Children of Gravity

पथ ऑफ़ लीस्ट resistance

2009-07-21T08:34:00.000-07:00

Each object of art is its own thought-form. It exists before my hands pick up a brush or a ball of clay or a stack of wood. It has it's own life mapped out for itself. Like a child, it has its own destiny, and its parents can either support it, or create resistance and therefore diminish its potential.
I don't like the word ART. It is a silly word. It has been commodified to mean "something which the average person should not readily understand, but should appreciate anyway." That's bullshit. So I don't make art. I make objects. These objects are not my own. They are a story, a spirit that is calling to participate through form in our daily life.
Now, I'm ready to get on the road with the Landscapes. I've got to get out there and be in the middle of Aerica. It's hard to be here when history is happening, when I'm not seeing or feeling that the story of America is being told. I am not a falling over myself patriot, nor a nationalist of any sort. I am a translator of concept into form, and America is still a concept working itself out-- a story that, as my birth land, I have a vested interest and native ability to contribute to.
What else can we do but surrender ourselves to the story that is being told now-- throw ourselves into the mix of monologues, pitch in our best of dialogue, and listen to the conversation?
The Stimulus Shovels are waiting. I don't know how to make headway, who to talk to in Government. And I don't even know if Governemental sponsorship even serves them. If this can be done grass roots then it can truly serve the people and hold it's own distinct voice.
How do they get out there? How do I put cameras i the hands of the next generation of American Journalists? How do I get one of these into every City Hall, or Governor's office? Do I even look to them? I have had a lot of trouble getting through to the congress people. Not that they are not busy. They are. But here is a way to engage ourselves with this process in our nation on a grass roots level with maximum participation, awareness, and playfullness. Because once we lose our sense of humor what else could we posibly have? I believe a sense of play is absolutely essential to a healthy human being.
The question I have is- what is the path of least resistance for the shovels? How do they want to be called out there, in service to the people? Because every art form has a mind of its own-- an intention written into its form. It is undeniable, and its form will mark its path in its own unique way.

The days pass.

2009-07-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

I'm still in wonder, my friends, at this adventure that has happened. Is it past tense? Is it happening still? The lines of intent, the love and comraderie of Chiricahua feels remote. Are we all on separate continents now? Are our dreams, our visions and hearts so far away? Or are we still together? I am writing this to myself, I know. I have failed in many this experiment- this task. I have failed to create a forum for dialogue, a unified place of inquiry and discovery. I didn't know how. I tried. Harnessing a technology like this, I am young to these tools. They are awkward in my hands. How can I? How can I pull all this wisdom and knowldege and love from journey that took me a year into something that serves our people? That brings us around the campfire?

Looking out on a solid oak. To call an oak old is redundant. This one is solid. I wonder what nourishment the sapling needs that we planted with our hearts in the Chiricahua's. Who is watering it, and how?

How do we build the relationships we have begun with each other, to strengthen our relationship with this soil and sky, we all breathe, we all sit and walk upon. How do we strengthen this web of international inter relation? These are questions, if you are out there, please reply.

