Author Archives: Morgan Mussell

Notes from the Wasteland

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Photo by David Mark, public domain.

Photo by David Mark, public domain.

Talk of drought in California isn’t uncommon.  Normally it means lower levels in reservoirs and thinner snowpacks in the Sierras.  Bad news for skiers, and boaters, and farmers, perhaps, and an earlier start to the fire season, but’s it’s January, and for those who don’t ski, or boat, or farm, it’s easy to ignore until summer. But this time it’s different. This year it simply will not rain.

Even in “dry” winters, you see warnings that river currents are cold and swift.  This year the river’s so low there is no visible current.  Half of the local lawns are brown, and those that are green invite visits from the “water patrols” the districts threaten to form.  They say the reservoir from which we get our drinking water is at 17%; that image isn’t easy to forget.

A year ago, I posted a report from the National Intelligence Council.  Every four years, the NIC, representing every US intelligence agency, collaborates on a summary of the world situation to give the incoming president.  They post the report online for anyone to read.  After the last presidential election, the NIC gave the administration a report called Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds:

Click for the text of the whole report

I discussed the report in detail in a post in December, 2012, but it’s worth reviewing one of the four “Megatrends” the report identified.  The CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and the 13 other agencies that compiled the report do not waste time debating climate change; they accept it as a given and factor it into predictions, saying that by 2030:

Demand for food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40, and 50 percent respectively owing to an increase in the global population and the consumption patterns of an expanding middle-class. Climate change will worsen the outlook for the availability of these critical resources. Climate change analysis suggests that the severity of existing weather patterns will intensify, with wet areas getting wetter and dry and arid areas becoming more so.

What gives you pause is their conclusion:

We are not necessarily headed into a world of scarcities, but policymakers and their private sector partners will need to be proactive to avoid such a future.

At this time, if we have to depend on our “policymakers and their private sector partners” to be proactive, we’re screwed, but there are different ways to look at our situation.  As usual, I try to relate literal “truth” to archetypal patterns, and in this case, the obvious mythic story is that of the Wasteland.

The story relates how Camelot fell apart.  How the rift between Arthur and his queen threw the land into ruin.  How the ailing king sent his knights in search of the Holy Grail, the one thing that could restore the barren world.  Those who reached the Grail Castle found another mysterious king inside, wounded through the testicles, in constant pain but unable to die.  His only relief by day was to float in a boat on a lake near the castle.  For this reason, he was known as “The Fisher King.”  He could only be healed by the right knight arriving at the castle to ask the right question.

Antecedents to the story are ancient and predate the Arthurian tales, perhaps by thousands of years.  In writing his poem, The Waste Land (1922), T.S. Eliot relied on an anthropological study, From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston, who in turn, drew on The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazier’s study of sacred kingship.

In the mythic cycle Frazier explored, the earthly king was “married” to the Goddess of the Land.  His potency and the earth’s fertility were one.  When he became old and infirm or impotent, the health of the land suffered.  He was ritually killed and a new king selected.  We find echoes of this in Arthur’s estrangement from Guinevere, though of course by then, the era when monarchs submitted to sacrifice was past.

We aren’t ruled by kings anymore, but if we consider “governments” alongside the word, “impotent,” and if we ignore what Viagra can fix, we find these meanings: “weak; ineffective, powerless or helpless; having no self-control.”

Yet the news isn’t all bad, and that is a theme I plan to explore in a series of posts exploring the Wasteland.  For one thing, the Grail hides there and nowhere else.  For another, the old stories never suggest that rulers can save us.  Renewal comes from the outsider, the dummling, the fool, Parsifal the rustic youth, or a carpenter from Nazareth.  

There are literally thousands of people today, already in or ready to enter the metaphorical forest on a quest for better ways to live.  I plan to discuss a few of their stories here.

