signs

“All opposites are in reality one thing, not two” – Mark Forstater, _The Tao_

“Reality, as Reality itself, has no opposite” – Neil Douglas Klotz, _The Sufi Book of Life_

“Reality…is ten to the eighth surface-filled polygons a second. “  -- Richard Powers, _Plowing the Dark_

“No, dear, this is the dream.  You’re still in the cell.” – Monty Python skit that all the above quotes brought to mind

You keep walking past signs that you never read, says that quiet voice ever-so-casually from the hypnagogic world, just before it lets me wake.  Now if that isn’t a remark I oughta pay attention to…if only I can remember it long enough to wake up and write it down.  Why can’t those voices give me some kinda advance warning when they’re about to speak?  Countless other times they’ve rivered some profound message my way when I wasn’t close enough to consciousness to catch it, and could only watch it slip silvery away, trout-like, out of mind’s grasp…

And I'm trying to ponder the nature of Reality before I'm fully awake, and so, naturally, I get up thinking of an old Monty Python skit.  A guy is being tortured in a medieval dungeon, crying out in pain.  And then suddenly he wakes up in a lawn chair in an English country garden, with a woman handing him a glass of lemonade.  “Mum!” he cries out.  “I had the most horrible dream – I was being tortured…”  She interrupts him, in a sweet motherly voice.  “No dear, this is the dream.   You’re still in the cell.”  And the scene wavers again, and he goes back to being lashed with a whip, crying out…  Something of metaphor there?  Trying to wake up and can’t even tell when we’ve awakened?  Continuing to suffer, when we don’t have to fall back into sleep and dream?…I don’t know.  Maybe or maybe not.  But skit made me laugh.  With some kind of recognition.

All the other quotes are words I read just in the last week.  Talking about walking past signs.  They're everywhere.  And I know good and well that there's a Reality infinitely larger and more exuberant than ordinary perception allows for.  It's been courting me for years.  Flirting with me sleeping and waking, in words more than clear, and in voices I may never comprehend with anything more than startled wonder.  And sometimes, with gifts so straightforward I can't even see them.

But this morning does have room for consciousness.  This room in which I wake very literally is a room for consciousness.  Clean high ceilings, wide mountain-gazing windows, woodstove beaming clean warmth.  Beautiful stones and crystals color all the corners.  Singing bowls wait on a table.  This hand-built house, I just noticed while lying here staring at roof angles, is a seven-sided polygon.  Full of silence and spaciousness.  No clocks or electronics, no internet, no artificial interruptions that I don’t bring here with me.  I’m only here temporarily, and I see the gift of it.  I'm slowing down.  I’m listening.  Today I don’t invite any distractions.  I have attention to pay.  I want to see those signs.

Sun overhead moves slowly upward, reaches zenith in its own good time.  Or, it waits there for the earth, planet leaning slow and sure into their daily embrace.

Trees out on the hillslope grow at exactly their own speed.  Into their very own shape.  According to what water and earth feed them.  And what fire and drought don’t take away.

Stream down in the canyon follows only natural laws of supply and demand.  Takes what passage the channel opens for it.  Brings what abundance the higher places have given. Offers always what it has to give, no more and no less.

Fire burns at the rate of the life each log has accumulated.  Strong solid trees, some achingly still full of life when felled, release their substance only at their will.  Others seem weightless, glad to go.  For each, I mourn a moment.  Then give thanks, as they bring relief to my chill.

Yeast rises quicker with heat, but finds a slow way with even a little warmth.  Bread will bake just as well over hot coals as in an oven.  Which is nice, since there’s not a regular oven here.  Yes, I baked some beautiful bread over the coals left inside the woodstove.  Just because I could.  It tastes a little like a campfire, but I don’t mind.  Joyful at the extravagance of having the time to bake real bread.

Time for the real is there – here – just outside this worried tangle of everydays.  Dreams and wisdom flow always, just outside the daily construct.  Finding them is waking up from too much sleep and inertia, finally willing to meet the day.  For me, yes, it was waking from a recurring dream of suffering, into the dangerous peace of healing and freedom.  Now, today, it's turning off the radio (literal or otherwise) and stepping outside the house, down to the river’s edge (here, less literal but just as present:  Flow). Surging there, swift and deep and sometimes cold, Reality’s constant conduit.  Often these not-seen banks overflow, watering the fields that feed us, in response to need.  To the relief of soul’s drought.  Sometimes even in response to asking. 

THIS is the real world!  That other one, that hyperrushed people-confined construct is the false one.  Everything real moves at its own pace.  In its own balance.  In its own symmetric freedom.  In its own perfection of natural cause and effect.  Why in the world we always trying to push it, restrain it, change it? 

I'm stepping out of the house.  I'm kneeling at the river's edge.  I won't walk past this place in the usual blur.  My eyes are starting to focus.  I can read the signs.  Please.

juliebot(ched)

(A found-poem of output lines chosen from the "what would I say" app, which creates fake facebook posts based, apparently, on my real ones)

Oh, I´m so glad he´s got a huge former prison 
where I often stay, with the Earth

my friends who are building community 
leaders who represent lowincome neighborhoods, urban food initiatives
(faith that each of your wedding I went to)
keep silent about something different. 
Thanks for the inability of toys and Community service
We want them where they need for change, and mutual support
so maybe all of work, with that theme.
And to replace any suggestions
are adamant on building your utopias, too, right?
could use some help the real
any of you
I guess that's why the open frequency. 

Excuse me, says a piece written 10 years ago
seeds and they are constructed, with mine, 
at the right to Protect the Rights of life.
Carrots, snow peas, squash, brocolli, 
cilantro, garlic, nopal, and other adjustments. 
Hopefully I had spoken of the crop for the struggling,
and building something of that stresses me
I guess there used to be taking off, but also everything we might bring.

more or less, since we do remember
Have to how your life and know the rhythms of grace 
I'm gonna walk from elsewhere, 
a menos poder conocer el mundo, la clima, las cosas fueron impulsados
But I know a country, its parks as possible.

breakfast with 2 guys could move a supporter of same.

People still on the feeling go away, 

close to Earth at the frequency turned to
News...gets into the crater, hidden under the raindrops
if I weren´t already much involved in advance
free in close second, and just a quick summary
I have trouble seeing the world, and that out next week.
my fellow humans are leaving play
we have the need for sure.

Just in case any other shades of starts for day
dreams, or so Finally at dark, the mountains,
within the next for the Dark.
even here the phrase In the sun comes next.

Talk about here..A whole life has just listen to think about.
language, class, race with Sun,
another matter altogether. And there.
Vamos al fin del día, el rocío remoja, mi amiga 
and I LIVED that.

dream:path to refuge

All that we have to do is cross this forsaken city.  It seemed a simple undertaking, some time ago.  But with every grey and dreary new street that opens, each more desolately crowded than the last with the lifeless inhabitants of this place and their castoffs and contaminants, our goal has begun to feel impossible.

There are six or seven of us.  Sisters and brothers in the Order, bound by the journey, its long miles, and its urgency.  Our destination, whose clear image shimmers constantly in my mind's eye, is a spacious oasis enclosed in a pearlescent pink-gold geodesic dome.  It's the only shelter within reach of travel, the only unadulterated air, the last safe ground for miles.  The place has a name Latin in origin, which carries the essence of its power.  With as much intention as I carry the word, knowing that it means my hope of refuge, it does not stay with me.  There are only later vague efforts at approximation, which include "palladium"  "hypericum"  and "aeolium".  (Words which on investigation prove to be mineral, vegetable, elemental:  perhaps this place is ultimately pure archetype).  In the moment, I only know that there are many trees there, and water flowing, and the contrast of this greengold mirage to the wasteland of concrete and rubbish around me keeps my weary feet moving.

