Last year I calculated the cost of the jars of cherry jam I had just made. This after long hours spent harvesting the cherries from a friend’s tree, buying the jars, making the jam. I came to the conclusion that the cost of one jar of jam was about $249, based on labor alone, at the approximate hourly rate of my old job. The cost did not include anything related to the tree, the land, the irrigation, the cherries themselves, the sugar, the jars, the pots and pans, the stove, the construction and maintenance of the kitchen. How, I asked myself, even allowing for the many statistical errors in my tired train of thought, could this thing sell for $2.79 at my old neighborhood market?! Suddenly I understood that the purchasing power of my labor bore no relation to sustainability but was astoundingly inflated.

I had based my calculation solely on my own labor because that is what I spent my life trading, my skilled labor as a professor, psychologist, author, and lecturer, for money to buy stuff. I bought houses, cars, experiences like travel, backpacking, kayaking. I bought bikes, kayaks, backpacks, clothes, dishes, appliances, insurance policies, health and beauty aids, gifts, and lots of things intended to calm and soothe and comfort. My life was an endless round of long hard hours of work traded for relief from those long hard hours of work.

Dawn Breaks Over the Bones

There is a wild grief
in me and a sorrow that I
was part of something horrible
that I didn’t see, while I tinkered
hard with the given machinery.

I was focused, looking intently
the other way while it
happened, the decimation,
and the filth stacked up
behind my back, while
sugar plum fairies danced
inside my eyes—and
I sucked their exquisite little
toes in my long opium dream.

It was a February dawn in South Africa in 2008, and I was about to fulfill a dream to ride on an elephant through the African dawn. After a thorough orientation to the elephants here at Camp Jabulani, the time came to ride them out into the bush veldt. I climbed up a platform ramp, received instruction on using the stirrup and keeping my weight balanced, I swung a leg over Jabulani’s broad back. Isaac Mathole, one of the men who had accompanied the elephants from Zimbabwe, was already on Jabulani when I landed. I was startled by how rudely I landed, but Jabulani didn’t flinch and Isaac just laughed. Paul adjusted my stirrups, and then Jabulani walked off with me bouncing along on his back, absolutely gobsmacked (me, that is!).

Isaac and I chatted over his shoulder. He told me that he loved his life of working with the elephants, and asked me if we have any wild animals in California, where I’m from. Sure, of course, I said, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, rattlesnakes.

The waters of San Ignacio lagoon were calm and we were calm when we returned to them after our lunch on a sunny deserted island to head back to camp. But our well-fed somnambulance was soon disturbed. “A whale! 3 o’clock, 3 o’clock,” someone cried, as for the first time a gigantic adult swam up alongside us about ten feet from the boat, her blow holes and mottled skin visible. It had taken me a while to learn the visuals of gray whale anatomy, partly because they do not have fins on their backs, but a series of knuckles, visible vertebrae which, in addition to blow holes, tell you which side is up. Their nostrils sit undaintily on the tops of their heads, ridged exposures that allow you to navigate visually forward and down to the huge jaws that open into baleen lined mouths, the baleen shorter and more bristly than I expected, looking and feeling like a cross between teeth and several layers of old tattered shower curtain.

Jason is the name I gave to a young raven whom I presumed to be male, based upon the crowd of bachelor buddies he hung out with, and Jason was the king of the water bowl under the pine tree in my front garden.

I had often watched Jason take flight from a branch in his pine tree, moving his wings to gain elevation until he became that wide V shape that is the hieroglyph for a soaring bird, way up in the distant thin sky. Like all ravens, he was able to powerfully perform the mechanical kind of flight that uses the pumping of his own muscles and blood; but, like eagles and hawks, he was also able to catch drafts and to soar. I’d seen him catch a draft and ride it, sometimes tumbling upside down mid-flight, or drop spiraling down and then pulling up in an impossible lift.