drop the map

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

transition2

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

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

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

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

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

transition

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

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

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


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


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

quote: know

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

-- Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert

signs

“All opposites are in reality one thing, not two” – Mark Forstater, _The Tao_

“Reality, as Reality itself, has no opposite” – Neil Douglas Klotz, _The Sufi Book of Life_

“Reality…is ten to the eighth surface-filled polygons a second. “  -- Richard Powers, _Plowing the Dark_

“No, dear, this is the dream.  You’re still in the cell.” – Monty Python skit that all the above quotes brought to mind

You keep walking past signs that you never read, says that quiet voice ever-so-casually from the hypnagogic world, just before it lets me wake.  Now if that isn’t a remark I oughta pay attention to…if only I can remember it long enough to wake up and write it down.  Why can’t those voices give me some kinda advance warning when they’re about to speak?  Countless other times they’ve rivered some profound message my way when I wasn’t close enough to consciousness to catch it, and could only watch it slip silvery away, trout-like, out of mind’s grasp…

And I'm trying to ponder the nature of Reality before I'm fully awake, and so, naturally, I get up thinking of an old Monty Python skit.  A guy is being tortured in a medieval dungeon, crying out in pain.  And then suddenly he wakes up in a lawn chair in an English country garden, with a woman handing him a glass of lemonade.  “Mum!” he cries out.  “I had the most horrible dream – I was being tortured…”  She interrupts him, in a sweet motherly voice.  “No dear, this is the dream.   You’re still in the cell.”  And the scene wavers again, and he goes back to being lashed with a whip, crying out…  Something of metaphor there?  Trying to wake up and can’t even tell when we’ve awakened?  Continuing to suffer, when we don’t have to fall back into sleep and dream?…I don’t know.  Maybe or maybe not.  But skit made me laugh.  With some kind of recognition.

All the other quotes are words I read just in the last week.  Talking about walking past signs.  They're everywhere.  And I know good and well that there's a Reality infinitely larger and more exuberant than ordinary perception allows for.  It's been courting me for years.  Flirting with me sleeping and waking, in words more than clear, and in voices I may never comprehend with anything more than startled wonder.  And sometimes, with gifts so straightforward I can't even see them.

But this morning does have room for consciousness.  This room in which I wake very literally is a room for consciousness.  Clean high ceilings, wide mountain-gazing windows, woodstove beaming clean warmth.  Beautiful stones and crystals color all the corners.  Singing bowls wait on a table.  This hand-built house, I just noticed while lying here staring at roof angles, is a seven-sided polygon.  Full of silence and spaciousness.  No clocks or electronics, no internet, no artificial interruptions that I don’t bring here with me.  I’m only here temporarily, and I see the gift of it.  I'm slowing down.  I’m listening.  Today I don’t invite any distractions.  I have attention to pay.  I want to see those signs.

Sun overhead moves slowly upward, reaches zenith in its own good time.  Or, it waits there for the earth, planet leaning slow and sure into their daily embrace.

Trees out on the hillslope grow at exactly their own speed.  Into their very own shape.  According to what water and earth feed them.  And what fire and drought don’t take away.

Stream down in the canyon follows only natural laws of supply and demand.  Takes what passage the channel opens for it.  Brings what abundance the higher places have given. Offers always what it has to give, no more and no less.

Fire burns at the rate of the life each log has accumulated.  Strong solid trees, some achingly still full of life when felled, release their substance only at their will.  Others seem weightless, glad to go.  For each, I mourn a moment.  Then give thanks, as they bring relief to my chill.

Yeast rises quicker with heat, but finds a slow way with even a little warmth.  Bread will bake just as well over hot coals as in an oven.  Which is nice, since there’s not a regular oven here.  Yes, I baked some beautiful bread over the coals left inside the woodstove.  Just because I could.  It tastes a little like a campfire, but I don’t mind.  Joyful at the extravagance of having the time to bake real bread.

