A Letter to my Daughter

Parenting in the Anthropocene

---

May, 2020

Baang Khok, Thailand

Dear Surya,

As you are the ultimate representation of your mother and I’s deep love for each other, I wish to write you a love letter, one I am pretty sure you won’t read for many years to come, and possibly won’t read ever. The world being the way it is now seems but to only intensify that eternal, sobering truth that nothing is certain, not even tomorrow. So should the actual words written here never be glanced over by you with a cognizance intellectually developed enough to interpret them beyond mere blotches of ink on sheets of dead tree, than may you receive these thoughts as a prayer from daddy, as does the mountain summit in Nepal which you are named after when it is first kissed at dawn by our Father Sun, illuminating beneficial truths that have less to do with well-wishes for distant superficial successes, but for a life of depth fully lived, today.

When I embraced your mother some 10 months ago in the certain way we humans do when in love, a very different world welcomed the seed that has now blossomed into being as you. You opted courageously to come into the world amidst a global pandemic, in a degenerate age whose collective actions have managed to seriously jeopardize the continuation of the human species (and many other species as well). I imagine many would say it is wrong for me to speak with such directness to a baby but from what I can gather from my 40 years on this blue planet, all the goo-goo, ga-ga talk that extends far beyond infancy on into adulthood, which raised my overly fragile, easily irritable generation has but resulted in various unbecoming forms of entitlement, misguided grief and unthinkable rage. Therefore I feel it best to lay reality out for you right away, as do most beings in Nature and then lovingly nurture you into making since of it all as we trudge forward into the uncertain terrain ahead with wisdom, humor and empathy.

Your daddy lost a good chunk of his faith in western “culture” (he still isn’t entirely convinced there is such thing as western culture as all the cool stuff seems at best to have been borrowed from other more intact peoples and at worst straight up stolen) years ago, when Barack Obama, who I had naïvely placed great hope in, bailed out the banks that were directly responsible for a financial recession that put your grandpa and countless others out of work, solidifying for any doubters that the American Dream wasn’t really designed for everyone. This, along with several more uninteresting things we can yap on about as you grow older if you desire, is one of the many reasons I now live with your mommy in a small village in Northern Thailand, on a farm with several other renegade families who share a similar disenchantment for mainstream societies’ cruel, boring, beauty-crushing worldviews. Here in our little, what I imagine well-to-do yuppies would refer to as an “eco-village”, we do our best to keep alive traditional ways of living. We save our own heirloom seeds and replant them each year. We collect and treat water, which we believe to be more valuable than gold. We grow our own food and herbal medicines in ways that do not disturb topsoil, without tilling or using any chemical fertilizers or pesticides. We build our homes out of natural materials and try our best to make our own clothes. It is a lifestyle that until relatively recently was viewed as “normal” by most peoples of the world. But suddenly, in the last half-century or so, everything has changed, and in the last two months in particular, the changes have become so drastic, rapid and dizzying that most humans on Earth are unsure any longer of what normal even is.

Daddy’s life certainly isn’t what most would consider normal and it hasn’t been for quite a while. In addition to making a home for himself far from where he was born, literally on the other side of the world, he holds very little interest in money, considers what most people would view to be strange as beautiful, and that which most humans evidently find attractive, he finds to be terrifying and rather repulsive. He thinks memory and attention to details is important. Efficiency doesn’t matter much to him, nor does the acquisition of what many consider to be “success”. Your dad does however value the depth and richness of character acquired while attempting to do something worth doing, especially when the doer knows he/she will certainly fail. Your dad has tremendous admiration for artists, nomads, activists, women and pretty much everyone else the governments of the world seem to despise. Oddly enough, your dad is an educator but isn’t entirely convinced that schooling is all that important and increasingly views it as dangerous, at least in its current post-colonial form.

