As we walked along No Name Creek, I considered this contradiction. According to Eastern thought there is no contradiction because of nonduality: everything is exactly as it should be at any given moment. I couldn’t quite accept this. It seemed too easy a way out. Did that include the Holocaust? Six million Jews plus four to six million homosexuals, gypsies, Catholics, and communists dead in Nazi Germany — is that exactly the way things should be? Part of a lesson humanity has to learn? It seemed too much of a stretch.
But gazing into No Name Creek, I realized the creek was two things at once: a crazy pattern of noise and texture on top and a quiet stillness below. Some parts of its surface were particularly rough, and some parts of the bottom, like pools near the banks, completely still. So Leah and I, as we became more immersed in Jackie’s home and philosophy, began to become more like the creek: rougher on our surfaces and stiller in our depths. We experienced more forcefully the distinction between maya (the illusion of sensory perception as reality) and dharma (the invisible, spiritual path). In its deepest essence the creek is neither rough surface nor still depths: it’s water.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, walking far up along No Name Creek, I came to an abandoned sharecropper’s house. I’d seen them before. In fact — for reasons nebulous to me — it was all the fashion in certain Southern lefty circles to translocate, renovate, and inhabit a former slave or sharecropper house. But finding them abandoned in the middle of nowhere was something quite different. I eyeballed the hardplank structure to be about twice the size of Jackie’s: maybe thirty by twenty-four, far smaller than the abandoned farmhouse I’d seen several days before. The roof had long since caved in, but the walls stood firm. I walked inside.
What was it like to be a sharecropper? In 1874, say, with slavery over but life largely the same? You’ve got freedom but can’t exercise it. That freedom must have seemed scary. You’ve always lived as a slave, as your parents and grandparents did. It’s the way things were done. Now, what options do you have? So you remain on the master’s plantation, in a house like this one, receive a little salary; in theory you can leave, but for all intents and purposes, life remains what it was, in bondage.
The woods encroached in and around the place. But I could see that it had been fairly recently inhabited, maybe a decade back, judging from the junk around it. It even had an electrical line, now severed, running up to it, probably pirated electricity. I could hear the gurgle of No Name Creek and see patches of blue through the forest canopy overhead. It struck me that maybe most of us inhabit the awful no-man’s-land of sharecroppers, suspended between slave and free. Between Gold Kist and free-range; between 100,000 square feet and 144; between Wal-Mart and homemade.
Recognizing the bind we’re all in together, I decided while at the 12 × 12 to experiment with practicing nonjudgment of others. One day up the creek, I saw the most beautiful buck leap a farmer’s fence into a corral of four horses. Sensing me, the buck returned to his mate and three babies. There, they grazed, the smallest doe rubbing its light brown face against the mother’s, a perfect little kiss. Suddenly: Bam! A shotgun rang out in the middle distance, and the deer fled into the forest. Not ten minutes later, the owner of the shotgun blast appeared — a camouflaged hunter in a shiny Silverado pickup. As he passed, we nodded to each other, both of us equally trespassing, so no problem there. Then I saw the bulk of a light brown deer in his pickup cab, and I felt judgment rise. He’d come to shatter some skulls. But I thought: Were I him, I’d do exactly the same. Perhaps he has kids at home to help him skin the deer and roast it. Perhaps they use every single part of the animal. I pictured my own dwindling rations (with no car for a supermarket run) and thought of the pleasure of venison roasting over my own fire.
As I tried to practice nonjudgment, things worsened with the Thompsons. Several times Mike referred to his Honduran and Mexican neighbors as “the Habitat Mexicans.” Then I was told that the African American woman who lived in the third Habitat for Humanity house hardly ever came, preferring to stay in her Siler City rental, partly because “she was afraid of Mike and his guns.”
When I heard these things, anger would creep in. Then I’d think of something Jackie said to me, a little cryptically, that first day in the 12 × 12: “When you see worthiness, praise it. And when you see unworthiness, trace it.”
IT WAS NEARLY TWILIGHT the next time I was with Mike, a week after the standoff with the Latino teenagers. He told me a story as the day faded, with his family gathered around. Michele had their baby to her breast, and the other five kids lingered on the porch in front of the pond, Kyle’s shoulder pressed up against mine. Only Mike stood, and he told us about the wolves that came to their farm one night. His family knew the story of the wolves — they’d lived it, just a year before. But they listened as intently as I.