Time for the real is there – here – just outside this worried tangle of everydays.  Dreams and wisdom flow always, just outside the daily construct.  Finding them is waking up from too much sleep and inertia, finally willing to meet the day.  For me, yes, it was waking from a recurring dream of suffering, into the dangerous peace of healing and freedom.  Now, today, it's turning off the radio (literal or otherwise) and stepping outside the house, down to the river’s edge (here, less literal but just as present:  Flow). Surging there, swift and deep and sometimes cold, Reality’s constant conduit.  Often these not-seen banks overflow, watering the fields that feed us, in response to need.  To the relief of soul’s drought.  Sometimes even in response to asking. 

THIS is the real world!  That other one, that hyperrushed people-confined construct is the false one.  Everything real moves at its own pace.  In its own balance.  In its own symmetric freedom.  In its own perfection of natural cause and effect.  Why in the world we always trying to push it, restrain it, change it? 

I'm stepping out of the house.  I'm kneeling at the river's edge.  I won't walk past this place in the usual blur.  My eyes are starting to focus.  I can read the signs.  Please.

juliebot(ched)

(A found-poem of output lines chosen from the "what would I say" app, which creates fake facebook posts based, apparently, on my real ones)

Oh, I´m so glad he´s got a huge former prison 
where I often stay, with the Earth

my friends who are building community 
leaders who represent lowincome neighborhoods, urban food initiatives
(faith that each of your wedding I went to)
keep silent about something different. 
Thanks for the inability of toys and Community service
We want them where they need for change, and mutual support
so maybe all of work, with that theme.
And to replace any suggestions
are adamant on building your utopias, too, right?
could use some help the real
any of you
I guess that's why the open frequency. 

Excuse me, says a piece written 10 years ago
seeds and they are constructed, with mine, 
at the right to Protect the Rights of life.
Carrots, snow peas, squash, brocolli, 
cilantro, garlic, nopal, and other adjustments. 
Hopefully I had spoken of the crop for the struggling,
and building something of that stresses me
I guess there used to be taking off, but also everything we might bring.

more or less, since we do remember
Have to how your life and know the rhythms of grace 
I'm gonna walk from elsewhere, 
a menos poder conocer el mundo, la clima, las cosas fueron impulsados
But I know a country, its parks as possible.

breakfast with 2 guys could move a supporter of same.

People still on the feeling go away, 

close to Earth at the frequency turned to
News...gets into the crater, hidden under the raindrops
if I weren´t already much involved in advance
free in close second, and just a quick summary
I have trouble seeing the world, and that out next week.
my fellow humans are leaving play
we have the need for sure.

Just in case any other shades of starts for day
dreams, or so Finally at dark, the mountains,
within the next for the Dark.
even here the phrase In the sun comes next.

Talk about here..A whole life has just listen to think about.
language, class, race with Sun,
another matter altogether. And there.
Vamos al fin del día, el rocío remoja, mi amiga 
and I LIVED that.

dream:path to refuge

All that we have to do is cross this forsaken city.  It seemed a simple undertaking, some time ago.  But with every grey and dreary new street that opens, each more desolately crowded than the last with the lifeless inhabitants of this place and their castoffs and contaminants, our goal has begun to feel impossible.

There are six or seven of us.  Sisters and brothers in the Order, bound by the journey, its long miles, and its urgency.  Our destination, whose clear image shimmers constantly in my mind's eye, is a spacious oasis enclosed in a pearlescent pink-gold geodesic dome.  It's the only shelter within reach of travel, the only unadulterated air, the last safe ground for miles.  The place has a name Latin in origin, which carries the essence of its power.  With as much intention as I carry the word, knowing that it means my hope of refuge, it does not stay with me.  There are only later vague efforts at approximation, which include "palladium"  "hypericum"  and "aeolium".  (Words which on investigation prove to be mineral, vegetable, elemental:  perhaps this place is ultimately pure archetype).  In the moment, I only know that there are many trees there, and water flowing, and the contrast of this greengold mirage to the wasteland of concrete and rubbish around me keeps my weary feet moving.

