Sometimes the Hardest Thing to Do is Nothing At All

My wake-up call came a couple of years ago, while working in Santa Monica, in the entertainment industry.  I was in a room with the director, the record label executive, various computer artists, and we were reviewing our company's latest music video production, evaluating it for color, production value, audio quality--when I suddenly noticed what the rap artist onscreen was actually talking about--concerned that his 'ho would spill malt liquor on the seats of his low-rider pimp-mobile.  I looked around and wondered if it was just me or anyone else could feel Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X turning over in their graves.  Visions of small-pox infected blankets handed out to the native populations came to mind.  If you want to commit genocide, surely a good place to start is doing my small part to abet and encourage a culture's hatred of its women, it's mothers, it's daughters, it's sisters. And that was the beginning of the end of my L.A. days.  I thought "I can't stop this, and in a million ways I contribute to it everyday.  This system is much larger than me, but I'd sure as hell better begin looking for an alternative."  And then I heard about Bill Mollison, this New Zealander who started looking  for an alternative way of living on the earth, in harmony with its natural flow rather than dominating it into mankind's myopic vision of the future.  And he called it Permaculture.  To make a long story short, I hocked my life savings, got out of L.A. and bought 10 acres of land in Oklahoma, where I ply my computer graphics trade still, but my heart is in what this 10 acres can teach me.  It is amazing how strong is the pull to see this wild, overgrown place, beautiful but daily threatening to my sense of order, and need to pull it down, build a tri-level and sit on the porch with a gun/spray bottle of broadleaf killer just waiting for something unauthorized by my plan to move, to grow, to show its head without my permission...and subjugate it.  Fortunately I haven't the financial wherewithall for the tri-level, and I don't care much for guns, and I've read enough about sustainability to begin to grasp that nature, left to its own devices probably has much better plans for this wild chunk of red dirt than I do, and it will teach me more about it--and about me--than my city-fied quick glance would have initially indicated. 

Let the games begin.