mayaland
I heard a “This American Life” once where one of the stories was about this guy, a huge Star Wars fan as a kid (as was I), who had been so upset by Phantom Menace that he found himself rewriting it, nightly, as he fell asleep. He worked out a whole elaborate plot and explained, in the radio piece, how his version would have been So Much Better.
I felt that way about the third Matrix movie. And the time has come for me to get this off my chest.
SPOILERS AHEAD if you haven’t seen the movies and you care about such things.
Okay? Okay.
I remember seeing the poster for the first Matrix and thinking, wow, that looks nifty. It still does, doesn’t it?
And the previews all had all super-cool looking clips, all from the first half of the movie. I saw the first Matrix in the theater on a huge screen that no longer exists, as it was later cut up into two tiny theaters, and then closed down altogether. The theater was packed—wow, when was the last time I saw a movie with that many people? I was immersed in the story, enjoying the mystery of it all, and then WHOOSH—
—Neo wakes up in the Vat of Goo, and WHAMMO! Remember that feeling? That the bottom had dropped out? This is a dream sequence, right? A drug induced weirdness? No? WHOA! This is a totally different movie than I thought it was! COOL.
In a movie full of awesomeness, that moment was, by far, the best.
I liked the second movie. I did. I know some people had problems with it, and it didn’t do for me what the first one had, but it was full of complicated chewy goodness, questions of identity and purpose, meaning of life, ethical choices, and cool leather jackets. And it promised so much.
I was stoked at the end for what they would come up with next, I believed they would make good on their promise. I believed!
But the last one. Revolutions. Oh, man. It hurt, didn’t it? The stupid Kid subplot was awful. The whole business with Niobe and the dude infected with Agent Smith, Bane, what a waste of time. And whe whole Machine City thing made no sense. Neo being a blind prophet, having powers outside of the Matrix, dying in the end—none of it worked.
I’m sorry, but gawd, what happened?
Let’s now have a moment of silence for our hopes and dreams for Matrix: Revolutions.
No, forget that.
Instead, I’ll tell you want should have happened.
At the end of Reloaded, Neo had just saved Trinity and then somehow repelled the incoming Sentinels with some kind of EM pulse from his bare, supposedly human (that is, not in the Matrix) hand. And Agent Smith seems to have taken over a human.
But all of Neo’s powers came from his ability to see through the Matrix code and manipulate it. Outside of the Matrix, he’s just this guy. And Agent Smith is a program, a bit of code—if he is a program, he’s got to have a computer to infect, right?
So clearly, they’re still in the Matrix.
Wouldn’t that have been cool? The Wachowski brothers could have pulled the rug out from under us a second time.
That’s righty, the whole Zion world could have been just another Matrix program, designed especially for those human minds that the Architect said were too rebellious by nature to tolerate the more mainstream 1999 program. Give the rebellious minds a revolutionary city to love and protect and they’ll happily go through their days fighting the Machines while their bodies provide electricity to Machine City.
But no, let’s take it further. Maybe that whole image of fields of human beings in pods, maybe that’s from the past, too. Maybe, just as 1999 was chosen as a time period with which to distract the minds of the majority of humans, maybe 2199 is just another time period chosen as a distraction for these other humans. It was real at one point, but no longer.
So what would real life be like in the Now?
I say, the Machines advanced on. When Neo does his thing to pierce the 2199 program and is awakened from the Matrix-within-the Matrix once more, he finds the Machines wearing beautiful human-like bodies, in a beautiful light-filled, enclosed, city. Here, some of the Machine population argue that the humans are no longer needed for energy, are no longer a threat, and so they should be set free. Kind of PETA for People. And maybe the Machines need the humans for something, creativity, art, ingenuity, maybe they’ve ground to a halt, maybe they’ve lost their sense of purpose. Maybe they want to know their creators. I dunno. But whatever it is, Neo and some of his friends are put into new (cloned, perhaps?) bodies, given a tour of the Brave New World, and are confronted with the idea that the Machines are no longer their enemies.
Should Neo and Trinity trust this version of the Machines? Can they trust their senses? Is the war really over?
