Author Archives: dorworth

Bargaining for Eden

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“Greed is all right, by the way… I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
Ivan Boesky
“Money doesn’t talk, it swears…”
Bob Dylan

Every so often a book is published that brings the larger world into clear focus through a well-polished, high-quality lens directed at one small part of that world. “Bargaining for Eden” is such a book, and everyone who is interested in the human condition and the natural environment and their connections to and effects on each other will be well served by reading it. Stephen Trimble’s skills and perseverance as an investigative reporter honors the craft of writing and serves its readers by bringing integrity, honesty, intelligence, humility and hope to a story that is about their antonyms.
The larger story here is that of the diminishing and degraded landscape and environment of the American west and the reasons it has gotten that way. The smaller part of the world Trimble focuses upon is the Snowbasin Ski Area in Utah and the machinations by which its owner, Earl Holding, used the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, political influence, obscene amounts of money, abuse of public trust, ruthless and imperious determination and implacable secrecy to expand his financial empire at the expense of the common good and the environmental health of the landscape.
Holding, who is 81 years old and worth approximately $4.6 billion and listed as the 59th wealthiest American by Forbes, also owns Sinclair Oil, Grand America Hotel, Westgate Hotel, Little America, 400,000 acres of ‘working cattle’ land in Wyoming and Montana, as well as Sun Valley. He is a self made man whose financial success in life is the stuff of capitalist legend, material excess and human shortcoming. The ski lodges at Holding’s resorts are unrivaled anywhere in the world for luxurious fixtures and expensive décor, including marble selected personally by Holding and his wife from the “finest materials from around the world” for the bathrooms. One long-time Holding employee who for obvious reasons must remain anonymous said, “If Earl Holding treated his employees half as well as he treats his bathrooms this would be a better world.” As America is a capitalist country and as each of us represents its value systems, “Bargaining for Eden” can be viewed as a morality play and, perhaps, an object lesson for each citizen. Greed, like its companions, lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy and pride, are part of the human condition and no human is exempt from them. Trimble certainly does not spare himself and he makes the case (a weak one in my opinion because Earl’s transgressions against the ideals of perfect morality, environmental consciousness and the common good deserve more weight than Trimble gives them) that his own empire-building, self-serving maneuvers in constructing a small house in the desert of southern Utah makes him not so different from Holding.
As metaphor, however, by connecting his own abuse in developing, owning and thereby unalterably changing the landscape to the demonstrably much larger abuse of Earl Holding’s, Trimble encourages the reader to examine what former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson terms “…our values, our commitment to action, and our sense of connection with place, community, and the essence of who we are as inhabitants of this wondrous planet.”
As metaphor, the development of Snowbasin from local ski area to luxurious development spun behind the smoke and mirrors of hosting a couple of the Olympic events on Ogden Mountain above the “idyllic Ogden Valley” which contains a Trappist monastery and its fastest growing community, Eden, could not be better. Trimble writes, “The seven thousand citizens of the valley, monastic and nonmonastic alike, relish a sense of living in a private paradise. They harbor a fierce love for the place, and the names they give to their towns capture these feelings: just down the road from Eden is its satellite village, Liberty.”
As the title, “Bargaining for Eden: The fight for the last open spaces in America,” indicates this is a sordid tale with a few bright spots (and people) of integrity and hope, most notably (perhaps heroically) in the persons of Greg Parrish and Mac Livingston who own a business called the Flower Patch in Salt Lake City on property Holding wanted for his Grand America Hotel. The Flower Patch wasn’t for sale and, despite his best efforts, political influence, wealth and imperious persistence, perhaps for the first time in his business career Holding couldn’t buy what he wanted. Trimble describes the final negotiation: “On March 20 Mac and his allies had their one and only meeting with Earl….Earl was ten minutes late. When he arrived, everyone rose to greet him except Mac, who remained seated…Earl answered most questions himself. A query about cost led him off into a long monologue about engineering, earthquake protection, and Salt Lake Valley geology…As he left, all once again stood—all except Mac Livingston. He wanted to force Earl Holding to reach far across the conference table to shake his hand, and he told me that he had never seen quite so much hatred in anyone’s eyes as in the glare Earl turned on him.”
If the fight for the last open spaces in America uses hatred as a weapon, it will, like its nuclear counterpart, destroy the landscape and all that live upon it. Stephen Trimble has offered us a way beyond hatred with a great and shocking story of the past and a template for the future in “Credo: The People’s West” which ends the book. The last paragraph reads, “We call it paradise, this land of ours. We call it home. Like our nation, the West is in the middle of its arc. We must remain both vigilant and tender if we wish to preserve its authenticity. We can do this. We are not yet too old, too greedy, or too cynical to take wise action together.”
The first action to take is to buy Trimble’s book, read it, study the credo and act accordingly.

