Travelogue — The Little Gardens on the Island of the Gods

The tourist meta-gaze, we tourists gaze at the tourists gazing at themselves. Seaside Tanah Lot temple stands behind us not giving a damn.

By my second day in Bali, my travel partner Patrici and I have determined there are three kinds of Bali tourists: Australians on holiday, lovers on honeymoon, and single women seeking enlightenment à la Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love infamy. Patrici and I are none of these, so we quickly begin to ask ourselves what we are doing in this place.

She and I stroll through the heavily touristed cities of Kuta, a beach town famous for its warm and friendly surf, and Ubud, the cultural capital of the island. We aren’t sure what we are looking for. Before now, I never expected in my life to visit this little island in Indonesia. The trip was a last-minute appendix to my Philippines journey. Patrici said “Meet me in Bali,” and I, compelled by a nomadic wind, answered “Yes.”

Travelogue — Manila, the Other Philippines

Dear friends,

Manila is a city that has been thriving since before even the Spanish arrived in the Philippine archipelago. In the sixteenth century it was the Kingdom of Maynila, ruled by the Muslim Sultanate of Brunei. Since the Spanish the city has passed through the hands of the Japanese, the Americans, and finally the people of the Republic of the Philippines. It is perhaps due to this centuries-long hodge-podge of occupations that Manila is the confused city it is today.

The metro Manila region is where the gasoline meets the groundwater, where the superpoor are hidden by supermalls, and where the shrines of national heroes are overshadowed by high-rise condos. Worlds that seem polar opposites exist right on top of one another. The inescapable poverty and pollution compete with the city Manila is trying to become — welcome to jet-setters and the economic elite of the world.

The Manila skyline, replete with condos and oil drums.

Travelogue — Pagkaon!

In Bisaya that means both “food” and “Let’s eat!” In the last few weeks I’ve been through as much of this country as I could muster. Yet through the chaos of festivals and family, one thing seems to occupy every bit of molecular space here: food.

The typical spread.

Travelogue – Ati-Atihan, A Festival in My Veins

Hi friends,

I apologize it’s taken so long for me to write. I have been swept up by this place. It has kept me in a deep long embrace for want of time lost between us.

I am in Kalibo, Aklan, Philippines — the city in which I was born. This isn’t the densely concrete and pollution-ridden Manila. Kalibo is the capitol of the province flanked by a river spilling out into the Visayan seas, ricefields, and mountains draped in verdure on all sides. Here you find Jollibees and small department stores across the street of the old public market, where vendors butcher meat in the open air and you can select from piles of dried fish of all varieties.

Tricycle is the main mode of transportation to any part of the town — a motorcycle with a carriage attached to the side that seats up to eight people, if one hops on the seat behind the bike driver. The sound of diesel motors fills the streets all hours of the day.

Travelogue — Beginning Where Everything Began, a Prologue

Dear friends,

As I ploughed the soil of Veggielution farm of San Jose in the last few months, a vision echoed through me of my grandfather. My father’s father was a trader with the Panay bukidnon, the indigenous mountain people of Panay Island in the Philippines.

Once I asked my dad what grandpa did for a living. He told me that my Lolo Adoy would travel days up into the mountains, spend sometimes months there, and then come back down with vegetables and wild game traded with the indigenous people for town goods. He may even have been given a small plot of land to tend for his own crops in the mountain.

This fact I add to the growing pile of mysteries that I have to solve around a man I only knew in his later years. A man who spoke sparingly, prayed frequently, and enjoyed McDonald’s like it was the best thing he got out of America.

After The One-Straw Revolution

There are days when I am working on the farm or in my yard and I just stop. I stare at the soil, the plants, the work. I look up, and take a deep breath. It’s a stance anyone who farms or gardens has taken over and over.

“To be here, caring for a small field, in full possession of the freedom and plentitude of each day, every day– this must have been the original way of agriculture,” wrote Masanobu Fukuoka.

There is a time to resist. And it is now.

It is 11:00 pm and I am sitting at home chatting with my friend about the collapse of the global industrial system.

I just finished watching a livestream of young activists Ellen Choy, Josh Healey, Christsna Sots — recipients of the Mario Savio young activist award — and economist Robert Reich, speaking to over 2000 students, workers, faculty, and community members on Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley.

Feeding the movement body and soul — The Oakland General Strike of 2011

Families, neighbors, and friends take to the streets of Oakland on November 2 to the call of "We are the 99 percent."

Just and healthy food has always been a prerequisite to building an empowered people. One of the Black Panther Party’s original initiatives was the Free Breakfast for Children Program, one of several that operated under the slogan “Survival pending revolution.” These programs sought to heal and strengthen the people and the movement. The panthers knew that when we eat well, we are able to build a world rooted in health and justice, rooted in the sustaining power of the earth.

So on November 2, when I attended the Oakland General Strike, I was not surprised to see the slogans and movement of food justice literally feeding the activity of the day.

Prayer for my friends in Oakland

A man sits cross-legged in front of a line of police forces in downtown Oakland this Tuesday. Photo by Kim White for Reuters.

It has never been beyond the forces of the government to declare war against its own people.

To my friends in the City of Oakland, take heart even in light of the apparently brutal events of these nights. For if a city needs to bring out an army to put down non-violent protest then it seems that peaceful community is indeed a  threat to certain well-invested interests. The community that is building now resonates with so many of us in this forsaken country.

Even if I do not stand against smoke screens and rubber bullets, I stand in solidarity with you. I am occupying my space. In rural America. In the suburbs. In the altars of my own home. I occupy.

What is happening in Oakland is happening in Atlanta. It is happening in San Jose. It is Chiapas. It is Palestine. The reality is that the vested fear the strength of peace. There was nothing you did but say you shall not be moved. The city and its armed forces chose the point and time of violence.

So let any act against you by five hundred police forces or more, any grenade, any bullet, be met with the wideness of your compassion.

Let all their spears and arrows obliterate into flower petals at your touch.

Wherefore the urban farm? — Land-based organizing in urban America

Mark Medeiros, Farm Manager at Veggielution Farm, tells volunteers to take home whatever they need from the remaining harvest of the workday.

Agriculture is the backbone of a people. A people’s ability to do work and live as a healthy society rests upon its ability to feed itself sustainably. Agriculture is also the most widespread direct interface a people will make with the land. The way people grow food reveals their ability to care for the environment.

In the United States, the American people’s relationship to agriculture has changed dramatically over history. The family farm was the means by which the majority of Americans made their livelihood sixty years ago. Today only 2.2% of Americans make a living by farming. Most of us have never seen a farm let alone know where the food we pick off the grocery shelf was made and how it was brought to us.

Yet it is in this same moment that people all over the country are coming back to agriculture. Most particularly in urban areas, where we have grown disenfranchised from a healthy relationship with our environment, we are returning to the land as a place of community.