And then there would be some intrigue between different Machine factions where some wish to destroy the humans forever, some are just using the ‘Human Question’ to distract from something else, or as PR to make their group look good, meanwhile they really are doing the opposite. Maybe the big secret is that the Earth has repaired itself, that the humans COULD be set loose into it, to coexist with the Machines, while some Machines cover this up for their own reasons. Some programs want to help the humans, some are pretending to want to help, some want to destroy, some could care less. The nature of life, the meaning of existence, what are we here to do with our time, all of that could be questioned and explored. Conflicting information, conflicting goals—what should Neo do?
But it won’t be a cool Matrix movie if it doesn’t have some time in the Matrix, right? So, say the humans can join the Machine communications, like hooking up to the internet, only instead of nasty spike in the head, there is some elegant hand-in-a-light-beam interface or something. Lots of cool mileau stuff you could do here, exploring Machine City. Neo gets to do his thing, maybe some fights, throw in some sex, yada yada, all in the Machine Matrix. Woo hoo!
Until finally, the bad Machines are trounced and a group of humans, in their nice new bodies (no freaky holes in the head!), and some Machines in theirs, escape the confines of the Machine City and go out into the natural world, the environment repaired by the passage of time, to begin anew. Neo is back to being just this guy. Trinity gets to see her sky. We walk out of the theater stoked.
Wouldn’t that have been So Much Better?
I am certain it would have been.
Sometimes, when the wind gives a gusty laugh, I look up through the yurt’s dome and see the tops of the pines heaving around like God is mixing a salad. Pine trees with vinaigrette, coming right up. Yikes. A few were particularly crazy-leaning-over trees, so we decided they had to go. Sorry trees.
Turns out a friend of Paul’s used to do tree work and he agreed to come out and give Paul a hand.
And here he is! Jeff the Tree Guy, cutting out expert notches that cause the tree to hinge and fall exactly where he wants it to i.e. not on the yurt. Or the car. And not the kids either. Or Paul. Or the goats. Basically anything that is mine. I’m selfish that way. Go Jeff! What an interesting skill to have.
It was surprising (though it shouldn’t have been, except all I knew about it was you shout “Timber!” when the tree is about to fall—which Jeff did NOT, much to my disappointment) how technical it all was. Look at this assortment of chisel thingies he hammered in to direct the fall of this small elm.
I felt bad for the elm. It was a pretty little tree, one of the first to turn red each fall, and it had done nothing wrong. It’s just that it was right beside a particularly leaning-over-the-yurt pine, and there was fear that the huge pine would get hung in the elm and fall where we didn’t want it to. So the elm had to go to keep the yurt safe.
Now why is my yurt more important in the cosmos than this little elm that was here long before the yurt? I ask you.
Jeff had another amazing skill, that of super-fast and fearless tree climbing.
I walked over to get a picture of him go up and when I turned back around about ten seconds later, he was way up in the sky. Dude! How’d you do that?
Actually, he went much farther up than this picture reveals. I couldn’t get a good shot of the really high climbing because he was just a dot up there, and the sun was behind him causing all these flares…. so you’ll just have to trust me. He was up in the needles of these huge, old pines.
And this is what he saw:
It’s our place! From where the angels sit to watch over us!
That’s right, in the interests of completeness in my reporting I climbing that tree, too, and took this picture for your entertainment and edification.
Um. Yeah.
The place looks kind of cute from up there, you know? Sort of junky, but overall, quite cute.
Look at this one of the Noah House. Can you see Sophie in the widow?
She’s holding up a picture she drew of Jeff doing his Tree Guy Thang, so he’s taking a picture of her drawing a picture of him.
Can you see Jeff? He’s in the fourth tree from the left.
Turns out being a Tree Guy is the fifth most dangerous profession in the country, following such illustrious careers as mining and commercial crabbing. “Always have two kinds of safety gear in place at all times,” Jeff said, right after the branch he was tried into broke off. He caught himself, high up in the tree, with the spikes on his boots. He was fine, just some scratches on his arms, but holy shit. He stopped being a tree guy as a regular job when he started having kiddos. I can see why.
