The Fertile Void with Lucy Hinton and Sarah Howes

You cannot see the white horse from the road. I can't see it from the hill, so I walk down a small footpath over the road to the top of dragon hill, a place where it is said that the youth would sit on a golden sheep skin through the night as a way of crossing the threshold into manhood. Still can't see it. I can make out a few of the contour lines-- thin gestures, from this angle, highlighting the curves of the hill. The only place to take the white horse fully in, to see it in it's swiftly frozen leap into the otherworld is from the perspective of the sun, or the low hanging haze that caresses the hills at each end of the day.

Certain places have an energy and a power of their own. Like a great artist on fire or a composer gliding through a melody with religious poise, this place moves and swirls in its own dimension. This soil has felt the feet and blood of man throughout the history of time and before-- before there were words to mark the passage of one deed to another. Before these times, there were pictures, spirits of the natural world brought forth upon a rock with blood and charcoal, or upon this landscape with the ghostly white chalk of which this system of hills spanning the East-West latitude of Britain is composed.

I am here to drop into "the Fertile Void" with Lucy Hinton and Sarah Howes in this place where dusk brings the fog falling quickly. Fog, a medium for spirits, mortal coils shuffled long ago, to move safely upon this warm earth. Fog, a being all its own, soaking up the night, distance, sound and light into one amorphous presence. We adventurers walk into the fields, heavy with blackberries and dew, to gather something to represent ourselves on this quest into the fertile void that we are setting off into.

I look and look. But I am looking with eyes looking for things. How do I walk into the world of voids-- of not-objects, of absences, holes. How often (always!) I am looking-- I am searching out objects, solid things, to grasp hold of-- even identities, occupations, actions, which have a distinct definition in the cultural lexicon. To define myself. To define my surroundings. To mark my route with markers and signposts? What would happen if I let go?

What happens when we walk into a void of seeing, of seeing the void, of empty places? How can I bring the Hoof Deep Imprint of Cow Walking back with me? How can I bring back, not this fallen, eaten dove, but the space within its breast? That pocket in which once it's lifeblood beat? How can I walk back holding the space that time and rot have hollowed from the center of this tree? How can anything new live where there is no space for it to grow? How can I carry this void within me--how can I walk with nothing? What does it mean to rest in these forgotten spaces, these non-places--in between what was alive and the life yet to be; to grow out of the rich humus of experience had and surrendered to the elements of becoming?

Between two trees with Uwe Werner

Uwe is standing below a 400 year old oak. I cannot see the sky--the canopy of trees overwhelms it. But this oak, standing taller than the others transmits the light down to the road we are on. The leaves are phosphorescent green, brimming with light, as if they are convincing us that we too could generate our energy from the sun. Uwe looks up. I see in his face an old warrior-- he is a German man. He is a father with two families, one of girls, the other of boys. What gift does his story bring to this greater story?

Sylvia, his wife, had a vision. She had a vision that the community of people taking people onto the land opened itself to the families. A year ago sh was planning to come to Death Valley for the fast, but then she found out she was pregnant. Rebekka took her place, and now Rebekka herself is expecting.
The theme of family keeps coming up here. Mothers and fathers to be, mothers and fathers already, all looking, calling, for a community to receive them, and more so, calling for their communities of which they are participating to honor and make room for them in their new roles. Not just room for them as individuals in a new role, but room for them as the families that hey have become. How do our communities receive us when we transform from "I" into "US"?

Dark shadows pass through. A great grief that I can only witness in moments beyond laughter. Not far from here St. Boniface cut Thor's Oak, a mystical tree for the early Germanic peoples. Because he was not struck by lightning when he cut it down, they believed that his god was more powerful than theirs. He knew how powerful their connection was to nature, especially to the trees, and so he knew that to establish the church he must destroy this sacred life at the center of their rituals. He built the church out of it. There is a statue commemorating this act. I am hurt to see this statue--a man holding a cross and an ax stands atop the amputated trunk that was a great tree. He holds up a model of the church he will build on that site. He will build it with the tree he has cut.

It strikes me as completely barbaric. And yet it is a local monument. And I suppose it is. We celebrate that we were created. Not the means by which this creation took place. And perhaps we do not question that we are, we will be, will continue to be, even if such barbaric acts were not monumentalized. That the tree could still stand and we too. That our standing here is not and has not been dependent on the destruction of something so grand, so alive.

7000 oaks, Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung

Unexpected discovery-- here I am in Kassel, Germany. Rebekka, the first of the interviews in Europe must go to take care of Jan, her fiancee and father to her child on the way, as Jan's father has just passed on. What am I doing here, I wonder-- how is this project going to reach beyond itself and the lives that each of the participants is immersed in and dialogue with culture? If this has no reach outside of personal lives, then why have I devoted the next year of my life to it? What am I here to create?

