my tendency is to laugh at my first impressions.
something in my history casts a sinister spell
that even the simplest question disperses.
delightful surprises arise when i go
beyond the first brush of my eyes.
followup questions are the love language
in my dialogue with life.
Two people in a boat. One can row, but cannot navigate. The other can navigate, but cannot row. If we view each as a whole, each has both an asset and a liability—each is both abled and disabled. If we view the relationship as a whole, we can describe things differently.
If participation and cooperation are both given, and both needs and abilities are transparent, we can say, for the sake of argument, that we have a balanced system. Ability and disability are actually complementary parts of a balanced system.
For the system to remain balanced, the requirement is that we do not judge one by the standards of the other. Both are necessary for the system to be balanced. It is only in separating the ability and disability within the system—through creation of a standard that applies to each equally—that disability as a permanent status arises (or ability, as a permanent status, for that matter).
Humans are a social animal, and no human can be said to exist in isolation. The work of survival as a cohesive community is complex. If we view human evolution as a community project, rather than a process of creating ideal and identical individuals, perhaps it’s fairer to say that humans are more like the two people in the boat that opened this narrative than like individuals striving toward undifferentiated perfection.
I believe that as our understanding of neurodiversity deepens, we will begin to see the complementary nature of different sensory, cognitive, behavioral, emotional, somatic, and relational expressions within a community of people engaged in the work of surviving within an ecosystem, and start to recognize the unique socio-ecological niche that each is adapted to.
That being said, humans have created systems that separate us from the ecology we evolved over millions of years to function within—capitalism being the most recent and totalizing form this separation has taken. Any framework, whatever its organizing logic, that substitutes an abstracted, portable standard for embedded relationship will distort our ability to view each type of expression fairly, in context. In the deepest sense, it is these imposed frameworks—not one’s specific neuropsychobiology—that create the permanent state of ability or disability.
Is this an argument that disability does not exist, or should not be accommodated? Absolutely not. Does the human organism itself demand that we recognize the various socio-ecological niches for which each individual may be uniquely adapted? Also no—evolution continues, and each part of any ecosystem is changed by interaction with the others—just as we were once single-celled life forms adapted to an underwater ecosystem that no longer exists, we will adapt to whatever conditions our survivors find themselves within (if there are survivors—evolution is a slow process, and the changes we have made to our ecosystem have arguably outpaced it).
What, then, is the good of understanding or accepting a principle like complementary adaptation, if we are eventually going to change anyway? From a human sociological perspective, it allows us to be both kinder and more accommodating of difference. In recognizing the many ways that variations in human adaptive expression contribute to the well-being of a complex social organism within an ecosystem, we can move people toward societal roles for which they may already be well adapted, rather than forcing them to adapt to environments where their permanent disability status is the only option. It changes the framework for our application of care—to use our earlier analogy, to match rowers with navigators, those who thrive as nurturers with those who thrive with care, across a broad spectrum of socio-ecological niches.
What this requires of us, as those who study human variation, is to recognize the many ways that current conditions game the system for the comfort of some, at the expense of basic human dignity for others, and to recognize the gatekeepers who enforce the conditions we find ourselves in, be they actual humans, economic systems, or simply cognitive frameworks. It would be naive to think that we can simply abandon every framework we’ve inherited outright, but making the shift to recognizing human variation as a relationship affords us a direction for a new field of study—and nudges us toward a kinder, more integrated relationship with our world and with one another.
Education builds bridges to new understanding. (educare: to bring up; to nurture). Indoctrination burns bridges and prevents new ones from being built. (endoctriner: to instruct; to imbue with an idea or opinion). Education makes the world bigger. Indoctrination keeps one sequestered in a silo.
The reason anti-woke folks rail so hard against indoctrination is that they were shaped by indoctrination that was presented as education; and in the absence of actual education, it’s easy to conflate the two, or confuse one for the other. Their impulse to resist indoctrination is sound. The target of their ire is misplaced.
The people who built these systems often believed in them completely—which is exactly what makes indoctrination so effective. You don’t need cynics at the top. You need true believers who’ve never crossed the bridge themselves.
That’s how the confusion between indoctrination and education perpetuates itself—not through deception, but through unexamined inheritance.
‘woke’ just means ‘educated, and ready to cross the bridge when it presents itself.’
‘anti-woke’ just means ‘bridges are dangerous: it’s only safe in the silo.’
