quote: path

"The one who treads the path must be willing to risk the difficulties of the path; to be sincere, faithful, truthful, undoubting, not pessimistic or skeptical, otherwise with all his efforts he will not reach his aim. He must come whole-heartedly, or else he should not come at all....the qualities of the heart are needed, with the divinity of love as a first principle. Then one needs action, such action as will not hinder on the path of truth, such action as creates greater and greater harmony. And finally one needs repose, which makes it possible to learn by one day of silence what would otherwise take a year of study; if only one knows the real way of silence."
-- Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Inner Life

on the earth

Get off the highway for a minute. Get off the illusion-world's agenda for a space. Get off the clock for a few degrees of sun's arc through lapis sky.

Listen to the conversation between wind and ponderosa, until it comes through clearer than all the other conversations in your head. And the conversation mostly consists of this: SSSHHHHHH...

Let the lessons arrive for a minute, instead of constantly seeking them out. Read every science in the life around you. In the chaos, in the fractals, in the perfectly disordered complexity. Hear every hymn in the hum of bees, wildflowers, silence. Every question can be resolved with the variable of YOU entered into the equation of this place. Every. Only, you usually have to show your work. Sometimes lately, that work has been of the hardest kind. Offering. Releasing. Subtracting. Waiting. Accepting. Sometimes it's much more simple: put your feet on the ground and watch resolution arrive.

Sit on the earth, still, supported, till you feel it turning under you once again. Like a passenger riding smooth seas on a sturdy, unsinkable ship. Like graceful flight on a giant bird's back, secure between its wings. Stand your ground with the pines until they remind you how they do it: their feet aren't on the earth, they're in it. Sifting it while it subsists them. Breaking it down, while it holds them up. Branches lifted in constant gratitude to light.

The (most recent) (human) name of this mountain range is Sangre de Cristo. There was a time when I had to concern myself with how different minds processed this name, and all its historical associations. Now, I just try to watch where my own feet are going. And remember that I too am only recent, and human. Locally/colloquially, the mountains are also called "the Sangres". This is easy to grasp. These mountains are my blood. They run through my veins, even when they slip my memory, because of the transfusion of life they gave me 13 years ago. Their generosity helped save my life, when it was hanging by its last most precarious thread of hope. Their unconditional presence gave me back my ground, when I had almost faded out of the physical dimension. Their effortlessly sustained green and their constant calling of the thunder recalled life to my flickering soul. For this I have to come back to them, not often as might be but often enough. To give thanks, yes. To participate in their constant give and take of life, more so.

good work

An acquaintance I met on a farm here in Abq now keeps a blog on her life in Madagascar. She's there to do permaculture and community development with the Peace Corps. Actually, it sounds like she does very simple, personal, and spontaneous work, based on the needs and the limited resources of her village. One line from her most recent post stayed in my attention: she writes that while she likes her community and has much to be grateful for, "it has been hard to identify good work".

It's fascinating to think that a third world country and this one might have a struggle in common: the challenging search for "the good work". Or what, in circles of my acquaintance, finds the name "right livelihood". With all we don't share with the world, with all we here have purportedly secured as a nation, why is it still so very difficult -- even in this country -- for well-intentioned human beings to make satisfying contributions to their society and their own lives? I think about the words of Peter Maurin, one of the founders of the catholic worker movement: his dream was to create a world in which it was "easier for people to be good." A vision we don't seem, individually or collectively, to be nurturing -- or to be able to nurture -- with enough heart. Not enough to go around, anyway.

In the last month I've applied for two jobs here in Abq. Having my fill of less-than-sufficient work over the last decade, I only apply now for positions that are sure to meet the needs of budget and of conscience. Thereby ruling out about 90% of the ads in Albuquerque, which are either soul-numbingly corporate or criminally low-paying, if not both. But there were two last month that could've met those needs. One, a 'farm assistant' for a local nonprofit that links at-risk youth with traditional and progressive agricultural projects. The other, a delivery driver for a local CSA. My cover letter to the first attested to a lifetime around farming and gardening, a 100-hour basic permaculture certificate, a deep admiration for what I know of the organization itself, and my current effort, maintaining a community garden and engaging kids with knowledge of healthy diets and food sources. To the second, I offered an intimate knowledge of the entire metro area with 10 years' professional driving experience, as well as enthusiastic support of their agenda. Neither job ever called.

