obligatory 'blogging about blogging' post

y u blog tho?

I haven't known what to blog about. People blog what they're passionate about. I'll admit, I'm not super passionate about being a slave driver or a slave in an institution of public education, partaking in a monocultural, mass-produced, arbitrary academic exercise. 

So let's start a blog during your one-month required education class! Great idea!

The anti-cynic in me saw the opportunity to stack the UNM requirements with the Permaculture Design Course I attended during the week I was supposed to be blogging, where I found the title to the blog. I am a teacher because I believe the classroom can be a place of healing, of personal growth, and a fertile ground to plant seeds of knowledge for a future our kids actually want to live in. I confess I don't like school anymore...

...like many, and maybe most--(maybe)--of your students...

...or think that they (schools) are necessarily a good thing for people, their health, or their communities. I'm not an expert at what any of those things mean. The school environment, from the point I began taking ADHD medication for behavioral issues, split my personality between a manic, testosterone-driven, competitive, obsessive-compulsive monster while medicated, and an emotional, sensitive, self-loathing, and impulsive drug addict in early stages of withdrawal. This was not great for my mental health, or the way I related to others. And. Ritalin probably kept me out of trouble. 

Wubba lubba dub dub!

What's with the title?

Underneath my initial irritation about being shuttled into a university human CAFO activity I found disappointment in myself that I had not yet found something I cared enough about writing to share with the world though many have suggested I start a blog. Since like 2010. So instead of reacting in course- or self-deprecation, I reflected. 

I care about knowledge and the values embedded therein. I care about sharing the spirit and utility of that knowledge with others. I care about the earth. I care about the future. I care about living in a way that reflects my values. For me, becoming a teacher was part of a new path of self-actualization, away from my PhD program, balancing the eastern and western, modern and ancient wisdom I encountered in my theoretical research and life praxis. 

a brief tangent: about when I decided to become a teacher

I miraculously snuck Dr. Greg Cajete's NATV460 Native Science class onto my schedule, unbeknownst to the Biology graduate advisor, who blocked me from taking PENP130 Kung Fu because it wasn't a graduate level biology class. 

Because the kinesthetic mimicry of mantids, tigers, cranes, monkeys, or eagles is irrelevant to biology...

The most important thing I learned from Cajete was nonverbal: when he discussed the relationship between Native Science and Western Science, he began by bumping his fists together, elbows out, forearms in a line, wrists rotated at right angles to each other, so the knuckles didn't line up.

"This is how it is for a lot of native students." 

Then he would align his wrists, and splay his fingers, gently sliding them together to interlock, adding:

"...but it doesn't have to be that way."

As a teacher, I have found my experience seeking harmony from the dissonant duality within myself helps to bridge, to connect people and their ideas--to heal--to stitch together the fragmentation of self we all experience through the rougher chapters of life. 

"Because we separate / like ripples on a blank shore / in rainbows"

back to souls and soils

I saw the fertilizer-monocultural specialization mentality that had brought me success was eroding my mental health. I was shocked and disturbed to lose a friend to suicide as he was quitting his ADHD medication, which kicked me awake to the dangers of the neural alchemy I was engaged in. When I deferred admission to the PhD program to buy a herd of sheep and flock of turkeys, I took a big step away from the fertilizer fossil fuel pharmaceutical frame of mind that had brought me to where I was in life: 23, M.S. in-hand, full of skills whose utility I worried would be limited in a rapidly changing world. From the straight and narrow, I hurtled myself into the fractal backcountry of re-tooling. At the permaculture design course (PDC) I attended, (hosted by my ecology TA from the beginning of that new chapter, who encouraged me to take a break---

--He still hasn't gone back--

--from graduate school and try out farming.) One of my design teammates (Seth Peterson, @permaculturechef) coined the phrase: "healing souls and soils" and I really liked it. Our design plan included a school, with lodging and an ecological/evolutionary succession of projects for interns and students to take on that would interact with each other and increase the synergistic feedbacks on the whole landscape. 

What should we expect?

Since I ultimately don't want to be shouting streams of data "into the ether(net cable)", I checked a couple tips on blogging. 

Here are a couple tips I like:

⁃ Link your posts to each other. (my friends at Mastodon Valley Farm do a stellar job of this.) Interweave them in a branching narrative. In permaculture, this is often referred to as "stacking functions" where a single element has many functions, and a single function concerns many elements. In this way, knowledge can be conveyed and practiced in the context of indirectly-related content. 

⁃ Be yourself and write for yourself before your audience. That way the people who read your work and appreciate your work already love you and want to read your most authentic voice. "Why am I trying to kill this thing that wants to live?" and "Why do I want to keep this thing alive that wants to die?" are common questions permaculture practitioners ask themselves as we observe and interact with the environment and the things living in it (here, readers). 

Maybe "be yourselves"...cultivating a diverse ecosystem of perspectives

⁃ Give away your knowledge through recipes, lesson plans, music, or experiential wisdom. Cool. Assuming readers read to obtain a yield. For me, the yield is a repository, a practice of production. If the state is going to pay me to interact with young/open minds and lead them to knowledge, I anticipate the content I can generate on a blog serves to attract the pollinators of ideas, and the value they offer to me: to do the work of reproducing and spreading the wisdom (I hope) I can provide here. 

Here are tips I'm probably going to ignore or challenge (transgress? (not yet. next post.)):

⁃ Post regularly! Keep it short! Whore yourself out for reader traffic! As you can probably tell by now, I don't write short snippets. But you're still reading, (I hope), because you're enjoying what I have to say and the means I use to do so. I don't operate on regular timelines. I am allergic to regularity for its own sake, which I anticipate the people who will enjoy my writing will appreciate. Animals, plants, I can deal with. I don't want to be on a computer everyday and I don't want my readers on a computer everyday either. Writing is hard. When the inspiration flows, it flows. When I write I am damaging my brain by looking at a screen. Sometimes I close my eyes to write, to avoid looking. I find the three-dimensional world more engaging and am attracted to bloggers (stanley donwood, jayrosen, vinay, Paul Kingsnorth) who eschew the model of regularity, or have found ways around it (e.g. 538: inviting new, talented authors)--mostly by being exceptional writers. Sure, I'll admit I haven't read the pope's entire essay on climate change, but I think there's a happy medium between Laudato Si and facilitating the shallow interactions with ideas and people that I felt I was doing when I had a facebook. Becoming an adult in a world with attention and validation channels less personal than real life led me to juvenile attention-seeking behavior patterns. I deleted my facebook in 2014, sick of arguments, getting my jimmies all rustled and trying to rustle other people's jimmies, too, chuckling maniacally behind a keyboard about the butthurt revenge I was exacting on my intellectual foes. 

On Facebook, one has strange conversations with friends. On Twitter, one has friendly conversations with strangers. 

Thanks for your time and attention.

p.s. other blogs I like:

https://foodshednomad.com/ << Bruce really doesn't care how long you take to read something. He rocks.

https://carbonpilgrim.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/land-literacy/