camping out

A few thoughts on leave-no-trace car camping in the city...which is to say, if it's successful, nobody will know you were there. Or even that you're there now, as they walk right by your window. This is what seems to work for me anyway, in several cities now.

- Choose a street in the middle ground. A neighborhood too upscale, and people will feel that proprietary need to know what you're doing on "their" section of the public street space. Too much of a working neighborhood, and you might be crossing paths with ones coming in from the night shift, or leaving for the super-early shift. Or, they might just not have enough room to park their own cars, and you might prove to be unwanted competition for limited space. A mid-range street might have people living just comfortably enough to tune out what's going on past their front door. Although you have to watch out for early morning dog-walkers: those dogs will sniff you out, curious like they are (they can't help it), and let their owners know something's up. I don't know if their owners would have a problem with an un-placed person on their street or not. I've never had any direct encounters with people yet. The goal is simply to be as invisible, as unobtrusive as possible. The goal is simply to get a quiet night's sleep.

- Choose a point in liminal space. On property lines: a section of wall or fence bridging the open space between two yards. By an arroyo or drainage canal between houses. A vacant space not built up yet. That way nobody needs to question why you're in "their" yard. Or, find something even more un-claimable. One of my favorite spots around here was outside a school fence. Until I realized I was gonna have to get up at 7:30 every day, to be out before the kids and the buses started arriving.

- Think about what's going to happen in your space throughout the night. Once I thought I had an ideal spot - deserted street, middle neighborhood, by a fence backing up to a store that was closed for the night. Then, at 5 in the morning the semis started pulling up with the day's freight and that was it for sleep. Another of the goals is not to have to be migratory throughout the dark hours.

- Park under a tree if you can. Shelter from morning sun's heat if it's summer, or from unexpected rain or snowstorms if it's winter or spring. Good company, either way. Good to have an ally.

- Carry just enough extra blankets, boxes, bags, or random items in the camper to arrange as if deliberately. That way any curious passerby who looks in won't see a sleeping body, but just a big pile of stuff.

- Bungees are a must-have item. I use them for curtain rods, clotheslines, a lock (of sorts) for my camper door.

- Put as many of the morning's new clothes inside the sleeping bag with you, to absorb body heat. Anyone who's been a backpacker knows this already. Or, if you like, hang them out on your bungee-clothesline. A nice fresh set of 30-degree underwear can be as effective for waking up quick as a cuppa coffee, at that...

- Be ready for absolutely any view through the camper windows, when you sit up in the first light. It will quite possibly be a different world than the one you fell asleep to. I woke up to snow this morning. Just when I was thinking, about time it warmed up a little, after the deep-freeze chill of 4 a.m.

- Thank any spirits of the place where you slept for their hospitality, and maybe for their protection. Because hospitality and protection both are always to be found. Whether from people, or just from the moment and the place. This is the traveller's blessing. It has always, in every in-between place, been mine.

more Nirvana

More from _Motel Nirvana_:
"Some New Age types even imagine that vision quests, sweat lodges, drumming and dancing ceremonies are rituals specifically designed to be psychotherapeutic. I never once saw, heard, or read any indication [in her months travelling the Southwest] that New Agers have grasped the possibility that Native American spirituality, or any other set of ritual behaviors, including their own, furnishes a community in a particular environment with metaphors for shared communal meanings...The narratives of our prosperous, materialist society are no longer spiritual; they do not describe mythological archetypes but psychological truths, elements not of a greater transcendent reality, but of the human condition, the here and now."

Time for work already. More news and commentary at 11.

geography for the soul

The book _Motel Nirvana_ came up in a conversation recently, and I had to get it out again to look for the lines I was trying to quote from it. I think this was one of them. Melanie McGrath, the author, impressed me the first time with her grasp of the inner trips that the desert and its people can take each other on. At this reading, it also fits because I'm moving across my little stretch of the desert once again, finding home in a new old place - Albuquerque's South Valley. A place that certainly has its trip to work on me...

