Summer: it’s a time for purposeful idleness

by Jill Severn | Jun 2, 2016

One of most annoying burdens of growing up Protestant is the nagging belief that idleness is a sin. Summer is definitely the time to throw off this sadly mistaken belief.

The truth is, doing nothing is arguably quite virtuous. When we are truly idle we burn no fossil fuels, harm no fellow creatures, and annoy no one.

Yet people stay busy – and often annoyed – even on vacation. They load up campers, hitch on boats, and head for the nearest freeway. Or they strap on backpacks, climb into kayaks, or fly away on airplanes. All of these activities require planning, buying, burning and consuming.

Once I read in a garden magazine about a man who decided to spend his vacation closely examining his own back yard. After two weeks, he reported, he had only made it halfway to the back fence. He had spent most of his time on his hands and knees with a magnifying glass, observing the insect life in his garden. He said it was like visiting another world.

Purposeful idleness calms the mind, lowers the blood pressure, and restores all the scattered pieces of our selves to their proper places.

I think about him often — both when I see insects whose lives are a mystery to me, and when I look at the stars and think about what is little and what is big. I think his adventure was probably equal to that of any astronaut. And he didn’t burn up any rocket fuel.

But of course, he was actually doing something. It takes a little more focus to really do nothing.

This is especially true at home, where there are always unfinished — to say nothing of un-started — household projects. We need to remind ourselves periodically that these projects are unimportant; that telephones won’t break from going unanswered, and that it is perfectly legal to hang a Do Not Disturb sign on a door to a house rather than a hotel room. (It gives the neighbors something to talk about, too.)

For those who garden, learning to be idle at home is a special challenge. The weeds, after all, are out there growing at every moment of the day and night. But the very most beautiful sight in my back yard comes from a neighbor’s neglected corner, where an un-pruned, un-fertilized rambling red rose has climbed up an old plum tree and cascaded artfully over the back fence. Such reminders of the benefits of inaction are everywhere, if only we think to look for them.

But to develop the fullest appreciation of idleness, it is necessary to turn to the Buddhist masters for instruction. (No one, after all, talks about the Buddhist work ethic.) The Buddhist practice of meditation has worked its way into our mainstream culture because sitting still and doing nothing reliably makes people feel better. Purposeful idleness calms the mind, lowers the blood pressure, and restores all the scattered pieces of our selves to their proper places.

But you don’t have to be a Buddhist to behave like one, especially during the summer.

The Pacific Ocean | George Le Masurier photo

Must we go to Mars to appreciate Earth?

by Jill Severn | May 26, 2016

When Earthlings first saw photos of our planet taken in space, it sparked a flowering of awareness that all humanity shares a common home – our inexpressibly beautiful and fragile blue dot. Our annual celebration of Earth Day arose from this new consciousness, and this new sense of shared responsibility for the health of the whole planet.

But more recent advances in space exploration may instead offer the promise of an escape from this responsibility.

The Kepler spacecraft recently discovered 1, 284 new planets. The total number of planets that may support life – those in the Goldilocks” zone where there might be water and habitable temperatures – is up to about two dozen.

And Elon Musk’s SpaceX is actively planning to colonize Mars sometime in the 2030s.

The best we can hope for is that adventures in space will teach humanity what an unfathomable wonder our little blue dot of a planet is …

While human curiosity and ingenuity make space exploration inevitable, colonizing other planets still seems highly improbable to us, since our biological selves are not well adapted to anyplace but earth. This is one major reason they call Star Trek science fiction.

But more visionary people disagree, and are rabidly enthusiastic about space travel and the prospect of living on planets light years away.

This evokes a new uncertainty in the relationship between humans and the earth.

Does the possibility of finding a home on another planet weaken our bond with earth, and make people less committed to repairing the damage we have done to it? Will the day come when humans have so abused our home planet that it no longer serves our needs, leading us to abandon it? This is the worst that could come from the prospect of travel to other planets.

We find ourselves hoping that further exploration will find that none of the Goldilocks planets can support human life without insufferable hardship. And if Elon Musk does actually mount an expedition to Mars, we expect its major value will be a demonstration of just how miserable and difficult it would be to live there.

The best we can hope for is that adventures in space will teach humanity what an unfathomable wonder our little blue dot of a planet is, and inspires them to come home and take care of it.

To paraphrase Chief Seattle, the earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth. We always have been and always will be earthlings. Truly, there’s no place like home.

How the notion of proximity affects how we see the world

by George Le Masurier | May 23, 2016

The noon-hour talk radio show host on CFAX 1070, Pamela McColl, invited me on her show last week to talk about a recent article of mine, “NIMBY is not a 4-letter word,” that appeared on the editorial pages of the Times-Colonist newspaper.

(I also published the article on this website — subscribe today!)

The key point of the article is that the people closest to something are usually the first to examine it, ask questions about it and for whom it has the most meaning. This enquiry, born out of self-interest, often leads to important policy debates throughout a broader community.