So this is what I'm wondering: who's my competition for this good work? Who are they calling, if I don't even rate a preliminary contact? I could understand, when I applied last year at a popular nationwide food market opening a new branch in town, that with a rumored 2,000 applicants I didn't stand a chance. But, farm assistant? Really? Are this many good-hearted, simple-living progressive types out of work right now? Is "the economy" really in such bad shape that the general labor category on craigslist has been inundated by a surplus of admin/professionals desperate enough to get their hands dirty? (Or is my resume in even worse shape than I think?) And if there is such a contingent of unemployed "cultural creatives" on the loose, what are they doing all day? What else are they up to during "business hours"? Why don't I hear of their calls for meetings, forums, salons, charettes, free workshops? Or even for more political demonstrations? What are they doing with their time? Are they really finding ways to do the needed work of the world without worrying about how to pay the rent? And what, if they are somehow transcending the practical and the material to engage right livelihood and satisfying activity, is their secret?

Here's my secret, with regard to work: in truth, I don't really care anymore. Last year was the hardest ever, for me, financially and perhaps personally as well. By both measures, I got close enough to zero (below it, at times) to arrive at last at this imminently relieving perspective: ULTIMATELY, IT DOESN'T MATTER. Which is not, for a moment, to speak cynically. It's to speak of release, and the liberation that comes after all else goes. It's to speak about how deep losses refine priorities. And how simplicity finds many paths in to the center (or, by how many paths from the center simplicity finds us). While I would love to give my time and energy to a socially-developing, personally satisfying job, until one decides to give me half a chance I'm pretty happy with pizza. As well as with the work that's my real priority. Which, at every moment, is learning to see, to listen, to reflect the Light. And which, in this moment, is learning to love someone. Not only that, but to accept being loved. To journey into such mysteries as these, such incredibly good and difficult works, I'll gladly give up what little I've still got. Including the need to know how anybody else works it out.

quote: what can I do?

"Probably the most commonly asked question of people just arriving at a deep concern for the ecological crisis is, “What can I, as an individual, do to make things better?” The simple answer, which I learned from living among Zapatista villagers, is nothing. Because we have to stop acting as individuals if we are to survive; the Earth won't be affected by our individual actions, only our collective impact.

The Zapatistas’ slogan, "Para todos todo, para nosotros nada" ("Everything for Everyone, Nothing for Us") rang true in the mid-1990s and still rings true today. But this slogan has a certain mystery. The demand “nothing for us” runs so counter to anything any of us — the resource-hungry individuals of the so-called First World — would ever think of demanding. As the saying goes, no one ever rioted for austerity. Yet, without feeling cheated, we need to build our capacity to live by another old saying: Enough is better than a feast..."

--From "What the Zapatistas Can Teach Us About the Climate Crisis", by Jeff Conant. Entire (excellent) article at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/04-0.

Wow. Surely there are many others who, like me, keep asking "what can I do?", and find their intimidation at the world's state quickly disintegrating into despair. But these words offer something of a new approach to the question. More than that: I think they offer an invitation to a new way of asking the question. I, for one, am in desperate need of an alternative to the futile practice of envisioning how I, personally, can in any way mitigate the actions of BP, the U.S. military, the banking system. I, along with many of willing hearts (but lacking the time and resources to invest in full-time activist work) am in desperate need of something I can do. And in fact, I don't need to protest. I think one thing this world has a surplus of is the stating of the obvious. The NO's seem more than obvious enough already. And the relations between various choirs and preachers already confirmed. What's needed is more room to listen. What's needed is the breathing room in which to begin, at all, to listen to new possibilities.

In this quote I read, not easy answers, but ways to introduce oneself to possibilities. As well as alternate ways to do something in the world. Having enough, and knowing it, is surely something to do in a country whose consumption is so criminally disproportionate to the world's. Accepting nothing, when appropriate -- when, in fact, it liberates -- is doing something profound. (Rioting for austerity, in my personal opinion, could be a beautiful thing, and I like imagining what form that might take). Contributing to a "collective impact" is excellent, and needed where it can be done. But this offers a act preliminary to even that: prior to connecting with the larger network is the upgrading of a personal operating system based on individuality at the expense of all else. Or, to be slightly less critical: individuality, and individual survival, imagined before anything else is imagined.

"Everything for Everyone" doesn't exclude us. It includes us, in a way we've rarely allowed ourselves to imagine. And surely, in a way that our socioeconomic structure, feeding on our sacred life energies as it does, has not permitted us to imagine. What this quote offers to me is an invitation, not to think about invalidating my own wants or needs, but to open up more to the idea of being included. Whatever form, practical or mysterious, that might take in the everyday. I'm not going to specify what that form might be, to myself or to others. Only to pay attention and see what turns up.

