Dangermond.org

It’s Frosty the Snowman around here – freezing and hailing and my toes are bitter cold despite the fact that I have socks and shoes on, which is abnormal for me most of the time I am working. I just saw an update about the massive storm and this is what caught my eye:

“A storm that produces a swath of 20-inch snow is really something we’d see once every 50 years — maybe,” Spriggs said.

The system was blamed for at least 10 deaths, including a homeless man who burned to death on Long Island as he tried to light cans of cooking fuel and a woman in Oklahoma City who was killed while being pulled behind a truck on a sled that hit a guard rail.

Years ago, Susan Sontag was speaking in San Francisco and I went to hear her and she said she had just gotten back from Bosnia and that if you weren’t paying attention to what was happening there then you were part of the problem. I felt guilty but also as if I had been caught in the headlights. I admit to being ordinary only because I had to laugh when I was reading another friend’s blog and the responses were numerous and all so erudite and I looked at the one comment showing up on my blog that week and it was about how good my hair looked!

So I think that on the scale of Paris Hilton to Susan Sontag, I’m firmly in the middle with perhaps a lean towards Sontag. And I’m frightened by what I don’t know as in the age old question how should I be spending my time on this earth on the scale of self-indulged pleasure to altruistic service. Is being a yoga guru better than being a researcher of media? Should I give more money than I do to charity? Is there something I can do right now, today, that would help work towards a solution to the crime in New Orleans? Is it possible to address the need for poor children to have access to a warm meal every day, a book read to them when they are a toddler, and clothes on their back – love in their heart?

I thought about all these things when I looked at this one image on my niece’s blog.

There is a NYT article this morning saying that a determination has been made in the BP Oil Spill that says the area will recover faster than people had anticipated – by the end of 2012 – and therefore compensation for the damages will be mitigated by this good news. I read this almost in disbelief that anyone could in their right mind know when and to what degree the damages from this spill would be over and I will highlight only one reasonable voice quoted in the article:

A key document used to formulate plans for commercial fishermen making claims was a report by Wes Tunnell, a marine biologist at Texas A&M’s Harte Research Institute in Corpus Christi, who has extensive experience studying oil spills.

The 39-page report acknowledges that any definitive assessment at this point is impossible, and that fully understanding the spill’s ecological effects will take years.

I’m still working through the compassion meditation theme which finished this month and last night, it was tough because in exploring who you are and who people near you really are, it is hard not to be compassionate if you are able to envision a person as a young child drawn into a circle of loving warmth. The nutty thing about the meditation last night was that in creating this circle of people who love and support me whether drawing from the living or dead, I found myself smiling a big smile as I drew a circle that had my grandparents, parents, uncles and ex lover and friends all sitting around in a campfire.

When I started bringing people into the group, first as a child and then as an adult, I found that even the people who I would most like to spit on were people I have compassion for – and so I guess I was able to surrender to the moment, to the desire to find compassion inside me for others I don’t want to see in any other light than the one-dimensional hurtful or irritating one they are showing me.

Surrender is a wonderful way to approach those things you cannot control – if you are dealing with someone who is inevitably placing themselves as an obstacle in your path and going around them is not an option – surrender to them being them and then that lets you go through them. Spooky but it does work.

When I visited the I Ching master in Shanghai many years ago he said that I would most align with a person whose zodiac was the Horse, so it was no surprise to find out that T’s Chinese sign is the Horse. Today I was wishing Happy New Year to some colleagues and noticed it is the year of the Rabbit, which is what my ex was and so I looked at the traits listed and thought, wow, spot on. So then I looked at mine and thought, wow, spot on. Not satisfied there, I then looked at T’s Horse traits, and thought, okay, this is weirdly spot on.

So maybe all of this is hocus pocus and doesn’t mean a thing but how is it that the I Ching Master basically called the next few years of my life spot on? And how would being a pig align with being a Polly Anna and how would a horse who constantly bucks against the stall she desires not translate beautifully as a metaphor or what about the quiet power of the rabbit sitting in the conference room only twitching his nose?

I used to have a recording of myself as a toddler and I was singing this song, “I’m moo moo the cow, I eat lots of hay, babeeshuninyuhairstyleface” – that word was a word I said as a kid constantly because it was a derivative of what my father would say when any of us sneezed, which was “vivir cien años” and who knows where hairstyle face got glommed on. So I love that Tin continues to call butterflies “bagash” even though he has actually said butterfly before.

A friend was over the other night and said she had heard a recording of herself as a toddler on Christmas morning and she said she was so impressed at what a bossy little girl she was even at an early age. She was delivering orders to her siblings and parents around gift opening and cookies and the day. She was with her fiance and he agreed she has grown up to be a bossy woman, which actually works for her because she’s a band leader and we all know how musicians are, don’t we?

Last night, Tin wanted to hear Trombone Shorty, who is in a dead heat with Louis Armstrong and Evan Christopher for his favorite musicians, so we had dinner and while he rocked out to Backatown, and I marveled at how tight his little monkey pajamas he inherited from Ruby have become – I video’d him because he is now getting to the point where he is stringing sentences together and I wanted him to see himself one day, talking for the first time. I particularly love how he says Constantin Pavlovic Dangermond, even though I don’t capture it to full effect here.

I’m following the upheaval in Egypt with interest as it all goes back to Clay Shirky’s premise that technology is changing more than you would have thought – the global community is truly here despite aspirations to stay local, to retain identity, to not get swept away with the flotsam – as soon as everybody controls access to information, no one is in charge and then what? Chaos.

Is chaos a good thing? Most likely you might see that the first rise of dissension works best because everyone unites against an enemy but then that is when real trouble hits. Topple this regime, yeah, no problem. But erect, build, decree this new regime – Houston, we may have a problem as everyones’ ideas vie for legitimacy.

We are living through interesting times.

On the Rooftops of Iran

Over the starlit rooftops, in Iran,
echoes the agonized voice
of those who only want
to say something.

Not the litany of the muezzins
and their monotonous prayers,

asking no questions, insisting on the same answers.

It’s the green song tearing
off the black cloth of the ayatollahs
as if from high above the houses
it would be possible to anticipate
the birth of light
that bloodies the dawn.

AFFONSO ROMANO DE SANT’ANNA translated from the Portuguese by Lloyd Schwartz, with Rogério Zola Santiago

Northwest Review Volume 48, Number 2 / 2010