"I have heard it said that people who live in a series of different landscapes or in a series of different cultures are in search of their soul's home...a new environment is not so much a fresh and transcendent geography for the soul as an instrument with which to change the personality. I have proved this to myself by standing on the plain and turning to face the four compass points. At each turn, nature makes a new relationship to both itself and the viewer. Even if that newness seems only to be a different pattern of rock and sky, the scape is irrefutably altered and the brain forced to compensate. One is on the plain still, but at one's feet and eye-line are five quite separate worlds. Each transmutes the personality, however slightly..."

My question was going to be, if travellers to strange new lands are in search of their soul's home, then what are travellers who come back to old homegrounds doing? But this is all the same journey. We can visit strange new lands not for the first time. Like she points out, it's so much about the perspective, and the openness to being altered. But it's also the recognition of what the land is up to - what the earth itself is doing, and has been doing in a place since we were gone. For me, in each direction that I turn, the Valley is making a place for me, a place that might not have been there just six months ago. And I will face and give thanks to each facet of it. And be altered, as it offers...

healing fire dream

It's a long, weary journey back home. Nearly uncrossable, this vast empty in-between wildness. All day I battle unseen forces for my painfully slow northward progress. The road's never been so steep and so uphill as it is on this trip. At times it fades off into a narrow, barely visible track, and those of us who accumulate there need a guide to get across. Other times it fades away altogether, and we go jarring over the earth's bare bones, teeth gritted with apologies and impatience and dust.

At last I reach my destination, but there's still so much work to do. So many people are waiting for the sustenance only I can bring them. I drain myself to the dregs of strength and of determination. I can't slow this frantic motion: it's written into the internal program now. My body runs by itself on gasoline fumes and exhausted, essential momentum. Just when the muscles are making their last desperate, shaky demands - stop now or we'll stop you - it's over. The deep quiet sweeps in again like the ocean, covering all.

My companion sends me a message, from the other side of the chaos: I'm with friends...it's peaceful...you can join us here. Winding through the cold night I fight off nagging negativity: I'm too depleted for people, even friendly ones. I have nothing left to give. But he meets me at the pavement's edge with a brilliant and peaceful smile, and now there are stars glimmering overhead, lighting up the dark. "This way," he says, and suddenly we're at the entrance of not a noisy house but a giant teepee, which glows golden from a fire burning inside. I climb through a doorway that is really much smaller than I can fit through, into a room that is much larger inside than out. In this round space a single young man sits crosslegged. His long dreds are the same color as the fire, and he radiates the same peaceful, unobtrusive warmth. My companion introduces him: he has the same name as that last one who broke my heart. It was two years back but the syllables still shake me for half a moment. Then I see clearer, and realize that this person tending the fire is the essential opposite of that hurtful one. Expression as kind and open as his was searching, cutting, critical. Energy as engaging as his was about separation. We're not in that dimension anymore. Ever.

And then there is my companion, sitting next to me now, absorbing the fire's quiet luminescence into his own. Casting welcome, kindness, and affirmation around me like a fine blanket, hand-woven out of beams of light. His presence is the essential opposite of years of futile, unfocused journeys alone. We have been travelling together for a while, it seems. Weeks, months, more? And following many of the same roads, in parallel planes if not together. Already he knows me - from deep listening, from patient seeing, and quite possibly from reading my mind, if not my soul as well. I am only here, now. There is nothing to fear and nothing to be wearied by, in this place. The flames lap softly at little wood fragments, drinking the energies of trees that once stood in silent celebration, in shadowy forests which my path once wound its way through. They give back just a taste, just a sweet breath of what it is to be one with all that grows and breathes on the earth. Time stops - or, there is no more need for time - or, maybe there never was time. Only now, only the kindness of this stillmoving golden light.

And the most beautiful part of this dream: it all really happened...