During the interview, McColl asked what had inspired this idea.

I recalled that it was my father, a small-town Minnesota newspaperman, who taught me the concept of news. It was the early 1960s. I was a freshman in high school and eager to write for the school newspaper.

For something to be newsworthy, he told me, it had to have what he called “proximity,” which he defined in both geographic and personal terms.

“If it happens here,” he said, “it’s news. If it happens in Iowa, it’s not.” That’s geographic. But he added, “If it happens in Iowa to somebody from here, it’s still news.” That’s personal.

I gained experiential knowledge of my father’s wisdom as time went on. Like most people, I never gave too much thought to tragedies in other parts of the state. When somebody’s ice fishing house fell through the ice up north, I thought it was funny. Wintertime car accidents on Minnesota’s icy two-way roads didn’t bother me much.

But when a family of four from our small town all died in a head-on collision with a semi-trailer truck somewhere near North Dakota, I felt the impact. We lived in a town of less than 1,000 people, and everybody knew everybody. The oldest daughter in that family had been my babysitter.

I’ve come to understand that the notion of “proximity” plays a critical role in how each of us understands and relates to the world. Proximity also influences ideology.

Or, how the building of a potentially stinky and noisy pump station in a rural residential neighborhood might affect those residents’ enjoyment of their homes.

It’s the underlying concept at work when an elected official opposes same-sex marriage, until one of his own children announces he or she is gay. Then they change their position. Former vice president Dick Cheney had this revelation many years ago when he learned his daughter was lesbian, making him aware of her struggle for sexual identity and how federal policies affected her.

I suspect the Comox Valley parents of a transgender child feel more strongly about the national debate over whether to allow people to use public bathrooms of the sex with which they most identify.

Parents who lost children and other loved ones in mass shootings at La Loche, Sask., Newton, Conn. or Colorado may or may not have changed their minds about specific gun control proposals or schools’ mental illness awareness policies. But their thinking is undoubtedly more complex and emotionally rooted now.

Without my father’s idea of proximity, it’s easy not to care about some other guy who got cancer, or the child shot at school, whose life never got started, or the LGBTQ people who just want a normal life.

Or, how the building of a potentially stinky and noisey pump station in a rural residential neighborhood might affect those residents’ enjoyment of their homes.

Without a personal stake, we’re mostly immune to the tragedy and hardships endured by others. It’s a natural defense mechanism, because it’s simply too overwhelming to assume everyone else’s burdens.

But as compassionate human beings we must try. We must listen to these voices.

My father had a terrific insight when he observed that people are most moved by events that impact them personally.

But I can’t help thinking of a world where all people naturally sought to see how the world looks from behind the other person’s eyes. Imagine a world where everyone attempted to understand each other, and where we all accepted those differences without feeling threatened or the need to “fix” the other person.

The case against gardening, complicit in consumption

by Jill Severn | May 12, 2016

Years ago, when I lived on Bainbridge Island, an elderly neighbor sold his five acres of forest on an idyllic inlet to a couple from California. They clear cut it.

Although Bainbridge had been logged within decades of the first white settlers’ arrival, that initial logging had been selective. So the five acres included majestic old fir, hemlock and cedar trees, huge big leaf maples, alder, cascara, willow, hazel, and native dogwoods. Beneath the canopy were wild trillium and honeysuckle, sword ferns, elderberries, salmon berries, and oso berries. Lacy deciduous huckleberry bushes crowned the enormous, rotting old growth tree stumps left by early loggers.

Within weeks, it was all utterly destroyed by giant bulldozers.

I was complicit in this destruction, since the firewood from that debacle warmed my little house down the road for several years.

Twenty-five years later, I returned to the Island for its annual garden tour, and that same five acres was one of the showplace gardens. And it was truly a showplace – a McMansion surrounded by paved paths, thriving flower gardens and well-chosen shrubbery, a rock-lined stream, and a large boathouse, suitable for entertaining corporate clients.

I’ve carried the sadness about that garden – and a truth about gardening it revealed to me – for many years now. So last week, when I read a news story about a local garden show, I was mortified but not surprised to read a quote from one of the chosen gardeners who described her place as having been “a blank slate” before she and her husband built a house and started planting flowers.

I know that every neighborhood – from the urban core to outermost exurbia – was once wild, free land, managed by the light hands of First Nations citizens who never felt the need to scrape away native vegetation for the sake of Shasta daisies or daylilies. So it’s silly to disapprove of people wresting gardens out of the wilderness when my own neighborhood has the same history.

But there’s another truth about gardening that’s been troubling me as well: it’s become just another form of consumption. In fact, Americans spent $36.1 billion on their gardens in 2015.

On my morning walk, I pass fields of nursery crops – tidy pyramidal shrubs, rows of tiny trees, and listen to the Spanish language chat of the field workers. The workers plough, spray, pot, and fertilize. On the far side of the fields are enormous greenhouses, and a small fleet of trucks to haul these living products to nurseries. I often wonder what percentage of these crops will survive in the city yards and newly built suburbia for which they are destined. And I wonder how much lettuce, corn, or broccoli rides in another fleet of trucks, from California and beyond, because this land has been turned from agriculture to horticulture.