Here was the first tree down. You can see the Priscilla Tent is still standing, somewhat worse for the wear. I told them they should put their feet up on the tree, like those hunting pictures where the Big Hunter has felled a Mighty Beast by shooting it. They wouldn’t do it though. I wonder why.
Paul will cut the wood up into chunks and we’ll burn it in our waterstove.
Here’s a challenge for you. Can you see Jeff in this picture? Look high.
I’ve mentioned before that we take our goats on walks. The girls come along with us like dogs do, except, being goats, they hoover up fallen leaves like nobody’s business. Yellow tulip poplars leaves are their favorite, so this is the best time of year for walks, as far as they are concerned.
When we let them out of the goat yard, they swarm out and glom on to the nearest tree, so we have to poke and prod them to get them out to the woods. Then we cross the creek and the walk has officially begun. Here we are at the bridge.
Our property is long and skinny so you can walk quite a ways down to the big creek, then up the slope and back to the yurt, in a long oval, never feeling like you’re covering the same territory.
Here we are following the path down along the little creek.
Fancy says, “Ple-e-e-e-se can I have that yellow leaf? Ple-e-e-e-se?”
Fancy is very committed to her leaf hoovering. She often falls behind, not willing to leave any leaf un-gobbled.
Lately, Mochi the Kitty comes with us on these walks. At the cross over part of the walk, there is a huge area of fallen trees from a hurricane about a decade ago. A great climbing area for kids, goats, and cat alike.
The big goats used to climb but once they started being dairy goats for real, their tender udders put a stop to all that. Here they are watching Sophie, Luc, Emma, and Mochi. Is it longing? Or curiosity?
The shepherd and his herd…
Our land covers a patchwork of sections cleared at different times in the past, creating very different kinds of forest. Then that hurricane came through and took down dozens of trees, opening up some areas where new trees are just starting to fill in. But some big old trees still stand, some old oaks, and this one, one of my favorites, a ‘three-tree’ that is, one tree at the bottom that turns into three at the top. Another tulip poplar.
We’re just about to transition out of the deciduous area and into a section of mature pines…
Can you see Mochi in this shot?
The goats always speed up as the walk progresses, because they know treats await them back at the goat yard. They practically RUN at the end. Here they are trotting past another of my favorite trees, a willow oak.
Sophie says, “Thanks for coming on our goat walk! Join us any time!”
This is a true story.
But here’s the thing: it happened twenty years ago, so I’m a little fuzzy on the details. Being a writer, this isn’t really a problem for me. I just fill in with some interesting stuff to make it a good story. But, if I do that a few times, as I have over the years with this story, I can’t remember which details might have gotten a bit further from the facts than I might like. But I want to tell this story true—it’s a very cool story, with an excellent moral at the end, wait for it—and so, if any of the parties involved happen to read this blog post and find errors or exaggerations, please let me know, and I’ll fix them.
Okay.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I had a job at a large-ish bookstore that had a basement with storage and offices and a bathroom with a bulletin board that someone had put things on a million years ago. You know what I mean, where the construction paper has faded to near-white except where the items posted on the paper have torn or fallen, revealing colored (or just less faded) construction paper underneath. Anyhoo, I had noticed at one point, and read, as had probably everyone, multiple times, because hey, it was in the bathroom, ahem, an article on the destruction of the Hawaiian rainforest.
What a downer, right? No one wants to read that kind of stuff while they pee. But you can’t help it, you’re sitting there, it’s right in front of you, you’re a captive audience.
So, one day, this guy comes into the store and he wants books on Hawaiian history. I used to live in Hawaii and he seemed like a nice guy, so I went the extra mile helping him find his books, and in the process we got to talking. Turns out he was a novelist and had plans to write a series of mystery novels set in Hawaii, sort of like what Tony Hillerman did with the southwest. “Cool,” I said, and then I had a brain-flash and said, “wait just a minute, I’ve got something you need.”
I proceeded to run downstairs and yank the rainforest article right off that decrepit old bulletin board. I figured, if any white guy was going to go and write books about Hawaii and possibly make money on them, he ought to at least bring some awareness to some real issues the Hawaiian people and their land are facing.
I got back upstairs, a bit breathless, and he was still there. “I thought you had forgotten me,” he said. “I almost left.”
But I handed him the article and bid him farewell and that was the end of that.
Except it wasn’t. Years later, I got a call from the guy. Turns out he had called the bookstore and spoken with the manager, who had put him in touch with the old manager. The writer had described me to him, and the two of them whittled down the options, until they decided it was probably me. The old manager even managed to remember my name. Wow. Anyway, with my name, the writer found my phone number, and dialed. The reason for all this effort was this: he wanted to thank me. And he wanted to dedicate his next book to me.
Turns out he had read the article and been moved enough about it to contact the people listed. Who turned out to be this family of Hawaiians who were trying to save the part of the rainforest where their ancestral lands were, including some sacred land associated with their ancestral worship of Pele, the Volcano Goddess. The writer had ended up meeting with these people and becoming very close to them, even living with them for a while. I remember him saying that the head of the family was a kahuna of sorts and had initiated our writer into some Hawaiian religious secrets, but that may be my writerly brain at work, I’m really not sure. But I defintely remember him saying he became very close with this family. That his life was changed by knowing them.
So, anyway, the guy wrote his books. And he donated the money he made from them to this family, who had founded this organization, to help save this land from the power company that wanted to, essentially, desecrate it by destroying it.
And the family, with their supporters, after much effort, were able to save it.
So rarely do these environmental struggles have a happy ending!
And so rarely do we know the train of events that follow from our day-to-day actions!
How amazing it was to get that call and find out what had come of my spur of the moment idea. It’s as if Pele herself reached out and made sure that guy got hooked up with that family, and She used me to do it. Or how about the person who put that article on the bulletin board in the first place? What would s/he think to find out where that tiny choice ended up?
So there it is, the moral of the story: you can never know what might come from tiny actions. So make them good, right? Even the tiny ones might matter like crazy.
After I got that call, I didn’t think a whole lot about it. Time passed and I even forgot the name of the writer! But after doing a little googling with the shreds of information my memory has retained, I think it is this guy. I think. And here is an article about saving that section of rainforest, and about the guy who is the head of the family who founded the organization that spear-headed it. Who might be the guy the writer was telling me about. Maybe. (If you’re that writer-dude, drop me a line! Help me get my facts straight!)
So why am I writing this in a blog post now, twenty years later? I don’t know. It’s the same sort of impulse that made me want to get that article to that writer-guy in the first place. Maybe someone will read this post at some point and end up where they need to be as a result. Maybe it will sit here unread and never matter. Who can know? The impulse is to tell the story now, so I’m telling it.
Pele, I am honored to have been in your service, even briefly. Please use me again, if you wish. (Maybe you are, right now…?)
From my loving family, who know me well, especially in the morning before I’ve had my coffee.
Okay, I know the equinox was last week. But I couldn’t find my camera until today, and it was full of lovely equinox photos, so how could I do an equinox post without it? Well, I couldn’t. But I can now! So look what we did on the First Official Day of Fall….
Well, that doesn’t really show you much, except two kiddos running through a field.
Here is what they were chasing…
Geese, flying in a V, what can be more First Day of Fall than that?
Here is Sophie, honking and running…
And Luc, in his tarantula shirt, thrilled. “Mom, I was running so fast that I was flying with them!”
Okay, what we did was go to this two hundred year old house, built by a Scottish fellow back in the day. Around the house is a mile’s worth of trail through some lovely grounds, all called (for reasons I could not find out) The Poet’s Walk. Maybe because the view is inspiring, or maybe because a poet lived here at one point…if I find out, I’ll update this post. The grounds keepers have put up a little box with cards and pencils and invite folk to write a poem and put it in the box, and they promise to read them all. Or light fires with them, you know, whatever.
This is Sophie’s poem:
We went with a few other families. The kids were hilarious.
Of course, this is all I saw of them for most of the walk:
Here I finally caught up to Luc, who had stopped because he thought this sign must have a poem on it and he wanted me to read it.
How disappointing that it was just the name of the tree on the sign, but I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. And that’s a fact.
As we walked, a storm started coming in, providing some dramatic First Day of Fall skies.
The grounds really are idyllic. While you look at these, imagine strolling along, cool misty air, the leaves just starting to turn yellow here and there….
The kids ran just about the entire time.
And what the heck is this alien looking thing? There was a tree full of them.
When we finally got home, we topped off our equinox celebrations by making a homemade pumpkin pie from a fresh pumpkin we carved, the first of the season.
YUM.
Happy Autumn!
Shortly after we first moved into the yurt, a distressing teddy bear accident occurred. A small green bear was tossed and landed on top of a tool closet shed thingy of Paul’s. We could see the bear from the yurt, but we could not reach it. And so the small green bear, alas, stayed put.
Time passed. Then, one day, Sophie said, “You know, he’s like the weather bear. When you want to know the weather, you just look out at him, and he tells you.” Eureka! The small green bear felt flush with purpose! From that day forth, he became Weather Bear!
Summer sun!
Winter snow, brrrr….
Rainy autumn weather—wear your slicker!
He looks kind of sad up there sometimes, slouched over, bleaching in the sun. But Weather Bear is committed to his work.
And unlike the weather man, Weather Bear is never wrong.
I found this little critter while cleaning up the other day.
I’m pretty sure it’s made out of chewing gum.
We met her, have seen her flock and her beautiful eggs. We’ve laughed at her slap-stick predicament. We’ve read about her alternative lifestyle love-life. We’ve even seen her recent embarrassing condition. Now, today, we have the torment of Whitey. Only this time, I’m not kidding. But before I go any further, let me reassure everyone now: Whitey is fine. I can see her through the yurt window as I type this. She is scratching and pecking, just like always.
So when we get to the bad part, breathe.
Okay, so a couple of days ago, the kids and I got home from galavanting around town. We’d been gone for a couple of hours and it was getting late so I gathered the milker up and headed out to the barn for the evening milking. Only to find this: poor Whitey was caught in the electric fence. I dropped the milker, screamed for Paul, and ran for the fence cut-off. She was sitting, beak open, grunting as each hit went through her, another charge every six seconds. It took me about twenty seconds, three hits, to cross the space to the plug and I was crying and shouting by the time I rammed the cord out of the socket. It was terrible.
She had clearly struggled at first as the netting had cut into her sides in two places, but she was shut down at this point, not moving. We got her untangled and she staggered into the chicken house and managed to get onto the lowest stoop where she leaned her head against the wall and shut her eyes. She wouldn’t drink anything. I thought for sure she was going to die. I kept going out to check on her, taking her water and raisins, but I don’t think she recognized me. I don’t think she recognized food.
There isn’t a whole lot to a chicken, but there is a sense of someone looking back at you—a chicken person, to be sure, but a person all the same. The next day, Whitey was gone. Blank. A friend of mine described to me a relative of hers coming home, fifty years ago, from electric shock treatments. Her short term memory was gone, her long term memory shaky at best. Passive, forgetting to eat, blank. Describes Whitey perfectly.
For two days she just clutched the stoop and wouldn’t come out.
But then she started coming back. She drank some water. She got to the top stoop in the chicken house. Even better, she came out of the chicken house and started scratching a bit in the dirt. Like it was a habit she couldn’t recall the purpose of, but hey, what the heck. And then I saw her go for a worm I had draped out for her and I just CHEERED. Yeah, Whitey! She’s found her will to live! She’s been getting stronger every day since. I can not believe it.
One time—I am such an idiot—I picked up a solar fencer (that’s the box that provides the charge to an electric fence) without checking to see if it was off, and yep, it was on. It was heavy and so I braced it against my chest, ready to carry it over to where Paul was installing it, and it did what any good solar (re: it doesn’t have to be plugged in to work) fencer does: it gave me a shock. WHAM. Strongest sensation I’ve ever had, including childbirth. For a second there was nothing, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t move. Then the pulse passed (these fences send out pulses, not a continuous charge, thank god) and I screamed and threw the fencer fifteen feet away from me in this instinctual shove. And then I threw up.