Our group has walked for miles, without a map, clinging to hope that we are closing the distance with our general trajectory.   On every side, massive stone walls shade the view a uniform white-grey.  Though the buildings appear ancient, the air is suffused with the same pallid color, as if granite dust were just now settling on every available surface.  There are no plants or trees to be seen anywhere. While the crowds around us don't appear to offer a direct threat, we're keeping our heads down, avoiding eye contact, just the same.  What we sense is a menace more unsettling for its intangibility.  To all appearances, the ashen citizens of this drab cityscape are not physically unwell; they seem to have simply lost their souls.  To have forgotten any connection to life and the living.  We slow our pace at another crushed intersection, the most distressing yet for its pathos of vacant-eyed people, heedless traffic, and animals wandering amid spoiled food and garbage.  To our left is what must have once been an elegant plaza, its marble statuary broken and splotched with bird droppings. On the corner, disturbing heavyset wild dogs fight over heaps of dead rodents and rotting meat as the walkers pick their way among them, apathetic, oblivious, their faces a grey approaching that of the stone.  The dogs become sick as they eat, then return from what they have disgorged to snarl and snap vicious teeth over more of the same.  I can only hope that the people fare better for food here, but so far there's not much evidence in support.  With gritted teeth, we squeeze past the gruesome scene, and under the momentary reprieve of a sagging sidewalk portal.  "Excellent!", exclaims a woman in our group, startling me with her buoyance.  "We've finally come to the crossing of two numbered streets.  We'll be able to catch a long-range transport from here."  But I am overwhelmed, leaden, and groan aloud with the critical mass of surrounding sadness:  "This spot is the worst of any yet!  I can't possibly stay here another moment.  Let me walk on, anywhere but here, and I'll catch up with you soon."  The others attempt to still my protests, reminding me of the impracticality of setting off alone, while I counter that, worst case, I'll find my way there by asking for the name of our safe haven, which I'll be sure not to forget.  Just then the woman who spoke earlier informs me that our expected wait for transport, an inconceivable half an hour, has already passed.  We raise our eyes for a sight of the transport that will at last take us out of this miserable place.

Suddenly, back on the plaza, a gigantic, magnificent slate-colored Percheron thunders across the stone.  Its impossible size is matched by its more-than-perfect muscular form.  Stray sun beams strike and richochet off its storm-cloud-dappled coat.  On its back rides a policeman in riot gear.  He is of normal size, but his mount lends him the illusion of mythical proportion.  Wan, ochre light glances off the face-shield of his helmet.  He does not brandish a weapon, or make a move of violence toward any, but something in the vision which he and the great horse present is a precipitant, an abrupt coalescing, of all of this city's stark, oppressive desolation captured in a single entity.  I am rooted, at once repulsed and longing to stare at the pair's brutal beauty. But the glimmer of foreboding solidifies:  we must move on, before we are too late.

Yet to accomplish the journey's next stage, it is vital that we concentrate and augment our own energies.  While the insensible crowds part and stream around us, we set our feet and stand, shoulder to shoulder, faces toward sun's dissipate, near-spent illumination.  Hands cupped in front of third chakra, the solar plexus, we call into reconnection.  Speaking the ancient words that affirm the all that is One and the One that is infinity, quietly at first and then with gathering potential.  My acute initial discomfort at unveiling these secret ways in public is replaced by a liberating wonder when, out of a current deeper than word or voice can track, a deep, honeyed hum of many invisible voices joins us, rich and resonant, flowing beneath our quiet speech and bearing it up, bearing witness to its vibrant continuity and community.  Unseen, atemporal, but potent and very present, this transcendant caravan swells us up on its surge of living memory and dream.  We are not alone or forgotten.  More than intuited or imagined, the voices become our transport, and dimensional space expands:  still the same impersonal city, and also a thousand welcoming ways opening simultaneously.  We don't see the road, but we are on it.  We will, be it at hope and vision's end, set weary feet on the last path to refuge.

harvest

We all walk out slowly into the late-morning autumn sunlight. There are only a few preparations:  we loop a rope over the strongest branch of an elm tree, and set a large plastic tub beneath it.  A collection of newly sharpened blades waits on a nearby stump.

My coworker and I are here with open minds and very mixed feelings.  It's the first time either of us have had a part in a matanza -- a community livestock slaughter.  All week we've talked over our limited picture of what it will be like, and which part will be the hardest.  We've been euphemizing it with the same word we use for the vegetables:  "harvest".   And we agree that we need to do this, in order to be consistent and conscious humans.  We both eat meat, and -- until now -- have lived safely separate from the processes that bring us this aspect of our food.  Which today will change.

The neighbor who's coming to supervise us pulls up in his dusty white truck.  In the back are a sheep and two goats.  In a pen nearby, we have three more goats ready.  One bit of information has made the decision to slaughter them easier to grasp:  they carry a genetic disorder which infected most of the flock they came from, and which, if they live to be adults, will most likely cause them to suffer.  Large sores will start to cover their bodies, and if they happen to be nursing babies, the disease will be passed on to them as well.  Knowing this helps me to distance from the fact that, right now, they're small, lively, noisy, and yes, cute.  

But there's still the essential question:  can I be complicit -- participant even -- in taking the life of another creature?  This is new territory for thought and action both.  I mean, there's the time that I couldn't swerve quick enough and ran over a rabbit.  And all those ants that I've walked on, in spite of my careful steps -- some friend called me a Jainist recently, and I took it as a surprised compliment.  Of course there are the cockroaches that I squashed without a twinge of conscience.  We draw the line of life and worthiness at different fine points.  My coworker here on the farm has enthusiastically been using the word "specist" lately.  He points out that we indiscriminately end the lives of plants, insects, and microorganisms daily, while giving  preference to humans and their well-being over any other consideration.  He's got a point.  None of us are really innocent here.  Maybe we'd do well to start by just getting honest about that fact.

For now, it's time to end with the philosophy and get to work.  We lead the sheep over to a shady patch of earth beneath an elm thicket.  Gently, one person at each end, we lay her down on her side and hold her front and back legs.  The neighbor who's done this work before kneels in the middle.  I'm glad he's here, bringing an energy of calm, caring competence.  I would certainly not want to do this with someone who was rushed or mechanical about it.  He carries a surprisingly short knife:  all our knives are smaller than I would have expected.  With focused intention, he sets the point at the side of the sheep's neck, just below the ear where a large vein can be found.  One soft pressing motion, in and then upward, and brilliant scarlet flows from the tiny wound.  We all fall quiet.  

Like every process on this farm, the death of this creature will be accompanied with peace and reverence.  As we settle into a weighty and waiting silence, watching the bright red pulsing line nudged out by a slowing heartbeat, the farmer murmurs prayer-words to the quiet sheep.  He thanks her for her life, and for the life she will give to us.  He hopes she will go without too much suffering, and urges her to seek that next place to move on to.  And he explains to the rest of us that, just as animals everywhere are made to suffer by violence and mistreatment, so are they treated unjustly by being denied a respectful passage to their own death.  

It takes her about ten minutes to reach her last breath.  In this space, she only cries a few times, each time with a weaker voice which scours my heart.  Once in a while her body convulses, legs twisting and lifting off the ground with a strength we can barely restrain.  The farmer tells us that the movement is her life energy finding its way up and out of her body.  I picture a dull shimmer flowing from hoof to hip to belly and then out through her open mouth.  The image, I realize, looks much like the life-lines drawn on Native American animal fetishes.

