un sueño océano

"SE PUEDE CUMPLIR, POR UNO PARECIDO A TI, PERO UNO QUE NO ES TU'".

Esta es la respuesta críptica que recibimos del Oracle, cuando finalmente buscamos su ayuda. "Nosotros" (en este historia-sueño) somos un equipo de expertos de la primera clase (científicos del nivel mas alto, sino también algo así como canalizadores o empáticos: curadores). Nuestra tarea es sanar las aguas de este mar, en cuyo borde vivimos. Algo está fuera de balance en sus aguas, y toda la vida en ella está sufriendo, y gran parte de ella se está muriendo. Uno del equipo ya ha pasado horas de buceo, explorar, la ejecución de pruebas, pero no puede sondear lo que debe hacer. El Oracle que consultamos es nuestra fuente confiable de la sabiduría, de la autoridad, de saber. Es una parte sistema informático de alta tecnología, y otra parte voz antigua. O tal vez, es voz antigua, y la accesamos (o traducimos?) por medio de una interfaz computadora de alta tecnología. Vemos las pantallas multicolores centelleantes, mientras sus escaneares de los bancos de datos se ejecutan a través de todas las respuestas posibles a nuestro problema, y ​​se reducen al fin en una sola imagen: una tortuga del mar. Estamos todos asombrados. Esperábamos algo más complejo. Pero vemos una sombra de semejanza: esta criatura es como nosotros, pero es otra. Reconocemos en ella algo de similitud física - una criatura que respira, camina, y nada - y esto mucho mejor que nosotros, porque se hace para el océano. Pero también percibimos un parentesco en su inteligencia, en su conciencia.

Salimos desde los computadores, dirigimos de nuevo a la orilla, y encontramos un nido de huevos de tortuga. Hay por lo menos un centenar de ellos. Tomamos uno de la parte superior (es anormalmente grande, como un huevo de avestruz). Decidimos que la necesidad es tan grande que vamos a intervenir: damos la cáscara un golpe muy ligera, sólo para agrietarla, para acelerar su eclosión. Esto me molesta, incluso en el sueño. Pero la conciencia de la necesidad inminente de toda la vida que nos rodea me deja con la esperanza de que seremos perdonados, en el gran esquema de las cosas. La tortuga emerge casi inmediatamente. Es más grande incluso que era el huevo, aproximadamente 20 centimetros de ancho, y un verde oliva, casi transparente, gomoso. Él es consciente de su misión: Lo veo en la mirada sombrío y sabio que me da desde ojos oscuros, tan sólo unos tonos más profundos que las profundidades verde-marrón-oro del agua a nuestros pies. El agua esta profunda, una  caída directamente desde la orilla rocosa donde nos encontramos, así que lo pongo en mi pie para un lugar de partida. Mientras se posa allí por un momento, me siento un solo latido de su corazón a través de mi zapato, mucho más fuerte que lo que hubiera imaginado a partir de una criatura pequeña. Luego se sumerge en el agua, que está lleno de remolinos de colores como un ágata oscuro, y se ha ido. Encontrará nuestras respuestas, y nos ayudará a lograr la curación que nuestro mundo debe tener.

Los interpretaciones de los sueños siempre permiten espacio para múltiples niveles de entendimiento. Así como la posibilidad de ver cada ser en el sueño como un aspecto del yo. Un enfoque que nunca me deja de fascinar.

Al nivel personal: este sueño expresa mi gratitud por el "equipo" de personas excelentes que son parte de mi vida en este momento. Cuyo bienvenida, aceptación, y colaboración en varios frentes que me está ayudando a formar la curación mi alma busca. Quiénes me recuerdan a diversos aspectos de mí mismo con los cuales tengo que estar conectada. Que son como yo, y tan maravillosamente a diferencia de mí. Quiénes me avisen: la tarea es desalentadora, pero se puede hacer.