Meditation Mount

2009-06-07T14:50:00.000-07:00

It is my fifth month back from the journey. I still don't know what it was about, and if it served. All I know is that while I was there, in the other winds and streets of other countries with a camera in my hand I feel alive, I feel vital, I feel the swift hand of my own personal history writing itself into my own memory.
I drive up through orange fields to a spot up int the hills of Ojai that overlook the entire valley. How can I walk in this spiritual place with shoes? So I quit them in the grass, and walk barefoot beyond the grass and gardens, past the silently grazing rabbits through a portal of shrubs into an open hillside. I plant my feet in the ground and dance-- I move. It is not a dance from the outside, it is still, it is internal, it is my sundance. I dance and ask my questions and slowly the mountains and sounds and air around me vibrate and expand. I can see my life, this living, these questions and these forms that are my charges-- orphans from the spirit world that I must bring to form with my hands, my body, to give them life and feel their form alive in this world, on this earth, a part of the ongoing story of myself, of man.
My vision shifts to gold. It all comes through, simple, discreet, inevitable. Here I am. What more is there? My mantra must be, "there is enough time, there is enough time..." and with it there will be. There will be and nothing made outside of the stillness of inevitability will hold it's form against the inertia of this world anyway.
I step away, back into my steel carriage, this wonderful machine that separates me from the truth of my own walking. I know this sensation, this uderstanding, will pass. And I know even if I return here everyday I have missed the point. I must walk easily with this, once I hold it is gone. And inevitably it is about trust, and surrender, and action. Perhaps I must issue the challenge to myself--if I am not meant to survive walking in spirit, then I choose death. That if I cannot live in this world according to the vision of my spirit, why should I live here? If I cannot live true to the calings of spirit, if spirit must be snuffed, allocated, moderated, why play this game? To see a lover, to live with a lover I am never permitted to love, only to wish for the accidental glance or brush of the skin.

Saturn Returns, NYC 2009

2009-05-31T09:42:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to return? What is this planetary myth of change and challenge, and how can it inform my next steps into the world, born again from the limits of my own vision. When I told Kent "give me two weeks and I'll be there" I didn't know that I wasn't coming back, that this journey would take me out of the self I knew and bring me to question it, the goals, motives, and desires until now, when I return to New York, which feels more like my native city than Los Angeles, the place of my birth. We can never return to the same place twice. There is no such thing as place. There is only relationship, and what the city was before I left was my relationship to it, to those spinning streets and vaulted buildings.
The story must be told. There are two worlds, and this city holds one firmly in it's grasp, the focus of human creativity, expression, endeavors. The full externalization. And where is the listening? When I speak of this story here, on these streets, where some have not slept under the stars in years, I don't know how to translate it. How do I speak of something that is not about doing, but about listening? How do I rest into the stillness I have found in the deserts and mountains, the open skies and leaf green canopies, beyond the swath and swirl of New York City? How do we find our rest, our connection with the natural rhythms and patterns amid the rectilinear psychology of I-beams and plate glass.
How does the story hold itself in its delicacy within the velocity of this world? Is it still meaningful witnessed by this speed? Does it still speak?

Radical Joy for Hard Times

2009-05-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

Trebbe's vision has grown since we saw each other at her endless mountains vision quest. Now her vision of sitting on the earth's wounded places has grown to become a non-profit called Radical Joy for Hard Times, and I am on the band of directors. Usually it is called a "Board of Directors", but I? don't want to be a board, I want to rock out, I want to make music, I want to Jazz, so we are a band.
Other familiar faces from the Death Valley Experiment are Christi Strickland and Farion Pearce. I am beginning to see each person's superpowers light up the group. I am beginning to believe that in coming together groups of people can create beautiful things that are more resilient than what the mind of one person can create. We are talking about a cultural collective here-- a movement towards empowering people to take the first step towards environmental equitability and reconciliation with our natural world, our natural selves.
We go to Cazenovia Lake and sit. We sit apart, we look, we listen, we feel. We come together. We tell our stories. The method is very simple, but this does not diminish it's power. We all feel more clear, energized, loved. We, at the very least, have connected ourselves to our earth, have sung it's acknowledgments, have honored the life in this place. It is a simple act. Christi sums it up: Stop. Look. Listen. Feel. Love. Give.

What more do we need?

The Gathering

2009-04-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

Ahhh...! The Gathering and the Return. I am still shaking from the power of community coming together.

In the Chiricahuas we witness and participate in not only an inter-generational rite of passage, but an international community coming into it's fullness.

In the words of Black Elk: "We cannot have the power of the vision until we have performed it on earth for the people to see."

