farming flowers

This evening I am supposed to write up a few paragraphs about the flowers I am growing here at Red Fire Farm. Each month an e-mail goes out to the CSA members, giving them updates on the crops and crew. These flower related paragraphs I intend to write are destined for tomorrow's e-mail. The intention, said one way, is to inspire people about the beauty and value of organic cut flowers. Said another way, the intention is to sell stuff.

I am not so into selling. The exchange of money is not so inspiring to me. In fact, there is something yucky feeling about it. But I AM terribly into flowers. bnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn (whitesockz, one of the most awesome cats in the world, just wrote that bit. i thought i'd give him an internet voice and leave it in).

I kind of wish that I didn't have a job. I kind of wish I lived on some beautiful land by a river and I grew all my own food and made art and sang out loud and had beautiful friends and love and animals and plants around me and I wish that traveling was free and inspiration and adventure plentiful and that my life did not in the least little bit require the exploitation of others.

Absent that reality, and lets be realistic, that reality is distinctly absent, I've got a pretty good gig going. I live on some land by a beautiful creek and I help grow and eat delicious vegetables and I make a little bit of art and I sing loud every day and I have beautiful friends and love and animals and plants around me and I get to travel some and I feel like I minimize the degree to which my life relies on the exploitation of others.

I make $ cuz I don't know how to exist without doing so. Maybe someday I'll figure out how to exist without it, but for now, I got to use money. Considering that reality, making a living by growing organic flowers is awesome to me. Awesome. It is holy and beautiful and lovely and fun and requires minimal exploitaiton of others and I like it.

Flowers are the sex organs of plants. Their purpose is to perpetuate life. Life. Growing. Flowers. Roots and leaves and FLOWERS. Soil and minerals and water and Sun. Dead plants and animals break down and become the rich and fertile food of the flowers that I grow for the purpose of selling them to make a living for myself. I like it.

Here are a few of the things I like most about growing flowers:

Zooming in on the dirt, a bug, a plant, a row, a bed, a field
And then zoooooming back Out to the bigger world
Being down in the dirt
Folk technology
Getting strong through my work
Listening to books and music while crouching in the dirt
Moving
Changing
SINGING OUTSIDE
The stages of life that you see in once season
Focusing on life
Growing growing growing
Mysteries of how got from point A to point B
Using water and life and soil and seeds to make things
Seeds!
Feels like a local answer to a global problem
because it is a material product that does not come directly out of an exploitive, toxic system
and because it is a material product that comes out of a more accountable system than most material products available
and because its’ manufacture was based in an intention to encourage life and diversity
diversity
germination
This is a weigh station on the way to a new world order

why do i always feel the need to justify my life to my life

Here are some of the names I brainstormed three springs ago when I was trying to name the flower business that I created in Chelan, WA:

Bee Candy Flowers

Dirt and Water’s Babies

Hua Flowers

Sophie Flowers

Lyla Flowers

White Sock Flowers

Pomo’s Flowers

Pomo’s Cut Flowers

White Socks’ Cut Flowers

Desert Blooms

High Desert Blooms

Purgatory

Plant Genitals

Plant Sex Organs

Plant Breeders

Sunshine Angiosperm

Hua Angio

Future Fruit

Sunshine Seed Factory

Shalom Cut Flowers

Shalom Blooms

Peace Blooms

White Socks’ Blooms

JLB flowers

Sandy soil blooms

Steep Slope Flowers

Lakeside Flowers

Snake Blooms

Sunshine Stems

Local Answer Flowers

Revolution Stems

Living Stems

Color Stems

Diversity Stems

Art Stems

Living Revolution

New World Order Flowers

Uprising Flowers

Rising Flowers

Chaiim Stems

Peace Stems

Nature Stems

Peaceful Revolution Stems

Harmony Stems

Amity Stems

One Love Stems

The way I have tended to see the fact that I make my living selling flowers is that the shopping population at large is looking to buy products. They will spend their disposable income on objects that make them happy or beautiful or wealthy or comfortable no matter what non-consumerist bandwagon I am on. And so, why not provide them with a product that is relatively healthy to produce? Conventionally grown cut flowers are bad to buy because they and the poorly paid labor that grows them are dowsed in dangerous chemicals. Clothes from target are bad to buy because they are made in sweat shops and create a lot of waste.

blah blah blah. actually i wrote all that last week and didn't post it. they didn't end up even asking me for soemthing about flowers to put in the e-mail.

