"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.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
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
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.
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.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
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.
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.
Monday, January 21, 2013
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...
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...
Monday, January 14, 2013
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)
"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.
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.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
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.
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.
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