I imagine you are wondering where daddy comes from, where he got such curious views. Why is your skin, compared to you Laos family so pale and your eyes, unlike their smaller ones, so big? Why does poppa have such a hard time communicating with all the people around here that look more like mommy does? Etc. Well, any big question like that deserves to be answered with an equally big answer (someday I will tell you the many deeper layers of meaning hidden in your name!). Let’s begin. My little bird, your father doesn’t often refer to the place where he was born by the name most others from the same place tend to nor does he consider that place his home. Your grandmother gave birth to me in what is currently referred to as Council Bluffs, Iowa. In a country now called The United States of America. But before Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark held  “council” there with members of the Otoe tribe in the region of Fort Calhoun thus thrusting this alien title upon a place long since known to countless generations of native peoples of that region by other names (and in other ways) prior to their arrival, it was already being referred to by another arbitrary title which was itself renamed with a similar arrogance by another group of outsiders (this time the Mormons) as Kanesville. Named after Colonel Thomas Kane, Kanesville was the starting point of what is usually referred to nowadays as The Mormon Trail, a 1,300 mile long route that exiled members of The Church of Latter-Day Saints journeyed on after being ironically forced away from the land they themselves had been occupying which was, incidentally, already filled with exiled Nishnabe (Potawatomi) people who had also been forcefully relocated there from their native home which had been the region currently referred to today as Chicago.

You see, daddy thinks these things matter, that knowing the critical geography and natural history of ones place of origin is important, that when your understanding of a place is so deep that its terrifying, ironic, multi-storied history makes you weep, when the memory of the trees that once grew thick there before being cut down is so strong you can actually smell them even though you yourself never saw them, when you can close your eyes and literally hear the mighty stampeding of thousands of tatanka (bison), then you have earned the right to say with authority that you are from said place. Otherwise, you are not really from where you claim any more than the gun-toting, so-called “patriots” that currently parade sporadically around various state capitals throughout The (Not So) United States of America are from  “merica”. These lonely, misguided friends are essentially immigrants from other countries whose recent ancestors stole the land they now occupy and have no real idea what it means to be from/of a place. This is true for most so-called “Americans”. It is true of me. Ask most Americans to name the current 50 states of the nation and show them on a map. Ask them the names and uses of the plants that are native to each region. Ask them to describe the smell of the wind as it blows over great plains, the Rocky Mountains at dusk. Then ask them to tell you who lived in the place they consider “home” for the 40,000 plus years prior to the arrival of fellow immigrant (Who never touched North American soils) Christopher Columbus. Maybe one or two could answer. I’m willing to bet not. It wasn’t until recently that I ever thought of any of these things myself. Very few who live in the world today have the kind of memory, heart and intergenerational commitment to a place that offers the dubious honor to even claim with any deep truth that they are truly of a place. I sure don’t. I am but another t-shirt wearing, wandering orphan whose descendants wound up at Elis Island years ago having lost all hope in people I have no recollection of, hailing from lands I have no connection to, just like most other “white” people. So, in honor of all that has been lost and forgotten, in an effort to keep alive the great stories that you yourself are indeed now a living extension of, with hopes of actually knowing what it is like to truly be from somewhere myself one day, I say proudly that I was born in what was once lush, bison-filled prairie-lands and savanna, alongside the longest river in North America (now referred to as the Missouri River) in land more beautiful than any of those oil paintings serving as magnificent, glanced over backdrops for assault rifle carrying good old boys screaming at middleman, all pissed off that people are telling them to wear masks in the hallowed halls of Midwestern state capitals today could ever accurately portray. Land originally tended to by the great Sioux people.

Little Surya, you should know this about your dad too, he regularly cries. When I learned a few weeks ago that due to fears regarding the spread of the novel coronavirus (responsible for the global pandemic in which you were born into) I would not be permitted to join your mother in the labor room for your birth, I wept uncontrollably. Oddly enough the feeling I felt while pacing the halls as your mother heroically ushered you into this realm more or less alone, was a familiar one. It is a haunting, reoccurring feeling that has resurfaced several times since my uninitiated, loosely organized coming-of-age years. I first experienced the grief-laden whisper when I was 18 years old, hiking through a stunningly beautiful forest near Talkeetna, Alaska with my parents and younger brother, your grandparents and uncle respectively. I walk much faster than they do and so your grandmother suggested I go ahead and meet up with them after some time back at the parking lot near the trailhead. I obliged and blazed ahead in carefree bliss. At some point along the way I noticed a magnificent tree that was too awe-inspiring to pass by. It literally stopped me in my tracks. The details of its long story seemed to pulsate outwards from each layer of lichen-covered bark, transmitting to me somehow the entire horrifying history of the world. The trees lonely effort to keep life itself living met then with my civilized inability to be present and helpful in any recognizably wild and beneficial way. A sensation nearly identical to how I felt when I was told I couldn’t help your mom bring you into this world permeated through me. The tree had been creating new life, unbeknownst to me, against unthinkable odds while, year after year, myself and my fellow humans went about our lives, placing matters pertaining to but our own selfish desires before all else. There was little I could do but say I was sorry. This reoccurring encounter with modern humans’ strange ways of attempting to control life while utterly ignoring it is consistently confusing, and it makes your daddy cry.