 

 

The Precautionary Principle

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In 1854 there was a cholera epidemic in London, England. Many people died and nobody knew the biological cause of the disease. Dr. John Snow, a London physician, made a map of the locations of the deaths to see if there was a discernible pattern. He found that the majority of the deaths took place within 250 yards of a public water pump. Without having irrefutable scientific proof, but possessed of good instincts and common sense, Snow suspected that the water from the pump was the source of the contagion. He had the handle removed, making the pump inoperable. The plague ended.
This is one of the earliest and best known examples of the use of the Precautionary Principle to protect the health of the public. Precautionary Principle is short for the “principle of precautionary action,” which was eloquently explicated in a statement in 1998 by an international group of scientists, government officials, lawyers and labor and environmental activists after a meeting in Racine, Wisconsin. The gathering was called the Wingspread meeting.
It was deemed necessary as a response to what the group sees as a primary danger to the health of the planet and its inhabitants. Its statement reads in part, “The release and use of toxic substances, the exploitation of resources, and physical alterations of the environment have had substantial unintended consequences affecting human health and the environment…..We believe existing environmental regulations and other decisions, particularly those based on risk assessment have failed to protect adequately human health and the environment, the larger system of which humans are but a part.”
Among many other disturbing, destructive and dangerous failures which led to that belief are the Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Thalidomide, DDT, species extinction throughout the world and man induced stratospheric ozone depletion and global climate change. Closer to home are the resultant high rates of learning deficiencies, asthma, leukemia, cancer, birth defects and other ailments which, like the London water pump of 1854, are grouped around sources of radiation, asbestos, pesticides, chemical dumps and industrial pollution.
Part of the Wingspread statement reads, “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.”
Indeed, the public so often bears the burden of proof in the role of test subjects, human guinea pigs who are expendable, replaceable and, under current law, powerless. A study by the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention concluded that only two percent of cancer deaths are caused by industrial toxins released into the environment. Only two percent is 11,000 people a year in the U.S. whose horrible, painful and unnecessary deaths can be scientifically attributed to industrial toxins. A case could be made that these 11,000 deaths represent a form of homicide. A case could be made that these deaths represent a form of terrorism. Each year, at least three times the number of people who died in the horror of September 11 are killed in America by industrial toxins in the environment. Instinct and common sense says the number is much higher.
Unfortunately, there is no war against this type of terrorism. The reasons for this apathy are complex and involve things like campaign finance reform and decisions based on what is called “risk assessment.” Wingspread participant Joe Tickner of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, said that decisions based on risk assessment asks questions like “How safe is safe? What level of risk is acceptable? How much contamination can a human or ecosystem assimilate without showing any obvious adverse effects?”
Corporate risk assessment is not new. It is reflected in such ancient aphorisms as “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” and “Let the devil take the hindmost.” Nor is the Precautionary Principle new. It is seen in such common-sense aphorisms as “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” “Better safe than sorry,” and “Look before you leap.”
The world is sorry, and a sorry place, and paying many pounds of cure for the past follies of the nuclear industry, the horrors released into the environment by the chemical industry, and the on going irresponsibility of the asbestos and mining industries, among others. And now those same industries, and even some of the same companies, have assessed the risks to the public and environment and decided there is money to be made in genetically modified foods. Critics of genetically modified foods, the seeds they grow from, the seed companies that sell the seed to farmers and the chemical companies that own the seed companies would like to see the Precautionary Principle applied to the genetic manipulation of the food we eat and of the environment we all live in.
So would I. Wouldn’t you?