Good for you, for recognizing the importance of education, and the power of indoctrination to limit education’s reach. If you’re sitting with the anxiety of a world widened beyond the scale of what you were prescribed, just reach out. Folks are here for you—just over the bridge.
to be woke is to have a visceral sense of justice, as reliable as the senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and cognition—that allows one to recognize that the current language of justice is inadequate, as justice is not applied equitably across all who would access it; and to participate in creating language that leads to equitable application.
to be a woke ally is to recognize that one lacks the visceral sense of justice; to believe those who experience it; and to use the other senses to fill the gap, trusting that the language will mature if allowed to do so—to be blind, but willing to coexist with the sighted.
to be anti-woke is to deny the existence of the visceral experience of justice; to belittle those who would enrich its language—to be blind, to deny the existence of sight, in the most literal sense, and to refuse to coexist with the sighted.
only a person who has had the sense of justice bred out of them can own humans or force them through contract into unpaid labor; deny them equal access to the right to vote; justify and continue to fund genocide; or accumulate wealth while others starve.
knowing that the path of the ally is available, one follows it to redemption.
never suspecting that justice is lived experience, the whole world becomes one’s adversary.
as a practicing buddhist, “leave no trace” is a guiding principle embedded into every teaching: leave no physical trace of your passage through the busy world, and leave no stinky teaching behind that muddies the waters of the dharma.
how do we practice this, living as we do with the legacy of colonialism, cultural appropriation, and industrial capitalism? do i join a monastery that maintains a culture derived from practices developed thousands of miles away within a separate but equally asymmetrical power structure as medieval Japan?
maybe—but what other options are there?
considering that i was born and raised in California, what models for living are available for living a leave-no-trace lifestyle in this place?
Let’s consider a moment like this.
dōgen, the go-to teacher in my particular subsect of zen buddhism, the Sōto school, was sharing his wisdom from a temple in a remote area of Echizen province in Japan in the 13th century. consider what was happening in California at that time.
California was arguably one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions in the world. people had lived here for millennia, and by 1500CE (3 centuries after Dōgen’s birth), there were somewhere around 80 distinct languages and cultural groups living in this place: in the coastal region; in the great valley between the coastal ranges and the Sierra Nevada; in myriad river valleys, watersheds, grasslands, and oak groves.
Consider this: upon arrival, on ships and overland, European colonists encountered a land that they believed to be pristine and uninhabited.
Let that sink in.
One of the most culturally diverse regions on Earth.
For anyone paying mindful attention (as we are entreated to do), this would seem to provide a textbook example of “leave-no-trace.” Look around. Where are the crumbling monuments and scorched places that a region with 80 distinct cultures would be expected to contain?
If you have the capacity to think about this for even a moment, it is likely to be almost unimaginable.
that being said, it would be inaccurate and unfair to say that the people who inhabited this place left no trace—on the contrary, the traces are there, if one knows where to look.
Let’s consider the traces left behind, in California, by the 80 or so distinct cultures that inhabited this place for millennia, before the ships came.
They left behind fire-shaped oak woodlands, park-like oak savannas with open understories, that early European observers admired and assumed were natural. They were natural, but they were also made—through precise, seasonally timed cultural burning that suppressed encroaching conifers, stimulated acorn production, and maintained the grassland-woodland mosaic that supported enormous biodiversity.
They left behind a superabundance of large game. The astonishing density of elk, deer, and pronghorn reported by early contact-era observers was not an accident of wilderness conditions—it was the managed outcome of burn regimens, selective harvest, and spiritual protocols around killing that functioned as de facto conservation law.
They left behind salmon run integrity—weir systems, harvest techniques, and first-catch ceremonies functioned together as a distributed watershed management system. The ceremonies were societal self-regulation—embedding catch limits and seasonal closures as cultural touchstones.
We knock on doors to ask for candy. They practiced similar rituals to ensure next season’s catch.
they left behind camas and brodaea meadows. These extensive bulb plantings, which fed both humans and animals across enormous areas, were cultivated through selective harvest, replanting, and burning. Europeans saw them as wildflower meadows—they were cultivated gardens in disguise.
Leave no trace, indeed.
They left behind tarweed and clover patches, in distinct patterns. Intentional burning created a patchwork of early-succession forb communities across hillsides—maximizing seed yield while simultaneously creating the habitat that makes species diversity possible. The quilt pattern that Europeans noticed in the landscape was an agricultural design, cultivated by people with intention and systems wisdom.
