Fatherwork - June 18

At times I feel guilty for just living, for simply eating and sleeping and doing the basics to live. I feel like I should be doing more, having more impact on the world. I am not sure if this is guilt inherited from a capitalist system that wants me to be always producing. Or perhaps this guilt is inherited from a Catholic vision of the world where I feel like I need to work off the shame of original sin or all the other sins that generations of my ancestors have heaped on top of that. Or an activist guilt: fear that the world is in desperate need of something that I might have to offer and need to be working to give. It is probably a wicked cocktail of all of these.

And I recognize the inherent value of simply living, of caring for myself and my family. Truly, all other activities of value, from philosophy to politics to art to food, should aim at making conditions possible for people to live well, to care for self, family and community in peace. If we cannot live well in the everyday lifeways that make up our daily rhythms, all other activities are worthless.

I sometimes imagine another person, someone in a far more difficult situation, imagining me, and demanding that I enjoy every last drop of my privilege, that I forge excellence from all the good material I have been given. I feel like I owe this to these imaginary strangers, to all those who came before me and to all those who currently are out there now dying for the opportunities that I have. Perhaps I am connecting with myself in the future remembering back to my self now in this blessed time… or perhaps I am sensing future generations invoking me as ancestor. How can I show up for them, now?

Sometimes the best thing to do is very little. Wouldn’t our world be better if people weren’t always running around trying to do so many things? All the do-goodery has really screwed us over the centuries—too many damn crusades.

My dear wife reminded me today: rest, fallow time, space, all the emptinesses and silences are of vital importance. So many haven’t had that luxury. Nor have I, except rarely. It is so good to have space in between the movement and action, yin to balance the yang. I have done many things in my life, and it is time to do less, better. Time to simply nurture my child. This is enough.

Fatherwork - June 16 - Father’s Day

We gather in a circle, sharing food and blessings.

My daughter is held by generations gathered around, expressing feelings: hope, grief, love.

Fatherwork - June 7

Questions I have been asking myself:

Can I clean up a meal, wash dishes, and sweep in maximum stillness and quiet, with the minimum amount of effort, as if all this were a Japanese tea ceremony, with virtually no sound, with every object and body part set into motion with utmost care? And can I do this without scrunching my eyes and clenching my ass in useless effort?

Can I set this sleeping infant down, moving imperceptibly slow, without my heart rate going up, without a sound? And should I start a baby qi gong self-help business?

How can I decolonize, depatriarchalize, detraumatize myself and my parenting to allow my child to remain as free as she was born? And maybe I could just be okay with her eating, sleeping, and pooping well without me trying to liberate the bejeezus out of her?

How can I strive for excellence without taking myself too seriously?

Fatherwork - June 4

Becoming a father changed time for me.

Watching my mother rock and sing to my newborn, to her granddaughter, I remember being an infant, I am brought back to being in her arms. I can also see my daughter’s grandmother become young again herself, perhaps also entering into her memory of being in her own mother’s arms.

The future has also become much more real. My hundred-year-present was my lifetime and the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents, and it had begun to stretch forward with my nieces and nephews. This present has now united fully with the lifetime of my daughter, and I am now deeply connected to all that she will touch. My actions and dwelling in this present will cultivate the world she will live in.

My time alive feels briefer than ever, as I have become increasingly aware of how quickly we grow, and grow old. And yet I now feel myself weaving a new generation of life into being, part of the dance of generations and regeneration, and so my life energy is becoming continuous with coming generations. I can stay here in this present, in this place, and channel to my daughter all my many journeys and relations, all that my ancestors lived and passed to me; it is a feeling of vast, dynamic stillness.

In some ways as parents we have lost all the “free time” we had before we had a child. It’s difficult to find time for our basic necessities while caring constantly for the basic necessities the baby. The tiredness is intense… though not like the first newborn days—those first moments stretched into hours making days full of wonder and love and only minutes of sleep. Time held still. Now, though, it feels like we have gained so much time—as a family, we take walks, and sing, and spend most of our time in the simple actions of domestic life. We eat, sleep, poop, bathe, cry, laugh, play. Time expands.

