Our local health food store is also the local community hang out. It sells organic produce, herbal tinctures, Dr Bronners and raw food snacks. If you spend long enough there, you’ll run into two or three people you know.So while we stood there, gazing in horror at his medieval-looking arm, a few other friends gathered around.

“What am I going to do?” Asked my friend. “Does anyone know a good doctor I could call?”

“You should get some calendula and make an infusion,” suggested somebody, in a helpful tone.

“You need to bath it in your own urine,” advised someone else. “Everything your body needs is in your urine.”

“You need to do a liver cleanse,” said a third. “Skin problems always come from liver.”

My friend, as it happens, is a European. He grew up with socialised medecine. The executive summary on socialised medecine is this: IF YOU ARE SICK, YOU GO TO THE DOCTOR. You do not worry about whether you can afford it, you just go. You go because it’s obvious: if you are sick, you need to get treated. Cost is not a question.

I also grew up with socialised medecine. I looked at his arm and I said, “If I had a rash like that, I wouldn’t mess around with infusions and urine. I’d go and see a real doctor.” He nodded.

Everyone else looked horrified, and so I did a spot poll. Not a single one of them had health insurance. Hence their reliance on folk remedies of dubious worth. Snake oil is cheaper by far than a co-payment, and even cheaper than paying for yourself to see a doctor if you aren’t insured at all.

And even if you are insured, chances are you won’t go unless you’re at death’s door. Another friend recently staggered about for a week with a belly ache that rendered her pale, and when I suggested she call her doctor, gasped, “I can’t. I don’t want this on my record. It’ll make my payments go up.”

Oy weh. I used to be involved with raising money for a free medical clinic in Burundi, the world’s poorest nation. The clinic was revolutionary, providing health care for the poor of the region. They only had to pay what they could afford, and in return, they got care. It freed the people from reliance on flaky witch doctors selling bogus treatments.

Can we apply the same revolutionary concept here? America is full of snake oil peddlers flogging fake remedies for everything from migraines to erectile dysfunction. Dubious super-nutritional supplements will save you from the natural process of aging. Laser treatments will detox you. Crystals will purify your aura. Herbal remedies and homeopathic pills (often based on the primitive medieval ‘doctrine of signatures’) will achieve curative marvels. Colonics will rejuvenate you and cure you of cancer. Some of these things work, but most are placebos at best.

Have you noticed how there’s always a new quack practitioner in the lime-light? Until they’re debunked, and their patients move on to the next miracle healer.

When will we free America from dark age superstition and allow people affordable, straight-forward access to modern medecine?

When I first heard about it, I had to grind my teeth, since I just missed out on the cash bonanza. My 12 year old Honda Civic finally blew its head gasket and died last December, and I considered myself lucky to be able to flog it on Craigslist for $1000 to a resourceful Cantonese mechanic, who had it hauled by triple A.

If I had waited, I moaned, I could have traded that thing in for a massive $3500. Ai. Ai.

But then I read the small print.

The good part is that you only get the full rebate if your replacement car gets more than 10 MPG more than your old klunker. Less than 10 MPG more and you get less rebate. Good incentive. Until you think about it a bit. It doesn’t take long before you begin to wonder, if you trade in a battered hummer that gets 11 MPG, should you get a huge rebate to buy a car that still only gets 21 MPG?

That’s the first snag. The second is that you can only get the rebate if you buy a brand new car, from a dealership.

It’s always the same with snags. Once you begin to pick at them, the whole thing starts to unravel before your horrified eyes. The more you tug at these two, the more you begin to wonder who this bill really benefits.

If CARS is really about getting klunkers off the road and replacing them with fuel-efficient motors, then why can you only get the rebate if you are buying something brand new, off a lot? Why can’t you snap up a used Prius, for example, and trade 20 MPG for 55 MPG?

Unless I glue my rose-coloured glasses to the front of my face, all I can see when I look at this bill is the blurry figures of car industry lobbyists, begging for a bill than greenwashes their need to sell more cars. This has nothing to do with reducing our emissions, and everything to do with saving some asses in Detroit.

Apparently whales have several known sound patterns, which are easily distinguishable for scientists. But Pierre has identified another pattern – previously unexplained.

First of all, whales communicate about logistics — about getting together, for example, to create a ‘bubble net’ in which to trap fish. Secondly they communicate while traveling together. Thirdly they sing, just for the pure pleasure of it. Apparently the males do the singing; the females shut up when the men are around, and only sing when they are alone with their calves. (This is not the only blatantly sexist thing in the marine mammal world, and in that it raises interesting questions, but they’re another story.)

So let’s not digress from the other sound pattern…

This other sound pattern has been recorded dozens of times. The male whales make it while hanging head downward for hours at a time, coming up only to breathe and then invert themselves again. What on earth could they be doing? Pierre and the other researchers were mystified by this until their research project was visited by a Tibetan monk.

