A March 16, 2010, posting to the Eugene Permaculture Guild Listserv.
	12.15 a.m. Tuesday, March 16, 2010. In December of 2001 I found myself asked to handhold Ayeshah, a five-year-old girl, through the death of her mother, Kit. The glorious, sunsplashed December morning Kit died, I drove up to the Eugene Waldorf School along with Ayeshah's grandmother to tell Ayeshah of her mother's death and to bring her home to view her mother's body. On the way back, we stopped the car, and I walked with Ayeshah, a child I had come to love dearly, her whole body racked with sobs, in my arms. That slow stroll marked one of the most tragic, moving and exquisitely beautiful moments of my life. Kit was a Moslem and the period of caring for her, her child, and her mother, had carried me deeply into the warm heart of Eugene's Moselm community in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. As local Moslems gathered round Kit and her family to help out, I was witness to the terrifying on-the-ground legacy of anti-Moslem prejudice, endemic to these shores, which flared into a full-blown blaze that fateful fall and winter of 2001. Such xenophobia continues, of course, to color so much of our nation's psychology. But I never bought it. Raised in a Moslem country as I was, and profoundly touched in so many ways by an Arab-Islamic aesthetic since then, I perceive Islam and Moslems through very different eyes. Our country's response to 9-11 marked a final tipping point of sorts for me. I'd been brooding on the topic of paperwork for a long time and, earlier in 2001, I'd stumbled across the work of the Quaker philosopher, Jim Corbett, which resonated deeply with me. One day, he prophetically observed, we will look upon borders the way we now regard slavery. Raised and remaining a committed internationalist, I have long experience of nation states, their raison d'etre and those who police them. But by December of 2001, I sensed I had finally reached the point where I could myself no longer condone this preposterous, global aberrance - the "barbed wire idiocy of borders" as my favorite contemporary Jewish philosopher, George Steiner, sagely describes it. He continues: "Nationalism is the venom of history. Nothing is more bestially absurd than the readiness of human beings to incinerate or slaughter one another in the name of nationhood and under the infantile spell of a flag. Citizenship is a bilateral arrangement that is, that ought always to be subject to critical examination and, if need be, abrogation. No city of man is worth a major injustice, a major falsehood. The death of Socrates outweighs the survival of Athens...Long before Forster, Dr. Johnson had defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel. It seems to me doubtful whether the human animal will manage to survive if it does not learn to do without frontiers and passports, if it cannot grasp that we are all guests of each other, as we are of this scarred and poisoned earth." Or, as our homegrown, fundamentally Christian, farmer-poet Wendell Berry paints it: "Denounce the government and embrace the flag." I knew, of course, that my decision the winter of Kit's death to no longer march to the drumbeat of immigration authorities on any continent would involve embracing a chain of still-unfolding consequences, legal, personal and otherwise. This past September, after almost two and a half decades pottering around America's roads, my Oregon driver's license expired and was revoked: because I no longer have the bureaucratic fiat to support it. And today is my father's funeral. He is to be buried this morning in an ancient churchyard, in a small village, deep in the English countryside. I remain in Springfield, my chosen, treasured homeland. I haven't seen my father since I arrived in Oregon 13 years ago, although we spoke every Sunday, religiously, until late. Here is the eulogy I penned this past Sunday, in the calm following Saturday's Propagation Fair, to be read aloud at his memorial service, this afternoon: -- I was aware my father was dying. A few months ago, his energy and ability to concentrate during our weekly phone conversations began to fade quickly in a clear downward trend - which picked up markedly in the few weeks immediately preceding his admittance to hospital and his death shortly thereafter. I am sure that something within my father sensed the finality of this trend, too: in one of our last long conversations from North Farm House, he gathered himself for a simply remarkable entreaty to me over the phone. Most of you will be aware that my father was, so very often, a difficult man. A few of you will also be aware that no son's character and style could perhaps have been more difficult for him to embrace than mine. I wrote to him, fondly, a little while ago acknowledging that in this regard, we perhaps deserved one another! Many people have remarked on how strikingly, fundamentally, shockingly dissimilar the two of us were. And yet, some of you may know that despite the