never fixed

Who are you this week? Come on, wanna get outside the box with me for a minute? If you're not already, that is. Science tells us the body regenerates all of its cells every 7 years, right? Psychology tells us we can change stuff as powerful as thought patterns, lifelong habits, choices. The dreamtime shows us, through vivid experience, how we are other selves, and are interwoven with others, much more than we give waking recognition to. Spiritual wisdom tells us, in so many varied voices, that we are beings of change, and growth, and also that it's All More than we think. Possibilities - for better and for worse - have us surrounded. We are constantly by all these things repaired, but yet we are never fixed.

So much talk lately of the tangible world changing. Many of the words, especially the fearful ones, seem to come from people living center-main-stream, who have been insulated somehow from the fact that the world is always in transition. By their jobs, by their money, by routine. By denial, surely, sometimes. By the mindnumbing nothingness of TV and the news. And then there's us who have never known much of anything but change. The main shift we hear these days, maybe, is the voice of others waking up to the fact that we all live in a dynamic reality. And, on the good days -- when we're not totally immersed in the current and the struggle -- we get just a little bit excited at the thought that, maybe one of these days soon, we'll find ourselves in a world where a few more of us are actually on the same page. Simplicity. Cooperation. Self-discipline. Hard work. Careful conserving. Creative resourcefulness. Celebrating the small things. But that, of course, is on the good days.

This week, I am a bricklayer. I make patios sloped to the land's angle, that won't trap the rain. I design lovely curving paths on sand, without mortar. When they are done I walk them in bare feet, to test whether they are level and smooth. I live in a simple room with one small table, two chairs, and a mattress on the floor. I get up early, work alone, and quit when I'm tired. I have no coworker banalities to distract me. I have only to cooperate with the weather. All the tools I need are available. Meals are provided in the evenings. There's not much else here to do but work, but toward sunset the most beautiful light washes over the rock faces across the river canyon, and I stop to pay attention, while hummingbirds and bats zoom overhead. Thunderheads build, plot takeovers of the valley, and then disperse behind the mountains, 50 miles away. After dark I read a quiet, inexplicable essay from Barry Lopez, and then go to bed very early. I'll wake again soon after sunrise.

It's a temporary gig, but in the moment, it's my life. And a pretty good one too. There's such satisfaction in working at your own pace, challenging your own strength, and seeing the results of your labor at day's end. In the last four days, I have laid 1,065 bricks. I just counted them because, as I said, there's not much else to do here. And I wanted to put a number on the weight that my shoulders tell me I have carried this week. With each brick weighing 3 pounds, this makes a total of 3,195 pounds: a little over a ton and a half. Not a bad week's workout. A little further progress in the Training. A little more preparation in the current Life Class, which is called, Anything Can Happen - And May, In Fact, Very Soon...

This week I am also a dancer. I don't dance all the time. I hadn't danced, with the circle, for almost a month. Body and heart were both too depleted. And I don't dance well, that's for sure. But this week I am a dancer, because I chose to show up. And, more important to me, because the circle welcomes me as one, whenever I choose to rejoin. On Sunday about 15 of us danced, under blazing sun on scalding sand (for a little while, in bare feet), for an hour or so. Without breaks, and without water. It was one of the most excruciating, exhausting things I've done in a long time. It was also one of the most beautiful, and empowering. It was an offering. A beginning of understanding what it means to offer oneself to an effort. There was nothing else, under the circumstances, that it could've been. And it wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't found a way to step outside of who the mind says I am, for a time. With the encouragement of a companion who inspires and incites me to get on my feet, out of the limitations of my "self", and to live. He doesn't just encourage me to celebrate life and change, but gives me many reasons to do so. And also with the help of a friendly and generous community who invite me to rejoin a world that was always changing, always alive, and is living still.