The act of waiting with another being, while breath and energy leave body, is a profound one. As we work, I realize that I've never had the privilege, or the responsibility, of sitting with a person as they leave this life.  I gain new admiration for those who have kept such a vigil, and how it must require them to step outside their sense of self and importance, while carrying a grief so much more immediate and personal than this one.  It's a privilege, in a way, to be here as students of death, without attachment.  In these minutes, sitting on earth without words, we have no other purpose than to be present witnesses to a journey which we can neither see nor understand.  But we do feel it.  As some of the goats take longer than others to finish their struggles, we all lean in around them and breathe silent prayers and encouragement that their passage be as quick and as peaceful as possible.  Their lack of language leaves us, for the most part, also speechless.

As the day progresses and the strangeness becomes familiar, I step up to help with more of the work.  I find, surprised, that it's possible to help with skinning the carcass, once it's hung by its back legs from the nearby tree.  First, sliding the knife around legs and back to peel off the soft hide, the fascia underneath parting as smoothly as water when the blade is angled properly.  Later, I try separating the internal organs, making a quick slit down the belly beneath the thin surface of skin.  It's so hard to stay ahead of the entrails, which immediately begin to slide out, while not puncturing any of them and releasing toxins onto the meat.  Finally I'm able to reach in deep, up to my elbow in the cavern of ribs, and bring out liver and heart.  The only way it's possible to do this is that these beings are shifting, minute by minute, from living fellow creatures to objects that meet a simple need:  the sustaining of life.  Touching the interior of the body is not repulsive like I might have expected.  It only feels like moist skin.  And there's so little blood, compared to what we had imagined.  At the end of the day, the carcasses are ready for delivery to a local butcher, and all that's left of six animals fills two plastic tubs.  And only a small stain of crimson marks the spot on the earth where each of them lay.

When we've collected all the remainders in the plastic tub, we load it and a wheelbarrow into the truck and drive half a mile up the gravel road.  Moving the tub into the wheelbarrow, we walk another quarter of a mile up a ravine, climbing over cholla and barrel cactus, and leave its contents on a rocky hillside, in a place the farmer says the coyotes like to come.  They'll have no qualms about taking their place in the life-circle.   Hopefully today, we learned a thing or two about it as well.

But it's good to allow these lessons time to settle their weight in the heartmind.  I'm glad to find another skill that I'm capable of, if needed, though I hope I don't need it again any time soon.  And we're all relieved to find that our dinner this night is vegetarian. 

10 things to love about living in a tipi

Round spaces feel more accepting, and more open to possibility, than square ones.

It's not possible to lock yourself out of the house.  Or in.

A little curve of sky, rather than a light fixture, occupies the peak of my ceiling.

The bathroom facilities don't use any water or electricity.  And what a view, by moonlight!

Not-quite-waterproof canvas walls and smoke-hole keep me aware of weather's presence -- and of my place in it.

Reading by candlelight or flashlight makes words, and the time spent imbibing them, precious.

With a tent set up inside it, nights are completely cozy and warm, and the space is transformed from a one-room to a one-bedroom house with a living room.

Small ones such as mice and lizards can come in and out, freeing me of any absolute claim to "my" space. And since they seem to prefer the narrow verges around the rugs' edges and between the walls and the inner canvas lining, we find it easy not to bump into each other.

Since the fire-pit inside has been unused for a while, there is a green plant growing out of earth at the center of my living room.

River-voice sings me to sleep at night with its memories of September's big rain.  Now I know what the rhythm of constant flowing abundance sounds like.

griefbeautyquote

"The ability to willingly continue to live, though knowing we all must die, living to become increasingly more worthy, noble, creative, awake, and beautiful, such that our deaths in their old-age fullness at their natural allotted time become a grief-making loss to the world of such dimension as to be an elegant and complex sacrifice of sufficient density as to sustain while the ecstatic nature of the Divine who in the process fertilizes the flower of Now into a time of hope and deliciousness beyond our own, is what gives us life and makes us truly human."

"...in the Divine collision of God's desire with our beauty, the world jumps back into flower with all its detours, griefs, joys, pains, reliefs, breakthroughs, and ironies, as its accepted petals."

-- Martin Prechtel, _Long Life, Honey in the Heart_

one day

They're marching tomorrow.  It's about damn time.

After Monsanto has almost succeeded in getting Congress to subsidize its crimes against humanity and the earth, after their leadership roster has provided the perfect retirement or second career for ex-government officials, after they've almost prohibited us from knowing what is in the food we buy...after the farmer lawsuits and the health crises and the colony collapses and the suicides in India...people are finally starting to look up and pay a little attention to what they're doing to this planet where we all live.

Some people.  Not nearly enough.  Maybe not soon enough.  I try to be optimistic, or at least to withhold comment when I'm not, to leave room for others to be.  But this is a hard one.  The infection of greed and corruption is too pervasive; the plan of attack too insidious.  I need to scroll through that list again of cities that have organized "March Against Monsanto" demonstrations tomorrow.  It's worldwide.  And it's pretty a impressive list.  Even the part that represents this country.  (http://occupy-monsanto.com/march-against-monsanto-may-25-2013/).  But tomorrow's actions hinge on turnout.  And ever so much more on what comes after that.

What would it take?  To move more of us into the action this world urgently needs from us?  What would involve enough of the workers, the families, the middle-ground ones whose collective voice would -- possibly -- shift the balance?

I put this question to friends on the social site.  It was a practical query, not an ideological one.  What tangible factors, I asked, might give us all the time/space/comfort/will to consider, and possibly to act, on the heavy issues?  A day off work?  A few stiff drinks on the house?  Free childcare?  A cash incentive?

And I got a nice collection of responses.  Surprising, since not many people take me up on my sleepless-idealist inquiries.  Childcare got the most votes.  That's cool:  I've said for years that as soon as protest organizers advertise free childcare, they'll get the turnout from the workers they're trying to represent.  Second most popular answer was time.  I won't get philosophical about that one here.  For whatever reasons, yes, we all feel short on time.  More knowledge (definitely).  "Financial plausibility".  Better community networks.  Knowing your neighbors -- which I took to be about remembering that we can, in fact, reach outside the walls of our own houses and other constructs.  To ask for help, to empower ourselves, and then to pass it on once we're able.

But there were some nice surprises in their answers, too.  Comfort.  A commodity we in this country might have both in too great and too short supply.  We don't act for the greater good, however we may perceive such a thing, because we are individually so chronically uncomfortable.  From our poor health habits.  From the exhausting schedules the capitalist economy imposes on us, and from the unending list of wants and needs we impose on ourselves when we buy into it. From the fact that we (as a nation) consume so much altered, processed, chemical-tainted, unnatural food.  From the toxic binges of threat and drama and shadow and judgment that we let mainstream news force-feed us, and from all the real news looming just outside the peripheral vision, that we're afraid to look in the face.   After surviving all the above, where is there possibly room for more bad news?  More comfort is what we look for.  And (for many, though not of course for all) it's easy enough to come by enough comfort to make action seem unnecessary.  Or at least, to leave the threats far enough removed to be only some sort of bad dream.  To be forgotten quickly by consuming more comfort.

We don't act because we're uncomfortable, and we don't act because we're too comfortable.  Is there a way into this?   How do we find a balance between "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable"? Is there a way to meet both our very human tendency toward complacency and avoidance (or, let me be a little less critical and say, inertia), and the perfectly valid dread and anxiety which confronting our world's current realities produces?  How do we convey the intensity of the need, in a way that incites real action from an authentic source in each person?  How is it possible to salute the inherent worth and value of each person as well as engaging them with their responsibility to the whole?