They left behind a near-universal network of dense, structurally complex riparian zones—willows, alders, sedges. These corridors were the circulatory system of the landscape, and they were kept open and healthy by people who understood the value of stewardship and systems thinking to their lifeways.
They left behind shell midden topography: shellmounds are found along the Bay, the coast, the rivers. They are features of the landscape now, that support unique alkaline plant communities. These indigenous communities had their landfills, but what they leave behind is kind of an accidental monument to valuable plant species that grow nowhere else.
They left behind stands of elderberry and hazel. Both were actively managed—elderberry for food and medicine, hazel for basket-making. Their distribution across the landscape reflects human intention. Where you find dense hazel stands, you are standing in someone’s workshop—again, disguised as natural selection.
They also left behind absence: absence of erosion signatures in pre-contact sediment cores. Paleoecological cores from California lakes and estuaries show remarkably stable sediment profiles through the pre-contact period—low erosion, stable watersheds, consistent organic input. In contrast, the colonial period shows up as an abrupt, catastrophic sediment disruption. These 80 cultures left behind measurable stability in the geological record. The entrance of Europeans is literally visible at the sedimentary level.
They left behind black, carbon-rich soils in valley and foothill community sites—soils darkened and enriched by millennia of habitation, burning, composting, and refuse incorporation. These patches grow differently than surrounding soils. Farmers and gardeners notice them. They are slowly-accumulated signatures of long residence—in the best way: they continue to support biodiversity and utility to the stewards who tend them.
Landscape. Systems. People. Intention. All working together for millennia. 80 distinct cultures.
Europeans arrive and see nothing but a natural landscape.
I’m saying this over and over again because it’s so easy to gloss over if you don’t make the effort to consider the alternative.
What is the alternative?
Let’s consider the legacy left behind by the people on ships (and overland) who saw a pristine place and sought to save the inhabitants from their sins.
If we consider the legacy of a supposedly civilized people;
and if we consider that what was left behind was left behind by a diversity of peoples whose numbers were diminished by 95% within 150 years of contact with the (supposed) savior peoples whose numbers arrived on ships (and overland);
what would be the legacy of the people who intervened in the millennia-long experiment of California’s indigenous peoples?
Let’s consider the legacy of an intervening people, if their numbers were suddenly diminished by 95%. Let’s consider (if we consider the intervening people to be more civilized) what we would expect to have found:
(I hope fellow buddhists are practicing mindfulness here)
Where are the prisons? The structures whose purpose is the forcible removal of human beings from the social body, if we assume that such removal is a necessary function of civilization? No pre-contact California culture is known to have required one. This begs the question: what kind of society needs this many cages?
Where are the parking lots? Surely an ecosystem that supports 80 different cultures must require an impermeable surface with zero ecological function, and a thermal mass that raises ambient temperature, that exceeds the footprint of habitable buildings, to carry out its work of saving a population from their sins. Surely they would have needed a warehouse for their means of travel.
Where are the landfills? We found shellmounds that became soil, ecology, and monument in one. What about their accumulated poisons, leachates, methane—sealed from the biological processes that would otherwise transform them?
Where are the strip malls—the commercial vernacular of a healthy market economy—built for a lifespan of 30 years, and already obsolescing before completion? We don’t see the parking lots (larger than the buildings themselves), but surely we would see some signs of commerce.
Where are the stadiums—the enormous structures used for roughly 20 days per year, built with public money, named for corporations, demolished when the team demands a newer one? The Romans had their amphitheater, that was apparently well-used—where did these people display their spectacle?
Where are the hospitals? is it possible that these people did not allow their baseline conditions—diet, air, water, social cohesion, meaningful work—to degrade so severely that industrial-scale intervention became necessary to sustain normal human function? Did they not live in such a way that made such monuments to care necessary?
Where are the highways? Roman roads are still visible from satellites. American interstates will be legible to geologists a millennium from now. Impermeable, like parking lots, severing watersheds, fragmenting habitat, producing runoff laced with tire particulate that is now measurable in the tissues of Pacific salmon. Surely civilized people would have needed a structure to move vehicles between parking lots, no?
Where are the golf courses? Doesn’t a civilized culture need a chemically maintained monoculture on land that could support hundreds of species, with water consumption needs on an agricultural scale—poisoned earth, to support a certain shade of turf, for the leisure of a few?
Where is the advertising infrastructure: billboards, signage, the entire visual apparatus of commercial persuasion permanently installed in the landscape? How would people have known what products to purchase to maintain legibility as citizens and support the corporate infrastructure?
