I wish I was a more peaceful person but frequently I make war on myself. Acceptance of this fact helps me understand how hard it is to create peace. Over the years I have learned that my passion and my anger can be forces for change but they must remain part of who I am. Everything that I contain is useful and not something to throw away, eradicate from my nature. I find how we label these various aspects of ourselves influences how we see people narrowly, determines the scope of our ability to embrace difference. The richness of spirit we need in life and diversity that creates life can only thrive through the care we take in holding this larger framework for others and ourselves.

While working to protect or be of some service to the wild it is often an easy situation to find conflict and feel at odds because of how someone treats the natural world with either poor methods we don't support or no consideration of any kind. We are also in a world that regards profit as the main meaning for accomplishing just about anything and this distorts seeing anything for what it truly is, pushes us into the realm of what we can make off of it whether it be entertainment or adventure. I find it helpful when I can deal with these situations with clarity, kindness, and the strength that comes from those qualities rather than the use of power or force but this does not mean I give up my insistence or my edge. I need all my raw material to build a strong plan for change.

When I organized the two days at the Gila Farm to help with the Johnson Grass removal I did it for a few reasons: to help Joe and Peter with the overall project, to make a place for the cranes, to have us gather together at the Farm where there has been so much history that has not always been easy, to help support the decision to not use a pesticide on the land, to have fun and feel how this Farm is part of my home in the valley. What I care about the most and why I did the "pull and dig days" is because I feel we need to keep working together to wrestle with how we hold dissent, take action and continue to influence one another as a community. I feel we hold some good conversations "out in the field." The effort, the purpose and time just digging in the dirt was satisfying just as a community act.

Arundhati Roy describes a walk in her book to protest the building of a dam in India. During this walk all of India seems to be represented; farmers, fisher folk, sand quarriers, writers, painters, filmmakers, journalists, lawyers, urban, rural, touchable, untouchable. She writes that this alliance is what gives the movement its raw power. She goes on to say, "As we crossed fields and forded streams, I remember thinking: this is my land, this is the dream to which the whole of me belongs, this is worth more to me than anything else in the world. We are not just fighting against a dam. We were fighting for a philosophy, for a world view."

I would like to think that each time we gather successfully or not that we work with this world view, and in that attempt we not only return something to the cranes, or the river but ourselves as a community.

Arundhati Roy asks for a new politics; one of resistance and forcing accountability and not of governance and for the politics of slowing things down and joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction. There is a line in one of her essays I like very much, "In the present circumstances, I'd say that the only thing worth globalizing is dissent. It's India's best export."

I think the hardest thing to do when you are in pain is to give into what is being prescribed and forget to ask questions. Yet it is vital that we ask if this is the best way to heal the body or in the case of the Farm, to care for a field of land. Our whole world requires the same kind of questioning because certainly what is being prescribed has more to do with profit and convenience than with healing. It is difficult to live with good questions nowadays and not rush to opinion, belief, and eventually habit.

Every time I write in my journal about the sound of the cranes moving across the valley or find a visceral place in me that knows they must survive as a species, I am reminded that the caring is from an experience that brings me towards an internal action that is about the preservation of what is beautiful, and itself.

I understood from Ms. Roy's essays that the position that is allotted to us matters very little whether it is writer or activist. Often a writer can be seen as vague and effete and the activist can occupy the coarser cruder end of the intellectual spectrum, "the position taker" lacks complexity or intellectual sophistication. Often she has to deal with being called a writer-activist when she simply is doing her work at what she does best, and what she feels is "one is not involved by virtue of being a writer or activist. One is involved because one is a human being."

I like the gathering at the Farm in the early morning and share a bit of food and tea while finding those rhizomes, slowing things down so that the river and the cranes have a healthy place in the valley so that we are talking together.

"Power Politics" is a moving book that gives the writer's voice grit and grace and reminds us of the strength of art as a force for change. She demonstrates that the media can link, bridge and make distinctions that can change a worldview, and that it is the responsibility of the media to do more than sell an idea to the public or become good news. She also reminds me once again of the gift of difference and finding common ground together.