The Next-Generation and their elders sit in simple ceremony before the community. The youngers in the center, their elders flanking them. Stories are heard. Not long, just enough. A vision, a moment, a bird. And the elders pass along their mantles, these objects of power or acknowledgment or lineage, these objects that throughout the course of this experiment had become a resistant point-- (who is to say I have a mantle to pass on? Why should we receive it and not everyone?) becomes one of the most powerful moments in the ceremony. Because objects hold power. Because objects are symbols of relationships, and symbols have meaning, because an idea is just an idea, a concept, a feeling; but once it is put into symbolic form, once our hands can touch it, can feel our arms holding it, passing it, and releasing it, empty again, we feel it so much more deeply than before. The symbolic object brings more of our faculties, our senses into play. And as a symbol, the ceremony brought all of the groups senses together, what was once a group of people, passionate, and purposeful, now I see becomes a community. And that is magic. This is alchemy on a social level-- this is the birth of the new global community, one of touch and care, of tenderness and voice and witnessing. A community, newly born.

Regenerative Design and Nature Awareness Open House

2009-02-22T09:05:00.000-08:00

In a damp half-mist dawn overlooking the coast of Bolinas a group of about twenty young men and women gently shuffle off into their own spots with a playful silence. Some are meditative, a couple tease and play with each other silently. We sit on stumps, rocks, in the thick dewed grass facing in many directions. There is no poise or "listening". It doesn't feel taut or tense like that. We are sitting, sitting and allowing what cals and songs and forms cross and present themselves into our awareness, and taking note of this.
Some coyotes sound off in the distance, it sounds like there must be twenty of them. We finish, gather ourselves, and walk gently and rested back to camp.
If my high-school was like Regenerative Design and Nature Awareness I wouldn't have "missed" over half of my classes in my Junior year. I would probably have grumbled about being up at 8 in the morning to milk the goats, but I would have shown up, because it feels important. I have never milked a goat before. Coddle, pinch, pull. Coddle, pinch, pull. I'm actually amazed this goat doesn't kick me in the face. She is very gentle.
The open house is a few sit down talks and explanations along with a tour. The only problem with the open house is I don't want a tour. When Penny shows us the greywater system attached to the main house, I want us to all build one right now. The cobb houses, I want to get my hands in that mud and straw. You almost don't need to see a curriculum, it's all right there, spread out and functioning in front of me. I want to do it now.
I have come here to catch up with Dave and Will, fearless adventurers into the unknown. I get to see the community that, not without it's growing pains, is a family of passionate, dedicated, intelligent, creative human beings. Watching Dave lead a basket-weaving workshop while another group builds drums from rough-hewn wood and buckskin makes me want to pitch a tent and not leave until I've absorbed every technique, ability, and technology that is being taught here.
There is a movement happening in this world, it is a movement to come back to this ground, this earth that we are standing on, and Will and Dave and the whole RDNA community are teaching and practicing and learning old and new ways to live on this earth together, abundantly, looking to the natural rhythms and cycles and ways for their model.
I wonder if the best economic stimulus package might be to send someone from every community in America to RDNA and other programs like it so we can bring it back and implement regenerative living and awareness of nature into our families, communities, and towns?
More than anything I am struck by the difference between what I hear on the radio and what I am seeing across the broad landscapes of California. Doom and gloom and economic disaster rock the AM and FM radio waves. I however, am sitting in record rainfall, on fertile ground, in one of the most abundant regions on earth. How can there not be enough? Which one should I trust-- an economic forecast I can neither see nor feel, or this rich soil under my feet, and a glowing red sun in the dusk of night?

Return to the land of Eureka.

2009-01-13T13:09:00.001-08:00

Back from this journey, not done, just back. Driving up to Ojai. First time since August that I am back home, but what is home? I have found a home so many places-- and I almost feel as though placing all of my things neatly ordered around me to settle, to put down roots and start to delve into what the story told so far has been is a suffocation-- a surrender to stasis. To be in one place, not trapped, but rooted--in one way feels like a breath of air-- like an island in the middle of an ocean of time upon which I am safe to sit with myself. Another thought is that it is paralysis--the journey, how can the journey continue, how can it flow?
The story is where my home is. The people, their hearts and lives, this is where I want to be. Do I lack an identity, a story of my own? New York, South Africa, Maui. There are so many homes for me. They are not brick and mortar. My homes are these communities, these circles of friends, family, seekers, searchers, collaborators and lovers. I do not want to say good bye to any of them. I want to be a thread, a path, a voice and heart linking all of them, making each circle wider and stronger from all the circles woven together with it. If my community joins your community, joins our community, well it's not such a small world is it? The world is as big as our hearts and imaginations can wonder and love, and the size of our wondering and love just might be the shape of our belonging within community.
How do I maintain this focus, this journey, amid the calm of settled life? How do I continue to weave and reweave all of these hoops of people sitting in council, breaking bread, around the world?
With each of my communities our relationship seems to be of lovers. Two lovers meet, and from their connection a child is born--an inspiration, an idea, a vision. And both must tend to this child, this vision. I must raise these children, these ideas, into beings that exist on their own--into lives which bring joy and connection into the lives of others.
With each of our communities we do this, or we don't. But this, from my still dawning perspective, is the nature and meaning of our communities, our interrelationship--to bring joy and belonging, understanding and wonder, prosperity and discovery, into each of the communities, (our family, our town, our office, the knitting circle, the coffee shop) through which we weave our lives, to raise these children together. These children are our visions, our hopes, our inspirations, and our communities are the places, the circles of beings, where all the children of our souls are safe and free and nourished to become what we cannot imagine--beings in their own right--living stories which walk the earth through the minds of humankind.
What will be born of these roots placed? Is this the land of the most fertile soil?

MUC to the ANC, and the TRC

2008-11-03T05:37:00.000-08:00

Fly out of Munich to Jo berg, scotch in conference so I get last minute flight to Cape Town. Leaving the misty old stone world of Munich and Germany for a continent of red earth I have never been before. Cradle of civilization. Financial Times on seat. Pick it up—the world is falling apart. And here I have to make the lexical distinction—“world” does not mean “earth”. What is “world”? When I think of that I mean by “World”, I do not mean bears and forests and vast sweeping plains. “World” always has to do with people. “World War”. It was never called “earth war”. Because the earth is not at war, and the earth is not falling apart. The games we have been playing on earth are falling apart. The financial game. The world markets are collapsing, and it puts into further relief the importance of this story, this film, this exploration. When the fundamental system on which we organize our lives—capital, economy, is undermined across the globe people can no longer trust money as a stable reflection of value, of labor, of nourishment. How will we negotiate a world where a group of men can determine the volatility of a market, of an economy, and thus of a peoples ability to nourish themselves with the words they choose? When they say the Japanese may need bailing out, suddenly it does, overnight. The value of my labor two weeks ago as represented by kroner has decreased 20%. The value of what I did has not decreased, but the value of the paper that represents my labor has decreased.
The land continues to slide under the wing. I am standing still and the earth moves beneath my feet.
Oh mother, what earth is this? How can I bring it back to my people? And my people are all people. All people my soul meets. Which is an expression of my soul and not just theirs. We must create a new myth. The old myth is falling apart. It doesn’t work. Most simply put, the sensuousness of the human being on earth is being denied. This is a sensuous existence. Who can deny the organization of the human body and impulse? It is for pleasure. External enjoyment through material (if one would include even a sunset as material, as it comes through the eyes) and the internal enjoyment of spirit, (ho is this separate from anything else? Is spirit not felt with the same senses I experience the rest of the “external” world with?
How can we live in a new myth of man and woman and time? All I want is to love and be loved, loving. To explore and exclaim this existence. What for are all these power brokers brokering? The desire to own another mans water, his land, his labor; his physical freedom is a great prison. Their identity is dependant on the mans domestication. So they are slaves to their slaves, for if and when they walk away, where will they go? To what community can they flea? They have been busy denying love in the world. Who will cherish them for who they are, when who they have been has been defined by whose energy they could leverage and what water and air and land they could put a fence around. They cannot own the land. No one can. They can only own the fence. But the fence is only as good as the man who guards it. And they can only get him to guard it when he remains under the belief that he must guard the gate to have access to a small ration of what is inside, when before there were no fences, and everything was his birthright.