Where are the Superfund sites? Certainly, a section of the continent that was home to 80 distinct cultures would have needed places where industrial processes so thoroughly poisoned land, water, and soil that the collective body would have designated them national sacrifice zones requiring generations of remediation—if remediation is even possible.
Shellmounds? Were these people even human?
Let’s pause, and reflect.
Eighty distinct cultures. Eighty different languages. Eighty different cosmologies, kinship structures, ceremonial calendars, ways of knowing. Not one people with one answer—eighty peoples with eighty answers, none of which required a prison, a landfill, or a Superfund site.
This is the part that is almost impossible to hold in the mind.
Dōgen’s monastery is a monoculture: an island of shared language and isolated cultural identity. The colonial project is a monoculture: a multivalent operation of power, subjugation, and extraction at industrial scale. Both operating from the assumption that there is one correct way, transmissible as doctrine, applicable universally, independent of place.
The eighty cultures of California suggest something the monastery and the colonial project both missed: that diversity of approach, held within shared relationship to place, is itself the technology of leave-no-trace. Not one answer refined to perfection—many answers, in conversation with one another and with the land. The oak savanna is not a monoculture. Its stability is a product of the diversity of its understory.
California today is one of the most diverse places on earth—again, still, differently. The question the land is asking has not changed.
What is meant by leave-no-trace? What traces have we been asked to reflect on?
From where we are, in this present moment,
what would buddha do?
Where would dōgen go to dispense his kitchen wisdom?
Does one attempt to move a civilization whose legacy is prisons and superfund sites toward a gentler stewardship?
What of the legacy of 80 cultures, across millennia, who left behind healthy fisheries, and pastoral oak groves that supported a diverse ecology?
What is a buddhist, who devotes themselves to leaving no trace, to do?
Practice, like your head is on fire.
Let’s take a moment to say something out loud:
there’s a lot of terrible writing in the world;
and a lot of terrible writing is one of the reasons
many of our kids are not excited
to sit and squint and parse, under fluorescent
lighting, at desks that wreck their bodies, in rows
of kids, not allowed to wiggle or whisper
or pat a beat to read along to. Somewhere,
someone decided that rhythm and rhyme were not
important enough to take the time to craft.
Here’s what that someone wasn’t paying attention to:
Rhythm and rhyme unlock the neurotransmitters;
Dyspraxics, aphants, dysgrahics, and dyslexics
are often able to entrain to a rhythm, or find
a rhyme, if they know that one is coming:
(you’ve hopefully had that experience, haven’t you?, when
the person reading leaves out the last
word of the poem, and the word pops in your mind?)
(If you haven’t, you should try it with a friend).
When you recognize that the Odyssey and the Iliad
were part of an oral tradition, encoded in rhythms
and rhymes, and familiar phrases, that invited
memory to do the work of storytelling,
passed from tongue to tongue for about as long
as Europeans have occupied the Americas–
you might start to wonder which skills we should be
focusing on, when passing information
along to our kids, that we hope will be memorable.
You can do the human math–(I’ve done it,
and with confidence can say what I’m going
to say)–I guarantee you: many, if not most
of the poets and writers of ages past were people
who would have, today, been branded as neurodivergent;
for whom encoding a human event in a rhythm
was just the way they knew their brain would remember it;
and in doing so, made the event accessible
to shared, collective memory. ’cause if you listen,
you’ll hear the way these bite-sized pieces flow;
the calming force of human expectation,
and satisfaction of expectation, over,
and over, and over, and over, and over again,
like a crocheted blanket, wrapped around your shoulders,
that your grandmother made in a ridiculously short amount
of time. (who has time for that, these days?)
If action turns the world within,
Then who knows where the world begins?
If sitting still should make one smart,
Then who can make a piece of art?
when breadth and height themselves are clear,
what then, when depth and time appear?
when space and time the self erode,
where, then, is found a safe abode?
bereft of home, can being be?
can being, without a center, see?
and seeing implies a pair of eyes:
what of the nose, and ears, and thighs?
and shapes that intersections bring
to bear upon this living thing –
if thingness is perceived at all.
what one, within the large, is small?
the faces in the clouds seem real;
a moment later: smell-hear-feel.
tasting something true, one finds
the thought that what is wound unwinds.
movement, stillness, presence, time:
what’s the nature of a rhyme?
people who shoot up places where people gather are people who think they know how the world works and have learned how to live alone.
no one should ever be alone.
