttle service. Food facilities outside hotels seemed oriented more to the employees of the many travel-related operations than to travelers.

But here's what I found: I was on the edge of airport-related service activity, so by going out on foot, I could be strolling in a residential neighborhood, complete with a little lake and a lovely park, participating in a place that makes sense as place. By car, I visited the library and the Post Office, even the supermarket, and there they were, solid and fixed, belonging only to the place they inhabit, even though minutes away, there was this other place that made sense only in terms of the logic of air travel. To heighten the contrast, it was spring in the places that were not in motion, with green grass, daffodils, cherry trees, and other Northwestern things I don't recognize in bloom, while the traveling place was dominated by concrete and electric light, knowing no season.

Since I was there for a few days, I was grateful to be able to access the place that stays put. Since I was leaving on the plane, I was grateful to be able to access the place tranforming into other places. The transforming place is ugly in terms of the ways of the place that does not move. The stationary place makes no sense to the people who are engaged with the processes of the transforming place. They know no season, only movement. They need no library or post office or park. They might as well be two different worlds.

"My Name is Rachel Corrie"

It happened that I was in the Seattle area at the same time that the one-woman show, "My Name is Rachel Corrie" was opening. This is a play based on material drawn from the journals and emails of the young Olympia woman who died when she was run over by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003, just a few days before the start of the Iraq invasion. I saw it with my nephew Ben, who is a little older than Rachel would have been, but shares with her the experience of being a student at Evergreen College. He continues to live in Olympia, so her reminiscences were close to home for him. He said it was right on.

Apparently the show we saw was significantly different from the one that played in London and New York, tailored for the hometown audience, the ones who would understand the significance of salmon swimming through a creek in a culvert to return to their spawning places. Marya Sea Kaminski, the actress who played Rachel, took us from the breezy hipness of a student going to college in her hometown to the anguish of a partisan totally absorbed in the cause of justice for Palestinians. Although Rachel had always wanted to help change the world, she realized when she went to Palestine just how silly her concerns in the middle-class college student world had been. She loved the Palestinian families she got to know with the wonderful passion of youth. She was part of a peaceful protest against the destruction of homes along the border between Israeli and Palestinian areas. That is where she was killed, standing in front of the bulldozer to discourage it from razing the home of a family she knew.

Two advertisements appeared in the program, one sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and one by a coalition of Jewish groups led by the Anti-Defamation League. They wanted to remind us that people are dying because of Palestinian attacks and the borders need to be secured. They wanted us to know that Rachel worked with the International Solidarity Movement, and that ISM supports "armed resistance" against Israel. The ADL ad's text told us that "the ISM exploited Rachel's idealism by intentionally placing her in harm's way, encouraging her to stand in front of bullets and bulldozers."

Maybe so, but I don't think it excuses mowing her down with a giant Caterpillar earth mover.

What's going on over there? What's going on over here that people want to make it okay to murder people who are engaged in nonviolent protest? The Jewish Federation ad wanted us to believe that Rachel Corrie died "by accident". I don't think so.

Palestinian extremists are certainly not to be excused for their suicide bombings, their artillery attacks, and all the rest. The Israeli government is certainly not to be excused for squeezing the livelihoods of Palestinians with border closings, destruction of water supplies, and bulldozing of homes, fields, and orchards. How can the constant escalation of nastiness be brought to a close?

I have no answer. I know that there is a role for people who affirm peaceful means in the face of violence, people like Rachel Corrie, who will go there and show what it looks like, standing with the Israelis, and standing with the Palestinians. I am grateful she lived and sorry that she died. I hope the spirit of nonviolent action will continue to stir and grow in that hostile land.

Two Land Deals

I found myself in two very different places recently, places that shared stories about land deals, where wise reflection led to two very different solutions to the problems a blessing of abundance can create in families. One was in the Hudson River valley in New York, at Claremont, where the Livingston family is remembered, starting with their first settlement there in the 1600s. The other was in the little logging town of Montesano, Washington, where the founding families are remembered from just a few generations ago. There was an official docent to show us through the elegant home, now a museum, at Claremont. There was a descendant of the one of whom the story was told to show us around the little lake, the dam, the sites of the old houses, and the edges of the forest at the park in Montesano.