Not everyone is as sensitive as daddy is. Recently a First Nation friend of mine from the northeastern region of what she refers to as Turtle Island shared with me a term that has sense stuck with me. The word is wetiko and it refers to a certain kind of sickness, of the spirit. She told me that many indigenous peoples of the world have long believed that to not feel the way daddy often does is to be sick. If you can learn of, as the world does now daily, another species of plant or animal going extinct forever due to human negligence and in turn feel no heartbreak, not feel the unavoidable urge to devote the rest of your life to keeping the world alive, than something has gone vitally wrong within your very essence, and you are no longer well. According to believers of wetiko, to not feel instant and constant kinship with all living things, a kinship as deep and strong as the bond I have with you, one that serves as the primary motivational force for making decisions throughout ones life that is rooted in an unshakable awareness that all things are interrelated and as such entirely dependent upon each other for shared survival, well, this is to indicate madness, and in turns makes one a cannibal, one who devours itself. My little one, it saddens me greatly to say that most of the world seems to have gone mad. We know we are killing the planet, we know what actions need to stop in order to keep Her alive. We know that if the Earth dies, we die. But we are killing Her anyway. Humans have become cannibals.

Due to human greed, only around 95 percent of the seed diversity existing on earth as of 50 years ago still exists and of what is left, there are few among us who maintain the kind of cultural intactness required to remember what they even are, their stories, what their uses are, who they belong to or why it even matters to trouble oneself with thinking about such things. Of the impossible-to-imagine enormity that was the cathedral-like forests that once housed for thousands of generations utterly countless nations of wildlife, only around 2% of those trees remain and of the noble beings who once called these felled kingdoms home, nearly all of them have since gone extinct. Because of this, when your dad sees at a climate controlled grocery store the painfully limited spread of cellophane encased “produce” comprised typically of genetically modified iceberg lettuce, tasteless tomatoes, unnaturally orange carrots, and oversized avocados all farmed in terrible conditions by underpaid (yet suddenly labeled essential) Mayan Indians or when he drives passed an overused field that only a hundred or so years ago served as a magnificent living, breathing ballroom dance floor for stampeding bison being elegantly courted by well-dressed Lakota that has now been reduced to a seemingly endless expanse of enslaved, monocultured Monsanto “corn”, or when he spots what to tourists is a beautiful “traditional style” home built entirely out of massive beams that are but the skeletons of what is now but reserved for fantastical retellings of what once offered lush sanctuary for elephants, tigers, gibbons and the highly skilled, so-called “hill tribes” that lived well alongside them, well, again I weep.

Please don’t find this strange my love, as so many others seem to. To feel deeply the loss of things you love is to offer honor to that which has passed. To properly grieve is something those infected with wetiko (which seems to be a far more dangerous and contagious a virus than COVID-19) cannot do. Only people who do not see the interconnection of all life can be convinced to kill the very things that give life. Grieving is inconvenient and it takes a lot of time. It requires the skilled artistry of a kind civilized peoples generally no longer value nor have patience for. When done right, it seems to confuse, even anger most modern people. But in this strange era you are coming into, with so few carrying the capacity to feel things deeply, even the chance spotting of a genuinely authentic reaction to something worthy of actual praise can inspire real beauty. And beauty, my little bird, is all that I really wish for you.

