First snow

The storm that blew through yesterday laid upon the mountains finally their first blanket of snow. From the hilltop here, you can see rock falls and outcroppings jutting still black through the fresh white dusting on the dormant volcano. From here you can not tell if the snow on the mountain is two inches or two feet thick.

The sun in Fall is so bright for lacking warmth. It brilliantly etches trees, mountains, squinting from light flat and harsh. How can the sun be so cold? In spring or late summer it is softer, yet so full and warm. It must be the way light polarizes as it bends and bounces through the whisper thin skin of air to fall upon the mountains.

The twins sit at the table in the trailer on this Saturday morning. I worry that when the house is finished in a month and they have their own room that I will be deprived of this closeness of hearing them think aloud to each other only five feet away from the couch where I write, of having them warble like wrens about anything and everything and nothing at all.

Right after eggs K.C. was strumming a rubber band and asked if a musical instrument could be made of rubber bands. I had a new pair of sneakers still in the box, we got the box and stretched the rubber band over the opening. I explained frequency. Within a few minutes, she was playing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” as if on a guitar. I told her it was now an instrument, and we could even mark the notes, “A through G” on the side of the box.

A thirty foot travel trailer is not always crowded, even when filled.

My second small pot of coffee is done, and I look at news of Oregon and the world: Cheney/Bush attempt to derail real action on global warming; Portland doused in the rainiest day of 2007 (the storm that whitened my mountains); Cal versus Oregon; drug free zones; truck crashes.

We are so much a part of it and so far apart from it, a day at a time in the trailer on the hill at the foot of the mountains with their first frosting of snow.

Straight "A's"

The twins have straight “A’s” so far. Living with me and in a tipi on a hilltop one-third of the time during the school year, with their mother in a house near the creek two-thirds, they are making this transition.

They are not brilliant the way that some of their friends are brilliant: they work, they slog, they are able at age 13 to put in four hours on a project, they do their homework. That will serve them better, I think.

I barked at them last week for not setting aside enough time to study for the Social Studies test, I growled when they told me that was why they did not know all the answers. I felt like the stupid one when told one girl scored 54 out of 50 with the extra credit, the other 53 out of 50. “I missed four but got seven of the extra credit,” she explained.

I felt stupid only until I heard her pride as she told me, without words but with the inflection in her voice, “See, Dada, I have got this under control.” It is not supposed to be easy, struggle in a safe environment is learning essential lessons.

Each with her own style, her own strength, the twins know they are different with their golden brown skin and deep black hair with highlights of henna when the sun watches them with an oblique glance, almost tomboys with their lack of understanding of girly girls, not quite getting that obsession with showing too much to boys (they are young, it may come soon).

We celebrate independence, talk about the loneliness of being on the outside, hint at the painful joy of self-direction. The day will come when I introduce them to the nobility of the outlaw, why the outlaw is always necessary, how the outlaw gives herds an option, a warning, a dynamic force that highlights the dangers of conformity.

But now there is the girls’ quiet knowing they are enveloped in grace: wrapped in the love of those close to them, part of a universe that truly intends them no harm, a welcome part of creation and free to create what they want to see, create themselves, create their days.

Second floor pour

The concrete truck is here, and the pump to move slurry to the second floor. The sun is not yet up at nearly 7 a.m., and it is 31 degrees, supposed to be 70 later today.

Ryan the concrete man asked for a couple of days to cut and finish, and the concrete has to give up its water, so we will not have insulation until maybe on Thursday, drywall next week. I will not be in before November.

The girls come back to the tipi/trailer on Friday for a few days, then back with my ex-wife until the 8th, then back to me for nearly 11 days.

On Saturday I leveled the trailer so fried eggs would not slide right to the edge of the pan. While it's always possible to turn the handle to the other side of the stove, the compensation is an unnecessary complication when you are in a hurry on school days.

The leveling gauge on the trailer did not show the frame to be that far out of plumb, but the true test was a fry pan with just a little water in the bottom. Sometimes the methods of measurement are also out of line, not just what is measured. It's hard to get a good calibration when you don't know where to begin.

Turmoil, most of it internal. I have temporarily lost my center. Time to reach for conscious contact.

Stiff hands

It is 6:15 a.m. The sun has not made it to the horizon, but the eastern sky south of Smith Rock is that delicious creamcicle orange and vanilla, fading quickly through blue and violet to dark. I can still see stars but barely.

I didn’t think about it last night but of course I ran out of water this morning. I had not filled up because Rod the Plumber was setting up the house, replacing with some real plumbing the funky standpipe I had cobbled together. So at 5:45 I was out there in my slippers unhooking the sprinkler, attaching the hose to the new bib, and filling the trailer so the girls can wash their faces, cold stiffening my fingers.