OBLA, DOMS, DUMB and ULLR

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It happens every ski season. Out of shape, often overweight, clueless skiers return to the slopes after a seven or more month hiatus and attempt to ski him and her self back into shape. More often than not, the ski yourself back into shape crowd are advanced intermediate or better skiers. They know how to ski but just don’t seem to understand or at least appreciate that in skiing, as in the rest of life, there’s more to the action than technique, technology and the Puritan derived faith that will power conquering pain is virtuous, practical, intelligent and might work. As Santayana says, “If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.”
Trying to ski oneself into skiing shape is lunacy. There is enough inherent risk in skiing without tilting the odds against the skier by being ill prepared. Ullr, the Norse god of skiing, was known for strength, and arriving at the beginning of the ski season without lots of it is gambling with an already risky business. Do not blow off Ullr.
Still, in skiing as in the rest of life, there are no guarantees. The well trained skier who begins the season is only changing the odds in his or her favor. Ullr approves of playing the odds.
The best conditioned skier will, after enough runs, become fatigued. This is especially true early in the season when even the fit body is not yet well trained for skiing. There is nothing that will fine tune the conditioning of a skier except skiing, so early in the season it pays even the most physically fit skier to pay attention to how the body feels. The muscles are used differently in a gym, on a mountain bike and running than they are on a pair of skis, and they will fatigue sooner and deeper than they did at the end of the previous ski season. The body announces its fatigue with OBLA (onset of blood lactate accumulation) and it should be heeded. OBLA means the body is tired and needs a little respite before resuming skiing. The body is not sore, just tired. An hour’s rest will usually suffice, though OBLA will likely appear sooner than it did during the first round. OBLA is manageable. It is only fatigue, but to ignore OBLA signs while skiing is akin to driving an automobile with bald tires at high speeds on wet roads. Tired muscles do not function very timely or well. Any skier who is that out of touch with his body is a threat to himself, to other skiers, and, of course, to Ullr’s Angels, the ski patrol who will sooner or later have to collect him.
More serious and more prevalent among early season out of shape skiers is DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness), a completely different malady than OBLA, though the two are often confused with each other. DOMS is not caused by lactate accumulation and does not announce fatigue to the body, but it is often caused by ignoring OBLA and pushing on through fatigue. DOMS is authentic microscopic injury and accompanying inflammation to muscle fibers. DOMS means there is damage that must be healed before the body can function properly, not just fatigue that can be addressed with a little rest. Soreness means there are small tears in the muscle fiber, actual physical damage, not just the fatigue that an hour’s rest will alleviate; and just using those injured muscles increases the risk of further destruction. DOMS appears a day or sometimes two after the exercise that caused it. Sore muscles will be weaker, prone to further injury, and slower to act and react. Using such muscles on a pair of skis is akin to driving an automobile with tires beyond bald, showing the threads, at high speeds on wet roads. Any skier that out of touch with his body is both dumb and dangerous. “The good thing about such people,” says one knowledgeable physical therapist, “is that they’re good for business.”
The solution is, of course, a pre-season conditioning program entered into no later than the first of September. Any skier who does not have such a program in their past is going to have OBLA, DOMS and dumb in their future.
It is the way of Ullr.