immense challenge of our relationship through the decades, my father always remained faithful to me and indeed continued to support me as he was able, until his death. I never saw my father as fully, perhaps, as I did in that last, long telephone conversation between us in which he made a final, magnificent effort to persuade me to surrender the highly eccentric trajectory of my life for a more orthodox course - a job, health insurance, a passport, an income to speak of, and so forth. What astonished me mightily about this particular attempt of his was not so much the request for me to reconsider my path - Dad earnestly made many of those requests through the years. Nor, at the time, was I moved by the quality of care so very palpable in his petition. Rather, somewhat oddly, I must confess, what struck me most was the piercing intelligence, emotional fluency and penetrating maturity distinguishing his delivery. Where I had through the years so often found my father's style of communicating with me and others to be painfully blunt, explosive, heavy-handed, on this occasion I found my father's calm, measured refrain nothing less than exquisitely beautiful. A model of understated eloquence, there was a lyricism to his words which clearly issued from a profound and deeply soulful place. Now these are categorically not terms I typically use to describe my father's conversational style, but I can assure you the depth, refinement, and remarkable subtlety of my father's last attempt to sway me were palpably real. At the time it was, I must admit, not a little unnerving to be on the receiving end of this shockingly lucid, powerfully gentle plea - in the face of my perennial refusal to turn from my course. I feel blessed now, to be able to recognize the passionate complexity and intensity of my father's heroic effort for what it so very clearly was, above all - an astounding testament to his profound care and respect for me and a consuming desire to wish only the best for his son. And, of course, in drawing from his deepest reserve, Dad offered me the very rarest of windows into the majesty of his soul. I have enjoyed the immense grace in very recent years of a rapprochement with my father, one born, I sense, of his and my long, steady, dutiful efforts to reach out for one another through what we came to acknowledge as an incredibly awkward clash of personalities and styles which hamstrung our engagement for decades. With hindsight, I see that my father remained always loyal to me, even as for so many years our estrangement caused him great suffering, and even as he never came to understand his son, to his death. But ultimately, I sense my father long ago accepted that understanding me wasn't really necessary. Instead, what I came to witness and feel in him was not his frustration at what I was not, but his great love for me as I am; and mine for him as I found him, and which slowly, steadily transcended the strong dislike we had carried for each other for so many years. This profound affection shared is how I recall my relationship with my father now. Yes, we almost always struggled to get a conversation rolling; yes, there were times when the vast differences between us scuppered our best efforts to find a conversational thread, but we both came to acknowledge this challenge between us for what it was, to allow for it, and to endeavor to press on together regardless. Together we both palpably relished the joy we shared in saying glorious farewells after managing an hour on the phone in one another's company; and when the conversational fire didn't take, we were both poignantly aware of a loss shared, of mourning together. The thought of the courageous acceptance with which my father met his last week, released from dialysis, knowing he was dying, brings me to tears now, as I write this note from the middle of a muddy field under a blustery spring sky the other side of the world to Pulham. I have long spoken to my friends of my father's courage. Even as our love grew, it has been many years since he last asked me to return to England: and he never complained to me of the slow, steady declines in his health through recent years, the constant humblings, the fears, the fierce indignities of a being a mountain of man reduced to an invalid, and of the soreness of our separation. I am immensely proud of this man who was so often and for so long a hardship to me and to others and yet who held without fail to the loyalty of his fatherhood and who knew, in the end, his difficult duty transfigured into the blessing of a son's great love and affection. I know my father suffered his flaws keenly, but I also know that in the end, his essence appeared to transcend his lifelong struggles in the gentlest and most accepting of deaths. I never imagined that my father's final legacy to those closest to him would be his kindness, but it is most certainly my abiding memory of him now. Would that I can live up to such a legacy, too. Thank you. -- n
	April 19, 2010 n