i kind of want to have a farm called "sophie's farm" or "sophie siller farm"

what now?

what am i doing? when i was traveling in israel i had all these thoughts and experiences i wanted to share with other people via my blog, and i had it in my head that when i had some time i'd do it. but it is difficult to write about the doves that live on the western wall or the man that shouted at us for meditating there, however recently it may indeed have occured, when i woke up this morning and cross country skiied through a new england wood. its hard to live in the present and write about the past, and truly, living in the present is what i want to do. i have started a new job, i am a person with a past who is the flower grower and events planner at a farm in granby, ma. i have a tomato festival to schedule for august and i have to learn which shed holds which tools and where the ladle lives in this new kitchen i now share with some wonderful folks. but what of the untold stories? the materialistic young urban professionals who were the participants on the birthright trip and how i covered myself with mud immediately after we all exposed our bikinied bodies at the dead sea because i felt embarassed about my hairy legs for the first time in YEARS. the moment of silence i held at the end of our five hour tour of Israel's holocaust museum (Yad Vashem) in which i asked people to empathize, not blame or analyze but to try to empathize, with the people suffering in gaza just a few kilometers from this memorial where we had just empathized with the victims of the shoah. the wild dancing i couldn't help but let loose in that kibbutz bomb shelter that night. the play i went to see in hebrew about a conversation among a group of turn of the century european jewish immigrants to palestine who were trying to figure out how to relate to one another as a commune and how it along with the commune i was staying in at the time inspired me to be conscious and intentional about relationships. the retail tycoon and birthright philanthropist, bernie marcus founder and owner of home depot, who uglied any sense of jewish identity i had while i sat through his bullshit speech with broiling blood and watery eyes at independence hall (the bomb shelter room in which ben gurion declared the state of israel in 1948) while all the young urban professional participants applauded home depot and israeli nationalism and laughed at his jokes about greedy jews. david grossman's eulogy for his sone, uri grossman. what about all these untold stories that i meant to tell?

kibbutz gonen

The first night of our Israel tour was spent in the hotel of Kibbutz Gonen in the north. Having spent a total of two years on three different Kibbutzim a decade ago, my eyelids fluttered with a sappy nostalgia as we entered the familar Kibbutz style gate.

Scruffy dogs sauntered freely through a maze of small tan buildings with red rooves. Brown drip irrigation lines snaked through well manicured gardens. Soapy water was being squeegeed out the front door of the flat roofed dining hall. Children climbed confidently over truck tire playgrounds. It was all familiar and I felt cozy.

I had spent 11th grade as a member of a program for American Jewish High School students on Kibbutz Beit Hashita. We lived in dorms, took classes in English at the Israeli school, worked one day a week on the Kibbutz, drank copious amounts of alchohol, had confused sexual experiences, smoked pack after pack of cigarettes, and engaged in dramatic teenage social relationships.

Living on a Kibbutz when I was 16 revealed to me an alternative to the suburban reality I had despised in Rockville Maryland. On the Kibbutz, there were no fences around the yards and the dogs weren't overweight. Working there I discovered that I could do manual labor, and that if I did, I would be able to create things with my bare hands.

I, the only small scale organic farmer and ex-Kibbutz resident of the birthright group, was quite a bit more enthusiastic about our tour of Kibbutz Gonen than the others. I wanted to chat with the Kibbutz member giving us the tour all day.

Is there any communal element left to Kibbutz life now that salaries are stratified, everyone owns their own stuff, and more than half of the Kibbutz members are over the age of sixty five? How did Kibbutzim come to the decision to hire Thai workers and pay them poorly rather than do the work themselves?

Why are the cucumbers in Israel sooooo amazing? And why are the tomatoes pale and flavorless?

Do you feel like a human shield here in the Golan Heights? Do you like it? What was the damage to the Kibbutz during the second Lebanon War in '06? How many weeks were you in the bomb shelter? Do you ever have the desire to invite your Lebanese neighbors from ten miles away over an invisible border to your house for coffee? Do you ever picture yourself in a cuddle puddle with them?

Do you miss communal life? I miss it for you.

During the bus ride from Kibbutz Gonen to Manara Cliff (an outlook from which the view of Israel's Syrian and Lebanese borders are visible) I gave a talk about my experiences on Kibbutzim. I also talked about how, while rural kibbutzim have fallen apart and all but ceased to be either communal or agricultural, there is a new movement of urban Kibbutzim dedicated to educating toward a socialist revolution in Israel. More on that to come...

I must interrupt the slow moving description of the birthright tour to talk about the past two days of my life

A few weeks before I came to this country, I was in Texas reading about the humanitarian disaster that was the war in Gaza. I worried myself sick about how I was going to exist here. I knew that I would be very close, a few kilometers, away from both the suffering in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. And I knew that the general population of Israel would not be discussing the reports of Palestinian devastation and that I would feel a roucous in my stomach about it.

Now that I am here, the feeling is very similar to the general sourness of guilt that I have living, working, and paying taxes in the U.S. There, I am reminded occasionally by the gentle voices of NPR that the U.S. governemt invaded a distant nation without justification and thousands of civillians and soldiers have suffered deeply in the process. The U.S. government is not only responsible for crimes against humanity, but most of its leaders don't even pretend to have any vision for an egalitatrian global humanity. I know that when I contribute to the U.S. economy I am contributing to a ruthless capitalism that makes unfair choices about who in the world will be fortunate and who will be exploited, who will be bombed and who will be educated.

With regard to living in a powerful and exploitive nation, being here feels quite similar to being in the states. A guilty nagging deep in my head motivates me to try to live in such a way that does not depend on the exploitation of others. In both places, I want to recognize and minimize the suffering of others while myself living as joyful a life as I can.

Like the U.S., Israel is also a democracy with freedom of speech and humane societies and social programming for Sudanese refugees and art. Like the U.S. Israel has racists and criminals and extremists. I just want it to be clear, that while I deplore the occupation and violence enflicted by Israel, Israel is also a wonderful place where a lot of really good people are doing a lot of really wonderful things. This blog is in large part about how I am sorting out those two realities. I assume that I will never be able to sort them.

I planned a schedule for this past Thursday and Friday that was intended to involve me in a peace/coexistance/environmental movement here in the middle east. On Thursday I was to go to "Chava V'adam," an ecological farm between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where I would meet up with a woman I had found on the internet. She is working on seed exchange among Israeli and Palestinian farmers and other coexistance projects. Then, the next day, Friday, I had scheduled to take a tour of the South Hebron Hills with an organization called "Breaking the Silence." The idea of the tour is to show people the situation of the settlements, the conditions of the West Bank etc.

Wow, Chava V'adam, the ecological farm, felt amazing. There were weeds to pull and kohlrabi to plant. Bok Choi and peas and lettuce and cilarntro were growing. The soil was alive, the toilets were composting my waste into useful material, and the communication pathway between myself and the people working there felt wide open and friendly. I wanted to stay there, planting, weeding, and breaking to eat collard greens.

I believe that taking responsibility for how you live and how you relate to your resources and community, is the most powerful tool for peace. Living "off the grid", growing your own food and managing your own resources, as they do at Chava v'Adam, is a response to the exploitive corporate stronghold that creates deep poverty and filthy wealth all over the world. The more localized an economy you live in, the less room there is for corporations and governments to widdle their way between you and your resources.

The American "peace activist/ seed exchanger" who had invited me to the farm was very inspiring. Finally, someone taking a practical approach to exchange between Palestinians and Israelis, an approach that will empower both. I revelled in hearing about ancient heirloom Palesinian wheat varieites and her efforts to save them. She talked about Palestinian farming villages, their effective use of draught resistant landrace crops and how the Israeli government isn't interested in adopting their methods. The Israeli-Palestinian seed exchange organization she is creating to increase the biodiversity in the area and support the independence of small farmers sounds amazing.

And then her address hit me like a ton of bricks. She lives in Tekoa, a Jewish settlement within the green line boundaries of the West Bank. She is a settler. She invited us, me and a few other travelling Americans, to her home for Shabbat to help her work on her garden and the new house she is building. I was at a loss. I had no category to put her in in my head. She didn't go into "Religious Zealot, deluded into thinking god gave Judea and Sameria to the Jews so the arabs who live there should just disappear" or into the category of "Racist Nationalist, deulded into thinking that Israel can be both an occupier and a peaceful nation." I couldn't make a drop of sense out of her.

That night I debated back and forth, should I go to her house for Shabbat? 'No!,' my moral compass shouted. 'You can't be just one more entitled Jew who takes a bus right on into the West Bank like you have every right in the world to do so. No! You cannot work in her illegal garden as though she has a right to grow kale in the West Bank. That Kale is a roadblock to peace and an oppressive occupier of a self determined nation! '

Another voice in my head sighed, 'Give me a break, one kale plant is not what is standing in the way of a peace deal. Often a person can learn the most and the deepest from putting themselves in uncomfortable situations. If Palestinians and Israelis, supposed enemies, are supposed to sit down and listen to each other then shouldn't you put some effort into figuring out what is going on with this very confusing woman? She obviously had some justification and some world view I can't even concieve of, so shouldn't I try to understand?' There was a major roucous in my stomach.

The question of whether or not to go into that settlement brought about another dilemna. Should I go on the "Breaking the Silence" tour that I had planned for the morning? If going into the West Bank is the act of a self-entightled occupier, why would I get on a tour bus, even if it is full of lefties and peace activists, and tromp around? I would only be able to do so because of the Israeli military presence there and I am very against the Israeli military presence there. But of course, I would learn a lot by doing so, and don't crimes against humanity happen only when we aren't looking? I am already against the occupation, so is it really so essential that I get riled up by what would be (as all brief one-day tours inevitably are) a simplistic education? By bedtime I was resolved to go through with both plans for the next day, the South Hebron Hills tour and shabbat in Tekoa. I didn't want to leave Israel without having faced the occupation of Palestine head on.

I slept through my alarm. Sivan tried to wake me up but I slept right through. I missed the tour.

I forced myself to call the woman in Tekoa at 10:45. It was then that I found out the last bus to her place left Jerusalem at 1:45 (buses in Israel stop running Friday evening for Shabbat and don't start again until Saturday evening). 1:45 was much earlier than I thought the last bus would be. Holy, stress ball. I rush rush rushed because I was a long way from Jerusalem and still in my pajamas. I got to Jerusalem at 1:50. Too late.

So was it fate that I missed it all? Was it my inner chicken that made subconcious decisions that got me out of it? Was it just coincidence?

Part 2

On the airplane I was just me myself and I. I flew through the night in quiet calm, breathing air that had already grazed the lungs of countless other passengers. The windows were coated in black starlessness and I slept on and off.
With sour stomach and stiff knees, I sat in my seat as the metal crane that contained me descended onto middle eastern tarmac. Between the Mediterranean sea and the desert mountains, we landed on this tricontinental wedge of holy earth as a blue and white flag flapped in the earthly wind. I exited single file into the airport terminal.
"Where is the bathroom?" one of the forty twenty-five year old American Jews from our trip asked me. "Don't we both have the same set of information from which to answer that question?" I silently wondered. "Over there," I answered, pointing to an open doorway beside which was posted the image of a simple lady in a boxy dress standing next to a simple, boxy two-legged man.
I counted everyone to make sure we were all there and ushered them through passport control. I was to be a leader. I was disoriented by this new role and by the time spent in a metal machine above the clouds.
Beyond baggage claim, a man with a black hat, black jacket, and long beard was holding a large cardboard sign with the name "JANNA" written in English on it. I said "Shalom" to him, my cousin's brother in law, and placed the suitcase my cousin had sent with me precariously on the ledge that separated us. I knew that he was forbidden by his interpretation of the Jewish religion to touch my womanly hand and potentially even to pass an object between us. In order to prevent the suitcase full of children's clothing from American corporate bohemoths like "The Gap" from falling, we ended up having to touch it at the same time. He took the bag and left. I assume that his wife and sisters in Jerusalem unpacked the bag that night, excited to dress their holy children in the soft cotton pajamas sewed so cutely by Chinese sweat shop laborors. Off I went to the waiting tour bus and the forty some Jewish young adults that were chattily settling themselves into their carpeted seats.

Part 1 of Chronological Chronicle of my Experience on "Birthright's Israel Experts Bus 25" in February 2009

I'd like to start off by stating, just to get it out in the open and then get over it a little bit, that the term birthright make me very uncomfortable. Birthright is the English name of an organization funded by three groups; philanthropists, the state of Israel, and Jewish community groups. The idea is to send young Jews on a ten day tour of Israel "in order to diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; to strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and to strengthen participants' personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people" (http://www.birthrightisrael.com/site/PageServer?pagename=about_main). While not all of Birthright's self descrtibed mission offends me, the English name makes me red because it assumes that Jews have a birthright to the land of Israel which I think is both melodramatic and dangerously presumptuous. By the way, the Hebrew name for the program is "Taglit" (meaning "discovery") which is far more benign.

