The Rain Gets Dirty in Parking Lots

I just finished reading all but the epilogue of Cadillac Desert (by Marc Reisner) today, and I'm caught in a moment of reflection.

The problem presented by Reisner summed up desert reclamation (building dams and pipes to make otherwise "barren" land habitable ...or profitable) as being akin to a boy building a sand castle at low tide. Having built and beheld the fall of my own actual low-tide sand castle on the beach, the word picture is overwhelmingly looming and I don't feel capable of even beginning to wrap my arms around the challenge facing "reclaimed" land.

While less pressing in Portland than say, Klamath Falls, I feel sick at the cost, study, argumentation and innovation required to safely rebalance the ecology we live in- especially with such profit-driven elements behind what people consider "feasible design". I feel like I must let my career and profitability suffer in order to stand by the principles learned in this book-- and even still make little difference after a lifetime of that sorry work.

In a quest for context and the latest conversations, last year I had the chance to attend an ASCE/EWRG Sustainable Stormwater Symposium, where I met incredible advocates for watershed health in policy, design, and development. I also attended River Restoration Northwest's Annual Stream Restoration Symposium, where the opening presentation offered a hard-statistical-evaluation of the overwhelming doom of "wild salmon" driven by our population growth and lifestyle. The room had a hard look. Wild salmon recovery has been significantly influencing legal requirements for development that affects rivers. To hear it is all generally pointless was so generally disheartening. Still, the symposium went on to discuss new research and successful efforts, projects, successes, and stories. Continuing in the hopeful way of conservationism.

The angst from considering magnitude of rebalancing the earth as a professional makes me think of what someone at one of the conferences said- that they knew an ecologist who defected from scientific study and ran towards a career in design because in design there is inherent hope for the future, otherwise why design anything at all? I'm glad to be working in design, and to know what precious little I know about ecology. I'm glad for all the stories that were gathered in Cadillac Desert, and the perspective I get to carry with me in that work I do.

I am a [young] PROFESSIONAL whose first duty is to the health, welfare, and safety of the public.
To be a professional, I know I personally must be part of a peer group that TALKS ABOUT THE PROBLEMS I FACE INTO. I want to read. I want to practice. I want to discuss. To process. To present and critique and evolve in different contexts, from different audiences. Then take off another bite and do it again. Having graduated college, I learned that I affirm my knowledge by speaking about what I learn. So I need and will seek community.

I hope what little knowledge and learning and listening I encounter will help disperse some unique perspective that may affect an unwieldy, but life-giving decision somewhere down the line. (I'm also hoping to write a musical about the whole wicked dance one day. I've got an outline written already.)

On maintaining messes and nurturing careers

I have a friend who's been studying French and linguistics.

On the occasion we meet to talk, she tells me the words she's learned in her new language.
I don't understand her because it's all excited-sounding French, or obscure analytical-English vocabulary, but it is lovely to listen. Just the song of her canter and dance of her gesture makes me want to join in.

I feel like a child repeating the words.
I struggle to keep up with her, but am excited to repeat, repeat, repeat.
Between our visits,  I do not practice or study, I forget our lessons.

There is a language I hope to speak in my newfound adult life, a language to fluently speak as a citizen, words of comfort and strength to share with a friend. Practicing alone has been so slow, and very difficult to sustain. I hope to repeat small and simple words on front porches with friends until I am met with those critical moments where all I've heard and practiced makes the very small and very important differences for which critical moments are made.


STILL, BEING A BACHELOR IN THE CITY IS LONESOME INDEED.

I've been wrestling an inward anxiety stemming from the unknowable future clouding my plans to die an accomplished and fulfilled human being:
To be a loving neighbor,
knowledgeable, inquisitive, engaged, and accomplished professional,
a mentor and a student,
a role-model for my someday children,
An old man, teller-of-stories! Of beautiful mountains and streams!
I want to have learned the hard way, each time, and earn the texture of old hardwood floors,
To have grabbed history by the scruff and have saved it myself!

Still, after a year of bachelorhood, I continue to be disappointed at having missed those marks.
My most frequent company remains to be my harshest critic.