I understand the benefits of engaging on an individual level, and I have already seen on an individual level how bringing film and questions into space catalyzes the processing, understanding, and meaning of experience. But how does it transfer beyond the life of Kent and Farion, Rebekka, Uwe, Lucy, and the other fasters and their elders? How does what happened in Death Valley, how do those questions transfer out into the world and speak to more than just the few whose direct experience and experiment it is?


Enter Kassel, Germany. Little do I know that the night I arrive is an all-night free museum festival. Later on Uwe is to tell me the story of Boniface destroying Thor's Oak as a symbol of Christianity's superiority over the native Germanic religion, and how this connects for him to the work of Joseph Beuys planting of 7000 oaks in this town of Kassel. Beuys refered to it as "Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung", which to Uwe's translation calls forth "the governance of the forest instead of the governance of bureaucracy."


We are sitting with this work of Bueys, and the coming Dokumenta International Art Exhibition in 2012, and seeing how a dialogue can be continued between Bueys and the EarthlinkProject. Are there any connections to it at all? What is this work that is in it's larval stages?

The Mortal Conundrum of Arrivals and Departures with Rebekka Schilling

Rebekka's soft voice belies her fiery nature. She is an elegant balance of sensitivity and ferocity. Namely, she ferociously defends the sensuous, sensitive, and vulnerable. Now she is expecting. A new life is being born in her, and another life has just passed away from her on the eve of my arrival. She has also just returned from her first Overnight with a group on the land.

We have very little time together. There is something strange and archetypal about our meeting, there is both pause and rush, urgency and calm. The sounds of students outside the bar down stairs rise and fall with the background rhythm of clacks and rumbles on the cobblestone street below. I am standing in a room whose objects have yet to find their place yet. There is an antique baby-carriage filled with pillows, cd's, and clothes. Six-month pregnant Rebekka is leaning over her bed. She is packing her suitcase with black to attend the funeral of her fiance's father. Three months from now she will be holding her motherhood in her arms.

Paris Charles De Gaul and Blueberry Pancakes

Sept 2nd
Though I think I return from new haven in time, I am frantically stuffing my bags at 8:15. The shuttle will pick me up at 8:30, I run outside to say goodbye in person to Michelle, then see Mark for a few minutes before the shuttle arrives. I figured I should not leave til later, but recommended travel time to JFK is 1.5 hours, and check in time is 2-3 hours, so—I am in the van and we are off—still feel I have too much stuff—not enough gifts for people, but I am recording their story, so—
The French serve bread with everything. On the plane there is a basket of bread brought out with every meal. First there is some strange shrimp and couscous thing, which is almost not terrible, but I don’t know who would eat shrimp on a plane. Breakfast however, is very nice—Pancakes or omelet? Pancakes or omelet? Because I hate pancakes, assuming they will be some horrible buttermilk stuff go for the omelet, but then I see they mean crepes, blueberry crepes!
I think of Koz, yes, pancakes for some reason make everyone happy! Why is that? Half of it must be the name. Pan-cakes. Pan- cakes. How the n rolls into the c, that soft into the hard. And its blueberry pancakes. I hold this up as one of the most beautiful words in the English language—next to "cellardoor". Cellardoor: Blueberry Pancakes.BlueberryPancakes. It sounds like an album, like "Tubular Bells". It feels good to say. I can almost taste them.

How do we listen to the sound of another persons life?

That’s what I discover going to see Milton and Doris last night. Before I was trying to tell stories. But the stories that are more interesting are those that reveal themselves to the camera. That is Documentary. It is a challenge. It feels invasive sometimes. But it is a meditation on moments that exist—partially due to the camera, and yet always from the core of the person. What is the balance between the person and the performer? That is the story—the space in between the person off camera and the person on camera. I wonder if this is why actors are like gods? But being a character and being oneself is much different. There is a certain pressure to presenting oneself. Self imposed of course—but the more beautiful of means—

So what is taking care of myself? To sleep long enough? I wonder if all of that post wake sleeping processing was beneficial? It felt very good. Very good. And here is the battle—is taking care of ourselves always about going towards the good? What feels the best in that moment?
This is actually not Hedonism. Because drinking, (other than sake) never is what will feel best to me—a glass of wine perhaps calls out on specific occasions. But drugs not. Usually I am moved towards the positive action. I don’t like to rely on the word “positive” though. It is a weak, misused word.

Action towards a mystery or a question that is living inside of me. Action towards illumination of obscurity. What word can possibly say this? It is like—there is a fear, a question, a doubt, a desire. Action, a movement, or a sitting still, contemplating this thing, it feels like a shuttle ride towards my own destiny. It does. I feel as if the world is spinning past me—that I am going forward toward myself, towards becoming. Not that I am anything in particular, but that I am a movement, or a settling into consciousness, into being, and when the attention of my senses, the movement of my physical body is in congruence with this being, then I feel alive. And this is taking care of oneself.

Moreover I wonder how I could adopt each guides passion towards filming them. Or the previous guides passion upon them? No. Show each person according to their own process- their story. See how congruent it is with their reality.