A lo colectivo: seguramente nosotros todos necesitamos el aporte y la pericia de uno al otro. Seguramente estamos todos los expertos con nuestras limitaciones, los buscadores desconcertados, y los curadores competentes, a la vez. Seguramente somos la interfaz de complejidad infinita, que transmite la voz del Oráculo. Y sin duda, somos el océano luchando, sufriendo, esperando ...

markets and wanting

Feet are tripping over centuries-old cobblestones.  Mind is tripping on centuries-deep forest humus, 1500 miles away in New Mexico, under wind-kissed pines by a whitewater snowmelt river. Here, head floats caught in clouds of five hundred years of chaos and conflict and deep (often tragic) history.  There, heart remembers empty mesas, miles-wide empty skies, bluegrass at sundown and everybody dressed in muddy Carharts and workboots. But here, now, it's Converse and skinny jeans and serious, street-level stares. And no stopping the flow of motion in Mexico, D.F., ombligo del universo.  Bellybutton of the universe, I love how they call this crazy city.

Senses, here, for now, are beseiged at every level. Exhaust. Open sewers. Sweaty feet that have walked many miles today. Tacos al pastor, uncovered food within reach of the sidewalk.  Rain on soot, with more soot sifting down at every moment.

Taxi horns.  Eternal traffic.  Market vendor music.  Probably banda or cumbia.  Somebody's voice on a loudspeaker, climbing above the other noise, stretching for one more sale today.  Grey-stone-brown. Red and green. Ficus emerald. Studded with raindrops.  Tiny bluesky patches sometimes seen overhead between the passing clouds, if you look quick enough.

These streets are so hard.  But the air is so very soft.  And the sidewalks will trip you, every chance they get, every time you let the soft sky distract you.  And that's to say nothing of what the beautiful people on the sidewalks will do to you.  Lovely long-haired gypsy man five years ago who snared me for 10 minutes with a very sincere, "Buenas tardes señorita.  What beautiful eyes you have..."  and yes, I bought a pair of handmade earrings from him.  That's the clever way business is done there.

Do we ever just want to be where we already are? Quiet and content, at home?

I've been at home, as much as I ever am at home, by that mountain river for a month now. How is it then, that a sentence like this one zaps me immediately back there...
"Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes, and history was always just like today, full of markets and wanting."

Markets and wanting.  If that doesn't sum it up. Travel alone, a soul on the search, in Mexico.

What's wanting's object?  What am I in the market for, still, yet?

Maybe next time, my fifth trip there, I'll find an answer for that question.

drop the map

"During life transitions, the obscuring stories break down and what's missing in life becomes clearer."

"To exit [the old story], we are going to have to drop the map and look around."

"Returning to essence, we regain the ability to act from essence.  Returning to the space between stories, we can choose from freedom and not from habit."

-- Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible


Can we start any journey without a mental map of it drawn out, already held tight in the hand?  Not just where, but when and what and how, all presupposed?  I keep thinking about my friend Ted, years ago in Santa Fe, a fearless Sagittarian idealist and explorer.  He told me about a road trip he and his brother took where, at the beginning, they made this agreement:  we'll take three left turns, two rights, and another left, and the place where we end up is where we'll camp.  He said they found some pretty amazing campsites that way.  I thought it was a great idea.  But at the same time, I had to ask, what if the road that went left at that second-to-last right turn was the one that called out to you with something more?

It's happened.  I could write volumes on the worlds that opened up because of those last-minute route changes.  As well as entire parallel lives that flew over and were gone in a glimpse, in the moment of not making them.  Surely all of us who have travelled could.

