I've always tried to be honest in this blog, but for the past year I've
been deliberately vague about some of the details of my life, for
personal
reasons*. It's reached the point where a certain cognitive dissonance
has crept into my writing, and left a lot of readers puzzled. I
think it's time for me to come clean. So I've updated the final part of
my About
the Author bio. Now you know.
With that as context:
I
sent a draft of this article to six extraordinary women, because I
wanted to know if they would see its contents as an act of
irresponsibility, as a betrayal, or even as the ravings of someone
who's coming unglued. Their response to me was overwhelming, as has
been the response of all of you, dear readers, picking up on my
"cranky" intro to my weekend links post. I am so lucky to have you in
my life. I am humbled by your wisdom, your appreciation, your love for
this wild and inarticulate stranger who has blathered on in these pages
for precisely six years now, and I have learned so much from you.
Namasté. Salute.
Dayadhvam.
·····
I feel as if I'm on a precipice. The other day I wrote a faerie
story which describes this sense
that, after all the changes that have happened in my life in the past
three years, even greater changes lie ahead for me in 2009. Earlier
this month I wrote about the desire to become
light, as if (as my old friend Rayne
picked up on) I was resetting, deciding whether I was "ready for the
voyage", setting my lands in order,
just waiting for a sign. (For those who put faith in the wisdom of the
I Ching, its counsel for me, poised on the precipice and asking if now
was the time, was hexagram 14, TA
YU,
which
would seem auspicious, a sign of sorts.)
For the last year I have been simply practicing, with no set objectives
or intentions, these things:
1.
exploring and discovering (people and places)
2. reflecting/imagining possibilities
3. writing
4. loving
5. learning
6. conversing
7. sensing/being present
8. playing
9. coaching and showing
10.self-managing
11.building
working models
In the process, and largely thanks to those I have come to love as a
result of these practices (those in the Gravitational Community box in
the right sidebar, and especially Cheryl and Tree), I have learned a
staggering amount, about myself, about how the world really works, and
about what I am intended to do and to be.
My instincts are propelling me forward, to make even more changes, to
simplify my life dramatically, to become truly the space through which
stuff passes:
...
a part of the unfathomably complex dance of all-life-on-Earth, learning
to improvise which of that passing-through stuff to touch, and which to
just let go. "Ah, I know how I can make this better, or clearer, or
more interesting, or more useful, or more innovative, or more fun --
there!" Just being the space, and touching the right stuff in just the
right way as it passes through.
I am filled with impatience, with fury, with a sense that my own fears
are holding me back from this journey, from what comes next, what is
meant for me. What underlies that fear is all the gunk that I have
acquired over the years, gunk telling me what is the correct and
incorrect way to behave, and live.
That gunk has a name: Culture.
The very word, with its agri-roots, implies control, tending, keeping
in line. Culture tells us what others have a right to expect of us, and
what we must do to live up to those expectations. Culture tells us that
the punishment for not doing these things is social ostracism --
loneliness, unacceptability, unpopularity, reproachment, exclusion,
abandonment, rejection and punishment. You must be obedient, says our
culture, or there will be dire consequences. Without us, says our
culture, you cannot survive -- you will starve, freeze, wither away.
You will be left alone.
It's a compelling argument: Those of us who have studied how the world
really works, and imagined better ways to live and make a living, all
acknowledge that love,
conversation, community, and
collaboration are essential elements of the way forward, that we have
to be together and work together. If our culture imprisons us,
separates us, we have no hope. We have to stick together, stay within
the culture, work within the system.
There is no reason, we might think, why we can't create our own
communities outside
or on
the edge of that culture. Yet
we cannot. Our culture holds all the cards -- it controls the education
system, the political system, the economic system, the technologies and
infrastructure. It is the author of the language whose structures and
meanings wire the very neural paths of our brains from the moment we
hear and speak our first words. We dare not walk away unless and until
we have nothing left to lose -- until the risk of trying to make a
bankrupt, crumbling, crashing culture last a little longer exceeds the
risk of starting all over, with nothing. And culture of course is all of us,
our peers, our families, those we love, not just those with
proportionally more power and influence, not just them.
And the counter-cultures lure us like sirens, telling us they are
different, that if we join them we are fighting the system, when we are
not. The counter-cultures are so steeped in the monolithic modern human
culture that they can't see that they are just a part of it, co-opted,
inadvertent pawns that lull us into believing we have a choice, that
there are alternatives, when there are none. Heath and Potter in The
Rebel Sell:
Practices
such as downshifting, energy conservation, eating organic produce, and
engaging in local environmental activities are pretty much useless.
Countercultural thinking has reduced much of the political agenda of
the left to individual consumer activism. When someone mentions
"environmentalism," most people think of recycling, conserving energy,
or riding a bike. Yet these sorts of strategies just promote "the
exploitation of the moral by the immoral," by making it easier for the
majority of the population to keep throwing away whatever they like,
leaving their air conditioner on all summer, and driving their SUVs.
The only real solutions to environmental problems are ones that are
compulsory for the entire population. And that necessarily requires
using the power of the state to punish those who fail to comply...
Ultimately, the counterculture sees politics as a real-life version of
The Matrix: it is a great winner-take-all battle between the totalizing
forces of mass conformity and the revolutionary individualism of the
enlightened rebels. This individualistic utopianism relies quite
heavily on the idea of spontaneous harmony, which holds that social
problems will all magically disappear once we achieve the necessary
global transformation of consciousness...In addition to being
impossible, this would be entirely unwelcome.
The answer does not lie in activism, in counter-culture, in revolution.