That was the weakest fencer we’ve used. It was not strong enough to keep Fancy the Goat in. She would just run it and go through. So we borrowed a fencer from a friend who said, “It’ll make their balls drop off.” Yikes. (Of course, our goats are girls, but we got the idea.) Nope, Fancy just ran through that one, too. So we got the mondo fencer we now have. Fancy laughed at our pathetic efforts and ran it.
How? How could she stand it? She weighs half what I weigh! Are human nervous systems that different from goatie ones? When we first put that fencer on, I was standing next to Fancy once when she got shocked, I was maybe a foot away from her, and all the hair on my body lifted with static electricity as the charge passed through her body and into the ground. Freaked me out. Of course, this was a stupid way to put in a fence, because Fancy was basically just leveling up each time. “I’ll take another level in b-a-a-a-d ass, thank you.” That’s when we got the netting (instead of the simple wires) and finally we had a fence that would contain her. (Also, she got more mellow and stopped wanting to get out. Having babies does that to you.) You better believe I kept/keep my children away from that fence! They’ll probably have to have therapy to get over this weird fear of fences I have instilled in them.
But this mondo fencer is the one Whitey got caught in. This little chicken could have been there for an hour. She could have taken hundreds of hits. A thousand. How could her tiny body possibly survive this?
Maybe Whitey, like my friend’s relative, has no memory of the fence. Maybe the last few days are just as gone for her as she has been to us. I hope so, anyway.
But there she is, acting like a chicken, pecking and scratching through the compost. Clucking. Doing her chicken thang. As if nothing has happened. Chicken of steel.
I’m so glad she is pulling through! It seems crazy to care so much about the fate of a chicken, but I find that I do. On the other hand, I feel very grateful that the biggest trauma in my life is about one of my chickens. Some people have bombs falling on their houses, or their children are starving, or they have some horrible form of cancer. I’m lucky, right?
Maybe Whitey is, too. I mean, she got hand fed raisins and worms, got petted and loved on for her recovery. Sophie sang her songs. It could have been worse.
(Whitey might not agree.)
- MAYA LASSITER is a writer of fantasy novels, an unschooling mom, a yogini, a former goat keeper, a yurt dweller, and an all-around cool person. Except when she's a boring ninny. Hopefully she won't post on those days.
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(24.44%)today's yoga practice
- friday
May 11, 2012 | 10:09 am…and now we come to lady’s holiday. the weakest week of yoga that ever barely happened.
- thursday
May 11, 2012 | 9:09 amprimary to navasana. can’t seem to get past freaking navasana this week. at least I’m on the mat.
- wednesday
May 11, 2012 | 9:08 amprimary to navasana with Maria’s vid.
- tuesday
May 11, 2012 | 9:08 amSKIP. Shame.
- monday
May 11, 2012 | 9:07 amprimary to navasana. am I back in the saddle?
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Archive for today's yoga practice »
- friday
"Dusi's Wings" April, 2003. . . .
"One thing fantasy can do for us is to give shape to the mysterious in the world; another is to make emotional yearning concrete. The early sections of "Dusi's Wings" do just that...there was a strong grasping towards the spiritual in fantasy here that was very promising, and I look forward to reading more by Lassiter." --review, Tangent Online.twitterage
"the maya report, continuing civil war and unrest, cloudy with an excellent chance of tears: For Mother’s Day we ... http://t.co/YdPYTfRQ"2 days ago"obsessed with lounge pants: It’s probably the Katwise thing (see yesterday’s post), plus Sophie doing a bunch of... http://t.co/Uuv0m9Dt"6 days ago"the technicolor fairy coats of the amazing and inspring katwise: I adore rummaging around Etsy, I always find co... http://t.co/Fi0d7kmN"7 days ago"botanicula — review: Around here we are HUGE fans of Amanita Design and their wonderful games. I have written be... http://t.co/j5H7nAuf"11 days ago"the surprising and convoluted history of a novel, plus some gorgeous cover art: I just got the last editor lette... http://t.co/CPa7AeYb"15 days ago