Birthright is the funding organization that "accredits individual Trip Organizers to run their programs and sets down the basic guidelines, standards and security policies by which Trip Organizers must operate. There are over 20 Taglit-Birthright Israel-accredited Trip Organizers running programs this session from North America..." (http://www.birthrightisrael.com/site/PageServer?pagename=about_main). The organizers come from a range of perspectives, from religious to secular, from right to left, from outdoorsy to urban, etc etc. The trip organizer that I went with, Israel Experts, describes itself as a pluralistic trip and it does lean left. Our trip, thank goodness, was only for people 22 and older.

The staff for the trip was as follows: a few behind the scenes Israel Experts staff who create the tour schedule and made arrangments, a professional Israeli tour guide who was essentially responsible for all of the educational content of the trip (within the guidlines of Birthright and Israel Experts), a medic who was with the group at all times carrying a backpack with bandaids and advil and a rifle with the safety lock on, the bus driver, and two staff members who counted heads, arranged food for the vegetarians and attended to administrative details. I was one of two staff members. In exchange for my work I recieved the free plane ticket and free tour. My co-staff member was a guy who was born in America but has lived in Israel since he was three.

As the only member of this staff group that started the tour off in the states, I organized everyone in Newark by myself and all thirty nine of us flew together to Ben Gurion airport. I tried to be enthusiastic but aside from the basic disagreement I have with the premise of birhtright, I am also a naturally kind of shy person in big groups. Needless to say, noone is going to give me a "birthright staff member of the year" award.

I don't think I'll get "birthright shit starter of the year" award either. I tried to take a gentle approach toward convincing the participants to be humanists before being nationalists. Acting as a radical didn't seem like it would appeal to the group. Most of the participants were urban professional types. Already my farmer-ness and lack of make-up probably struck them as waaaaaay out there. I didn't want people to think of peace and empathy as hippi values that they could reject off hand. I tried to encourage people to understand how to connect to Israel and be critical of it at the same time. The truth is though that I'm not a terribly charismatic leader so I don't know how effective I was.

Luckily, our tour guide was both charismatic, knowlegable and extremely left wing (for an Israeli). Wow, what a relief!!!!!

More to come...

Thoughts from Israel in 2009

Thousands of grey cranes stretch their feet toward this consecrated land as they calmly descend upon it each spring and fall. Africans in the winter, Europeans in the summer, these migrants feel at home in the lush green peanut and wheat fields of this tri-continental wedge of earth.

Bordering the desert, this earth has water, this earth has life, this particular earth is overflowing with human passion. For thousands of years, layers of human story, holy and unholy, have rubbed against one another, creating a hot and tangible friction. The place is quaking with human history and desire. This place is in the news.

Though I often wish I were, I am not a crane whose outstretched feet meet this land in happy reprieve from miles of flight. I have a human history and identity that brings me here and my shame is in dramatic conversation with my joy. My guilt and my pride taunt and tickle and test one another.

I am both a simple creature of the present and a complex daughter of history. I am a Jewish American College-Educated Vegetarian Heterosexual Leftist White Farmer Woman of Eastern European descent. I am an animal.

I am spending February of 2009 in Israel. In exchange for my free airfare I was the staff person on a tour trip funded by an organization called Birthright whose mission is to send young Jews to Israel on peer group trips. The leaders of and financial contributors to Birthright are Jewish Nationalists.

I am a humanist first and foremost. Secondly, I am a speciesist, meaning that I also believe in the multi-disciplinary worth of all species. I don't think I am a nationalist but I can recognize the appeal. I have yet to figure out whether or not those three -isms (nationalism, humanism, and speciesism) are mutually exclusive. I like to believe, that they can, at least in small ways, coexist.

The rest of my time here will be spent attempting to emotionally recover from and intellectually deal with the tour that got me here for free, visiting friends who I deeply deeply love, trying to investigate whether or not there is anything I can do to support the vision of Israel as a humanist state, hiking, learning, and indentifying my identity.

I'd like to create a few chapters/entries on this blog that will chronicle the things I have done so far in Israel. Who knows how much time I will have to write these but I'll give it a go. I want to use this writing as a tool toward understanding the layers of story that massage and aggrivate one another here and what my role is within that process.

"Human Rights Abuse" means that people are treating other people like they aren’t people. It happens the world over.

I believe in equality for all the species.

I believe that all the humans deserve peace and love and beauty equally. This belief seems so obvious I can hardly say it out loud.

My mom gave an identity to my tiny pink born body: Jewish.

I am afraid of what having a racial identity can too quickly lead to: racism.

My mom gave me my sense of justice and fairness and compassion. She called them Jewish Values.