Despite Heath and Potter's wishful thinking, solutions "compulsory for
the entire population" will only be forthcoming in a totalitarian
state, and then not in the interests of that population. And certainly
the answer does not lie in technology -- as John Gray has argued so
eloquently, every new technology creates many more problems than it
solves.
The answer lies not in salvos from, or experiments on, The
Edge, but beyond it,
over
the edge, the precipice. And, horror of horrors, we have to go over it,
plunge into the abyss, alone.
We have to walk away, and start over. Give up on everything we believe,
everything we fear, scrape off all the gunk that is sticking to us,
holding us back. Inviting those we love to walk away with us, knowing
that they will probably decline, because they are still addicted to the
culture, still believe that counter-culture, elections, revolutions,
activism, collective consciousness, education, faith or technology will
somehow work, transform the culture in time or allow some tiny new
culture to survive in its nuclear shadow.
It is this cynicism about working within or against the system (it is
all one and the same) that, perhaps coupled with my inherent laziness,
has caused me to give up my ambitions to do the hard work so many
people want me to start, to lead. Just damned well do something,
they implore. When I put "building working models" on my list of things
to do, my 'intentions list', my instincts cautioned me, told me there
was something wrong. My sweet spot, they reminded me, is imagining
possibilities, not realizing
them. I'm a writer, a dreamer, an artist, not a builder. Like Colleen,
I like to start things, but have no stamina for the shovel-work, the
sweat, the waiting, the negotiating and problem-solving, the damned details.
(Alas, I lack Colleen's wonderful sense of humour about it all.)
So I'm crossing that item off the list of things I practice doing, and
now the list of practices is entirely, well, impractical (or
if you're British, impracticable). So if you're waiting for me
to stop talking and do something concrete, something physical, better
give up now. Other than words and
ideas, my practices have no product.
So what does this mean, this walking away, this jumping off the edge,
this starting over? While I'm still unsure, I think it might
entail:
1.
Letting go of my beliefs, my stuff, my responsibilities and obligations
and expectations and all sense of control and power over people and
situations.
2. Giving up on the illusion that language conveys any
precise meaning, and using it instead as a purely creative and
imaginative tool.
3. Being fearless. There is however a tension here between
fearlessness (being free from insecurity), which is liberating, and
recklessness, which can be hurtful.
4. Not belonging anywhere. This doesn't preclude a reverence
for place, but rather acknowledges I can be a part of any
place that can naturally sustain me.
5. Trusting my instincts and my senses as much as my emotions
and intellect, and relearning when to be guided by each. Jung love.
6. Understanding that we are all, even in crowds, even in the
company of those we imagine we love and who we imagine love us, utterly
alone.
7. Understanding that no one is in control.
8. Realizing that freedom to be nobody-but-myself is more
important than anything
else, even health. Even love.
9. Appreciating that time
is chimera; it doesn't exist.
Animals live in 'now time', a time that stretches out forever, except
in moments of stress. Time to be wild.
10. Giving up my 'wants', while being skeptical about my 'free
will'. Stewart and Cohen in Figments of Reality:
Living
species, including humans, are emergent properties of the 'pandemonium'
of the body's semi-autonomous processes -- We are a complicity of the
separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual
benefit i.e. we are an organism. And our brains, our intelligence,
awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more than an
evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to advise
these creatures' actions for their mutual benefit. Our brains, and our
minds (the processes that our neurons, senses and motility organs carry
out collectively) are their information-processing system, not 'ours'.
What might this 'walking away', this 'starting over' look like? Evelyn walked
away, I think, a couple of years ago. Her blog was transformed from
Silicon Valley marketingspeak to a nomad's mystical, colourful
explorations of meaning and declarations of wonder, and then, more
recently, dwindled to a trickle. She gave away everything she owned and
now travels, lightly, where her heart tells her, with no destination,
no home. Cheryl
walked away, last August, and is embarked on an exploration around
Australia with her beloved Marlo. John
Francis
is an environmentalist who not only walked away, he took a vow of
silence for 17 years (thanks Tree
for the link).
The idea of living in a one-room cabaña or yurt in some warm
rainforest (the one pictured above was where I stayed in Central Belize
last year), near the beach, naked, eating local vegan food with a few
nutritional supplements, blogging and writing fiction, saying nothing,
and paying
attention and exploring and learning about my immediate ecosystem,
falling under the spell of the sensuous, really appeals to me. A
footprint as small as humanly possible. Inviting people I love to come
and stay as long as they like. Maybe that, instead of an intentional
community, is what I should walk away to, where I should start over,
and how I can be, simply, a model. And perhaps one month a year I
should select and travel, by foot, around one area far from this
tropical home, just to learn, to connect, to get new ideas to write
about in my fiction. Sound familiar? Patti
got me started thinking about
this.
I don't know. But let me know what you think anyway. Call me
irresponsible. Call me lazy, romantic, nihilistic, escapist. Tell me
this is not a natural life, because I'm using my savings to import a
few things I can't grow locally, or because it's antisocial,
misanthropic. I can take it. I can still be persuaded not to jump off
the edge, not to do the ten things in the list above, not to start
over, and instead to stay in our culture's gravity. It's
pretty comfortable here on the ledge.
But it's no longer such a long way down.
* Basically I didn't
want my ever-worrying father to know about the breakup, because he
means the world to me, and he's been so ill and stressed this past year
I didn't have the heart to tell him the relationship he thought was so
perfect, and so good for me, is no more. Tonight I spoke with him, and
he's fine with it. Whew. |
My book is available to US buyers
from the 
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY
