No Time For Words
By learning to step out of the way of observation we can experience a greater degree of reality.
‘Stow it, Guv’nor’
Turn On, Tune In, Shut Up.
In the beginning, we observe. We watch, wide-eyed, taking it all in. At first, we do not know what any of it means. There is nobody teaching us, and we have no words. Our only option when we are very young is to sense the world directly — with our fingers and toes, our breath, our noses and our ears, and our eyes.
Soon though, so soon, we begin to have ideas. That person is a friend. This animal is soft. I like the taste of that. Those noises make me flinch. And soon those ideas come to replace observation. Soon we are interpreting as we observe, and it becomes difficult to tease the two things apart. What I am seeing becomes intertwined with what it means.
In the study of animal behavior, one of the most difficult things to learn is to return to a state of observation without interpretation. If you are trying to figure out what an animal is doing, and also would like to understand why, you …
Banditdamack Is on the Run
Hemet isn’t a place that you visit, it’s a vortex where you wind up.
The greatest rapper ever raised in California’s Inland Empire nearly gets busted, and it’s mostly my fault.
Good thing we weren’t smoking.
The sirens are off, but the silence is plenty ominous. Only a few seconds separate the moment when the Hemet police car bends the corner from when the cops bounce out of the late-model SUV to start lumbering in our direction. No time to do anything but react.
Until now, it has been an almost artificially pleasant Sunday afternoon on Presidents’ Day weekend. One of those subtropical 70-degree winter idylls that originally inspired the Eastern pioneers to exchange frostbite for the fertile soil of the San Jacinto Valley. But tranquility can quickly breed carelessness. Even if you’re Banditdamack, the hyper-vigilant 20-year-old storytelling phenom, who may already be the best rapper ever raised in Southern California’s Inland Empire.
The slipup was harmless enough. We’d agreed to meet at 2 PM at a spot in Bandit’s downtrodden hometown of Hemet, a former agricultural depot of about 90,000 …
Rural Virginia’s Solar Gold Rush
Is solar energy destroying the soil it was meant to save?
Fields of Chinese-made solar panels and giant corporate data centers replace farms in Mecklenburg County while electricity prices climb
‘I see God’s beauty everywhere’
There’s a reason the American pastoral has endured in art as it has, tenuously, in life. Paint me a landscape with rolling hills, with cattle grazing in distant fields and a black horse with his white-streaked nose looking curiously up at the fences. Paint in the foreground a woman who spent her life here, who worked this land with her mother and father and then with her husband and sons, who has seen the county change with the crops, and who is thinking now about what world will be left to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What will they see when they look out over the open pastures? What will they remember?
I am spending an afternoon with Mrs. Betty Upton at her cattle farm in Virginia’s Mecklenburg County. It’s early in the day, just after church, and she is still wearing a black dress embroidered with white flowers and a red woolen jacket with a broad black lapel. The Southern lady is …