For many years now, your dad has served as an educator, working with some of the most prestigious universities in the world. He has placed an enormous amount of energy into trying to “educate” people. Yet during this time of quarantine, as I have been forced into a place of deep stillness and introspection, I am no longer as convinced as I once was that what we westerners are doing can be accurately described as educating, at least in the noble way we typically associate such a profession with. After spending many years with your mother, living in the so-called “developing world” where most make no more than $5 a day and observing the details of the deeply intelligent and intentional way she and those around her live in this world, a way that is the result of a very different method of education altogether (one we in the west wouldn’t even consider an education at all) and after being broken-hearted by hearing again and again of the terrors inflicted on native peoples the world over by ever new waves of seemingly well-intended efforts by missionaries, aid groups, voluntourists, militaries, etc. whose awkward efforts to help seem but to, unbeknownst to them, only reiterate an age-old, inherited arrogance that repeatedly suggests in various ways that somehow we in the west know best… Well my little angel, it turns out we don’t. In fact, we “civilized” people seem to know very little about how to be a real human, one who is truly able to live well in a place, at all. Everything we do seems to be destroying the world. This is not an exaggeration. Everything we do seems to be destroying the world.

Therefore, daddy has little desire for you to be “educated”. Don’t get me wrong, I hold high esteem for earning wisdom. Like I said, for all intents and purposes, daddy is a teacher. But the acquisition of wisdom is not the primary goal of most schools today, where success means to gain power, prestige, money and fame. And I get that said things are not always inherently wrong per se, but I do not initially wish for you to “succeed” or “become somebody” motivated by such tacky intention, motivated by the poorly dressed gods of post-truth. Nah, my wish for you is, as one of my own beloved teachers, Martin Prechtel has also wished for me, that you be broken open by life’s inevitable losses in such a way that allows you not to grow vengeful but ever more able to fall deeply in love with the possibility of life again living. If you can do this well, than you will one day grow into a real adult, one that might potentially even blossom fully into the brilliance of a true elder worthy of descending from, like those legendary humans who once lived freely long before you or I were born. This kind of authentic living slowly cultivates, over the course of ones lifetime, a real eye for beauty and an understanding where one is from that makes it possible to actually be at home in a place, to truly be from somewhere. And when this happens, one gains access into the increasingly endangered human capacity for making beauty that was once part of true humans’ educational curriculum everywhere.  

My dear girl, learn to walk the other way. Learn how to observe your mind and how to trust your heart. Learn the many languages of water and soil. Then, as you age, should we still be here years from now, do as you wish, you already have my blessing. You are no more “mine” than do I belong to your mother. We care for, not own, each other. But please refrain from judging others along the way and remember what my dear friend said about us all being related, for this memory seems to be the ultimate antidote to wetiko.

I don’t wish to scare you by saying things like, should we still be here years from now. Forgive me. However, from what the Buddhist monks whom I have come to admire here in Thailand have told your mother and I, as you in your innocence no doubt understands in a more direct and pure way than either of us do, dying never can truly occur anyway. What you hold in your hand now that appears to be a sheet of paper is in actuality but a million empty, swirling phenomena that have temporarily come together, midpoint on a long journey from mountaintop stream to raging river on down to the sea and up again into evaporated mists that went on to become clouds that eventually passed over a particular forest that then chose to fall as rain and merge with hummus and seed in order to participate in a heroic dance of sprouting and flowering that over time evolved into an enormous tree that was suddenly cut down, shipped off on big trucks to a big factory somewhere where it was then sliced into a million pages of paper, one of which you now hold in your hand. Those million swirling phenomena never died and never will die. Nothing can. One day this “paper” will transform again into yet another temporarily existing, seemingly solid thing that will eventually dive back into yet another cycle of coming and going as it has already experienced many times before, but this time it will be totally different. As another of your parents’ beloved teachers, Thich Naht Hanh, who himself is now preparing to transition has kindly reminded us of frequently; A cloud never dies. And neither Surya, do you. Therefore, do not be afraid when daddy says such things. Don’t be so terrified like most modern people are of life’s greatest mysteries. Uncertainty is a wonderful friend on this path. Knowing the deepness of this truth may be more important than anything else. Be in Awe.