Robert Livingston, one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, had a huge estate in that part of New York, part by inheritance, and part by marriage. He was married to a remarkably resourceful woman who not only bore him ten children but also managed the estate while he was away doing public business. When their house was burned early on in the Revolutionary war, she managed to save herself and the children, hide the silver, and protect the library from the ravages of the British. Livingston was a believer in a natural aristocracy, not an inherited one, as befits a founder of a democratic nation. In those days, the expected thing for a landed family was that the oldest son would inherit the whole. That was not Robert Livingston's choice. Instead, on his death, he bequeathed each of his children an equal portion of the vast estate. They would all be rich, but much less rich than the eldest would have been under the old system. It was much more democratic. Indeed, in several generations, the wealth was completely dissipated. The last two members of his immediate lineage, two women, had different approaches to the disappearance of the old wealth: one married a rich man and the other went to work on Wall Street.

In Montesano, it was Gene's grandmother who came into ownership of the large tract of land with the lake and the dam when her husband died in an accident at work. She had borne fourteen children, and had to raise them, so she built an electric generating station at the dam site and operated it until quite late in her long life. In her will, she gave the large tract of land with its lake and dam over to the town as a park. She stipulated that there should be no making of money from it -- no logging, no more electricity generated, no selling of pieces of it--but that it should be used as a park. If the town failed in this, the land would revert to the family. The town did not have resources to develop the land as a park, but the State was willing to create a park there, leasing the land from the town. The land remains intact, and in an area where most of the timberland is clearcut on a regular basis, the forest grows in its own way. Gene's grandmother could not have divided her estate equally among her children without dividing that piece of land, so she gave it away. She clearly believed in fairness and in the value of keeping that parcel in one piece. Did she believe in a natural aristocracy, rather than an inherited one, as Livingston did? Her grandson Gene works in the woods, and her other grandchildren and great-grandchildren work at many occupations that keep things moving in that town and elsewhere.

Different families find different solutions to questions of fairness in inheritance. Seeing the same issues come up in such different contexts made me think that sometimes people can do the right thing, and that not all right things look the same.

Homeless in Olympia

Olympia Washington has homeless people. Or at least people who spend much of the day on the street. Since I had just come from the East Coast, I was up much earlier than normal people, so I found myself strolling in downtown before things really got started. As I waited for the light to change to cross the street to the marina, a man came up the sidewalk and stood next to me. He seemed a little bedraggled, and he seemed to be talking on a hands-free cell phone. As I waited on the curb next to him, it became clear that he was talking on a cell phone of the mind. I changed direction, thinking the marina would be more fun a little later. So I went to a coffee shop that's part of a fair-trade crafts shop called "Traditions". I was their first customer of the day. The next ones to come in were a couple, the woman pushing a walker loaded with things they needed to have with them. It was a nice walker, the kind with hand brakes and big wheels, with a seat for resting when you need to stop walking. They sat over coffee and talked quietly, counting over some change from their pockets. She wanted ice cream to settle her stomach and he got it for her. I left and continued my tour of downtown, spotting several more people in nooks and corners, looking inconspicuous.

Then later, I met with Art Vaeni, the minister of the Olympia UU Congregation, a New Hampshire native, who used to serve the Starr King UU Church in Plymouth. Something happened this winter, when the City Council decided that people needed to be off the sidewalks at night. A group organized in solidarity with people who were without the usual kinds of homes organized a protest. They set up a tent city on a tract of city-owned land. Just as they were about to be arrested and taken to jail, the Board of the UU Congregation had passed a policy that said they would offer sanctuary to homeless people who asked for it. They didn't exactly invite the encampment to move to their grounds, but communications were very good. The congregation affirmed the Board's vote very soon after. They are providing a place for the tent city for three months, and interfaith conversations are under way to make it possible for them to be supported by other congregations later.

Art claims not to have had much to do with the courage of the UU congregation's board, but I'm still impressed. Impressed with his ministry and impressed with the ministry of his congregation. How does this happen that a congregation steps up when the occasion presents itself?