Here's one thing I'm envisioning, lately:  a world in which just one day, once in a while, is given to getting outside the comfort zone and working together for something bigger.  Just one day.  We have so many holidays on the calendar, for so many diverse actions and observances.  We've agreed on consistent occasions to celebrate, to gather with family, eat, drink, relax, be comfortable.  But we talk so much on the "regular" days -- some of us, anyway -- about the need for better.  Why don't we have a holiday devoted to collective social change?  Just one day a year:  is that asking too much?   We don't even use half the holidays we have now for their stated purpose.  Memorial Day isn't, unless you're actually a war veteran or close to one, for remembering.  Labor Day, for most, is neither about laboring nor being mindful of labor conditions.  On Presidents' Day we don't honor, petition or protest any president.  We just have all these miniature vacations with nice names on them.  And that on top of the weekend all those people with "normal" jobs get.  Couldn't there be room in the year for a day for building the new in the shell of the old?  Construction Day.  Reconstruction Day.

I'm as frustrated with my own inaction here as with anybody's.  I don't have the answers to all these questions.  Except this:  only together, yes?  Marches and demonstrations seem such a scratch on the surface...but, we've got to start acting any and everywhere that we each see that we can.  For the life of us.
See you downtown at noon tomorrow.

calling

"Your calling is the point at which life's greatest need and your heart's deepest joy intersect." -- some writer whose name I can't remember

Something I read a while ago that gave me hope.  For its practical take on a concept as nebulous as a "calling", which some of us would like to perceive as an element in life's flow despite a need for strong pragmatic and empirical threads to be woven into our metaphysics.  The line is also attractive for the recognition it gives to the heart.  For me, such considerations put the idea neatly between the two seeker's poles of "save the world" and "follow your bliss" -- positions held respectively, in my head, by the Socialist ex and all of those Santa Fe women.  While those two voices seem to have some degree of permanent residence in my mental programming, I've let them know that they have their place: at the margins.  They taught me with their extremes, but intention's center is now reserved for balance, and for interconnection.

The line came back to me at a welcome moment this week, as I started to wonder (not, of course, for the first time) what in the world I was doing heading to Mexico to learn how to teach English.  It's a sharp turn of a trajectory that in the last few years was moving steadily toward farming, and barter, and all things tangible and earthy and simple.  I haven't been a full-time student in over 20 years.  I'm apprehensive about the move for what I know (the training course will be a serious challenge) and for what I don't (most of what happens afterward).  The whole idea, even though I've imagined it for years, would fit that old disclaimer, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."  That time being the moment, two months ago, when a surgery seven years in the waiting (see: no healthcare, misdiagnosis, survival mode) suddenly returned a huge dividend of energy, optimism, and longer perspective.  This in turn began to defeat the insidious long-term insomnia that was the result of too many layers of physical and emotional stress (see:  an abusive relationship, economic precarity, driving for a living and the compounding effect of insomnia itself).  The resulting sudden boost to strength and outlook was, as I've told several friends, quite a bit like winning the lottery.  Going for the ESL certificate, as a new travel adventure and a career change long overdue, is how I decided to spend the jackpot.

But my own decision is also a surprise, for the timing.  Of all points at which it's seemed appropriate, or at least justified, to drop everything and hit the road, this surely isn't such a time.  Very belatedly I've discovered, in the last few months, how profoundly essential are some of the simplest daily realities many people take for granted.  Recognitions which my life's chaos and transition had never really allowed the chance to catch on.   Continuity in daily routine.  Enough sleep to feel sane and competent.  A homespace that feels safe.  Housemates that treat me with respect and kindness.  Economic stability (for the first time in several years).  A vibrant network of friends and community groups.  That familiarity with a place which, in the past, nearly always bred contempt, but now inspires a bemused loyalty to what I never meant to call home, a noisy city in the drought-ridden desert.

Really, if heart's desire alone got to call the shots at this point, I'd be heading for the hills.  A landscape with mountains and rivers and space and silence is what I always longed for home to be.  There was a moment, just after the credit union approved the loan to cover course and travel expenses, when I thought to take the money and run.  To Colorado, green dreamscape of so many younger years.  Or maybe to Taos, whose luminous skies and liminal mountain-mesa poise have so attracted my attention of late.  Find that little cabin on the land, slow way down, get on Earth-time.  Maybe start writing more.  But that route leaves unanswered the question (after the loan runs out, anyway) of how to make a living.  As well as the deeper query to which a word like "calling" speaks:  how can I make my living on this earth feel at all worthwhile?  It's not enough to be the hermit in the mountains anymore.  Not with the earth returning us the early-stage cancers of all the toxins we've force-fed it, and humankind hemorraging justice and crying out for dignity as they are. The life-current in me is electrified by the increasingly forceful impulses of the world's great need.  It's no longer enough just to keep myself well.  Not that it ever has been.  I've wrestled this question almost all my life.  But the last half-year's events have finally offered the means by which to live my conscience instead of just to keep my head above water, so it's time to move in that direction.

I'm not exactly sure how teaching English will meet the larger existential challenge.  As I wrote in the application essay, I'd like to imagine it feeding into greater economic justice for people in Mexico.  Perhaps even into the immigration dilemma, by equipping some to find sustainable work where they already live.  It will surely engage the heart's desire for communication, understanding, and mutual learning about the human experience.   It'll feed the mind too.  And it's an emotionally safer venture than farming would be at this point.  While socially conscious farmers might well be the world's greatest need at this point, or at least in the top five, that's not a vocation for the faint of heart.  The psychic toll of keeping even a little abreast of Monsanto's actions, and the empathetic perspective gained from watching the struggles (both practical and political) of several farmer friends both here and in Mexico, have shown me that -- at this point anyway -- I just haven't got what it takes.

At the essential level, this venture might be a first-stage action analogous to the launch of a space probe (if I remember correctly what I've read on the subject):  that initial shot towards the sun -- obviously not its destination -- which catapults the vessel into the stronger gravities needed to liberate it from home base and send it on its way outward into the galaxy.  This year seems to send the clear mandate for a dramatic change of course.  I need to vault myself out of my present orbit, into a space where new possibilities are visible.  Whether this is a voyage into a calling, or only another step in getting free, time will have to tell.  Time and need and heart.

here and there

"Novelty excites the brain in precisely the way we want in order to heal and transform our stories."  -- Lisa Wimberger, New Beliefs, New Brain


Come on.  You know you wanna go.  Even if you want to stay, as well.

Spring always sets the mind loose in a crazy spin and spiral.  Unearths the highway virus from its dormant wintered state. Electrifies intuition with the contagious contamination of every place-vibe once touched on earth's green surface. The here and now is finally -- miraculously, after recent events -- beautiful again.  But so, concomitantly, is everywhere else.  Especially Mexico, that years-running infatuation and fascination.

La Capital in the rainy season.  El Ombligo del Universo, in original connection with the Mother.  The ancient Templo Mayor, reexposed after 500 years, drawn up out of Her belly to be seen again by sun and moonlight.  Greenglow of palm and cypress and eucalyptus in the parks.  Afternoon slantlight reflecting off stone.  Street vendors throwing tarps over their colorful squares of sidewalk as sky unfolds in downpour and people dash for cover under the nearest portal.  Thunder joining sky to earth, reaching through the concrete of el Zócalo to reunite what went before with those who now walk the surface.  Danzante drums rescuscitating the city's ancient hearbeat, inciting stone buildings to be its dirty but strong lungs, still offering echo of living breath.  The friendliness of strangers:  young hippie guy I bought a bracelet from on the sidewalk, asking me with a smile, "Do you live here?  Well, do you want to live here?"