I just spent two weeks in a town that had never been a so much as a mark on mind's or imagination's maps.  It was an unexpectedly useful experience.  Imagination would have steered me a bit further south or east, homing in on the Rockies' deep music of rain, wind through pines, and whitewater rivers.  Mind endorsed the northeasterly drive, where a greater concentration of farms offered work-trades, and one in particular held out the kind of offer that has long entailed a bold typeface on the map.  But an actual look at that place showed it empty of the elements of place and potential I needed to find there. Montrose, Colorado turned out to be where the story was taking me in this chapter. Once I let the story disentangle itself from all the lovely tales of other lives that, at least for now, are not part of this trip.

Those obscuring stories, as it turns out, can be quite beautiful.  A few of them have kept me moving most of my life.  Literally.  Going in circles, maybe.  Like the one that has me living out life in a sweet Colorado mountain town, one of those tiny places with one main street that closes up at sundown, and locals who all drive muddy Toyota 4x4s, and no tourists except those who honor the wild country like it deserves.  Montrose is not that town.   It sits on a flat plain, surrounded by farms, the mountains just visible on a hazy horizon to the south. Two weeks' closer look gives it a spot more toward the middle of the spectrum of places lived:  not the traditional extreme of Carlsbad, where I went to high school, though its one-street brick downtown brings that sad place to mind.  And not the sensory-overload nonstop party of Portland or Boulder, either.  Which -- the surprising part -- is a very good thing.  There's room to listen to the moment here.  To honor the needs of body and spirit, when they're not pulled in so many simultaneous directions by need and want and distraction.  To just spend the afternoon on a long bike ride along the river, and maybe helping a neighbor clean their yard or build a chicken coop.  To catch up on a few good books, and get acquainted with the small but inspiring efforts of local nonprofits, and trade work on a farm for food and some excellent stories. To consider choices made out of deep listening to the soul, rather than coerced by outward and momentary necessity. These two weeks have been a right turn in the road worth taking.

Worth, it most of all, for the space that unmet expectations turn out to leave.  The kind of space in which essential things speak in the only, quiet voice which they have, and are finally heard.  Through unstructured time.  Through sleep and dreams.  Through hands in the soil.  Through three deer at twilight, just off the bike path, gifting me with a long look and a slow, fearless walk in the other direction.

Drop the map.  Maybe a gesture of exasperation.  Perhaps of surrender.  Maybe a gust of wind picks it up and carries it a few yards to the west, and when you run to grab it, you look up, and finally see the bend in the road that you want to be following.  Or even this:  the wind vaults it up and away from you, off over a mesa, and sensation returns to the feet that stand, still, on earth's surface. Connected with guidance enough.

transition2

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” --  Leo Tolstoy

Here's one way (of many I could mention) that Transition Lab is already a success story in my book, though the program -- and my acquaintance with it -- are still young.  Six days ago, I arrived in a town where I'd never spent more than the few minutes it took to drive through on the way to someplace else.  I didn't know anybody.  I had no job, very little money, and no local information other than the address of the best local coffee shop I'd looked up online, which turned out to have gone out of business.  If I'd had nothing more than first impressions to go on (see previous post), I'd probably have kept right on driving.  But I did have two points of contact, thanks to an email a few weeks earlier to the founder of the TL program.  Today, after less than a week here, I have a peaceful place to live, meaningful work, food and basic needs met with very simple effort.  Two people I'd cautiously (since that's how us introverts are) call friends, who offer daily stimulating conversations and a fast track to the well-connected local's perspective.  The acquaintance of a dozen people engaged in creating community together, and more chances to be social and share fun projects than I can fit on my calendar. In other places, an introvert like me took a year or two to connect with all of that.  Here, these pieces were already in place, and the door was standing open.