The girls go back to their mom today and I miss’em though they ain’t out the door.

I don’t think I am going to Seattle this morning to race. It is too far, my racing buddy has bagged out, the weather is iffy on Saturday and I may be coming down with a cold, I didn’t sleep well from 2:30. It’s about six hours each way, a lot of fuel to burn in XSSUV, Auburn, Washington is not a town to enjoy by myself and Seattle proper is too far from the track.

I’ll hunker down here with a book instead, I think, and review the divorce papers. We may, finally, be seeing the end of this. I don’t quite know what I am going to do for a living. My wife will end up with our business, she is set for life, and that is all to the good. But I am going to be scrambling, for a while. Anybody need a writer?

The girls are packing. It’s time to make breakfast.

Jesse Jackson is a rascist

Jesse Jackson accused Barak Obama for "acting like he's white." (read it here) Any time a white man says that a black man is "acting like he's black" or if we hear someone claim that another is "acting like a Jew," the outrage pours forth. As perhaps it should.

But there is no excuse for Jackson's comment, because Jackson has made fighting rascism his Crusade. Yet with that one remark he shows he is himself a rascist, which is what we call those who, to paraphrase Peter Jennings, hold groups responsible for the acts of an individual.

Belligerence

The New York police have decided not to allow Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit the site of the September 11 attacks. (Read it here).

Presidential candidates have climbed aboard the Outrage Express, calling the request “shockingly audacious” the State Department has called it “appalling,” and U.S. Jewish groups are apoplectic (the Iranian President has called for the destruction of Israel).

The shrillness of the outrage is easy to understand, but it seems too many of the most vocal are using the 9/11 tragedy to further their own agenda. There is something of a false note in the screaming. Nowhere have I read that Iran was involved in the 9/11 attacks. (Nor was Saddam Hussein, right everyone?)

Iran is of course developing a nuclear bomb and using client groups to create anguish around the world (we taught them well). Is Iran a state sponsor of terror? Probably.

But there might be some benefit if the world’s Muslims could see a Muslim leader laying wreathes at a site where Muslim extremists killed innocent U.S. citizens. What is the downside? A dubious moral imperative? The satisfaction of name calling?

Frankly, to deny the visit seems a bit petulant. We should accept another's acknowledgment of our grief. We might have been able to forge a propaganda tool out of the visit. As it is, the world’s Muslims will see once again that we scorn them.

As far as I know, belligerence has yet to prove effective in furthering national interest over the long term. It has not served us so well in the last 50 years, it does not seem to be serving Israel (though it is hard to know what would ameliorate that region’s toxic anger). Did it help in Northern Ireland? Depends on which Irishman you ask, but peace may have broken out.

Self-righteous indignation is powerful drink. Belligerence is the glass. The hangover is often quite brutal.

Fall announces

The laughter of girls lightens the trailer. I roll out at 5:30 still tired, the twins come in from the tipi at 6 a.m. It was cold last night, it was supposed to get down to 28 degrees. I wrapped the well pressure switch pipe in foam just before sundown.

Eggs and sausage and we’re a half-hour from leaving for school. Leave at 7:30, and we get there too early at 7:40. Leave 8 minutes later, and the trip takes 20 additional minutes, traffic snarled around the middle school, lattés and cell phones battling with kids in crosswalks for driver’s attention.

I prefer the early run.

Today Mike and I will lay down a foam/foil/foam sandwich on the top floor of the barn. Tomorrow tubes for radiant heat will go down, concrete comes on Monday. Insulation. Drywall. Three weeks for drywall, I have been told. We finally have a plan to get the corrugated steel siding on before the snow flies.

The trailer, after four months, is getting small. I don’t know how it will fare when temperatures drop to 10 degrees, five degrees, below zero degrees for a week or so, and don’t really want to find out what it’s like draining sewage and gray water tanks when ice forms in seconds, thawing the hose to refill the freshwater tank.

The race is on.

Gunslingers

The problem I have always had with “private security contractors” in Iraq is that it’s hard to really know what they are. Actually, that’s wrong. What they are is obvious: they are mercenaries.

There is nothing wrong with that, now. Those of the “Have Gun, Will Travel” profession, Knights Errant, Ronin, have been around for thousands of years. It’s an honorable living. In fact, it’s a damn good living, and it should be, it’s a dangerous occupation. That does not dismiss the question of whether we should be buying their services.

The most recent (not the first) incident involving Blackwater USA (read it here) occurred when a “convoy of U.S. personnel protected by Blackwater security contractors came under small arms fire...” according to Time Magazine.