Sigh...New Mexico in May.  Cottonwoods' instant illumination of river's presence through the city.  Farmers' markets and music outoors and camping in the mountains.  Staying also has its pull.  Almost-home in the sweet slacker life of Burque.  Almost at home in the routine,  in the simplicity, in the mind, in the skin.  Heart craving just a season or two to learn of continuity.  What it is not to have the earth shaking every time you lift a foot from it. Not to be closing a door in the same motion of opening it.  Ceasing to understand every hello as really a goodbye.  Finding out what it's like to live in the same house and work the same job for more than a year.  To find roots -- yes, angry leftist voices, even comfort! -- in the security of a network of friends, a little economic stability, a little sweet give and take and share.  Only took me 13 years to decide to live in this place.  Why give it up just when it's working?

Because there's more.  Life always drawing toward more.  Knowing the way change can flow into strength. The coincidence of much-needed physical healing with Lisa Wimberger's excellent book on regenerating the mind urged:  reach out.  Don't keep sheltering within.  Just barely do I open the door and peer out, and there it is:  river still in flow.  Full now to its banks, with the waters of winter's thaw.  This season the current invites me to the very thing I asked for last year:  to go back to Mexico, but not as a tourist.  As, just possibly, a useful member of the community.  Which community, yet to be seen. But the starting point will once again be the center:  Mexico City, in July, for a month-long intensive course that will certify me to teach English as a Second Language, somewhere in the country.  That will offer job placement assistance, and a whole new network to weave into.  That will push me toward another much-needed step:  career change.  And that will most certainly offer the kind of challenges that keep mind and body strong, primed for longevity and resilience.  Those are the essential currents to follow right now, toward this story that wants to heal and transform.  Mine, and however my story connects with the world's healing and transforming.

all ears

One of the really simple portals that travel offers into an altered consciousness:  immerse yourself in a town you don't know well, and try to visualize life there, in all its facets, in a single day's time.  I did that last week in Taos. 

A few minutes on craigslist, at the hostel, suggests that some unusually low rents can be found here.  And, as one might imagine, they're mostly out on the Mesa. The high open space west of town, stretching along both sides of the Rio Grande Gorge, has been the subject of a couple of indie films and the object of some pretty intense feelings, positive and otherwise.  I haven't spent much time out there, but I know it's got a reputation among some for being the sort of place that nobody in their right mind would choose to live.  But then, right-minded people are the sort I've been edging away from all my life.  I've got DIYers and back-to-the-landers in my family history, and more and more in my circle of admired acquaintances and chosen family. This desolate stretch of earth might just offer some common ground.

I head northwest from the traffic light that marks the city's edge.  The two most interesting rentals are across the Gorge in an area known as Tres Orejas, or "Three Ears".  The name is a fun co-incident with the e.e. cummings poem a friend sent me this morning for my birthday, which ends with this proclamation/invocation:

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

And they do feel opened.  Already, in fact, the moment wheels hit highway at my own city's limits, the mind's more subtle frequencies crackled into life.  This happens on most roadtrips:  normally invisible antennae go up at the first sense of unobstructed space.  Optimism reboots.  Long-sought words abruptly clarify into conciseness.  Strands of poem find their way to paper.  Internal arguments (with others, with self) are suddenly and simply resolved.  Always, this leaves me wondering what would happen if I just left home once a week.  Going anywhere.  And what about living out on open land, truly free of all those blocking influences and distractions?  Could this snowmelt of frozen insight be coaxed into a constantly flowing stream?  Could I irrigate intuition, cultivate voice and thought-freedom as the norm instead of an occasional privilege?  And could I open up not just third eye but also a third ear to these quiet voices, if I lived in a place called Tres Orejas?

Late morning sun gilds sage and chamisa.   Out here, the last snowfall's already melted.  The West Rim of the mesa is a smooth, very gentle slope of nothing but knee-high plants and dust.  Trees don't grow here, and the view for 20 miles east to the wall of sacred, white-summited peaks is unobstructed.  Even the Gorge disappears quickly into the immense flatness.  If you don't look to your left as you drive the razor-straight county road south from the Bridge, you could forget there's an 800-foot drop right over there.  Only squinting westward do you see any green at all in the landscape:  turning onto one of the side roads which begins to climb the hill of Ears, a few scattered junipers begin to relieve the monochromatic dazzle of gold on gold.  This looks almost livable...

Real estate ad for the West Rim:  "For Sale by Owner.  Wide Open Skies."
POWER: No. must use alternate source
PHONE: No. some cells work
WATER: No. Must install well, if/when you build
SEWER: No. Must install septic, if/when you build
ROADS: dirt 

RVs, Mobile Homes, and Modulars are allowed. Distant Mountain views. No restrictions 

And the settlers out here have taken that last clause to heart.  The tiny homesteads that I pass are crafted out of plywood, hand-molded adobe, recycled tin, and (once in a while) more conventional materials.  They are old school buses with woodstove chimneys, or a pair of ancient mobile homes stuck together in a sort of windbreak.  Many are unfinished. A few tiny structures look barely big enough for one person to lie down in.  Each side road -- a weaving pair of muddy ruts -- is named with a unique hand-made sign.  Most have animal names:  Toad Road, Raven's Reach, Oso. Somebody with a dry sense of humor lives on "Ocean Shore Drive".  Each road leads to no more than 4 or 5 miniature houses, with plenty of vacant space between them.

More online reading reveals that land prices on the West Rim are lower than any I've seen, anywhere.  Sales of quarter-acre lots seem common.  A website affirms that "This land is free and clear of all liens and encumbrances."  Another site notes that the area has a population density of 9.8 persons per square mile.  Free and clear, indeed.  Though this information rekindles the lifetime dream, almost lost, of owning a little piece of earth somewhere, I know that there has to be a challenging face to the freedom of this particular piece.  One person's conscious anarchism is another's unhealthy chaos.  While the spaciousness and the simplicity are lovely, and open ground dominates the view, I can also see piles of trash, junked cars, and dogs running loose.  There's a freebox full of clothes, and a handmade community bulletin board -- definite signs of life -- but also road signs and old refrigerators that have been used for target practice.  I wonder if my dream of intimacy with earth and silence would find commonality in a place such as this, after all.

Of the two houses-for-rent that I'm looking for, I find one.  Its context, and the 3-mile rib-jarring road, cross it firmly off the wishlist.  I drive back into town in the afternoon slantlight with a head full of questions.

At the Brewery halfway back to town, they're having "bluegrass jam night".  I want to see how the locals live; I'm especially curious now about the mesa-dwellers in their isolation, who must surely be drawn to a friendly place like this one.  A guy walks by my table, and starts a conversation.  Turns out he lives on the first road I drove up today.  "You must have passed by my house, then...it's small, mostly cob, with a round window on the south side..."  "Well, that could be quite a few houses out there", I laugh.  But he's got some interesting perspective to offer.  He's not from New Mexico.  He's probably about my age.  He's obviously intelligent. He came out here on purpose, and did his homework on the off-grid life, before buying into it.

He's lived six years on the Mesa, and isn't entirely happy with the experience.  The West Rim, he informs me, is locally known as "the open-air asylum".  The land exposed to the elements, the hardships of life without normally-expected city services (as the ads pointed out, there are no water, sewer or electrical lines), the difficulty of access.  And the population of people who just don't fit anywhere else: veterans, the very poor, and those whose disabilities (or perhaps just their idealism) make it hard for them to find a place in "normal society".  It can get intense, he smiles.  And as if that wasn't enough, many residents don't have cars.  He often meets them hitchhiking into town, or walking back from the highway, loaded down with packs full of a week's worth of groceries.  So add claustrophobia to the mix, for those who get there and then can't leave.  And for all those, surely, who have given up hope of finding a home anywhere else. 