I can’t hate my Jewish identity. I won’t. I miss my mom. I love my mom. She gave me a lot of things that don’t just go away. Like my human form and the knowledge of what real love is.

Right now, the Israeli government is slaughtering humans. Jews the world over support the massacre. I am at a loss.

Sixty years ago Jews were slaughtered in Europe. Millions were tortured and slaughtered. America dropped bombs all over the place until the few scrawny undead Jews were free.

I used to understand my Jewish identity as that of a persecuted people, a people that thrived in the face of discrimination and irrational hate. I miss that identity.

Peace is real.

I learned about Non-Violent Communication from Marshall Rosenburg’s audiobook. He states the obvious. For a ticket into the world of peace, just say what you see, feel, and need. Then make a clear request. Don’t diagnose somebody else. Take responsibility for your own feelings. Share them clearly and honestly.

Marshall tells me not to say "The Israeli Government and those who support it are war mongering, blood thirsty, racist killers."

He tells me to say, "When I see the Israeli military massacring Palestinian civilians in Gaza, I feel scared and angry. I feel ashamed of my Jewish identity. I feel hopeless and helpless."

Marshall makes it sound so easy. I wish I were better at it.

I am afraid of nationalism. Deeply afraid of nationalism. I am afraid that having "a land to defend" is too dangerous a possession.

There are people the world over who value peace and equality and non violent communication even more than they value their born identities. I am one of them.

Israel/Palestine is a power spot. Right now, the power is a fierce one. A deadly one.

I know about beautiful power. I've even seen beautiful human power. I've even seen beautiful human power, really strong stuff, in Israel/Palestine. Please, Universe, let beauty take over!

I am in a straw bale hermitage. But I am not a Hermitess. The walls are pink and textured; the light distinctly sun through a window. I am a visitor in this room. Empty bunk beds fill one corner. I am joyfully alone.

Underground, lays a fiber through which light travels very quickly. It might be plastic. It might be glass. It is buried underneath the roots of cedar trees, decayed cockroaches, and the microbes that feed off of both. Light shoots east along the fiber, toward the ocean.

The light passes east along the fiber, underneath the LBJ ranch near Johnson City, underneath the hooves of show cattle bred by the park service in the historically stout 1970s style of President Johnson’s herd.

It passes underneath New Orleans, where a young activist, tattooed with the message “critical resistance,” serves margaritas out of a slushee machine five nights a week while the Mississippi river is held in place by concrete.

Once, a Quaker woman lived in this room. A few weekends a year, her city dwelling Friends would come out for their country weekend retreats, joining her among the prickly pear and live oak trees. On the rest of the days, she was a hermit.

The light shoots out of my computer and east along the underground fiber, to a complex of buildings on the beach of the Atlantic Ocean. There, the light is sorted and organized, prepackaged for the next leg of its journey. Down it descends along a glass or plastic fiber to the ocean floor.

It passes underneath miles of water, plankton, whales, seahorses, and algae. It passes under millions of pounds of hydrogen and oxygen that have melted off of glaciers and gushed through river channels down and out into the sea. The fiber is thin and it bears the weight of all that ocean while light shoots across it, eastward.

The light reaches shore. It passes across land, mountains and valleys and rivers and down under a sea and up onto shore where the light has a message for a server in the Middle East.

It is a request from me for a picture. I had pressed enter on a Google image search for “Gaza” and light traveled across the globe to obey my command. Now this Middle Eastern server grabs a picture and bundles it up in a package of light and it sends that light back west along the fiber.

Underneath the ocean it shoots, its zeros and ones blinking at the speed of light straight across the fiber that lays on the dark ocean floor. A moment ago I pressed enter on a Google image search and now the bottom of the ocean has light swimming along its floor.

A man is walking with his eyes closed down an alley of grey brick on all sides. “Gaza,” I searched for. He is carrying a limp boy body. It is a limp boy body covered in blood. Actual blood. I asked for an image that, based on the news I’d heard, I thought might be bloody. But the image is very bloody. It is actually an image of a man carrying a limp boy body covered in blood. It is a real image. I asked for it, and here it is.

I am sitting in a straw bale hermitage, a pink little building built for a Quaker hermitess. The loudest sound this place has to offer is a howling wind that whips the cedar and the brown grasses whenever the weather changes from warm to cold. This place was built to accommodate weekend retreats.

The light I control here with my enter key is not tired. It will travel at the speed of itself, the blink of an eye, in search of anything I ask it to. I am a visitor in this hermitage.