25 Principles of Adult Behavior and The Art of Being Alive

The more famous songwriting pair in the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, offer a lot of life lessons in the songs they wrote. Their songs are easier for me to play on the mandolin and if we still exist their simple beauty will inspire beings 500 years from now. 

But I've always been a huge fan of the "other" songwriting pair in the Dead, Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow. 

The two pieces I share below, one by Barlow and one by Weir, illustrate some very important fundamentals about being alive in this day and age, and sum up a lot of my own life philosophy. 

Barlow wrote songs with Bob Weir, but he was also a Wyoming rancher and a founder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and you could call him one of the early Internet pioneers. May he rest in peace. I'm looking forward to reading his memoirs Mother American Night.

It is now my goal to be the Bob Weir of mandolin. His songs are very tricky rhythmically and I don't have any under my belt. Besides being the most unique rhythm guitarist that ever lived, the McCoy Tyner to Jerry's Coltrane,  Bobby Weir's letter to a timber baron below is a another reason for why he is near the top of my pantheon of heroes. Not just because I share with Weir a deep love of forests, but his letter perfectly describes the art of being alive and Life itself. It is a defense of life. It appears in this day and age that our politicians and the robber barons of our gilded age are completely incapable of experiencing beauty and love--they appear to be robbed of a soul or life itself. They may have all of the money in the world, but they don't appear capable of even knowing what beauty, art or love are, and for that I truly feel sorry for them. 

John Perry Barlow's 25 Principles of Adult Behavior:

1. Be patient. No matter what.
2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.
3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
4. Expand your sense of the possible.
5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
7. Tolerate ambiguity.
8. Laugh at yourself frequently.
9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.
11. Give up blood sports.
12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously.
13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)
14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.
15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.
17. Praise at least as often as you disparage.
18. Admit your errors freely and soon.
19. Become less suspicious of joy.
20. Understand humility.
21. Remember that love forgives everything.
22. Foster dignity.
23. Live memorably.
24. Love yourself.
25. Endure.

Below is Bob Weir's 1996 letter to Charles Hurwitz, CEO of Maxxam Corp., then part owner of the Headwaters Forest, at the time the largest stand of unprotected ancient redwoods on Earth. Eventually, 7,472 acres of it became the Headwaters Forest Preserve. 

"Dear Mr. Hurwitz:

Maybe 30 years ago, I was on one of my first band tours. We were in the Pacific Northwest, between somewhere in Washington and some other where in Oregon. The road took us to the lip on a ridge, from where we could see around us for many miles in all directions. To the west, we could see a weather front moving high clouds in from the Pacific. To the north and south, where the front came parallel with us, we could see a mist rising up from the forested foothills all around us, and when this mist joined with and seeded the clouds passing overhead it turned to rain and snow, which then fell on the mountains to our east. Scientists call this regular phenomenon evapo-transpiration. I wish you could have seen it.

It was breathtaking to behold, but as we watched, we had a firm realization that we were witnessing something even more beautiful than our eyes could ever take in. We saw how the rain falls to Earth, where it mixes with sun, soil and air; and there rises the grandest of all life forms - the forest, awesome in its size and complexity. the forest, in turn, holds the moisture until the next storm front comes through, when again the mist will rise, the clouds will seed, and rain will fall. Life causes life. Heaven and Earth dance in this way endlessly, and their child is the forest.

And so there we were, epiphanously watching that grandest and most glorious dance of life - of which we are just a tiny part - awed by a magnificence without beginning, without end...

Until a couple of years later, when we were making the same trip, and we came to the same place, but the forest was gone; now the land lay bare. The same weather patterns move through, but now no mist rises up to seed the clouds, and the rain no longer falls so much on the mountains to the east. I was still pretty young, but it seemed altogether wrong to me that we should destroy something so big, so far beyond our understanding. What unimaginable arrogance!

I also realized then and there that weather is a life form as well. So is the Earth. Our culture tends to overlook this because they are far too big to understand or control, but our Native American forbears knew quite well when they turned their gaze to the sky that they were looking at the face of God. They knew that below their feet lay the mother-goddess Earth. They knew that heaven and Earth are our grandparents, and that we are children of the forest; it was there our species originated.

Now you own, and intend to destroy, the last and best of these ancient forests. Like Shakespeare's Shylock, you have a legal right to extract your pound of our mother's flesh, in board feet. But the legality doesn't make it right; not nearly. This policy toward our environment is disastrous. And so, we the people of the society you live among, must call on you to stop this practice. Can you hear us?

Do the right thing. Sell to the American people the 60,000 acres that make up a sustainable, viable forest at a reasonable price, or just give it to us. You can afford it, even benefit by it. The goodwill you'll generate from such an act will come back to you many times over.

Perhaps you should go and sit for a while in one of your clear-cuts, and think this over as you listen to the desolate sound of the wind as it blusters unhindered past your ears, bereft of the trees that once tamed it. Then go and spend some time in the magnificence of the ancient forest you plan to destroy and perhaps you will hear that voice much older, wiser, deeper and gentler than ours - it's there.

I hope to hear back from you soon on this.

Respectfully, Bob Weir"