Though the area seems to fall outside of regular county maintenance, its residents aren't entirely free of the "system".  He was reprimanded recently by the county for building without a permit.  "They pick on me because I'm one of the ones close enough to the road to see", he says wryly. Is it really worth it, then? I ask him.  His response doesn't give me a conclusive answer.  "People can make do with a lot of things...If you're sitting inside with a book you like, I guess it doesn't really matter where you are...I do miss biking, though.  You just can't do that out here."

And, it occurs, maybe you can't just "drop out" anymore, either.  Probably the places where that's an option are precious few, in the world and surely in this country.  Tres Orejas was most likely "free and clear" for the first dozen settlers.  Now, maybe not so much.

I'm glad this place exists, problematic though it may be.  Of course I want there to be places where society's "misfits" are welcome.  Most of my involvement in communities has been an affirmation of that belief.  And I'm excited to learn that land is anywhere within the reach of more than the very wealthy.  I would imagine most who move to the Mesa come prepared to rough it, and maybe even to open their lives to a more chaotic atmosphere than they would've had in the city.  But does committing to an essentially -- and, in some respects, intentionally -- impoverished community have to mean entering a pact of shared suffering as well?

I think of my favorite aunt and uncle, who have spent the last 30 years in a hundred-year-old cabin up a dirt road in the foothills of the northern Colorado Rockies.  They live with extreme care and simplicity, without running water, with an outhouse out back, chopping wood for the stove.  They also grow a lush garden along the creek, keep a few cattle, and work satisfying jobs close to home.  They've raised two of the most capable and well-adjusted young men -- my cousins -- that I've had the privilege to know, and thrive at the center of a vibrant and fine-humored community of "up the canyon" folks.  They've got it made, in my view.  They and their neighbors, many of whom also live without the utilities and the comforts most in this country take for granted.  In visits to their home, I've been delighted at the mutual support and creativity that joins the neighbors and keeps them healthy as a community.  Not content with only the typical neighborly acts of shared meals or work parties, they've created regular social events such as "Train Wreck" (young single guitarist living in a renovated caboose -- still painted red -- invites anyone with an instrument, talent and/or a six-pack to come over and jam once a week)...and "Windmill School" (another guy who's learned to build home wind generators in a steam-powered machine shop invites people to come and learn to make their own).  Over the years they've put together a volunteer fire department and a PTA for the formerly one-room school, which has grown to accommodate all their kids. I've even heard them refer to an elaborate (and tongue-in-cheek) social caste structure based on which of various upper and lower side-canyons the neighbors call home.  Living off-the-grid with such an off-the-wall approach surely mitigates many of its hardships.  I can't help but wonder if the Taos landers have organized or self-started in any of these ways, or if they've found it possible to laugh together and create shared celebrations, in spite of their likely diversity of lives and struggles.

For now, I let go of the idea of dropping out here in Taos any time soon, after joining the day's questionable inputs with the evening's uncertain evaluation of the Mesa.  But I hope to go back and tune in again:  see what's to be learned from this very original place.  Maybe I'll find some more locals to talk with.  Maybe I'll close my eyes, with all of their preconceptions formed within and without about how we can live, and find a way to hear what the land itself tells me it has to offer.  There are understandings here that I've been years in search of, whether they fit with this place or go in the pack to be carried elsewhere.  I can't see where all these pieces fit into the picture of a life, and that's alright.  For now, I'm all ears.

2012 readlist

Haven't done a year's-best-reading list since the first year I kept a blog.  Every year could have this: an expression of gratitude for the astonishing and wonderful books that Life continually sends me.  Most of which I'm not looking for.  Many of which I judge by their cover, and/or some nudge of intuition, and which turn out to be exactly what I need at that moment.

Isabel Allende was one of those, 15 years ago.  She was responsible, as well, for a shift in the way I read, when I made her acquaintance (also by pulling a paperback off the shelf at random).  Clara the clairvoyant, central character in _The House of the Spirits_, has a custom of keeping journals.  But these aren't just any old diaries filled with personal reminisces:  she calls them "my books that give witness to life", and they are literally a record, a remembering, of every single event that happens on her sprawling, multigenerational, highly dysfunctional family homestead.  While that was a bit much for me, I was attracted to "witness to life".  To both writing and reading as ways to engage more consciously, and positively, with its currents.  I began trying to balance, in journals, thought-feelings and reactions with observations, affirmations and connections-of-dots.  And I started writing down memorable quotes from every book that I read.  I even developed a system of symbols that recognizes the different windows onto understanding opened by these quotes.  And, while I often wonder if this habit helps or limits memory, the fact is that I read and forget at almost equally rapid rates.  So, if once in a while there's time to look back and wonder whether or not I learned anything in the last year, I have these transcribed lines for my witnesses.

[Note to the angry leftists in my head:  Yes, as you've observed, this post will in fact occupy some time, and indulge in a fair amount of introspection.  And yes, I might not normally sanction that.  It's even going to reveal that I feed my mind as much with fiction as with nonfiction! But right now, it's covered:  January's a month of healing.  I won't be joining any of you in saving the world this month.  I will rest, read, ponder, and seek out any precious lessons learned.  From scholarly text, and from powerful story.  For as much of Now as it takes, to feel safe and sane and sound again.]

Below, then, are my best reads of 2012. (It'd be really fun to see the lists other friends would compile!) And a quote or two from each book, to show the particular beauty that it graced me with.


10.  Neil Gaiman - American Gods
All the ancient deities of the world's mythologies, having accompanied immigrants to this country over the centuries, realize that their power is fading because not enough people support them with the old practices and with belief.  They convene for a showdown with the "new gods" of media, celebrity, technology, and drugs, their replacements.  A lonely ex-convict named Shadow is caught up in the intrigue and discovers he has a greater role than he knew, while meeting characters on a cross-country roadtrip with names like Mr. Wednesday and Low-Key Lyesmith.  Mr. Gaiman's unique mix of depth and irreverence is barely even quotable.  You just had to be there.


9.  David Holmgren - Permaculture
A book on systems thinking doesn't really fit into sound-bites.  But here are a couple of best efforts.

"the connections between things are as important as the things themselves"

"With little experience of whole-system thinking, and such cultural impediments, we need to focus our efforts on simple and accessible whole systems before we try to amend large and complex ones. The self is the most accessible and potentially comprehensible whole system."

"While global capitalism has been like a fire converting green forests to ashes, it has likewise released potential and information from the constraints of cultural norms and institutions that were hopelessly inappropriate for dealing with a world of declining energy."


8. Octavio Paz - The Labyrinth of Solitude
This master elocutionist takes on the psychology of Mexico and the meaning of human separateness and connection.

"In the Valley of Mexico man feels himself suspended between heaven and earth, and he oscillates between contrary powers and forces, and petrified eyes, and devouring mouths. Reality -- that is, the world that surrounds us -- exists by itself here, has a life of its own, and was not invented by man as it was in the United States."

"How can we tell that man is possibility, frustrated by injustice?"


7.  Camilla Gibb - Sweetness in the Belly
A sensory and heartfelt narrative of a young British woman and her memories of growing up in the city of Harar, Ethiopia, just prior to Emperor Selassie’s deposition. Honoring and questioning cultural, political and religious issues while centering on a couple of very human journeys and themes of exile and belonging. One review called it " A poem to belief and to the displaced".

"It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs."