“What do you think of this?” asked Pierre, playing the mystifying tones and showing footage of the upside-down-hanging whales.

“Isn’t it obvious?” answered the monk. “It’s an OM. They’re meditating.”

Once he had pointed this out, Pierre said, it seemed obvious.

I did not make up this wonderful story of how diverse cultural knowledge can lead to breakthroughs that Western scientists would never get if they stayed enclosed, but I shall be using it for the rest of my days. It’s especially touching to me that the interspecies connection had a common element of shared experience that was not present between the two cultures of humans. To a skilled meditator, another skilled meditator is obvious, even if he is of a different species

The story also underlines for me that there’s a lot about humans that is really just about us being mammals. It’s not specific to homo sapiens at all. Up till now, meditation seemed pretty much a human activity, but why wouldn’t it be a mammalian thing? Gorillas have been spotted watching sunsets. Wolves collect to howl (sing?) at the moon.

For more about Pierre Lavagne and communication with whales via music, go to his Shelltone project website.

So when we play, or engage in creative activities (for their own sake rather than with any goal in mind), we’re letting our inner soul communicate with our sensible thinking self (otherwise known as the ego), and with the outside world.

Why is this important for activists to know?

Because it means that play and creativity are not just opportunities to blow off steam, but rather as vital activities in themselves. They’re the bridge between the world inside of us and the world outside. With the magnitude of the issues facing us, we need to cultivate that bridge for several reasons:

1. For regeneration. We need energy going back into our souls, especially when we’re swimming upstream and trying to change the world for the better. Otherwise we’ll burn out. Creativity and play enable the source inside of us to be replenished. Some of us dance, some make music, some paint, some play with kids–whatever we do to play and unfold our creative soul, it’s essential.

2. So that we’re more likely to come up with generative (rather than limiting) solutions. By this I mean solutions that make the previous problem obsolete, or at least render the old ways so much less attractive than the new way that we don’t have to waste energy trying to legislate against them. In my experience that kind of lateral thinking comes best when you’re in a relaxed, slightly dreamy, playful state. Which often has to be cultivated.

Permaculture is good at this. It actively teaches the art of doing as little as possible for the greatest effect. For example, if you want to dig a swale, redirect your cows along the line of it for a few weeks–they’ll make it for you, by walking a shallow runnel into the earth.

3. To create more pleasure, which creates community, since fun is contagious and attractive. We can’t do a thing without community, not really. And the best way to pull people in is to create something irresistably beautiful or enjoyable or captivating.

4. To enable us to start things without getting put off before we even get going, by the magnitude of what needs to be achieved. Apparently Wangari Matthai started with a vision of planting a tree for every person in Kenya, but I know that for myself, it’s easier to start on a small scale, in a “what if we did this?” kind of way.

One of my favourite ways to play in a way that accesses deep soul is nature art. You go out in the woods or down to the beach and make art–mandalas, or arrangements of twigs and stones, or sculptures of assembled branches, or whatever. It can be anything from mud pies to Andy Goldsworthy, and somehow it doesn’t matter. Everyone can do it, and the inner critic has a hard time getting its teeth in. People don’t have a history of being told they’re not good at nature art, so very few find themselves feeling limited. At the end you visit everyone’s piece and enjoy it.

What other ideas do people have?

His first line of argument I called “The Frances Moore Lappe”: we should plough up the pasture land in order to turn it into arable land, and plant crops on it. But we tried this before, in many regions of the world, and the result was dustbowls. Much pasture land is a delicate eco-system of plants, ruminants and light soil. If you plough it, it flies away in the wind, resulting in topsoil loss, and not much else. It’s not made to be cultivated. It’s made to be grazed. As such, its only contribution to the food system is as grazing land. Marginal land that can’t be used to grow grain and other crops can nevertheless be used by animals for forage. And humans can then eat those animals.

This brings me to a second point: what about the rights of wild animals? If you plough the forage land and the pasture, you lose their ecosystem. Mice, voles, hawks, small wind-blown plants with delicate flowers. The vegan appeared not to care about these species at all. He was all for cows, but not for cowslips. Many people are surprised to hear that soy, so beloved of vegans, is the bloodiest crop there is, when harvested. Soy combine harvesters are massive, and they trap rabbits, mice, hares, voles, rats and other creatures in their blades. Tofu is tainted with their blood. So is any grain harvest, but soy is the worst.

And here’s another thing: soy, like corn, is 90% genetically modified. Eat soy and you fatten Monsanto. You support agro-business, mono-cropping, genetic modification, and the monsterization of food. Your soy is nowhere near locally grown, it’s flown and trucked around, and over-processed, and you know what? It’s not even good for you—soy was sold to us as a health food by the agro-business lobby, but in fact, it has been linked to breast cancer. Raw foodies won’t touch it.