I USE CLUTTER AS A TO-DO LIST.



I create my own obstacles:

Arranging my environment to make my goals and health the path of least resistance.
Never motivated to work-out-run, I refused a parking pass, and now biking is my easiest choice in the morning.
I hide the remote to inconvenience my television, leaving books sprawled instead to tempt my eyes.

And clutter! I clutter my space with all of my to-do.
The only way to put something out of sight, then, is to finish it.

But
Once my table is too full for too long, I just clean up anyway.

MEANWHILE I CONTINUE TO BE AFRAID.
I HAVE BEEN ALONE.

In my heart are fists, white-knuckling to beliefs I refuse to admit.
I am afraid to speak them because I fear they are wrong,
or worse
they are right, and I must practice them.
I am afraid to be wrong again in choosing a new doctrine, too.
Perhaps my stubborn refusal protects me from charismatic silvertongues who stand to benefit from new membership. Still, I know that having been so stubbornly wrong, I am the very problem that so sickens me:

Refusal to relinquish belief long enough to consider other truth.

There must be truth outside the limits of any belief!
We are so small, and the only way to understand anything must the admission of humus!
Of being totally temporary, miniscule, small and insignificant!

I concede, instead to fearfully hide from new salespeople. I concede also to hide from my own belief-system, and refuse to be its owner. There are enough stories about sure-minded people who were wrong, so I, too, must be wrong. Acting will only cause everyone pain!

So also will people suffer from my own terrible stillness!


[You see my frustration.]


WHAT WILL COME OF ME AND MY EFFORTS?

I am not old.
Living long enough, I will become old.
Being old long enough, and I will die.
Everything comes to an end,
Oh, this spiral!
[saying so only reminds me
I still don't understand death,
but I can still die, anyways!]

My precious wick has been burning all the while.
And much as I hope to die having lived right, to die having been kind, I want to be someone lovely to meet. I approach life slower than I think I should, still convinced that listening, study, and prudence will best aid in achieving such dreadful standards of practicing empathy, neighborly love, vulnerability, and the like...
(WHICH I AGAIN AND AGAIN REFUSE)

SO I LOOK. SO I LISTEN. SO I SPEAK LIKE A CHILD WHEN I CAN.


For inspiration, for joyfulness,
To experience some spontaneous combustion.
I am biding my time for the ideas that will release me into Nirvana!
To suddenly recognize all the worthy risks with which I, myself, will joyfully upset my stability!

I believe the neighborly love I aspire to live and die by is not a pretty love.
It is not a safe love. It is vulnerable and soft and it sweats and bleeds.
I know how weak I am, and that I am hiding,

But

Until I find some wonderful unlocked state of mind,
(Or it finds me on my more cowardly days),
I will try my best to keep listening.
To process and understand this neighborhood around me.
To repeat, repeat, repeat until suddenly the lyric of humanity and everything in us brings me to my knees.

Listening [Winter '16]

I want to digest everything I've heard, thought, and listened to over the last several months.

[Portland] is gradually becoming more home than it has been.
I have to eat my burrito before we talk.

----------

Now that I have a burrito in me, it is time to write.

The clouds have me feeling sedated. Spending time in the past brings relief. It gets me high. I could roll around in the past for a long time. Sometimes I want to go back so badly I forget about the present.

Writing for the neighborhood paper (Concordia News) has given me the most traction in being a part of my neighborhood, of course.
concordianewspdx.org

There will come a day I will think I understand everything better than I do now. I will consider myself well-read and stop listening because I will know better, and that scares me, dear reader.

My concerns, my aspirations:

Work.
I am in the business of developing land. Of knowing it, tearing it apart, and leaving something new.
My aspiration is to be a steward of the environment, to be proud and committed to the decisions we make as people who live here.

Politics.
I am a listener. I am a child. I realize the faults of this.
My aspiration is to hear the right stories, all of them, and so share right words at the precise right moments.
[Remind each other to keep listening. Everything begins with listening.]

God.
I am looking for God everywhere, but always forget to listen.

I always forget to listen.