stormlight

you spent the night with me again
shared my free and fragile perch
beside another indeterminate road
darkness never really fell
dreamtime made its motion felt
but not its forward pressure
shadows only wheeled, deepened, enlightened by turns
around bluegold opalescent light-diagonals
summer thunderheads were cumulating
over the western mountainsides
and sunflowers the color of monarch butterflies
the glow of undiluted sunlight
profused themselves on all sides
surrounding, taking no sides
complementing the cloudviolet
with a shelter only slightly less impermanent
and exposed than niche of wire mesh fence
we stationed ourselves in

trying to head off the storm again
sincerity and patience admirable
for knowing it would probably fall the same
luminous detachment as commendable in this space
as in daylight's tangle of desire
the only difference, there, necessity
and here at last truly freed from need and time

a struggle elemental as before:
still the gorgeously oppressive sky before it smothers
or distill those heavy stormclouds
and pour out all the life I/you/we deserved
but no, as here: never all cloudcover
and never really clear
no more to make of this lowering and exquisite potential
than of the last promise of abundance passing over
only sun seeking release through insufficient fissures
and your face, for a moment, gilded in stormlight

that laughs at the obstacles

Carne asada grilled outdoors, by an Argentinean. Tinny Tecate from a can that looks way too much like Coca-Cola (the can, not the beer). An embrace, a kiss on the cheek, or a handshake from each person on arriving. None of those noncomittal waves at the room in general, like I'm used to getting by with. I like it so much better - me encanta - the way Spanish-speakers greet each other.

Dinner starts around 11, and this seems nothing out of the ordinary. Our host brings the meat, balanced on a heavy wooden slab, fresh from the grill in the order of our requests: first the rares, then the mediums, last the well-dones. A dozen small courtesies at the table, that I never learned as a child but wish I had. Half a dozen dirty jokes, of which I understand all but the punchline (and, for the most part, wish I hadn't). Jokes that make their object the indigenous country person or the status-seeking city-dweller, or the particular South American nationality of whoever sits next to the speaker. If other topics lag, there's rapid-fire commentary on soccer, for which ardor does not seem to abate with the end of the World Cup. Somebody asserts, "You don't have to know soccer to be a commentator. You just have to know how to talk."

I didn't come here expecting to be at the center of the conversation. To say the least. But it's fascinating: much the same dynamic appears that I encounter at English-speaking parties. What I find is that I really don't know how to connect with the greater part of the conversation. And not for language, but for diversity of life experiences. For lack of pop-culture education or recent TV viewing. For dislike of raising my voice across a yardfull of people. But it all becomes the same workable challenge: navigate the mostly unfamiliar waters with an accepting grace, with a dash of ironic detachment, with genuine appreciation for the inexplicability of other human beings.

And, just as in English, one or two astounding conversations may surface from the static, tuning in like surprise radio stations out on the late-night highway. This night brings two such gifts. One, the life-story of an Ecuadorian who spent 10 years in Amsterdam and New York before settling in Albuquerque with his partner and young son. The other, a Texan who grew up in Spanish-speaking South Texas, but who asserts when somebody labels him chicano, entonces, that he never once heard of the Chicano Movement until his university years. He tells me about a year of digging latrines and building schools with the Peace Corps in Paraguay. Of having missed being witness to the assassination of a vice-president, by only a few city blocks. And of watching a kind and intelligent group of Franciscan nuns, after the coup that removed a corrupt local boss, avoiding death threats and bringing the inspiration of local power back to the people well before the government presence finally arrived in the pueblo.

Somehow, a lovely paradox grows here. Unexpected and welcome as a volunteer flower in my barely-surviving vegetable garden: spending time with people who speak a language different from mine is easing the sting of separation that's lived with me, sad and parasitic, all of my English-speaking life. When factors less essential than the medium of communication seem the obstacles to connection - personal interests, personality types, social class - it's too easy to be distracted, alienated, by what divides on the surface. When the language itself instigates the separation -- a divide that can't possibly be crossed in the space of an evening -- I'm relieved from duty to my anxiety and expectation, to simply enjoy the state of unknowing. Supported, of course, by the kindness of a few translated words here and there. By the knowledge that I am progressing, however slowly, toward that elusive prize of bilinguality. And by the fact that the beautiful fellow traveller who brought me to this gathering has already gifted me with a connection that bridges all of the above. A connection that laughs at the obstacles of language, life experience, expectation, pessimism. That builds bridges in total disregard of reason. That ignores the voices in my head to tell me, You may not understand it all but you are, in fact, understood.

gypsy list

- the dizzy disorientation of waking up alone in a strange bed (not even a bed, a truckbed): a reboot for the mind
- the loveliest slant of new light, anywhere, at 6:30 a.m.: a few of earth's resources still unexhausted
- the edge to early air that makes even the familiar a mystery
- the crazy root-tangle of inscrutable dreamtravels: product of a manageable discomfort, an acceptable level of insecurity, an intentional degree of self-unmaking
- the gratitude for the essentials: water. stretches. public restrooms. that extra hat or pair of socks at 3 a.m. sheltering tree companionship. moments of profoundly unbroken silence. the birds that begin to imagine light at 5. strong coffee on waking. so few needs. in-dependence, for a blessed moment.