Apparently our State Department is the primary employer of this private army. It us unclear why our State Department is being protected by hired guns. Why isn’t our army the “gun” of first choice?

Why we would pay these soldiers of fortune hundreds of thousands of dollars per man per year when a sergeant in our military has to support his family with food stamps is unclear. I can only think of three obvious reasons: (1) Mercenaries are not bound by the same rules of war as our troops; (2) Someone is getting very rich; (3) Somebody doesn't want the rest of us to know what's going on.

The State Department is itself without much information, apparently. "(State Department spokesman Sean McCormack) had no information about any Iraqi laws Blackwater or its employees might be subject to, the chain of command its employees answer to, or details of the company's contract with the State Department..." according to the Associated Press (read it here).

The cluelessness extends to the Senate. "Having visited now 10 times in Iraq, most recently just two or three weeks ago, I know full well the dependence of that nation upon contractors — contractors who are trying to refurbish their seriously deteriorated oil production facilities, their power lines, their fresh water," said Sen. John Warner, R-Va. in the same article.

What an absurd statement. It indicates that Sen. Warner doesn't understand the difference between rebuilding power lines and protecting convoys with guns.

We used Afghanis as a surrogate force to defeat the Soviets, then left the country awash in guns and fighting know-how, until the Taliban used those guns and that knowledge to protect bin Laden. Saddam was “our guy” until he decided that we had given him permission to take down Kuwait.

We can’t institute a “rule of law” in Iraq when we enforce it with mercenaries from South Carolina with tribal loyalty to each other first and their corporation second. How do we tell the Mehdi army to put down their guns and pledge allegiance to Iraq when private corporations from the U.S. speed through their neighborhoods in Suburbans with blacked out windows and shoot their civilians in the street?

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq spoke of the courage and capability of Blackwater personnel. Of course. They were trained as SEALS and Green Berets and Airborne. They are the best fighters (retired) we could train and develop. No one doubts their courage or capability.

The doubt is whether the United States should out source our shooting.

Time machine

“The Razor’s Edge,” made in 1984 with Bill Murray, was an instant favorite when I first saw it. It caught, in a coarse net, my own hopes as a young man, what I sought in India, aspirations I thought were universal.

College in the late 60s was full of adventure. Alan Watts turned me from an engineer to a student of Zen, though I knew even then the contradiction in rigorous study, a tight fistful of water. When I got back from India the first time, it was 1974. All my friends were in medical school or studying polymeric memory at Cal Tech. I became a waiter.

This month, I ran across the movie again. I rented it. And then the original film version, made in 1946 with Tyrone Power. And then read the book, written by W. Somerset Maugham in 1944.

The movies are very different, abstractions of a tale about the ineffable, about society, about the church and about faith, about personal values, social values, religious values, about a search for enduring truth in an age when the trappings of success were as temporary as the weather. In their abstraction it is clear the movies try not to let authenticity obscure the veracity of the tale. Very different, the essence is the same.

The book was one of the best selling in the 20th century. I don’t remember if I had read the book before my trips to India, if it is buried in my library.

The title comes from the Katha-Upanishad: “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”

Maugham offers gems of his own:

“Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.”

“I have come too late into a world too old.”

“The self ... is not part of the absolute, for the absolute, being infinite, can have no parts, but the absolute itself.”

There is no wisdom offered in this post. But young seekers should know that the path has been tread by countless sandals; returning seekers can remember with a smile: “In the present” can have its own memories.

Monad

It’s nearly 7 a.m. now when the sun throws itself above the eastern horizon, an hour later than when I first started paying attention in June. It rises 15 degrees or so further south, too.

The geese are gone. Which started me off on a long, fruitless meander: Is a large flock of geese one being, or the summation of 1,000 beings, neither or both? How can something that large alter course so quickly; on the other, perhaps only as one organism can the flock so quickly change path.

Because we cannot see a physical connection, we assume separateness; perhaps the connections of communication, of information, are as binding as those of chemistry and physics.

Of what being are we? A point of isolation, an observer, a slightly self-aware exchangeable part of a larger being, a temporary and disposable cell point of family or of church or of community or of a business or of a society or of a culture.

Are we but a transitory nexus of different sets, of different languages that overlap in infinitely many ways, a vibratory micropoint set atwang by interconnections far away and unseen? I could be good with that, too.

The sun breaks over the horizon further to the south today and far later than in June. Fall is here, the geese are gone, there is work to do and here I sit pondering vacuous philosophies, Leibniz and Whitehead, Goedell, Escher and Bach.