“Half-breed wolves,” Mike said, the sun’s afterglow giving his eyes a sparkle, “took out a thousand dollars in livestock one evening.
“Two of them, male and female, snuck into our farm when we were in town and ravaged the place. We came back to find bodies everywhere — turkeys and ducks strewn there, there, there, all the way up the road!”
I could imagine the carnage. Imagine how he must have felt to see so much of his work devastated by those half-breed wolves.
“They even got three goats and a hog.”
There was a silence. “Did they eat any of it?” I finally asked.
“Nothing,” Mike said. “Killed for killing’s sake. One of the Habitat Mexicans captured a half-breed, the male. He’d collared it and came to tell me I should shoot it. Out of revenge. I grabbed my gun, loaded it, and raced over with my finger on the trigger.”
He paused, the suspense before the blood-soaked ending. When you see unworthiness, trace it, I could hear Jackie whisper. Don’t judge. Trace anything you don’t like in someone else back to their unique history; then trace it back to yourself because anything you dislike in others is somewhere in you. Mike was trying, against the odds, to live as an organic farmer, Gold Kist becoming more poisonously efficient every day. He and his family were fresh out of a drug-riddled trailer park, trying to make a quixotic dream of sustainability come true in an era of the big, the efficient, the flat. He’s quick with a weapon and suspicious of other races, but in his situation, would I be any different?
“When I got to José’s, I pointed my gun at that half-breed wolf. My hand shaking, I —”
Just as he was about to finish his story, to deal the deathblow, an eagle’s shadow passed over his face. We all looked up; the eagle soared right past on a warm current, in a slow arc over No Name Creek, toward the sharecropper house and out of sight. He said “José,” I thought to myself, not “the Habitat Mexican.” It was the first time I’d heard Mike use his neighbor’s name. Beside the porch, tiny white moths rose up in lazy flutter, seeds falling from the trees around us, and I could hear insects crackling in the dead leaves below our feet.
“I looked at it through the sight of my gun,” Mike continued. “The wolf was all huddled up and whimpering, and I lowered it. I said to myself: ‘I can’t kill him. He’s just doing what he was born to do.’ So I put down my gun, called animal control, and they took that half-breed away.”
THE TENSIONS LEAH AND I DISCOVERED at the 12 × 12 — the creek’s rough water and its stillness, maya and dharma, that the world is evil and the world is perfect — seemed entwined with another apparent duality: sacrifice and seduction.
To reduce her carbon footprint to the level of the average Bangladeshi’s (that is, to one-twentieth of the average American’s consumption), Jackie had made some considerable sacrifices. Ciao, airplanes; hello, Grey-dogging. She also said good-bye to electricity, to home heating, and to piped water. I was living these sacrifices on a temporary basis, but could I make these changes permanently? It was more than a bit scary to picture.
Leah and I talked about what would really change in our lives once our time in the 12 × 12 was over. I’d gotten rid of the car and b
egun to bike and walk everywhere — put on Jackie’s garments, as it were, for a retreat — but my international twenty-first-century life, my flat life, was still waiting for me. I knew that unless I changed, nothing would change. That’s the biggest test, the only test of the worth of an experience — is the change atomic? Does it get down into the very pattern of your psychological, emotional, and habitual DNA?
I didn’t know what would happen. Like a caterpillar, I’d gone into a cocoon and felt my inner world shifting, but I had no idea if a butterfly would emerge or a stillborn half-creature. Would I be wise enough to identify the changes I’d need to make to align my life with the health of the planet? Even if I identified the changes, would I be strong enough to follow through on them?
The seduction of the 12 × 12 experience drew Leah and me in: organic food, fresh air and water, feeling God through feeling good. But looming in the background was the unsustainable lifestyles we both normally lived. Sure, I had the financial resources to drive a car, but is it sustainable? What is the larger cost of this mentality to the planet? I tried to be transparent about my own hypocrisy, of navigating the tensions of mindfulness. I began to see things in terms of what you might call false privilege, or any action that can’t be enjoyed by everyone on the planet without compromising our ecosystems. Until that is somehow reconciled, clean living is all seduction and little sacrifice.
ON A LONG WALK ONE DAY, Leah and I talked about living honorably in the environmental era, a time when all of our planet’s life systems are in decline. Before we realized it we were a couple of miles into the countryside, near a pond freckled with leaves and seeds. We stopped and sat on its banks.