Heaven knows I’ve bought my share of perennial plants at the nursery, and geraniums at the grocery store. I’ve tossed out those black plastic pots that nurseries refuse to recycle.

And the two semi-dwarf crabapple trees in front of my house must once have grown in a field just like the one I pass. Once again, I am complicit.

But the longer I garden, the more my regret and misgivings grow. I’ve been thinking about what my neighborhood would look like if no one gardened or mowed. What if we just cleared paths from the road to our houses, and left the rest to go wild? It’s a lovely but ludicrous idea that I’m quite sure my neighbors would abhor.

And I do love my flowers and shrubs, and my little vegetable garden. And more than that, I love sinking a shovel in the earth, watching seedlings sprout and grow, and thinking about which combinations of colors, leaf textures and plant personalities should be grouped together in my shady back yard.

So I can’t say I’m gardening any less, but over time, I’ve come to garden differently. I value the plants swapped with friends rather than bought at a nursery. I grow more from seed. I spend less.

But I still grieve the loss of that five acres of native woods, and all the other five acres of native woods that have been sacrificed for the gardens we can’t seem to live without.

Playing God isn’t as easy as it seems, there’s a lot of guilt

by George Le Masurier | May 9, 2016

I’ve been playing God lately.

You know, deciding who lives, who dies. When to end a life, and whether by violent or somewhat more humane means.

And I have to say that, while it’s kind of empowering to play God, there’s a lot of guilt involved. I can’t say for sure if God feels any guilt about letting me live, while my two high school and college buddies died in horrific accidents. But I sure do.

I make most of my decisions about who to kill and not to kill in the spring. Because that’s when the natural world tries to invade my personal space.

This year, for example, I’m killing off carpenter ants by the thousands. Crushing them on sight without trial or remorse. I dispatch carpenter ants to the afterlife simply on sight, and without guilt.

Spiders, on the other hand, I take great care to capture in a drinking glass, under which I slip a stiff paper or or piece of cardboard. I try not to damage their many legs. What is that, 6 or 8, I don’t know.

Then I sentence the spider to the George Relocation Program, sometimes walking them all the way across the front lawn and flinging them into what could possibly be their preferred natural habitat in the neighbor’s yard. I only say to them, “You can’t live in my house,” and “You’re going to love this.”

Wasps die, usually by covering them in what looks like the foam in my Starbucks latte cup. I get too much foam at The Buck, and it kills me, too.

Bees live. I like bees. They aren’t mean like wasps. I think bees only sting you if you’re mean to them first, threaten them in some way. Wasps are like motorcycle gangs. They’ll sting you for no F-ing reason whatsoever, or because they’re drunk after gnawing up all that dried wood off your cedar fence.

Rats die, squirrels live. I kill a rat, there’s no remorse. But raised in a family of avid hunters, I made squirrels disappear by shooting gazillions of them with a 20-gauge shotgun. They would literally vanish. I still feel terrible about that.

Flys are dirty, so they die. Or as a friend of mine put it after a particularly hard day, “I just improved my outlook by washing windows and getting rid of all the smashed fly guts that were darkening my view.” Butterflies and most other flying creatures live.

You get the picture, right? I don’t feel remorse for killing living things that intend to harm my person or my property. But I take extra care not to harm living things that do me no harm.

Maybe that’s how God does it. I don’t know.

But I can say that if B.C. conservation laws allowed, I would gladly put the hit on every last deer wandering around my neighborhood like they own it. Urban deer are pests. They’re just big rats. They wander uninvited into your yard, chew up about $500 worth of plants, drop a pile of brown marbles and fall asleep on your lawn.

Oh, but the deer are so cute. The little deerettes have big doe eyes, and cute little noses. Horsefeathers. I like to think God would have kept Walt Disney around until about age 187 just to make more happy family films. But, no, Walt, had to go glamorize a little pest and named it Bambi. And he was punished.

And don’t get me started on the proliferation of wild bunny rabbits.

It gets serious for me when the B.C. government conducts misguided wolf kills, and allows trophy hunters to kill bears. There’s no excuse for big game hunters — like Donald Drumpf’s two sons — to shoot wild African animals. In fact, I don’t see the sense in most hunting these days, because for most people, hunting is for sport, not a food necessity.

And yet, in the time it’s taken you to read this, I’ve probably taken the lives of several carpenter ants and a few wasps. Is there a difference between what I do and what hunters or the B.C. government are doing? I think so.

Sometimes I justify my killing with the Bambi principle. Wolves and bears are cute woodland creatures. Ants and wasps are ugly … and creepy. But then, how do I make peace with my desire to murder deer? It gets confusing.

All I can say for sure is that if you believe in the afterlife and that you might be reincarnated as some fish or fowl, choose carefully before entering the universe under my omnipresence.