 

Attention Deficit Disorder

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My youngest son Jason is a fine, responsible, active man of 41 and a joy in my life. He is a college graduate who makes his living as a paramedic/fireman. As a professional, he knows a great deal about the science and effects of many drugs on the human system. When he was in the first grade he was termed “hyperactive,” what came to be known in the pop psychology of pharmacology as ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder and, later, ADHD, or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. That is, Jason was a natural boy of six with an abundance of energy and intelligence who was bored out of his gourd, bored to tears, bored to action and movement by sitting at a desk in a row while a teacher tried to keep order in her classroom through conformity and rote memorization. There were aspects of his life at home that were disturbing and unacceptable to him, and school was one place to vent those aggravations in his life. He did not sit still nor remain quiet for the standardization that is a public school first grade classroom. He disrupted his class. He was not a good soldier nor a candidate for the future organization men of America. I was neither surprised nor as disturbed as I should have been by his social recalcitrance, and, as a consequence, I was not nearly attentive enough to it. Jason’s energy and intelligence were a gift to him, a joy and a pleasure (and, on occasion, an amazing frustration) to me. It is not hard to understand that his school teacher and administrators took a different view. And they had the perfect solution to what they saw as Jason’s problem and that I viewed (and view) as their problem—-daily doses of Ritalin.
Ritalin is the brand name for methylphenidate, a “mild” stimulant of the central nervous system, whose exact mode of action on that system is not completely understood. Though I did not know it at the time, Ritalin produces hallucinations and paranoia in a significant number (about nine percent) of those who take it. In the pharmacological/psychiatric trade, it is credited with “unmasking” latent clinical depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in its users, conditions which that métier addresses with regular doses of other drugs whose exact mode of action on the central nervous system are also incompletely understood. It is my opinion that the word “unmasking” is erroneous; “causing” is the more accurate word. Alcohol, too, is known to “unmask” those same conditions as well as a variety of other social disorders, including hostility, violence, idiocy, lethal driving, boorish behavior, really boorish conversation and even more boorish breath, but to my knowledge no moderately dependable person prescribes more or other drugs as a cure. Common sense and objective observation dictates that the cure to such “unmasking” is to cease ingesting the original drug. While my knowledge of Ritalin was scant, my instincts were excellent and my personal, experiential knowledge of many other drugs was significant. And no one was going to secure my permission to chemically mutilate my son’s behavior or mood so that he could more easily blend in with the school furniture. If only instinctively, I knew what Dr. Peter Breggin wrote many years later in the New York Times: “Attention deficit disorder does not reflect children’s attention deficits but our lack of attention to their needs.” That lack in myself at the time it was needed is something I deeply regret.
I was called to a meeting with Jason’s teacher, the principal and the school nurse. I knew that Jason’s problems in school were a direct result of his life at home (i.e. my own problems and failings, stresses and disorders), as well as the school’s inability to deal with each child’s individual needs. Being all too familiar with hallucinations and paranoia, I assumed they believed all of Jason’s unwillingness to fit into the school curriculum was my fault.  Nevertheless, with some if not full awareness of my own failures, contradictions and hypocrisies in the matter, I told them I thought they were crazy to be drugging children in order to get them through a day of school. Even then, sitting in a room with three proper and competent educators, including Jason’s teacher, a beautiful single woman, who I sometimes saw drinking and dancing in the local bars, I was acutely aware of the incongruity of the scene: three proper, conservatively dressed American public school educators of the 1970s and me—dressed in faded denim pants held up with a colorful hand-dyed tied woolen belt from Argentina, huaraches, a turtle-neck shirt and a sheep skin vest, a head of black hair falling to below my shoulder blades and a full beard to the middle of my chest—discussing the advantages and disadvantages of schools legally drugging six year olds with the consent of their parents. I assume they were aware of the situation’s ironies, and I hope it gave them a smile and some insight into our culture’s contradictions. It certainly did me.
(I refused the consent and Jason never became a Ritalin junkie. He is now a fine and responsible and active man, and still a joy in my life. He is thankful that I did not allow the entrenched school system to flood his developing system with mild stimulants. He has told me so many times.)
That, of course, was in the early days of systemically altering human behavior with chemicals. It is now an enormous business having a profound effect on our culture, the practice of medicine and the living experience of millions of people. They are not health food, but anti-depressants are a staple of the diet of the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind. I, for one, agree with Dr. Breggin about ADD, and his point applies to several other maladies of our time. Their solutions lie in attention to and confrontation with their roots, not in masking their manifestations with chemicals. The quick chemical fix, whether it be insecticide, pesticide, mild stimulant of the human central nervous system, anti-depressant or defoliant, has always had a hidden cost. They may make life easier in the short run, and it is surely good business for the pharmacology and petrochemical industries, but there is always runoff, and there is always an unexpected consequence somewhere downstream, and it is cumulative.