In those middle-of-the-night wakings, when I hold my baby in her moment of need, I awaken out of normal time into interstitial time: normal time is suspended, and my child becomes the universe.

Fatherwork - May 14

I now spend hours using only one hand, juggling the baby while I cook, clean, shop, text, write. It has become a design and organizational challenge to make the entire home one-handed accessible. Mad respect to all the one-handed (and no-handed) folks out there. And to all those working single moms and dads who do all this with a bone-deep tired that must be way beyond mine—wow.

Late at night, I have the opportunity to move as a sightless person, in near-total darkness, striving for an economy of movement to avoid the devastating error of sound waking baby. It is an elaborate house-wide Japanese tea ceremony: no clinking, all presence, full savoring of all the simple movements and flavors of now. I’ve set up the bedroom for these moments: my clothes just so, to locate and put on blindly. This all feels like good practice, regardless of fatherhood: take care of our space, our objects, and give each thing it’s easily accessed honored space. It’s stewarding a place that is conducive to care, whether that care is for a baby or just simple care for this environment and ourselves.

Care itself has taken on new dimensions: to hold my baby at night, to carry the most valuable thing in my world through the darkness, demands absolute presence of mind and body.

Fatherwork - May 8

Caring for this tiny being, for the weakest and most vulnerable human I have ever known this well, I am finally learning to be strong—which is to be vulnerable, and to know the intense power of vulnerability. This tiny teacher is reminding me, and powerfully compelling me, to slow down, to take walks, to sing. She shows me what it means to live in the present, without worry of the future or past. A master of energy, she is the epicenter of all attention of those in her presence. She leaves me little energy to spend on my habitual narrowings of consciousness that are my anxieties about what is beyond my reach in the past or future. And so I am with her, and with the simple things that she needs, and that I and my wife need when I am not directly caring for her.

She is teaching me to express pain and discomfort with every fiber of the body. So often she expresses what I feel but repress without thinking—so often I remain quiet and unfeeling in the face of terrible things. Even the banal difficult things—hunger, tiredness, traffic—trigger an astoundingly great distress expressed in bold, demanding volume. And yet she feels no fear of the many apocalypses we have learned to fear, she hasn’t heard that climate chaos may turn our living Earth into boiling Venus, never heard the voices of any genocidal dictator or demagogue. I am tempted to think she feels no grief and knows no death, either, but perhaps she does; upon being born into this air-breathing world, she died forever to her former self of the watery womb world. Martín Prechtel writes, in the exquisite The Smell of Rain on Dust: “Our very lives start out from the very beginning by us crying out as hard as we can in a newly found voice, not in a complaining squeal of rage for not having things stay the same, but in a sorrowful musical wail, tiny and beautiful, that says, ‘Mama, where are you? Where am I? I'm cold and alone here without your drumming heart.’ It's the first grief poem, a song.”

I recently lost my friend-brother-teacher-mentor Iván Nogales—he died unexpectedly, his bright light going out suddenly, leaving me, together with his family, friends, community, all his people, suddenly in the dark, blinking in shock by the sudden lack of his creative, passionate and loving brilliance. He met my daughter in the womb, blessed her with the vibrations of his hearty, rolling laughter. His death, in Bolivia, came in the same season as her birth here in California, and he sent his blessings for her just before leaving for the other side. I grieve that she will never meet him and breathe the same air, never learn directly from his clowning wisdom.

And I grieve all the deaths that have deprived and will bereave her: the deaths of good friends, the extinction of countless species, the desecration and destruction of places of power and beauty. I once stood on firm, dry earth at the foot of a glacier in the Bolivian Andes, and heard my guide recall, voice laden with loss, the ice caves that once covered the place we stood, once stretched for one hundred of meters below us, over the now-bare earth. I was stunned then. And now, still sensitive to the miracle of life with my child newly formed, I feel loss as unbearably real… I feel more. I am not stunned; instead, I cry actively. Now, I can feel Iván’s spirit, his ajayu alive and present in me and in all those he touched, in the same way those glacial ice caves continue to echo in the memory and presence of those who knew them. I will pass these spirits on to my daughter, and recognize that all these temporary bodies are only vessels for eternal spirit.

