Meditation Mount

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.