 

The Blue Sheep of Rongbuk

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Our last morning at Rongbuk monastery was emotional with farewell to a unique and spectacular place and time. It was 1981 and we were among the first westerners to visit the Rongbuk Valley, under the massive north face of Everest, since China began its experiment with openness to the rest of the world.
At 16, 500 the monastery had been the highest on Earth, the home of some 300 Tibetan Buddhist monks. Rongbuk means “valley of caves” and long before Buddhism arrived from India followers of Tibet’s ancient Bon religion sought out these caves for spiritual quests. The landscape was as stark as it was beautiful, but it was steeped in the energy and tradition of high human spiritual aspiration as well as the highest of human mountaineering ambition.
We were 13 Americans, most of them old friends of mine from Nevada; two Canadians; and three Chinese escorts. I was leader of this commercial trek to see Tibet and its people and to visit the north side of Everest where our permit allowed us to reach an elevation of 18,000 feet, but no higher. Since our Chinese guardsmen went no higher than the monastery where the trucks that had driven us across Tibet from Lhasa deposited them, we were free to do as we pleased and were able above 16,500. That wasn’t much in terms of elevation gain, though a few of us managed to wander up to around 20,000, but it was huge in terms of experience, perspective and appreciation of one of the most stunning and moving places on earth. None of us wanted to leave that last morning. All of us were disgusted and angry with the Chinese because of what China had done and was doing (and in truth is still doing) to Tibet and its people. Everyone in our group was enchanted and filled with admiration and concern for the people and countryside of Tibet.
We had learned that Tibet bore a striking physical resemblance to Nevada and that its people were cheerful, open, curious and deeply religious. They won our hearts with their shy friendliness.
The land, its creatures, its people and traditions had been subjugated and brutalized by the army of the People’s Republic of China—the invader and unwelcome occupier of Tibet, a pugnacious gang of thugs in a temple.
The once exquisite Rongbuk monastery lay in ruins, shelled and reduced to rubble by the Chinese military which might more accurately be described as the army of the Pugnacious Republic of Thuggery. Of the more than 2500 Tibetan monasteries in existence when the Chinese invaded in 1951 less than 10 were intact 30 years later. In the jumbled remains of Rongbuk were thousands of shattered examples of Buddhist art, mani stones and frescoes, the work of centuries by patient and skilled and devoted monks, sad glimpses of another time, poignant reminders of impermanence.
Tibet’s mystery and the allure of Everest had been our enticement, but the dignity and grace of Tibetans in the face of Chinese brutality and desecration of their culture and landscape were our memories. Tibetans know how to smile, even though life has never been easy. The Chinese invasion only made it harder, as always happens when barbarity invades compassion, including, among other things, the deaths of more than 1.2 million Tibetans and the additional deaths by torture of some 26,000, many of them Buddhist monks and nuns. The snow-covered Himalaya loom over sparse, green valleys from which efficient people had long nurtured a living from infertile soil and climate with the tools of labor, intelligence and faith. Our group of tourists viewed both people and landscape with awe. Our Chinese hosts viewed and treated them with disdain.
We had seen a few hares, ducks, geese, a condor-like lammergeir and various other birds and domesticated animals during our journey, but there was a notable scarcity of wildlife. We deduced that this eerie paucity of life in a vast land was related to the conduct of our Chinese escorts. Every time a wild creature appeared, out came the pistols, shotguns and rifles. They were poor shots, though an occasional unlucky hare and pigeon were killed. The most enthusiastic killer (‘hunter’ is the wrong word as it implies deliberation and connection to the natural world) was Tong, our cook, who claimed to be hunting food for us. This was untrue, as none of Tong’s kills were ever cleaned, much less cooked and eaten. Tong killed for the thrill and, perhaps, for the small sense of control in a life over which he had little control; but Tong had his story and stuck to it.