Cesar Chavez march

Flew down to Albuquerque on the train Friday night after work, for yesterday's annual procession in honor of Cesar Chavez. An action I needed to take part in, out of respect for my new home in the South Valley. The march began at Sanchez Farms: where, in the truest sense of "demonstration", people are right now joining as various collaborative groups to plant seeds in the earth, and grow food to share. The broad column of people wound up Isleta Boulevard, happily slowing traffic, bringing the neighbors out onto their porches, provoking honks and waves from passing cars and trucks. It headed for the National Hispanic Cultural Center just across the Rio Grande (whose cautious cottonwoods still hold their breaths of green hidden in their waiting bark-muscles). La danza Azteca led the way: we are, after all, following with awareness in the steps of our history here. Then came various community and youth organizers, workers groups, Wobblies. A man on a truckbed tried to lead us in a list of chants. His success was limited by the size of the march (I'd guess around 150 people), and by the fact that, a few rows back, a woman with her own microphone (supported by a guy walking with a generator on his shoulder) was leading chants of her own. One line attempted by both instigators, but at different times, was: "This is what Democracy looks like!" Our mismatched, juxtaposed chanting struck me as annoying, but then as funny, and then as perfect: this IS what Democracy looks like, right? People many and diverse and lively, speaking in their own different voices, all at once and all together. The cacophony became fun at that point, and I walked for a moment celebrating the chaos. But then, even better, the man in the truck invited the woman in back to come up and take his microphone, and lead the chants. Her stronger and more rhythmic voice united the group, almost completely, for the last half mile or so across the Bridge bridge and into the Cultural Center parking lot.

At the Center, a man passed round a petition which I want to share: a request for a national holiday - a PAID holiday, for the workers - on Cesar Chavez' birthday. Here's the link - very quick to sign!
http://www.ufwaction.org/campaign/chavezholiday?
qp_source=web

for Lunasa

who I saw last night, at the Lensic. This doesn't begin to do them justice, or to what the music did for me. Only a shadow of an effort to convey...


For those of us not Irish
but made for that deep cycle of celebration
of elation and of ache
of the highest and of deepest depths
your music helps to set the heart
back in its orbit once again

For those of us not Celtic
who shudder yet when the green world turns
who never learned to drink the pain away
or play it out on some enabling instrument
the sea of sounds in which you wave
can bear those riptides back into healing oceans
an air or reel can turn them round
just as sure as lunar beckoning
moves the visible sea

I am not Irish
in fact I own no culture to speak of
have known as mine no embracing heritage
am not wound around (or wounded)
by ancestral ties or rootpaths
I am a free traveller on this worldsea
but an hour floating on your mellow incandescence
your aquiescence of unmaking and rethreading into Life
finds me in the kinship of the living
with an moment's invitation to the inheritance
of those who yearn and breathe and travel oceans wide
and although it near drowns me with sorrow
deeper than time, deeper almost than my soul can bear
still ever deeper yet I hear and know
a home, a belonging place, in joy

to do list

in any given week...in this week...

catch up on sleep
do the laundry
take the tips to the bank
take a tip from a stranger
quit the pizza business
find sustainable work
release attachments
drop caffeine addiction
regain endorphin addiction
leave room for the magic
find that portal to Portland
take that left turn back to Albuquerque
retrace my steps
watch my feet
walk backwards in my carbon footprints
walk like I have a head full of Irish fiddle tunes *
listen
see the stars and planets outside the blue sky
carry the memory of Colorado from 14,433 feet
get fluent in Spanish
get fluent in English
take back the city for myself tonight *
develop my inherited psychic abilities
breathe green
dream lucid
resist fatalism
be patient
give thanks
pursue the devastation of my separation *
metamorphose the poison into power *
forgive
hesitate in the space between Wonder and Why *
seek wisdom
love unconditionally
get free


(must cite my sources: the lines with a *
I owe, respectively, to Bruce Cockburn, Snow
Patrol, Joan Osborne, Frank Herbert and Rush)