When Transition Lab links with the participation of Time Bank of the Rockies, a whole new set of possibilities opens up.  "Extras" often out of reach to a struggling worker -- natural healthcare, massages, yoga classes, lessons in various new skills -- become simply a matter of deciding where to spend a little time offering something that helps another person out.  And the freedom from chasing rent, provided by Transition's "skilled resident" exchange,  makes that time another form of abundance within reach.  In the space of a few days, then, I've moved from being a worker in survival mode, with barely the energy for self-preservation, to an available and empowered member of a community full of choices regarding "quality of life".  And this power comes not only from such tangible benefits as mentioned above, but from a rapid integration into a larger circle of acquaintance, and a point of connection with their goals and projects within a context of mutual support. When I think of the time, energy, and emotion I and many others have spent just reaching the basics, while our talents, ideas, enthusiasm, and desire to share go to waste, I grieve that loss.  Which is the community's loss as well as ours.  But of course, I have to also celebrate its potential recovery, in such a network as is being created here.  When I imagine what could be done, for givers like me and our chosen communities, if our first meeting occurred on such terms of ease and empowerment...it becomes a life entirely different than the one of separate struggle which I've lived for the last twenty years.  When I relive the too-familiar story of the stranger arriving in town, but find that stranger not only welcomed but immediately engaged in the valuable work at hand, her particular hopes and strengths connected with met needs...well, that's a story with an entirely new plot.

And on the subject of empowerment, I can't recommend enough the experience of thinking, planning, and feeling in terms of time and barter instead of money.  Everyone should get a chance at this.  And could, with the simple actions that would put these structures in place in more communities.  Timebanking is definitely not a one-for-one transaction.   My previous understanding was that an hour of a service I could essentially live without was probably not worth an hour of "my" (meaning my earning potential's) precious time.  But the possibility set quickly gets bigger than that -- and a lot more fun.  A participant is quickly reminded of the more subtle wealth of connection and support, elsewhere termed "social capital", found in an active network of neighbors and friends.  The positive feedback loop that meaningful work, mutual support and fun create is an exponential, rather than a linear, formula for satisfaction.  And the disruption of society's regular story of competition, scarcity and separateness creates a space in which entire new stories can be written.  The kind we mostly just dream about, so far. 

Some of these concepts will take a little longer for people to grasp.  Some, when seen and enacted in the tangible, are immediately within reach.  And those of us for whom journey, community, and dream are already part of one and the same long narrative...we understand, at once.  This is a story we're more than ready to help write.

transition

I arrived here two days ago, bringing little knowledge of what to expect, to participate in a fairly unique human experiment. 'Here' is Montrose, Colorado. A new place on my travel log: I'd passed through once, on some other roadtrip, but without stopping. This town isn't a place I'd normally consider stopping. Coming in from the south, the mountain-loving traveller (already mourning the San Juans receding in the rearview) is met with trophy vacation homes waving American flags, large conventional fields of alfalfa and corn, and a gauntlet of big-box stores giving way to a traditional brick downtown district. An hour's scouting shows none of the signs of life that normally open this heart to a new city: a co-op, a lively central plaza, an active art or music or poetry scene, coffee shops with scuffed furniture and a free-book shelf. A white SUV pulls up next to me at a red light with a bumper sticker that reads "I don't trust the liberal media!" I'm not due to meet my hosts until 4 p.m., and am starting to wonder what I'm doing here.

Transition Lab found its way onto my computer screen a couple years ago, a definite sign of life. The project's founder, Russell Evans, offers an original and welcome premise: how much more fully could we be community and be ourselves, if we significantly reduced the pressures with which our normal social and economic paradigm weights us down? What if, instead of the ruthless individual struggle that leaves many of us shearing off dreams one by one in the desperate effort just to feed and house ourselves, we suddenly had a place to live, and could focus on more important goals? What if, rather than sacrifice all thoughts of meaningful projects or community involvement in order to have a career and make the mortgage, we found the extra space in our homes shared by an energetic co-conspirator, ready to help us fill in those neglected efforts? What if, having removed these very tangible blocks to creativity and vitality, we found whole new rooms of ourselves available to inhabit? How might we all breathe deep, stretch cramped muscles, and advance our gifts, skills, and hearts' desires to the next level?