Tong was a handsome, athletic fellow with an abundance of malevolent energy that he channeled into suspicious resentment toward our party. But he was no cook, as three weeks of his mostly inedible meals proved. We learned that he had come to Tibet with the Chinese army. He had married a Tibetan woman and had a family in Lhasa, but he treated the native people with angry condescension and an always visibly implied threat of violence. His profession was coaching soccer and he looked every bit the part of a tough, unflinching Asian warrior/athlete. I often thought that if I had known Tong in the context of coaching soccer we could have found some common ground and trust. But Tong had violated some stricture of Communist life and had been stripped of his job. Cooking for the enemy was his society’s method of instilling humility into his proud soldier/athlete soul and bending him to its will. Such upheaval is common in Communist China. At that time it was not unusual for doctors, engineers and scientists to spend some of the best, most productive years of their lives as field hands and miners to keep them from thinking too deeply or independently or setting any example that might cast doubt on accepted dogma or inspire a questioning of authority. The result in this case was a deeply resentful and hopelessly inept cook who fought back by sabotaging his own social/political system and our physical ones in every way possible. Each member of our group lost between five and 20 pounds during our time together.
There wasn’t much about Tong to like, but if he could not fight without dire and possibly fatal consequences the system that would make of him a cook for the hated westerners, he would and did fight us with every tool at his disposal. He took pride in letting us know he did not need or bow down to us. His government was despicable, his cooking disgusting, his demeanor deplorable, but there was something about his spirit that I admired and that made me laugh (not very often). He was a warrior and he would hold his ground even as that ground diminished, and while he might be defeated and beaten he would never surrender. In that he was more like the Tibetans and perhaps his Tibetan wife than he would ever know.
The last morning of our two-week base camp stay at Rongbuk we were all loaded into the “Chinese Liberation Truck” (the Chinese actually named the truck that in honor of the Orwellian deceit that China had ‘liberated’ Tibet) for the dusty, arduous 500 mile ride on dirt roads back to Lhasa. Emotions were high. My own reluctance to leave Rongbuk was less sentimental than visceral—as if I were leaving home for the first time. We looked with gratefulness, longing and a recognized sense of humility upon Rongbuk and Everest.
Suddenly, a herd of nawa, the graceful, endangered Tibetan blue sheep, magically appeared in the monastery ruins. Two of them jumped up on the remnants of a wall. We knew that the blue sheep were in the valley but we had not previously seen them. It was a thrilling farewell sign, an enchanted few moments, a portent, and a time warp in which man and beast were in harmony.
Like Eden, it didn’t last long.
Tong, rifle in hand, was out of the cab (Chinese rode in the covered cab; paying guests in the open back) with the speed of a trained soldier. As he raised his weapon to fire, an amazing thing happened. Everyone in the back of the truck spontaneously rose in unison and shouted as one voice a warning to the nawa, and, more significantly, a condemnation warning hinting at threat to Tong. We had finally had enough of mindless slaughter. A message in sound via the animal chemistry wireless was transmitted to Tong which said that shooting a nawa would start an international incident detrimental to everyone concerned.
Tong lowered his rifle. He looked up at the westerners he so disliked with a look of bewilderment followed by one of slow, cunning realization on his face.
The blue sheep took the hint and vanished as quickly as they had appeared.
We gave Tong a standing ovation, shouting approval and clapping like mad. The freedom to make life or death decisions could not come easily or often to a poor, over-regulated soldier like Tong; and for that reason when they did come he usually chose death. He was stunned by our exuberant show of approval. The enemy applauding. Then Tong shrugged and gave us a wide, handsome, heartfelt smile, the first we had seen from him. He got back in the truck, still smiling.
We drove out of the Rongbuk valley, gazing back at the north face of Everest as long as possible, feeling good.