But none of these is the most critical argument. The most critical is that the growth in demand for soy (along with the demand for McDonald’s burgers) is directly leading to the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. It’s being razed so that the land can be converted to grow beef and soy. If you care one iota for this planet and the species upon it, you will boycott soy (I’m assuming you already wouldn’t be caught dead with a McAnything) for this reason. The Amazon is our oxygen generator. It’s our wild pot of gold in terms of its rich variety of species. And it’s home to indigenous tribes whose world is being burned to the ground…so we can eat tofu and drink soy lattes, while congratulating ourselves that no chickens died for us this week.

I don’t mean to disrespect Frances Moore Lappe, whose work has inspired me for years. I agree that we need to modify our diet in order to promote the planet we want, which I hope for all of us here is one on which most people eat enough. But veganism is not the way to go.

I was brought up in China and in the Mediterranean. In both places people eat primarily unprocessed food based on plants, supplemented with a little animal protein. This is the diet I follow. Meat has a role in it. A few ounces of chicken per week is much healthier for the planet than soy. Chickens can be locally raised, eat scraps and forage, and have a small footprint. Same with pigs.

To live is to die. To live is to cause other creatures to die. To produce milk you have to kill male calves. To harvest grain you kill small critters. Jain monks wear a face mask to avoid inhaling gnats and carry a broom to sweep the ground in front of them clear of spiders and other small scuttlers. Does any of us go that far?

So let’s get real. It’s time for a sensible diet and a soy boycott.

After all, these are the people who preach the doctrine of the free market. In which case, by their own creed, it’s sink or swim, baby, and if GM is sinking, then that’s the market, so bye bye.

But we could, if we wish, inject funds to regenerate the economy in those soon to be stricken areas of Detroit. Not by putting it into the hands of the already fat cats, but by spreading it around to the people whose lives would be most affected if GM were to close. I don’t mean just handing over cash. I mean, what if we funded those peoples’ dreams of the better lives–and better communities–they really long to create, in their buried heart of hearts?

What if we set up funds for the following options:

- Going back to school to take any course you like. Not just a new machine shop class for ten weeks at the local community college, but a PhD in philosophy, if that’s what grabs you, or a law degree, or whatever.

- Moving your family to another location where you’d have a better chance of getting the job you want.

- Starting your own small business, with a year or so of sustainable management consultancy thrown in, to help you succeed.

If we did that with the money, we’d affect people’s lives in a way that would far surpass a bailout of a failing auto giant whose cars are an international scandal of low fuel efficiency and high emissions. And it would be cheaper too. Which would leave funds left over for other grass roots projects, resulting, potentially, in a mushrooming of small, local growth, and a true regeneration after the death of the big, bloated mammoth.

A feeling suddenly came over me of great sadness and tenderness. I was suddenly overwhelmed by how vulnerable and defenceless these stalks of this vegetable seemed, and I thought about how they had been harvested by someone who didn’t care, and bundled into a box, and shipped here and then stuck out on a shelf for me, under bright lights. They were all a little wounded and scraped.

I was aware that this was all rather ridiculous. It was RHUBARB, for godssake. But there was something so incongruent about a food so real, so directly and undisguisedly alive, in this antiseptic place where most of the food has been processed to a point where you can no longer see its real origins. It was shocking to see the rhubarb as a living being.

I thought, “If this were meat and I were feeling this way, I would become vegetarian”.

And then, “But no-one can give up eating plants”.

And then I thought, “I never want to eat another plant I didn’t grow and harvest myself, humanely.”

And then I said to myself, “Stop it. Get a grip.”

I wouldn’t write any of this in a public place except for a conversation with another friend, who has been reading Derrick Jenssen, and who tried to tell me about her grief for the damage we’re doing all around us, and for how we ignore it, hide it, turn away from it. So I confessed The Rhubarb Incident to her, and she said, “Yes. Exactly.”

So now I confess it to you, because all of us need to know that we are not alone with these sudden intrusive feelings about The UnSpeakable. We need to know that so that we can start to speak to each other as humans about The UnSpeakable. So that eventually it becomes Speakable, and Feelable, because only then will we be able to do anything heartful about it.

And now of course, it’s no longer just about rhubarb.

By dint of a natural aversion to luxury (as well as angst about the future and an inherited fear of poverty), and no dependents, I stashed away quite a lot while I was working in a corprate job. As I added up numbers on the back of an envelope, I realised I had a small nest egg (not huge, but it could hatch a sparrow, or a quail, so long as I don’t splash out and make an omelet), and I felt some pride about this–Self-Made Woman.