These are the questions that Transition Lab attempts to answer, in ways that are refreshingly immediate, practical, and essential (as in, they get to the heart of the matter). It does so first by removing economic obstacles, as described above, and then by speeding up the process of learning, connection, and mutual support -- the avenues to those goals and gifts -- through a solid network of creative barter and educational opportunity. It's a surprisingly simple model, in essence. One that almost any city could follow -- since, as Russell points out, almost any city has homeowners with a spare room and too little spare time, and workers whose time and work would be vastly better spent outside of pure survival concerns. At the same time, it's really kind of a wonder that it's happening, of all places, here. Other, more overtly progressive communities might make more obvious the pleasant, shared escape routes from the capitalist-individualist paradigm. Portland's City Repair, or the vibrant farmer and artisan markets there and in Eugene, Boulder, Santa Fe. The lovely cohousing developments in those and other towns, available to those who can afford them.  Even Albuquerque, in the last year, has gifted its citizens with the Railyards and a Free Market downtown. Across this country, towns seem to divide pretty cleanly between forward-thinking and right-brained expressions, and, well, the opposite. Between those willing to try new (even risky) ideas in the hope of improving the quality of life for all present, and those that seem content, collectively, to tough it out in the same old, separate struggle. And, often, as well, in the same old divides of income and "quality of life" which prevent real community -- a diversity of people with room to breathe and move into self-expression and mutual support -- from ever having a chance.


But as Russell told me yesterday, "I'm doing it here, because if it can work here, it can work anywhere". And it does seem to be working. I arrived to a most pleasant welcome from people I'd never met, in a town where I didn't know anyone. That in itself is a departure from the regular script, when one thinks of energies spent just getting situated in a new place, around finding a home and meeting people. I was shown my room in the home of the president of the local Time Bank, for which I'll trade 10 hours a week on projects she wants help with. Some of my hours may even be transferable to the timebank back home. I'll spend another 20 helping out with what Russell's doing, and being introduced to more faces of the community and of this effort. Yesterday, this involved working all morning at a 40-year-old organic farm, and taking home a half share of beautiful produce. This afternoon my host and I will help an older woman build a chicken coop. From the look of things so far, in stimulating conversations with both my hosts, I'll also get to help voice the useful questions, valid frustrations, and little insights that will continue to give shape and direction to the program.


Transition Lab is only a few years old, and is still taking shape and, hopefully, growing into its potential. There's an extended program every summer that offers an even more engaging foray into the ideas mentioned above, and looks like it could really get interesting in the shifts and openings that it might invite its participants into. I hope to hear of these worthy ideas sprouting up in other communities, from the seeds planted in this unlikely place. See more at http://transition-lab.com.

quote: know

"For the first time I ceased hovering over the earth where I had only landed from time to time to taste and try a flavor of neighborhood or of race, of person, place or thing...I will always be trying to penetrate into the mysterious varieties of human nature, though with perhaps a different motive.  Self-preservation had been the greatest need, and what I had called love the tool to draw out of the human material at hand the various mysterious savors of life.  In order to lose the sense of death and isolation that was my solitary mode of being, how often I had flung myself into fictitious relationships in order to escape the conviction that I was nothing in myself!  I had called it love, when at its best it had been a certain chemical magnetism motivated by curiosity, the curiosity of the damned seeking the chance of salvation.  This combination of magnetism and curiosity was a potent one.  It had enabled me to know and understand people.  It had been a kind of searchlight fastened on my head as I groped through a dark world.  Whereas a person like Andrew concentrates upon an idea, or on an occupation like collecting or painting, all his attention upon it until every secret part of it is revealed to him, so I had done with people and always will, I suppose, though much blame has been put upon me for it at one time and another, and still is sometimes now.  Never mind.  Never mind the blame and the shame, the hurts and the regrets, the burned fingers and the angry looks.  I know what I know.  I know what it cost us all and I know what it has been worth." 

-- Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert

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.