 

 

 

 

Desert of the Heart

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“There are deserts in every life, and the desert must be depicted if we are to give a fair and complete idea of the country.”
Andre Maurois
Karen Chamberlain was a longtime dear friend, a Colorado-based poet/writer who died in 2010 and whose well crafted work has long been respected and cherished in small circles that continue to expand. Karen was the poetry editor of Mountain Gazette for the first five years of its resurrection and her book Desert of the Heart, published in 2006, is an astonishingly well written and beautiful memoir. Like Walden, Desert Solitaire and Sand County Almanac, Chamberlain’s Desert of the Heart is an important narrative about humans’ and the earth’s present situation. It is a natural history of a person, a time, the environment and ecology of a place and of that history’s timeless connection to and unbreakable relationship with all people in every place.
One definition of natural history is that it is “…an umbrella term for what are now usually viewed as a number of distinct scientific disciplines. Most definitions include the study of living things (e.g. biology, including botany and zoology); other definitions extend the topic to include paleontology, ecology or biochemistry, as well as parts of geology and physics and even meteorology.” While Chamberlain was a poet/writer flesh and pumping blood woman, not a cold, fact laden scientist, her depiction of the four and a half years she spent as the sole caregiver of Horsethief Ranch, an isolated oasis in the Utah desert, is natural history of an American Odyssey of spirit and heart. And every oasis, every human heart and the only earth we will ever have a chance to care for are both fragile and enduring and as related as cause and effect.
Desert of the Heart is a study of the interconnection of living things (some of them already dead in the corporeal/material realm but alive and present in others) in a stark environment that to the caring eye and intelligent effort of its author is as lush and life-sustaining as the mythological Garden of Eden. But Horsethief Ranch, Karen Chamberlain and what she experienced, accomplished, learned, left behind and brought back to all of us in the form of stunningly beautiful, soulful prose is not myth; it is evolutionary adventure and fine literature.
Chamberlain did what nearly every person of spirit and imagination dreams of doing without ever doing it: she ran away from home. She ran not to escape but to expand, not to retreat from the world and its illusions but to embrace its primordial realities. She sold her condo and left a comfortable and not unenviable life of friends, culture and social involvement in Aspen, Colorado, which epitomizes the apex of modern materialism, American culture and success according to western values. Without directly posing the question, Chamberlain’s story answers the question of why she would exchange Aspen for Horsethief, where there was no electricity, no phone, and no neighbors. Also without directly posing the questions, her story reveals the costs and the rewards of her great adventure in the desert.
What a story it is. It includes love, sorrow, death by loco weed, suicide, laughter, a (barely) harmless sexually addicted fool, fear, joy, unlikely friends, wise friends, new friends and old ones, and the space and time to think, write, experience and evolve.
Her companions are her dog, Koa, her horses, occasional and usually but not always welcome human visitors, a wild landscape—and solitude. Her immediate world is an oasis used by humans for centuries, nursed by her hands, effort and skills into a desert garden; and her own mind, unencumbered by the material signposts of western values. She falls in love with an eccentric, reclusive man as wary of relationship as she is of a lack of what she terms “unmolested landscape.” That man’s love, enmeshed with extended doses of solitude and daily and nightly encounters with unmolested landscape bring Chamberlain closer to what Buddhism terms Bodhichitta, “awakened mind.” Close enough that she is able to write of encountering a bighorn ram only ten yards away, “The ram stood still as a statue, head high, legs poised, gazing at us with neither fear nor arrogance nor interest. His presence, his wildness, his life defined in his own mysterious terms, was so overwhelming that he made everything else disappear, including ourselves.”
Chamberlain began writing Desert of the Heart: Sojourn in a Community of Solitudes during her second year at the ranch, and completed it after she left Horsethief. It is a stopover on the journey of life to treasure, and it speaks to us all. Don’t miss it.