Georgy, Narcissism and Community in the Post-Communist Bloc

2008-10-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

"I want my relationships to be sharp." Georgy is a psychoanalyst. He is a powerful man. His words come out sparsely, but when they do, they stick. As if this whole story really is connected, when I arrive there is a reunion of two groups of fasters Jora (as he is affectionately called) has taken out on the land since he got back to the Ukraine after the Death Valley experiment, and one of these was not only fasters, but their families came with them. He says it was like a village, almost thirty people in camp together, and then sending out their fathers and sons and wives and the rest staying, tending the fires, making food together. Perhaps there is space, room for our families in this work, indeed for all families. And what if it is even more potent, more powerful, that the families are there? That there is a community there to receive the fasters, and that while they are out, there is a community supporting each other in base camp?

How simple, how original. I don't know what it means. But it happened. And it worked. And all were touched by it--every member of the family had a new unique experience, and each member of the family participated in the story that came back from the mountain. How can these stories remain only personal, when there is a community there to send them off and to receive them, and not become something more?

It seems like Georgy answered the Uwe and Rebekka directly. You make room for and honor the family by doing just that, include them, and see what alchemy is there hen the many small circles of family join together once again around the camp fire.

The State of Learning and Bumble-Bees

2008-10-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

Thoughts after an interview with Lonnie Gould of Suggestopedia at Psycho therapeutic Conference in Kiev:

Our current education system is based on the French mechanical model.
But...
Nature functions at 7-10 kHz. Productive human mode is 22-28 kHz, but receptive Alpha wave state is 10-12 kHz, so to learn we must be relaxed—in state of nature-to allow more information in. The mind can focus on multiple levels—birdsong, highly complex, non-random. So when we are "just sitting in nature" we are actually learning—processing information. To learn we must be at rest. Learning is not about being productive, it is about being receptive!

Much like the state one enters into in the wilderness.

Lonnie says that our first memory becomes a blueprint for what sensations we seek in life. I remember my wonder and fear at a huge buzzing bumble bee in the kitchen. It was the first moment I remember discovering that I was I and there were other things that were not me-- that were separate, an alien reality, both exotic and frightening.

I wonder...

How are we constantly reliving our first memories?
How am I constantly reliving the bee- that excitement and fear of something not me? And from another world? Because the first memory is the first separation from wholeness—the differentiation of instinct, of pure reaction and thought—a moment of decision? A moment of popping above the surface of pure experience—realizing self through other? Through contradiction—a pleasure and a pain—or a contradiction of experience, or a sense of time—of self above something?

What does it mean to be receptive, what does it mean to re-member? To create a memory, must we stand outside of the flow of time?

The Fertile Void with Lucy Hinton and Sarah Howes

2008-09-29T11:48:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-22T12:25:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-15T02:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-09-01T09:27:00.000-07:00

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.

How do we know who we are?

2008-08-31T18:00:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to take care of ourselves? What is the difference of doing something I think I need to do and doing something that is my morning ritual? There are many directions to be pulled in the city—I am pulled in many directions on the city. To be with friends, to go to museums, to make art. I see from my own behavior that I am still largely social-centric. I make my decisions on being with people that I love. But who is Noah? What is Noah?
As Michelle says “Noah is finding out who Noah is right now.”
It’s nice to hear that. Soothing to know I have a friend who understands the process I am in and does not get frustrated with me about it—passively watching me I think would be relatively entertaining—running here, running there. Doing this and that and shooting for the moon. It’s hilarious. All while balancing these family dramas that I have given meaning to but otherwise without my attention would not exist. Why do I feel the need to see my father? For resolution? Of what? No, I want to see him just to see him. I want to witness him.