"there's an organ without a name that only registers the invisible."

"He whispers, 'Hindus believe that the essence of the person -- the soul -- lives on, reincarnated over and over with greater maturity each time to the point where it ultimately achieves enlightenment, freedom from the body. It is what we all ultimately wish for.' Like a Sufi, I think, only a Sufi attempts to do it in a single lifetime."


6.  Seyyed Hossein Nasr - The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition
An engagingly welcome combination of mind and heart:  philosophy, ideology, love for beauty.

"The spiritual life may in fact be defined as the practice of techniques that enable us to forget all that we remember about the world of separation and dispersion and to remember..."

"love runs through the arteries of the universe"

"If understood spiritually, beauty becomes itself the means of recollection and the rediscovery of our true nature."


5. Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, River of Poppies, Sea of Smoke
Mr. Ghosh is my favorite new discovery, whose work I am devouring as quickly as possible.  I didn't copy quotes from these because they're the kind, and the quality, of book that you just fall into and read almost without stopping.  Rip-roaring adventures with a healthy dose of history, world politics, and human migrations mixed in.  Pure food for the imagination and the mind.  http://www.amitavghosh.com/


4. Arnold Mindell - Dreambody
Mr. Mindell draws from Jung, shamanistic studies and Australian aboriginal ways to attempt a synthesis of mind-body-psyche understanding and healing...potent medicine.

"the real body...a potential temple which is unaware of the gods it is carrying."

"Remember, if you want to learn how to heal the body you must start at home, in your own forest, in your own body.   There, lying within your own symptoms is the spirit that makes you ill.  But this very same spirit has the healing potion..."

(citing the Upanishads) "Yama's first message tells the young man that enlightenment -- that is, connection to the spirit -- cannot be had through wishing.  It occurs only through contact with death, with body symptoms."


3. Kelley Eskridge - Solitaire/Connie Willis - Passage
These two sci-fi novels share a spot because they arrived in the same month and with the same intense relevance to present questions:  how far can a person travel toward healing, within the boundaries of her own mind?  And how fluid can our concepts of life and identity become while preserving our wholeness?  Connie Willis writes of a pair of neurologists researching near-death experiences whose work takes some definite turns for the unexpected.  Fascinating insights about our relationship to death and to facing our fears.  From her book I again have no quotes; only gratitude for this:  the experience of hearing the moment right after a sound had stopped.
Ms. Eskridge tells of a not-too-distant future Earth ruled by technology and dominated by the planet's first corporate-nation-state in Hong Kong, called Ko.  A woman employed with Ko is framed for a terrible crime and given a choice of sentence:  many years in regular prison, or 8 months in a suspended-animation virtual solitary confinement.  When she chooses the latter, she embarks on a gut-wrenching inner journey through the nature of mind, reality, and self that breaks all the expectations of the technology, the system, and her own as well, and finally leads to her liberation on all levels. 

"I think there's a threshold of alone that most of us can't pass beyond without some kind of profound change."

"It was inconceivable that there could be a hole in a virtual cell, where there had been none before.  She sat for much too long thinking about how none of it could be true before she realized that her opinion didn't seem to matter much to the hole...Then she took a deep breath, and began to kick down the wall."


2.  Belleruth Naparstek - Invisible Heroes:  Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal
Another book pulled off the library shelves that met exactly the need of the moment.  The author worked as a therapist with the entire imaginable range of trauma and PTSD sufferers, from Vietnam vets to 9/11 survivors to adults subjected to abuse or cult practices as children.  Her explanation of how trauma affects mind, body and spirit is clear and holistic, and the inclusiveness of the stories across the spectrum offers a welcome to those seeking a path to healing and to understanding the validity of their experience.  Ample appendices and a set of guided meditations complement the information.  This book and its quotes will most likely show up in a future post.


1.  Richard Power - The Echo Maker
Yet author I'd never heard of is the creator of the most amazing thing I read all year.  In a small town in central Nebraska, a young man suffers a head trauma in a highway accident and emerges with Capgras syndrome, the belief that what he perceives is not the authentic world, but that every object and every person in his life has been secretly replaced with a duplicate.  His older sister and a circle of other caregivers converge on the scene, confronting troubled family history and inner demons of their own.   Everyone in the central circle of characters deeply re-evaluates her/himself over the story's course.  Every character exasperated me at some point, and a few redeemed themselves.  Some change dramatically and others face their inability to change.  This book was one incredible mind-trip, as well as a lovely homage to the Platte River landscape and its migrating sandhill crane population. But the language of the story is what stole my heart, with its shifting points of view, and particularly the trippy, disjointed attempts to capture the fractured thoughts of the man recovering from brain injury (first two quotes that follow). 

"A flock of birds, each one burning.  Stars swoop down to bullets.  Hot red specks take flesh, nest there, a body part, part body.
Lasts forever:  no change to measure."

"So he says nothing.  Some things say him."

"Damage had somehow unblocked him, removing the mental categories that interfered with truly seeing.  Assumption no longer smoothed out observation.  Every glance now produced its own landscape."

Here is a statement from the author about his intent for the book:
"[The] aim in The Echo Maker is to put forward, at the same time, a glimpse of the solid, continuous, stable, perfect story we try to fashion about the world and about ourselves, while at the same time to lift the rug and glimpse the amorphous, improvised, messy, crack-strewn, gaping thing underneath all that narration. To this end, my technique was what some scholars of narrative have called double voicing. Every section of the book (until a few passages at the end) is so closely focalized through Mark, Karin, or Weber that even the narration of material event is voiced entirely through their cognitive process: the world is nothing more than what these sensibilities assemble, without any appeal to outside authority."


Should you see theme or themes in this list...you'd be correct.  But I repeat, I didn't go looking along any theme.  Life sends what I need.  A day at a time and a book at a time.

what she needed (to hear)

"I know it's been years (she says), but I am still so full of anger at him.   That he just walked out of it.  That he walked out of it with everything:  the house, all the money, the good credit, the security.  Never once apologizing, never once taking responsibility for any of it.  Even though life is so good now, that anger is still alive."

I hear her loud and clear.  We have this battle in common.  But she's talking about a 10-year marriage.  My situation lasted a year (and that was too long, by several months).  I can't imagine what forgiving must be like for her.  Except that we have this in common too:  we gave it everything we had.  And far more than we had.  Time, energy, communication, money, sacrifice, support, good faith.  We gave heart, soul, mind, body.  And we came out of it looking a lot like...skeletons.  Psychically, at least. 

I'm resisting that urge to speak too quick, from my own experience instead of from patient empathy.  But something surfaces, and it seems worth sharing.  "What I came to, finally, was only this," I tell her.  "Yes, I would so like not to have given all of that to a person so uncaring and self-absorbed.  To someone who only took, while continuously asking for more and criticizing whenever I expressed a need.  And then spoke and acted like it was all no more than he had a right to.  Yeah, I'm still angry too.  All I've found to answer it with is this:  I am happy that I was the generous, kind, and open-hearted person that I appreciate me for being.  That at least I was consistent with myself.  And that I'm (somehow) still that person now."

She stares at me for a moment.  Then she shakes her head a little bit and says, "You know, after trying to put it into words all night long, I just heard you say exactly what I needed to hear.  Thank you."

And I wasn't expecting it, but those were some of the words that I needed to hear, too...

quotes: Louise Erdrich

from a much-admired author:

"It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That’s how one has to write anyway—in secret."

"When it comes to God, I cherish doubt."

"When I can’t end a story, I usually find that I’ve actually written past the ending. The trick of course is to go back and decide where the last line hits."