 

 

 

 

 

A Crazy Cloud, Out In the Open

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A wealthy Japanese merchant of the 15th century once invited a number of Zen Buddhist abbots and famous priests to a feast of vegetarian dishes. One of the famous priests arrived dressed in a shabby robe and tattered straw hat. This priest was taken for a common beggar and was sent around to the back of the merchant’s palatial home, given a coin and ordered to leave immediately. The priest left.
Sometime later the same merchant put on another lavish feast for the same invitation list. This time the priest who had been turned away because of his shabby clothes showed up dressed in fancy vestments. When the meal was served the priest removed the vestments, carefully folded them and set them before the tray of food.
“What are you doing?” the host asked.
“This food belongs to the robes, not to me,” the priest replied as he was leaving.
This anecdote is well known in Japan, a characteristic tale of Zen literature. It is filled with practical wisdom, as was the priest. More than 500 years later, both are worthy of study and contemplation. The life of this man is interesting, instructive and inspirational.
The priest’s name was Ikkyu Sojun. He lived from 1394 until 1481. He was a Zen master, an artist and poet of the highest order, an eccentric, radical, uncompromising, unconventional and combative man who saw through, mocked and fought sham and hypocrisy wherever he found it. Indeed, Ikkyu was born to hypocrisy and sham, and his life was marked by the machinations that inevitably prop them up. His mother was the favorite lady-in-waiting at the court of the emperor of Japan, Go-Komatsu, who was his father. The jealous empress forced Ikkyu and his mother out of the palace and at birth the son of the emperor of Japan was registered as a commoner. His early life was humble.
At the age of five, he was sent to a Zen temple in Kyoto. This was a practical, not a religious, decision. There he would receive a solid and first rate education. More important, he would be assured of protection from the jealous empress, scheming court officials and suspicious generals. In medieval Japan, even the bastard son of the emperor—with the right circumstances and supporters—could claim the throne. To those ambitious for power, even a child is threatening.At the temple Ikkyu’s brilliance, precociousness, and wit were immediately recognized by both teachers and fellow students. And he was mischievous.
Another anecdote has it that one of the other acolytes accidentally broke the favorite tea bowl of the temple’s abbot while cleaning his quarters. He was terrified of the abbot’s fury and pleaded with the resourceful Ikkyu to get him out of the jam. “Leave it to me,” Ikkyu reassured him. When the abbot returned to the temple he was met by Ikkyu.
“Master,” Ikkyu said softly, “you have taught us that everything that is born must die, that whatever possesses material form will eventually perish.”
“Yes,” the abbot replied. “Those are the inescapable realities of life.”
“Master, I have bad news for you,” Ikkyu said sadly. “It was time for your favorite tea bowl to die.”
Though he grew up to become a Zen master, his behavior was always unconventional and erratic and he shunned the traditional role of the monk. He never settled down, spending his life roaming the Kyoto area, writing verse, creating brilliant calligraphy and paintings, practicing monastic Zen in the mountains by day and carousing Zen in the city by night. A self-descriptive verse reads:
“A crazy cloud, out in the open,
Blown about madly, as wild as they come!
Who knows where this cloud will gather, where
the wind will settle?”
Ikkyu concealed nothing of himself, thus allowing him to fully live his life without pretense, sham or hypocrisy. Even his sex life he celebrated openly, both in practice and verse, making him unique among stone-faced Zen priests who were masters of masked emotions:
“A sex-loving monk, you object!
Hot-blooded and passionate, totally aroused.
But then lust can exhaust all passion,
Turning base metal into pure gold.”
Late in life Ikkyu fell in love with a young woman, the blind minstrel Lady Mori. Their romance is one of the most celebrated in Japanese history, and Ikkyu composed this poem for their daughter:
“Even among beauties she is a precious pearl,
A little princess in this sorry world.
She is the inevitable result of true love,
And a Zen master is no match for her!”
Ikkyu, who knew the difference between a man and the robes a man wears, was thus eulogized by his first biographer, Bokusai:
“Ikkyu did not distinguish between high and low in society, and he enjoyed mingling with artisans, merchants, and children. Youngsters followed him about, and birds came to eat out of his hands. Whatever possessions he received he passed on to others. He was strict and demanding but treated all without favoritism. Ikkyu laughed heartily when he was happy and shouted mightily when angry.”
May we all live so heartily and mightily!