Our group has walked for miles, without a map, clinging to hope that we are closing the distance with our general trajectory.   On every side, massive stone walls shade the view a uniform white-grey.  Though the buildings appear ancient, the air is suffused with the same pallid color, as if granite dust were just now settling on every available surface.  There are no plants or trees to be seen anywhere. While the crowds around us don't appear to offer a direct threat, we're keeping our heads down, avoiding eye contact, just the same.  What we sense is a menace more unsettling for its intangibility.  To all appearances, the ashen citizens of this drab cityscape are not physically unwell; they seem to have simply lost their souls.  To have forgotten any connection to life and the living.  We slow our pace at another crushed intersection, the most distressing yet for its pathos of vacant-eyed people, heedless traffic, and animals wandering amid spoiled food and garbage.  To our left is what must have once been an elegant plaza, its marble statuary broken and splotched with bird droppings. On the corner, disturbing heavyset wild dogs fight over heaps of dead rodents and rotting meat as the walkers pick their way among them, apathetic, oblivious, their faces a grey approaching that of the stone.  The dogs become sick as they eat, then return from what they have disgorged to snarl and snap vicious teeth over more of the same.  I can only hope that the people fare better for food here, but so far there's not much evidence in support.  With gritted teeth, we squeeze past the gruesome scene, and under the momentary reprieve of a sagging sidewalk portal.  "Excellent!", exclaims a woman in our group, startling me with her buoyance.  "We've finally come to the crossing of two numbered streets.  We'll be able to catch a long-range transport from here."  But I am overwhelmed, leaden, and groan aloud with the critical mass of surrounding sadness:  "This spot is the worst of any yet!  I can't possibly stay here another moment.  Let me walk on, anywhere but here, and I'll catch up with you soon."  The others attempt to still my protests, reminding me of the impracticality of setting off alone, while I counter that, worst case, I'll find my way there by asking for the name of our safe haven, which I'll be sure not to forget.  Just then the woman who spoke earlier informs me that our expected wait for transport, an inconceivable half an hour, has already passed.  We raise our eyes for a sight of the transport that will at last take us out of this miserable place.

Suddenly, back on the plaza, a gigantic, magnificent slate-colored Percheron thunders across the stone.  Its impossible size is matched by its more-than-perfect muscular form.  Stray sun beams strike and richochet off its storm-cloud-dappled coat.  On its back rides a policeman in riot gear.  He is of normal size, but his mount lends him the illusion of mythical proportion.  Wan, ochre light glances off the face-shield of his helmet.  He does not brandish a weapon, or make a move of violence toward any, but something in the vision which he and the great horse present is a precipitant, an abrupt coalescing, of all of this city's stark, oppressive desolation captured in a single entity.  I am rooted, at once repulsed and longing to stare at the pair's brutal beauty. But the glimmer of foreboding solidifies:  we must move on, before we are too late.

Yet to accomplish the journey's next stage, it is vital that we concentrate and augment our own energies.  While the insensible crowds part and stream around us, we set our feet and stand, shoulder to shoulder, faces toward sun's dissipate, near-spent illumination.  Hands cupped in front of third chakra, the solar plexus, we call into reconnection.  Speaking the ancient words that affirm the all that is One and the One that is infinity, quietly at first and then with gathering potential.  My acute initial discomfort at unveiling these secret ways in public is replaced by a liberating wonder when, out of a current deeper than word or voice can track, a deep, honeyed hum of many invisible voices joins us, rich and resonant, flowing beneath our quiet speech and bearing it up, bearing witness to its vibrant continuity and community.  Unseen, atemporal, but potent and very present, this transcendant caravan swells us up on its surge of living memory and dream.  We are not alone or forgotten.  More than intuited or imagined, the voices become our transport, and dimensional space expands:  still the same impersonal city, and also a thousand welcoming ways opening simultaneously.  We don't see the road, but we are on it.  We will, be it at hope and vision's end, set weary feet on the last path to refuge.