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.