Then I switched on the radio, where a woman was talking about the use of women’s issues in war propaganda. (Remember how all of a sudden we were liberating the burkha-clad sisters in Afrganistan? This after years of women’s organisations fruitlessly raising the issue. But then once oil was at stake, the tune changed, and suddenly the long-ignored plight of the women oppressed by the Taliban was all over the news, being used to encourage us to swallow the war.)

The woman’s speech reminded me that even a hundred years ago, none of us women could have worked in a profession. None of us could have voted. Basically the choice back then was be a servant, get married, or sell your body. British women accepted proxy marriages with farmers in Australia, said adieu to everyone and everything they knew, and sailed out there to some rough chap they had never met. Because there was no other way, bar becoming a prostitute.

But we don’t have to do any of that anymore.

It’s so easy to forget the basics. I rehearse a little litany to myself sometimes: I’m safe, I’m fed, I’m warm, I’m dry, I’m not sick, I’m OK. It’s more than most people on the planet can say. It’s worth remembering what we have, and how far we’ve come.

As I reflected on all of this, a solid kind of a feeling crept over me. Women really can make a life for ourselves now (at least in our culture). We can work and we can live and no-one can say boo. It’s not necessarily the life we thought we were going to have, much less the life we hoped for. But we rally round each other and I’m proud of the support we give each other.

Look what happened when the Gramin Bank gave women in Bangladesh the means to work their way out of poverty. Amazing. Look at Wangari Mathai, a million trees later. Women are impressive.

Archetypes, as Jung said, have dual aspects. The archetype of forceful big is the counterpart, or opposite, of the archetype of delicate small. Once forceful big enters the scene, there is no more space for delicate small. It gets crushed.

This observation alone is worth the dissertation. Think about it. Absorb its implications. What does it tell you about intractible situations in this world? What does it tell you about your own life? How can you re-open a space for delicate small?

The paradigm symbol for delicate small is the little girl. Is the world safe for little girls? How do you change in the presence of a little girl?

So how did forceful big arise, since it clearly arose after delicate small, if its presence signals the end for delicate small? Aaron theorises that it arose on the steppes of central Asia, with the domestication of the horse. People who rode got used to speed, and to subjugating someone else (the horse) in order to self-gratify with more speed. Then with that knowledge of the gratification you can get from someone else’s pain, and with the practice they had gained at hardening themselves to that, they took to raiding, and did it to other people.

Gradually the habit of subjugating others took over–because it’s in the nature of things that once forceful big arrives, then delicate small cannot resist.

Is that true? Perhaps that is the big Tibetan experiment…can they really maintain that compassion in the face of unyielding force? Can delicate small persist, like a tattered flower respringing after the passage of hooves?

I read this dissertation five years ago, and it is still with me.

What does it tell me about my own life?

How can I open and hold a space for delicate small?

Can it be done at all in the presence of so much that is forceful and big?

Can it be done in a world that taught me to deny the wisdom of the little girl I once was?

This entry is not about me. It’s about you too.

Where is your delicate small?

It is of course an interesting thing that a Black man raised by White people got this far–he was free of the awful effects of internalised racism and multi-generational trauma that is still such a wound in the African American community. He grew up with a sense of entitlement that just isn’t there for many Black people. (As a White person I am basing this on conversations with African American and non-American Black friends, as well as on reading the political and social commentary of many Black and African American writers and thinkers.)

I am really hoping that Obama, at the head of the country, will provide a role model and a living proof that you really can go as far as you want, if you have the talent and the sticking power, that will transform the country and raise a whole new generation of Black kids to set their sights high and know they can do it. Up till now, most of the Black men in TVs are actors playing pimps and criminals. Imagine the effect of seeing Obama on the screen every day, day after day, proving that there IS hope, and that the larger world of power and influence IS available to everyone, just like Martin Luther King imagined it would be.

On the other hand, I’m really hoping that Obama doesn’t get shot (aka lynched) by some white supremacists with a very different agenda. Just as Bhutto got killed by Islamic fundamentalists, disgusted by the continued presence of a woman in the democratic process. I was no particular fan of Bhutto, who was as corrupt as she was powerful, but I wanted her to be voted on, not removed from the agenda.

Shelby Steele has written about how Obama cannot win (in the larger sense of the word) since he represents an icon of redemption–a pedestal from which he can only topple when things move from the world of symbol to the world of real politik. But I hope he is wrong, that Obama manages to find some wiggle room. The same wiggle room Tony Blair found–the left loathed him for a centrist cop out, but most of the country breathed a long sigh of relief throughout most of his tenure, after the crushing regime of Thatcher.

By the time anyone reads this, I expect to be celebrating. And then will begin the long haul toward reform. Building a better country takes long work, and we will need (paradoxically) to drop our great shining hope and get our hands in the dirt in order for that hope to materialise.