This morning you, your mommy and I all “zoomed” with your extended family. On a thin computer screen we could see and hear your cousins, uncle, auntie, grandma and grandpa. They were so happy to see you. They were overjoyed. Especially grandma and grandpa, as you are and probably will forever be, their only grandchild. Because of the way things are currently playing out in this world you may never actually be able see your American relatives in the flesh. The last I checked nearly one hundred thousand people have died of the corona virus back on Turtle Island and the current lack of leadership stateside shows no sign of letting up. The bewildering eruption of ill competence, mismanagement and disorganization is so distracted by its own hateful folly that virtually nothing is being done to prepare for the tidal wave approaching that is climate change. The not-so-subtle encouragements from the current occupant of the white house to single out entire groups of people based on race, class, gender, political affiliation, etc. have everyone so rightfully impassioned that we are forgetting to think like a mountain, as our ancestors did. The Democratic Party, which claims to be our night in shining armor that will at some point swoop in and rescue us all from whichever great fear is most popular on any given day seems to present little truly opposing view to the capitalist driven ones ultimately responsible for said cornucopia of travesty in the first place, placing the arrogant desires of mankind’s most disconnected ultra-elite ahead of the needs of real people and the very Earth Herself just like the evil “other”. One might think they all have caught the wetiko virus themselves. Who’s to say? But I digress.

…At the time of your birth, atmospheric temperatures have already surpassed the crucial point where experts have repeatedly suggested for decades we must reside within should even a remote possibility of returning to any semblance of a quasi-healthy planetary life remain. I remember hearing in grade school of all places that we were to make sure we not allow the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to surpass 350 parts per million. Well no one in power took this seriously, concerned more with typical capitalist dreams of endless financial growth and an almost religious devotion to technology. So now we live in a world where carbon dioxide concentration is at 400 PPM and steadily rising. 2020 is set to be the hottest year in recorded history. Here in Thailand, Bangkok is already experiencing major flooding due to sea rise and we are regularly hosting climate refugees, i.e. people forced to leave their homes due to various climate related disasters. Major natural disasters are indeed regular occurrences now, globally. As I write these words, a massive cyclone has just touched down in an already troubled region of Bangladesh. Fresh water is increasingly scarce internationally and Her all too often taken for granted cousin, Useable Topsoil, is quickly becoming a rare commodity (as modern schools seldom even manage to mention the importance of healthy soil much less offer knowhow regarding regenerative farming techniques). All of this is happening atop countless generations of unprocessed grief, unrecognized genocide, vulgar misdistribution of wealth and resources, access to wisdom and authentic power coupled of course with what is essentially a total disregard for morality or but even a faint recognition of anything being deemed sacred at all. Far from The American Dream, late-stage capitalism is indeed a post-apocalyptic nightmare and if Americans are not careful, the Land of the Free could soon find itself amid another civil war. May all the gods help us. One thing is for sure, the world you have come into will not be here much longer. There will be no “going back to normal.” But my little flowing river, it has always been like this. Breathe and smile…a cloud never dies.

It is often said by generally well off liberals “another world is possible”.  It is a catchy phrase, and while enjoying a nice bowl of chilled acai berries mixed with fresh roasted granola at a solar powered eco-event in sunny California it certainly makes one feel hopeful, in that tingly kind of way I felt when Obama gave his acceptance speech in Denver, Colorado back in the day, before we all learned that he was also attached to the established way of living out business as usual. Hmm… Daddy may seem bitter… Well, I assure you, he is. But rightfully so. Remember those bison I told you about, those forests and prairies and the Sioux who tended to them? It’s nearly all gone. The forests and prairies have been systematically turned into factory farms and most of the mighty Sioux have either been killed/educated” and/or relocated. None of this has even properly been acknowledged as happening much less have any apologies or reparations been given.

This world is truly mad my little bird. As phrased recently with potent accuracy by a young Swedish woman named Greta Thunberg, who is truly on track to be an ancestor worth descending from herself,  “Our house is on fire.” It would serve us well to feel the weight of this truth, to weep beautifully and deeply for all that has already been lost. Once the tears pass, which I have found they never do, we ought then begin living in wildly different ways than we have become erroneously accustomed to. I can assure you at least this much, vow this much, we will. While I am blessed to have you with me, your mother and I will do our best to expose you to that which is still Wild and Free in this beautiful world and help you nourish that which is likewise Wild and Free in you. Gods give us all life.