"By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive... People sometimes ask me, Did you really have these experiences? I laugh, Are you crazy? I’d be dead. I’d be dead fifty times. I don’t write directly from my own experience so much as an emotional understanding of it."

[on her business, Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis]  "People need bookstores and need other readers. We need the intimate communication with others who love books. We don’t really think we do, because of the ease that the Internet has introduced, but we still need the physical world more than we know. Little bookstores are community services, not profitable business enterprises. Books are just too inexpensive online and there are too many of them, so a physical bookstore has to offer something different. Perhaps little bookstores will attain nonprofit status. Maybe one fine day the government will subsidize them, so they can thrive as nonprofit entities. Some very clever bookstore, probably not us, is going to manage to do that and become the paradigm for the rest."

(Louise Erdrich, interviewed in Paris Review, "The Art of Fiction #208, winter 2010)

hard to be poor

Just heard from my cousin Sam, who landed last week in Costa Rica.  He's the artist-in-residence this month at a young community called Choza del Mundo, in the high-altidude jungle-forest not too far outside the country's capital.  In his response to his new surroundings -- fresh food, simple and functional architecture, courteous and friendly human interactions -- he seems to be having an experience similar to mine in Mexico:  just a day or two outside the overdone, hyperstressed artifice of this country, and you wake up to how much the rest of the world makes sense.  Community and culture and even commerce on a human scale are surprising to a degree that's lamentable, for their being so natural. 

Sam writes that while many people back home would call the circumstances that he's seeing "poverty", he recognizes, right away, that "it's really sustainability... and they realize that here."  Choices are practical, efficient and within the range of needs rather than wants.  And, since most people even in the cities are able to grow their own food, "it is hard to be poor".

What a fine phrase, that.  Hard to be poor.  While plenty of us are aware of poverty's existence and its concomitant suffering -- elsewhere and even in this country -- it has another face that far too few of us consider.  As a matter entirely apart from the deep need for social and economic justice worldwide, poverty does have its chosen form.  And living with less by intention is itself another country, as foreign to this dying-of-consumption society as would be a land beyond an artificially calculated political border.  But many of us who have made even initial explorations into that way of being find it difficult to go back to former pursuits of citizenship among the "wealthy".  And, though we still may struggle, it becomes hard to count ourselves among the poor when our eyes are opened to the wealth of possibilities that a conscious, creative and careful path presents.

I've tried several times before to write about poverty's other, chosen face; it often defies words.  Or perhaps it defies us, as at-all-awakened humans, to invent and refine better words for it. Some have begun to use "simplicity" in this sense, which works at times and at others is misleading (or at least, relative).  "Sustainability" certainly conveys its essence, though it may have lost some of its potency to its buzzword status.  "Precarity" is one of the best terms that I know, partly because the word itself is unfamiliar.  Appropriately opening windows onto a mostly-unrecognized way to see, and be.

In fact, just the effort to find an online dictionary or other source that even recognizes the word convince me that it merits a post all its own.  Another day.  I'm going to leave this thought-thread dangling once again.  And for the moment, let go the greater human concerns, and just offer a couple of my own reasons why -- living now in a small, very contained, landless room/space -- it's pretty hard for me to be poor.

 

the migrant workers' church

[If dreams would write more stories for me, I could become very...happy.  Well.  Something to hope for.  One of these days when I remember how to sleep consistently again.
As well as to the dreamtime, my thanks also go to my friends in the Catholic Worker movement, for 80 years of reinventing and revitalizing the word "church".  Not a positive connotation there for many, I'm well aware.  But through CWs' dedication to solidarity-through-poverty, radical personalist community, tireless labor for peace and justice, and joyfully anarchistic creativity, many of us have experienced something authentic and vibrant in this word (as well as many others in its realm of meaning), much more of life-affirming essence than a system or an institution.  Or a piece of architecture.]


*******
Passing by Chiara's desk on the way to the kitchen, I catch sight of a familiar image on her monitor.  There's no way I'd forget that solid shape, though I haven't seen it in a while.  It's the Migrant Workers' Church.  Why's my roommate looking at this?  Religion's not her field.  Maybe an art history project.  It is an artistic edifice, though it's more than that...

I lean in for a closer look.  A complex quadrilateral of rough, honey-colored sandstone fills the view, filigreed with rainbows of delicate stained-glass.  The building is a living metaphor of light-suffused shelter.  I always admired the balance of fragility and strength in its features. Something is making it hard to see the contours, however:  squinting at the miniature image, I observe that most of its facade is covered by a scaffold.  Tiny men move along the wooden frame, engaged in careful preservative restorations of the ancient stone surface.  It's a live view, I realize with a little shock.  I've heard about these new virtual systems, but this is the first time I've seen one in operation.  They're supposed to have made some serious advances in the technology, in the last few years.  Just like being there, they say.  I angle my face closer to the flatscreen --hesitantly, as it almost feels like I'm going where I don't belong -- then, suddenly, I'm there.  Gliding around the church's walls, diagonalling across one sturdy buttress, rising toward a view of the horizon on the other side.  At first I don't want to look up:  a sense midway between dread and anticipation fills me.  Always been a bit wary of this technological mind-trip.  But I can't resist.  Knowing that the system's navigational controls are inside me now ("inside" "me", whatever both of those words mean in a virtual field), I simply think "left", and the scene swivels round, and a deep, sheltered valley opens below me.  Boundaries and reservations melt away.  Fearless and free, birdlike, I bank and dive over coral-rosy cliffs of volcanic tuff, into what appears to be an ancient caldera. 

The church had perched right on this cliff-verge, looking as if it had been there for a century or two.  But the settlement in this circular earth-hollow is obviously much older.  Modest wooden houses, in various stages of quiet dilapidation, dot the slopes.  Horses and cattle wander, grazing.  A man plows his milpa with a donkey.  Stunted trees of a brilliant green contrast with the cliffs, which curve round and shade from orange to dove-grey to lavender.  Swallows wheel across the vertical faces in soft slanting light.

Clarity of vision I was expecting.  But this is something a little beyond virtual.  If this is only technology at work, its designers seem to have progressed far beyond the old days of GoogleEarth.  I can feel a warm afternoon breeze on my skin.  Breathe the scent of woodsmoke from the small houses below.  The clarity of light and color is too intense for a virtual app, and too lovely.  Is this really a program? 

And the subtle prescience of this place's story is an altogether unexpected addition.  As easily as turning to gaze from east to west across this peaceful scene, an interior shifting reveals knowledge I couldn't have possessed on my own.  Peace didn't always rest on this valley.  In a past not too distant, guerilla wars threatened the homes and lives of these families who quietly labored for no more than subsistence.  Men wresting power by corruption and violence gave no heed to the wishes of those not living by the sword.  Governments neither recognized nor cared.  In their moment of greatest threat, perhaps on some plane as subtle as that of my present knowing, the people reached out for relief.  And the church came.  Not the "organized" institution, not a hierarchical system of authority.  Not even a group of people.  But a living, sentient benevolence, for purely practical reasons expressing itself in a visible structure solid enough to offer sanctuary.   Perhaps an expression recognizable to those with whom it would temporarily share that space.  Probably different in other instances of manifestation.  Solidarity and shelter in tangible form, surrounding peace and light and refuge for those who struggle.  No more, and no less.


Chiara walks into the study, and abruptly, without warning, I'm back in the room with her.  Trying to slow my breath, shake off the vertigo, let eyes readjust to present limitations.  "Hey, where's the Migrant Workers' Church located?" I ask her in what I hope is an offhand tone.  "Oh", she replies, distracted by the contents of a file drawer.  "L.A." 

But it's not.  Not this time, anyway.