“Arming the Grail Knights” by Edward Burne-Jones, tapestry, 1890’s, public domain

Cool water

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“Cool Water,” a classic western song, was written in 1936 by Bob Nolan (1908-1980), a Canadian transplant to Arizona, who fell in love with the desert.  Nolan, an actor, poet, singer, and songwriter also wrote “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds,” and is credited with the creation of “western music” as a distinct genre.

Bob Nolan in "The Lights of Old Santa Fe," 1944

Bob Nolan in “The Lights of Old Santa Fe,” 1944

“Cool Water” tells of a man and his mule, lost in the desert and beset with mirages.  The song has been widely covered by artists as diverse as Hank Williams, Marty Robbins, Joni Mitchell, Burl Ives, Johnny Cash, The Muppets, and Fleetwood Mac.

All day I’ve faced a barren waste
Without the taste of water, cool water
Old Dan and I with throats burnt dry
And souls that cry for water, cool, clear, water.

The song came to mind for obvious reasons last week:  Gov. Brown to declare California drought emergency.  Nobody here needs the newspaper to tell us we’re in trouble.  A glance at the brown lawns in January, and the American River, running lower than I’ve ever seen it at this time of year will do that.

My thoughts have been filled with many songs, stories, and images of water that I will be sharing here.  I was planning on writing a longer post today, but I never got past this clip of Marty Robbins’ version of “Cool Water.”

I first heard the song on my absolute favorite album as a kid, Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.  Even though he’s kidding around with his friends (I think it’s a clip from “Hee Haw”), if you listen, it sounds like a prayer.  I think I’ll leave it at that for today.

Help wanted, heroes and heroines: must be civil and adroit

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This unusual job description comes from the opening lines of a Grimm’s fairy tale I recently read for the first time.  Fairy tale characters never get more than a word or two of description, and most of the time, tags like “clever fox” and “evil stepmother” are so familiar they don’t make us stop and think.  The opening of “The Glass Coffin,” was different enough to catch my attention:

“A civil, adroit tailor’s apprentice once went out traveling, and came into a great forest, and as he did not know the way, he lost himself.”

Civil and adroit are good terms for key attributes of successful folklore protagonists.  Though the words may sound quaint to us now, the traits they describe are as relevant to our own world as they are to travelers in Faerie.

The Glass Coffin

The Glass Coffin

The virtue of civility:

Some of the Grimm Brothers’ stories seem to locate these attributes along gender lines, implying a world of civil females and adroit males.  But if we review a number of tales, much of the time we find both characteristic needed by men and women alike.

Girls who are rude or mean may wind up dead or have their eyes pecked out like Cinderella’s step sisters.  Toads may jump from their mouths when they try to speak.  Feminists point to such story features as efforts to domesticate young women and make them docile.  Yet for many youngest sons, success also hinges on civility, often to seemingly insignificant creatures.  It’s a dwarf who offers council in  The Water of Life.  When the worldly-wise older brothers mouth off to the little man, they end up imprisoned in stone.  The youngest brother, who is respectful and heeds (most of) the dwarf’s advice, wins his heart’s desire and more.

In many of these stories, motives are greater than simple expediency.  The hero of The White Snake shows genuine compassion.

The White Snake by Arthur Rackham

The White Snake by Arthur Rackham

Through a bit of (adroit) trickery, a king’s servant gains the power to understand the speech of animals. He goes traveling and saves three different kinds of “lowly” creatures – fish, ants, and baby ravens.  Kind heartedness rather than self-interest drives him, for though the creatures promise to help him, they only do so after he sets them free.  There were no strings attached to his generosity.

The story is not just a simple call to spare the lives of all creatures, for the servant kills his horse to feed the ravens.  It would take another post to explore this detail, but to the extent that these stories dwell on  compassion, their theme is both ancient and timely.  The Dalai Lama put it in simple terms:  “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

The virtue of being adroit:  

The dictionary defines adroit as “skillful in a physical or mental way; clever; expert.”  In fairy tales, this sometimes means knowing when to kill your horse to feed the ravens.  At other times, it means cunning, trickery, and lies.  In stories, we often imagine these as men’s attributes, perhaps because traditional full time tricksters, from Hermes to Coyote, are usually male.  Yet in Grimm’s stories, young women need to understand and master deceit as often as men.  In Bluebeard-type tales, and notably a frightening story called “Fitcher’s Bird,” it’s a matter of life and death.