My little sprout, another world is possible. Whether or not we humans wake up quickly enough to act appropriately in the short window of time we have (most experts suggest we have about 20 years before irreversible disrepair) is still to be seen. For better or worse, daddy cannot offer you many examples outside of poetry that offer any real reason to believe modern humans have what it takes. We have proven time and time again, for literally thousands of years now (modernity has been going on for a long time) that, possibly due to widespread mental insanity caused by the wetiko pandemic, or maybe the fault of bad genetics, or possibly all merely being the inevitable outcome of survival of the fittest, we have thus far proven we are not intelligent enough to act in our own best interest much less the benefit of the greater-than-human worlds. Yet, there are still those precious 5% of the worlds wondrous seeds still living. 2% of our great trees remain standing. And among all the weirdness, I myself have personally met a small but powerful handful of real-life human beings not infected with greed who are compassionate, creative and remember how to live well. And my love, they do so now, today, smack dab in the middle of unprecedented chaos, apathy and fear, right alongside crumbling concrete jungles and polluted rivers.

One seed, when placed in the right conditions, can quickly produce a million more seeds. And the seeds of those remaining trees can, over time, birth an entire forest. Neither you nor I will ever see the grand forests our ancestors knew I’m afraid, but as the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore who was immortalized forever in a meme that has been circulating widely around social media for a while now stated, “The one who plants trees, knowing he or she will never sit in their shade, has learned to understand the meaning of life.”

Surya, whether you live well into your sunset years, or should we only be granted five or so mysterious years of secluded lockdown surrounded by societal breakdown and perpetual waves of unthinkable disaster, we can still find time to enjoy the fleeting joys of father-daughter affection right in the eye of the storm as many before us have done so also. The miraculous beauty of simply living requires but an awareness of it. We don’t need to be mobile to embrace each un-promised sunrise in accordance with the same honorable code that long ago allowed humans to live well for millennia. And even if no one else around us does this, and they laugh mockingly as they see us doing so. We can dance when we plant our corn. We can offer beautiful handmade gifts to trees. We can weep when the seed dies as we cover it with soil, asking her with tear moistened songs if she might be willing to become, in her passing, something different than what she was before, that we might live? We can feel sad in doing so, and happy. We can feel real human emotions. We can be still. We can rest. We can try and we can fail. Contrary to the competitive race to grow up and produce things no one really needs going on all around us, by the time you come of age, no one will need any of those things any way. If humans still inhabit the earth 40 years from now, what will mostly be needed is real people. Ones able to gracefully manage uncertainty, who aren’t entirely leveled when things inevitably don’t go their way, who absolutely hold respect for, yet do not view, the magic-killing insights of science as some sort of new age gospel.

Things are never as they appear. Your mother and I (and your grandparents) had envisioned a very different scenario for your grand arrival into this world. Yet instead of receiving a steady wave of bubbly visitors basking in the usual newborn baby optimism that comes with such a joyous occasion, we are instead now warding off the onslaught of messages suggesting impending doom. Nonetheless, in the past two weeks since first I laid eyes on you, I have experienced some of the most hope-filled days imaginable. I have come to know with you a peace which until now I had but only read about in books telling of seemingly mythical old-time people who, as their world literally crumbled around them do to genocide, slavery, earthquakes, culture crushing evangelizing, malnutrition, disease and plenty more unthinkable horrors managed to go on living through it all with real dignity, approaching each day as they would any other; humble, grateful, and at peace.

This dreamlike, human experience will most certainly pass. Civilized man, arrogantly armored with the narrow-sighted shields of technology and science is terrified of this truth. You needn’t be. If, in the end all we can do in the limited amount of time we have here is become good compost for the overly tilled, chemical saturated soil now covering this once green planet, I can think of no more noble a way to go. The opportunity to be a human is a rare gift that passes quickly. I pray that each sunrise that graces your eyes be viewed as a generous and unexpected bonus to ones already known.

That this morning I woke up, my first image being your beautiful face, highlighted softly by the great golden glow of dawn was to me as great a blessing as if 40 years from now I receive a call from you from wherever you then might be, on another auspicious morning, telling me you are pregnant, ready to feel then, as I do now. I love you Surya, my first and only daughter, sweet child of the Sun… and today is more than enough.

Pom raak khun na jaa,

Poppa