Walking with the Beloved

2008-08-25T01:23:00.000-07:00

After Trebbe's Endless Mountains Quest, I ask myself, what does it feel like to walk into New York the way I would want to walk into the Beloved's arms? The city is repulsive after being in the marshland and blueberry filled meadows of Pennsylvania.

But don't run away from this city, this place. Be here the way I was in the woods. Feel it. Stop resisting it. Feel it. Head a total mess-- hot. Armpits suffocated, breathing shallow, tired behind the eyes- a cloud, my eyes try to push through-- my heart tries to push through. I am here-- these streets, this city, all the sound and sex of it. I want to devour everything , to own everything, to to chew on the air i pull through my nostrils like a cat or a bull, ready to charge and pounce on something smaller than it. Is this city so much larger than me? It is only buildings and streets and bill boards overwhelming-- All the people slanted this way and that, sitting and sipping and shouting and frowning seem so big mixed in together with so many sounds of sirens. But take them one by one. Sift them each from the city arcing and cawing around them, and they are just me, moving, looking through wonder and anxiety-- what do these streets these hundreds of streaking faces have in store for me? Spin them up with a smile, twirl them around with a shit eating grin-- look in wonder at the bubbling streets- they all become children again, that coffee shop is the stream they dangle their bare feet in, hoping for someone to play. And the games are all in busy hearts, waiting waiting waiting, and the streets are waiting, the great planes are waiting for your face, the great streets are waiting for your Fred Astaire roulette, their horns solitary and full of loneliness wait for your ears and the clitter clattering sky is waiting swallowing you up--its the city, and its going to pull something out of you or you're going to pull something out of it and it must be this way-- you must destroy each other, if you hold on to who you were, it can only eat away at you, but if you let go, let every smile fly without the necessity of commerce, let your heart out the door to all those passing strangers, paint the walls with your most startling desires, let this churning consume you and a new spirit raises itself out of the waddle not to be seen or heard but to sing out, to call out across the Hudson to places lost in America-- I am. Let me be a part of this great myth!

OUR EYES MET, or Alluring Ourselves In, Hook, Line and Sinker, with Trebbe Johnson

2008-08-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

Luscious dripping blueberries. Thick fluffy baked bread. Warm tea, chilly afternoon. Trebbe Johnson knows how to make the small pleasures in life a big part of her own. So much so that her voice itself almost sounds like caramel dripping off the spoon of her words. "Go take a walk around, and pay attention to what allures you." Allure. Allures. Allurement.

What happens when we follow what allures us? What happens when we dive right in to what calls us forth, in, or out of ourselves, to passionately follow the passion of ourselves daringly wherever it may lead? We are walking on dangerous ground here. We just might fall in love; not with something, someone, but with love. We might just fall in love with love. I think if Trebbe was a superhero, her superpower is to enchant people into being inspired by life. To clear the ground so we can find a way back into falling in love with something. To connect her back to Dave Talamo; to find our way back into the wondering again. To rediscover our wonder!

Sierra Quest with Dave Talamo

2008-07-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

Standing with Dave Talamo breathing in the rolling stream below, the crisp air makes my vision shudder; this is NATURE, both absolute and receptive in it's ISness. And this is Dave's gift to this story as it unfolds: that everyone along the path has a gift, a magic potion, viewpoint, perspective, value, or standard that clears a way, that gives life and meaning to the path. Dave's gift is a deep care and respect for this natural world within which we stand and breathe.

Dave's emphatic wonder with these grand trees creating their own thin bed of soil upon this impenetrable rolling thunder of pure granite mountain and the dipping flight of little russet-brown birds is not just youthful joy. It is a wonder that he has cultivated into a knowledge, respect, and honor of the natural world. He is both a pilgrim here, and a part of the landscape. Watching and listening to him is a window into the most basic form of human alchemy: wonder, tempered by experience into knowledge, transforms itself into a respect and honor for this observed, experienced otherness. I wonder if in this deepening of the relationship of wonder, the observer becomes both a part of the wondering, and a witness to it?