Part of being adroit is the intuitive sense of when someone or something feels wrong; when civility is not in order.  In fairy tales, women often do this better than men.  Typically, in three-brother stories, the youngest prince will trust his older brothers, even after the dwarf has warned him not to.  Cinderella and girls like her know better than to be fooled by older siblings.

Instinctively knowing when something is off has new relevance in the 21st century.  Interviews with 9/11 survivors adds to research suggesting our brains are not very good at processing radical changes or threats.  People on the upper floors of the South Tower had just over 16 minutes before the second airplane hit; those who left survived and those who waited did not.  On average, people took 1o minutes to choose.  In times of radical change, we need that cunning, adroit part of our ourselves to cut through the illusion that things will right themselves and return to “normal.”  It can be a matter of life or death.

***

Few things in fairy tales are certain, and the first story in the Grimm’s collection, The Frog King, is an exception that proves the rule proposed by this post.  The princess is neither civil nor adroit.  She’s a petulant brat, who gets what she wants by hurling the frog against a wall (the kiss only comes in later versions).  To our sensibilities, she doesn’t deserve the prince who appears when her act of violence breaks the spell.

There’s an irony in the original “Frog King,” however.  When the transformed prince reunites with his faithful servant, Heinrich, he almost seems more delighted than he is with his new bride.  At least one illustrator, Walter Crane (1845-1915) implies that the princess won’t have everything to her liking.  Who does the prince have eyes for in the closing scene, and how does the princess appear to react?  Does this story end with a twist that the Brother’s Grimm shied away from?

The princess, the prince, and Heinrich in Walter Crane's 1874 illustration.

The princess, the prince, and Heinrich in Walter Crane’s 1874 illustration.

Experienced explorers warn us that the way through Faerie is perilous.  Trails may shift beneath our feet, and hard-and-fast rules don’t apply.  As Joseph Campbell observed, everyone must find their own way through the forest.

My latest exploration leads me to wonder if “adroit” is another word for “street smarts,” something we need in our own world as well as in dark imaginal forests and castles frozen in time.  And isn’t “civil” an attitude that understands that our own wellbeing, even in the most practical terms, must include the welfare of others?

The old stories may offer no certain answers, but with careful reading, they can always lead us to ask interesting questions.

An ambassador for the power of stories

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Author Kate DiCamillo says "Story is what makes us human."

Author Kate DiCamillo says “Story is what makes us human.”

I almost skipped the final segment of the PBS Newshour on Friday.  They announced an interview with the newly chosen National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, a position I’d never heard of.  I feared it might involve a discussion of post-Twilight, YA romance.  Fortunately, I stuck around, for the interview was profoundly inspiring.

The new National Ambassador, a position created by the Library of Congress in 2008, is Kate DiCamillo, author of Because of Winn-Dixie and The Tale of Despereaux.  The author of these award winning books for children claims to have been the shyest kid ever.  How did she come out of her shell and become an ambassador?  By telling stories, she says.  “And telling stories helped me connect with the world. And it turned me into somebody who can talk to people, I think.”

This Newberry Award winning author calls herself a late bloomer and kept a notebook where she tracked all 450 rejection letters she got before her first story was accepted.  Over the next two years, as ambassador for children’s literature, she hopes to “remind people of the great and profound joy that can be found in stories, and that stories can connect us to each other, and that reading together changes everybody involved.”

I invite everyone to watch Ms. DiCamillo’s interview.  It’s an upbeat testament to the power of stories and the power of persistence by someone whose life embodies these truths.

