Fire on The Mountain

Murky Memory, Modernity and Masturbation

Surya, our two-year-old daughter, woke me in the middle of the night. She pointed to the North and said “Daddy! The fire is on the mountain!”. She was right. The iridescent creeping dragon that has been burning far in the distance for weeks now, lit by disgruntled villagers, possessed as they are by the madness of hyperproduction forced upon them by modernity’s overlords has now literally reached our back door. The glow from its flames lights up my daughters fearful, courageous face as her mother and I hold her tightly, assuring her of safety from things we have no control over.

Where once Thai mountain dwellers held great respect for the forests and lived with sacred agreements between The Wild and the tended-to, nowadays the so-called “civilized” approach that emphasizes profit over well-being and production over health is the main practice. It has resulted in a general zeitgeist of forgetfulness regarding what those original agreements ever even were. So, annually, deep into the dry seasons increasingly hot nights, instead of prayers being sung and offerings being made as once they rightly were to all the beings seen and unseen who allowed the people to live again for yet another year, now whiskey and weed fuels misguided, restless scavengers as they attempt in vain to escape debt by burning forests raw in hopes of finding expensive mushrooms that only sprout after fires burn in order to make a quick buck and clear the underbrush promptly so man can hunt the few animals able to survive the flames more conveniently. The result is an eerie silence of a forest without life, the flickering glow of post-apocalyptic neglect.

It’s unbearable and our daughter can’t take it anymore. Neither can we. So this morning, after our Father Sun rises, we will leave our farm and escape towards the southern islands in hopes of finding a sliver of coastal land where the air is more breathable, where kind people might welcome us into their homes until the smoke finally subsides.

We are lucky. Due to our small but generous network of organic farmers committed to recognizing gift (*please check out Charles Eisenstein’s classic text, Sacred Economics: Money, the Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition to learn more about gift economy, etc.) and friendliness as a better form of currency than money we are part of a global network of simple humans willing to house us should we show up. Many amongst us here in Northern Thailand however are not so lucky. Many cannot leave. Many will stay as the fires increase and grow angry, fearful. Houses will surely burn; lungs will fill with dark clouds. Countless animals will die, and minds will grow ever madder. Such is the way of these times. The mountain is on fire. Our planet is literally burning.

For some the fire is an actual fire, as is the case for countless throughout South and Southeast Asia currently. For others, the fire is within our hearts, seen in our broken relationships, our inability to come together and find the time to communicate lovingly, to share, to offer a bed, a meal. Addictions and cyclical patterns of thought prevent us from seeing clearly. Few can recall a time before the days of fire, irritability and rage when we truly loved our fellow man, all children, ourselves. When we spent our time laughing with one another, not in sarcasm and tomfoolery but with dignified creativity and joy. We played useless but intelligent games and stared gloriously into space, watching ponds ripple as we skipped stones over their surface with nowhere to go, nothing to do. We rested. We allowed ourselves to rest. And we let the land rest too. It wasn’t that long ago.

Yet seemingly gone, so suddenly, are those days when taking even a shit was itself an exercise in mindfulness. We took it for granted I suppose. Remember when a shit was just a shit? We would simply sit there and shit. We rested and we shat. Yet how long since we shat without thumbing through Facebook? Gorging on whichever feed offers a fix? When did we last navigate through town without google maps, dated without Tinder?  And now, saturated as we are in a single story of distraction, told so loudly by a handful of big players we all claim to loathe but nevertheless still loyally follow, cheering them on at each new election, consuming each new meta-product they tweet, each expensive ticket they sell, etc... resting itself makes us feel somehow anxious and guilty. A burning sensation on the back of our necks. We must do something, nags the inner corporate cry, all the time.

It seems like it’s always been like this. We put our masks on, glue our vision to our screens and scroll. On those rare occasions when inspiration sparks, we troll our enemies on social media, cast our vote for the lesser of two evils, post our pride, send money to starving children in Africa, masturbate into a towel flippantly yanked from the dank pile of t-shirts ironically made by those same children, in sweatshops we’d rather not think about. We take a nap in our bug-free, lonely, air-conditioned apartment and get on with it. Time is money! Relationships are stressful. Nature is lovely, but, well, dirty. Children, emotions, caring properly for the land, ritual, art… all these things get in the way of our convenience. Better to just burn it all and be efficient.