Fatherwork - May 1

I begin three months of paternity leave today, the day variously celebrated as the beginning of summer, the end of spring, May Day, Beltane. I now look back, astounded, on four months of life with my daughter, this tiny teacher who has changed me beyond measure. Impossible to imagine life without her now. And more possible than it has been for years to remember what it was to be in her place: tiny, defenseless, with the enormous power of innocence, full of wonder and fear and pain and love and pure living potential. Sometimes I even feel like I am holding myself when I hold her.

May Day: We celebrate labor by not working, we celebrate workers and thank those who organized and fought and bled to make work humane. I can think of no working practice more humane than taking time off “productive” work in order to care for an infant. I bow in gratitude to those who have made it possible for me to take three months to dedicate myself exclusively to being a father, to nurturing my daughter. I bow in humility for all the mothers in the world, who routinely sacrifice so much to raise their children. I bow in astonishment at the fathers who manage to work without pause (with good reason and without) in the pursuit of creating safety and security for their families. I marvel at my privilege and grieve at how extremely and tragically rare this is for fathers throughout history. What effect will this have on our daughter, to grow with this deep and focused nourishing? What effect will paternity leave becoming more common (may it continue to be so!) have on the generation being born into the world now? How will this change men of this generation, as we learn to caretake in ways that have always been expected of women?

Beltane: the old Celtic traditional celebration of spring turning to summer, revived in the traditions of neopagan America. A season of my life has ended, and a new one begun. Bonfires bless the animals, people leap over flames. Hearths are rekindled from these fires born from pure flint and friction. And so now I am rekindling my dedication to life, I am remade from this new spark which already has consumed my past self. Flowers adorn people, cattle, trees: everyone is in bloom, all is fertile. Maypoles sprout up, girls dancing ribbons around them, celebrating fertility and the union and balance of the male and female. As a father, I feel the responsibility to act with balanced male energy, to teach my daughter mature masculinity, so that she might recognize and embody that energy. And as always, I must balance the male and female energies in myself and in the world—yin and yang, chachawarmi. In achieving balance, however imperfectly, I open the door for my daughter to strive for the same in herself.

The ever-birthing present
gifts and challenges,
swiftly shifts-slips-henges,
rearranges the fences,
centers past and future tenses,
cycling the distances of differences,
impermanences,
life and death dances

People in Places - part 1

See more at www.wovenpathmedia.com/photos

I awake and know my dreams were deep

but I’ve already surfaced and can’t see past my feet

my tongue, though, is tight,

feels like if it might just speak the right words

the perfectly positioned hocus-pocus

to snap the world back into focus

to make go poof all the bogus nuclear nightmares

the garish greedy empire of our daily fare…

no, though, not yet at least—now it’s just time

to shower and shave and savor the coffee of the day

Valley of the Gods - Bears Ears

The Valley of the Gods: sacred power resonates in this place, with astounding beauty guarded by countless generations. It is our turn. These lands are in Bears Ears, which is under attack though an illegal presidential proclamation that violates the protections of its monument status, opening the door to toxic extractive industry such as uranium pit mines and coal stripmines. Over 100,000 Native American archeological and cultural sites are here, including the epic petroglyphs at Newspaper Rock in these photos. In order to defend these lands, all photos in this post are available for free under Creative Commons BY-NC license. Please reach out if you need higher quality images. Defend Bears Ears!

The 5 tribes who have stewarded this land for centuries created a ground-breaking coalition to form the monument protections. They are fighting this in the courts, and need support. https://bearsearscoalition.org/

#StandWithBearsEars #DefendNativeLands and #PublicLands #ValleyoftheGods #BearsEars #GrandStaircaseEscalante