10 of the Greatest Essays on Writing Ever Written

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I was delighted to find this post on WordPress’s “Freshly Pressed” page where it deserves to be. Here’s a collection of essays on writing, more than half by writers whose names are household words (in literary households) – Robert Frost, Henry Miller, Susan Sontag, T.S. Eliot, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joan Didion among them. They all look compelling. I’m looking forward to starting a piece on structure in fairy tales by the editor of “The Fairy Tale Review.” Enjoy!

Chimps in charge

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chimp

The day after my post on how to find healthy veggies, Mary and I decided to grab some burgers for lunch.

As we sat down, I noticed “Heart of Stone,” from the Rolling Stones’s first album, playing in the background.  I was contemplating impermanence – how quickly the songs of youth wind up on the oldies station – when the song ended, and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” came on.

I looked at Mary.  I muttered an expletive and said, “I thought we were done with all that!”

Our food came, and the music shifted to “Chain of Fools,” a good old Motown classic.  I sighed with relief.  Life was good.  January was good.  January means months and months without “holiday music.”

Or so I thought…

Until “Holly Jolly Christmas” began to play…

More than any other song, “Holly Jolly Christmas” reminds me of pre-transformation Scrooge and the wisdom of his comments concerning boiling certain people in their own Christmas puddings.

“Maybe they just want to hurry us out the door,” Mary said.

I slugged down the rest of my drink.  “It’s working,” I said.

The question I’m left with is, who put together that playlist?  I’m ruling out computer generation, since in my experience, the algorithms, (like iTunes’s “Genius” function) are too sophisticated to create such a mishmash.  I’m left with two theories:

  1. In an effort to save money, satellite radio stations now use institutionalized sociopaths to assemble their playlists.
  2. In an effort to save money, satellite radio stations now use chimps.

I kind of hope it’s the latter, although chimps-in-charge is not a trend that bodes well for things like TV schedules or mid-term election advertising, which will probably start up next week.

If you have any other ideas on who is to blame for Burl Ives in January, please let us know so we can free the poor chimpanzees from blame!

photo by Will Brenner, CC BY-ND 2.0

photo by Will Brenner, CC BY-ND 2.0

Wild Eating

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animal house food fight

This post isn’t really about food fights in school cafeterias – some of us have matured (a bit) since those days.  Actually, the photo of John Belushi was a classic bait-and-switch, a ploy to draw you into a post about foods that are good for us.

At the end of November, I caught an interview on NPR’s Science Friday with Jo Robinson, an investigative journalist who specializes in science and health.  She discussed the way humans, since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, have bred the nutrition out of plants, and what the science of micro-nutrition has recently learned about optimizing our food choices.

eating on the wild side

The interview was a good introduction to Robinson’s bestseller, Eating on the Wild Side, and she led off with a discussion of corn.

Wild corn came with tough husks and only a few kernels per ear. It didn’t taste very good, but it was healthy, with 20% protein and only 2% sugar.  In contrast, modern corn has 2%-4% protein and sugar as high as 40%.  Still better than Ding Dongs, but headed in that direction.

At the core of this research are phytonutrients, molecular level nutrients that are natural wonder drugs.  Lab work over the last 15-20 years reveals that some phytonutriets increase resistance to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.  Unfortunately, they tend to make foods bitter, a taste we would rather avoid.

Taste hasn’t been the only factor in denaturing our food.  Carrots were red and purple until 400 years ago, when a group of Dutch growers, paying political homage to the House of Orange, used mutant yellow carrots to create the orange variety we know today.  Unfortunately, orange carrots have 16 times fewer antioxidants than red and purple varieties.

There’s good news on the carrot front; Robinson says we can find the older varieties in seed catalogs, and they actually taste better.  During the rest of the interview, she presented ways to maximize nutrition and the number of beneficial phytonutrients we eat.  Her suggestions included:

  • Eat the skins.  The skin of carrots of any variety contains half the nutritional value, so wash them but don’t peel them and throw the skins away.  Don’t skin potatoes before mashing them.
Blue Jade corn

Blue Jade corn

  • When choosing fruits and vegetables, a rule of thumb is the healthiest colors are red, blue, black, and purple.  There are exceptions, however, like artichokes, which Robinson says are among the best veggie choices.