Late-stage capitalism has nearly succeeded completely in its intergenerational effort to have all cultures forget who they are and the ways they once lived so that constant production at all costs is the only story being told. Fires burn all evidence of any other way. With all other options charred, lost in smoke, on the machine grinds; Production…chuggachuggachugga… Success. Development…chuggachuggacchugga…GDP. The bottom line. Me. Me. Mine!

Yet this isn’t life. The forest should be green. Love isn’t a late night quicky. Sure, once in a while chaos and fires are important, yet this isn’t the skillful methods of slash and burn once masterfully orchestrated the world over by human extensions of Earth Herself. This is murder. Escape. This is rape. And we know it. Yet here we are, living in the awkward blaze of the bardo realm, lost in the liminal murk of amnesia, weak from too much time immersed in technology, unable to speak up directly with real wisdom, to let go of our desire for wealth and convenience long enough to allow the Soils to regenerate, long enough for our forgotten Stories to tell themselves again. How many of us noticed when the media shifted the narrative from East Palestine, Ohio where a toxic chemical leak quickly joined the race to become the most damaging environmental disaster in U.S. history to concerns over an alleged Chinese spy balloon? “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”, screams the great and powerful OZ. And we all fall in line. What’s Kim up to? Paris? How can I grow my network? How can I market my talents more effectively?…chuggachuggachugga…

Martin Prechtel shares, “We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. Deep in our bones resides an ancient singing couple who just won’t give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won’t end if we can find them.”

How can we find the dancing couple that remembers The Agreements, the ones that we used to sing aloud together before planting rice? Before harvesting barley? How can we get over ourselves long enough to realize that, to borrow words from one of one of hip hops most elegant MC,s, Blackalicious, “this is God’s act, we’re just actors in it.”? How long indeed before we tell the street vendor, we don’t want plastic, we brought our own hand made bowl? How long before we stop judging how Rihanna performed and perform for ourselves, in our own uniquely wild way? How long before we stop judging people for having children or not and instead create a local network of homeschools to raise each other’s children collectively? I wonder.

I pray. And I weep.

The smoke burns my eyes.

This year, like the previous two, has been stressful for my wife and I. Marriage, like all meaningful relationships (and everything is a meaningful relationship) is always a challenge but becoming parents during the crux of lockdown, learning to navigate the curious post-truth, COVIDified terrain of the Trump era while attempting to address conflict cross-culturally while figuring out how to raise a child in a world increasingly averse to children (how many school shootings already this year and still no real effort to address root issues??) is a unique riddle indeed. It’s put unique strains on our relationship. I get exhausted easily. I get lazy and stop trying. Just like I do with my efforts to engage with my community, my brothers and sisters on the other side of the isle, my greater than human relatives; animals, plants and minerals, my dreams, my aspirations, etc. opting instead to just stare into oblivion and let everything burn. But last night, before we went to bed, my daughter, sensing our struggle, took both our hands and placed them together. She told us we needed to hug, and that she wanted to be “in there”. She noticed the fire and in her own way she told us how to put it out. She has become our greatest teacher, our ultimate bell of mindfulness. But how long before I forget again, how long before someone with a big stick points out the encroaching spy balloon and I stop paying attention to the fire? Can I wake up this time? Can I speak truth to power and, more importantly, can I, amid raging fires, fearlessly love?

I put my mask on, take one last glance at the Sri Lanna forest, burning, screaming, and drive away from the farm. We won’t be able to escape forever. Maybe, as the great Chief Seattle is often quoted as saying, “…when the last tree has died, and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught we will realize that we cannot eat money.” Maybe then we will all fall in love again, all of us, with everyone, forced by grief to properly praise all that has been lost. I hope, for my daughters sake, and the sake of the remaining forests, we wake up sooner.