  • Garlic really is a “wonder drug,” but it’s value depends on two substances combining after the cloves are cut or crushed, and one of these can be damaged if heated too soon.  The solution is to crush garlic then set it aside for 1o minutes before sautéing.

  • In one study three to four servings a week from the cabbage family (cabbage, broccoli, mustard greens, kale, and others) reduced the risk of prostate cancer in men by up to 60%.

  • Daily servings of Welches grape juice, made from Concord grapes, appears to improve the memory of seniors with early signs of Alzheimer’s.

  • The nutritional value of many fruits and veggies increases with cooking.  This includes berries, which makes berry pies and cobblers among the healthiest deserts.

***

Once, when I was younger, I lived as a strict vegetarian for two years.  At the time I was learning to meditate and tried out advice (which proved to be true) that a moderate diet and occasional fasting helps concentration.  My diet is different now, but I’m equally attentive to what I eat; my motive is overall health.

Wherever one stands on the issue of health care, no one can argue that the best way to stay healthy is not to get sick.  Next to quitting smoking and exercise, diet is a major behavioral variable we can tilt in our favor.  The effort is enjoyable to, in a mildly subversive way, like buying nothing on Black Friday.  In an era when the next big corporate move in fruit is patenting GMO apples that don’t turn brown, I find heirloom veggies like blue corn and purple carrots to be especially attractive.

Take a look at Jo Robinson’s website, eatwild.com; you’ll find it informative and inspiration.

***

PS:  Based on several comments, I’m adding links to possible sources of interesting seeds.

burpee.com:  For a long time, the seed catalog of choice.  Now online with info tailored to your climate zone.  I poked around enough to see that they have purple carrot seeds.

Heirloom Seed Companies: I found this link on Facebook. Haven’t checked it out yet, but it looks interesting.

A teller of sacred stories

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Robert Béla Wilhelm, storyteller

Robert Béla Wilhelm, storyteller

In 1965, a young New Jersey college student, in need of money for rent and tuition, took a weekend job as a tour guide at $25 a day, for a charter company that specialized in high school class trips to Washington, DC.  The company gave him a binder of facts and statistics to learn, but the student, Robert Béla Wilhelm, quickly realized that only a story makes facts and statistics come alive.

Sixteen years later, Bob was a university professor and had written his PhD dissertation on the craft and philosophy of storytelling.  His wife, Kelly’s, PhD centered on travel and leisure.  Both had grown up in storytelling families, and in 1981, they founded Storyfest Journeys (see their Facebook page too) with an inaugural trip to Ireland.  After more than 50 storytelling oriented, small group tours to Europe, the Pacific, and destinations in the US, they are still at it.  It was thanks to the Wilhelms that Mary and I traveled to Iceland in 2012.

Over time, Bob and Kelly have focused their energy on mentoring storytellers and specializing in sacred stories.  I just received word that Bob has completed a 17 year labor of love that he calls, “Parables Today, A Weekly Lectionary Storybook.”  For every Sunday of the three year lectionary cycle of the Catholic church, he presents stories from around the world along with artwork, and reflections.  The tone is open and ecumenical; many of the tales will appeal to people of any faith or none at all.  They  are now freely available at sacredstorytelling.org.

I was thinking of Robert Wilhelm when I wrote my second post on this blog, which featured a poem called “Story Water” by Rumi.  I think it’s safe to say that Robert has carried on Rumi’s tradition, which centers on the understanding that our spiritual dreams and longings are woven of stories.  Abstract understanding may sometimes move the heart, but more often it is The Prodigal Son, or Arjuna at Kurukshetra, or Coyote coming along that opens our eyes of understanding.

If you love stories, take a look at the stories that Robert Wilhelm loves.