An hour passed in silence. I let my gaze glaze the pond’s surface. A flying insect made perfect circles, two feet in circumference, and then began lazily carving figure eights. After a while I was no longer looking at a pond; it had in a sense seeped inside of me and merged with the nearly two-thirds of my body that is water. Closing my eyes I felt its dimpled surface, its cool foreign depths. The figure eights started to tickle. I was smiling when I opened my eyes. The feeling was more than a little weird to the rational mind. What was going on? Something inside me was shifting. I was getting glimpses into the mystical experience — the sense that everything is intricately connected into a grand unity. It’s what Thoreau meant when he called fish “animalized water,” or what Whitman meant when he called grass “the journeywork of stars.” It’s Van Gogh’s wheat fields and starry skies bleeding into their background; Gauguin painting people in colors as earthy as the world around them.
“I feel different,” Leah said, walking back to the 12 × 12. The sun was setting in red and orange pastels. I looked over at her. Her soft blonde hair fell over bare shoulders, just the strap of a black tank top. A bit of perspiration covered her forehead, matting a patch of her hair. She brought up a hand to push it back, and then her hand came down and took hold of mine. We stopped and kissed for a long while. It wasn’t our first kiss. Though we’d initially hesitated to become lovers — as if that would somehow obscure the spiritual and societal questions we were grappling with — we eventually allowed ourselves to express what we were both feeling. We held each other, and I looked over her shoulder into the thickening green of the oaks and dogwoods. Spring was now here.
We walked on. Another mile, then two, and I felt something catch in my chest, beyond the budding romance with Leah. Is there any limit to what I, what she, what we humans could become? I felt a sense of awe, as if all of my former boundaries had melted and I was now a pile of clay ready for molding.
Back at the 12 × 12, we lit the candles and cooked up a stir-fry with freshly picked shiitake mushrooms, sipped heirloom tea, and entered into a kind of stillness that I thought was possible only in solitude. It was cool outside; the full moon lit up some dark gray clouds passing over. We heard the first spring frogs calling, and some cicadas, and saw Venus through the window. I was thinking about Jackie; she’d emailed me from her Nevada desert peace walk and dropped a hint that a big change was afoot in her life. I wondered what it was. And then I wasn’t thinking about anything at all.
“There’s a roominess to the present moment,” Leah said. We lapsed back into silence for the longest time. Actually we had little conception of time. Sitting there in Jackie’s goosehead rocker, hearing the slightest bubbling of the creek, I entered into a kind of trance.
I felt the house and me overlap with a click; we fell into place together, fitting each other like shoehorn on heel. A similar thing would happen again several times when I was alone in the 12 × 12 at night. But on this, the first time, with Leah, I felt a shiver. Most of the time, of course, I was just in the little house cooking, baking, writing, dressing, sleeping, marveling at the sky through the window. But then it would happen, suddenly, on the rocker: I feel the house living inside me. Not metaphorically, but actually inside me, doing house things like warming, illuminating, freezing, getting dirty, getting clean, boiling, baking, inspiring, being still. Grounded, but stretching a little toward heaven. Breathing through a flung-open window or door, breathing through my mouth. Inside me.
I was somewhere else. Nowhere, with a tiny house in there. Leah had a look on her face at once bewildered and astonished. She whispered, “Did you feel that?”
I did, and I still do. That’s the One Life about which words are only signposts. It’s the other world inside of this one, the place beyond contradictions. Are we to find the fullness of life in more things, in faster food and bigger shopping malls? Or is it to be found in the still, the small, the radical present?
PART II
TWELVE
13. CREATIVE EDGES
WHAT‘S THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD?
Looking at baby lettuce coming up, the smell of fresh, loamy soil saturating my nostrils, and feeling around at the dewy base of the lettuce for weeds to release, I burst out laughing. An all-out guffaw. It’s the wrong question. When the Aymara philosopher Honamti told me, by the blue shores of Lake Titicaca, that the earth was round up into the heavens, round out to the horizon, and round into our inner selves, he was actually trying to destroy the idea of roundness. His trinity of circles — up, out, in — is an allegory meant to smash the idea of our earth as any geometrical shape at all. It’s not flat, nor is it, in any lived sense, round. So what is it?
Perhaps the world is not shape but rhythm. As my laughter died, I could hear something in the wind in the trees above; the slightly discordant bubble-gurgle of the creek; the peck-peck-peck of a giant woodpecker over the low baseline of buzzing bees in their hives. The search for a meaningful life is the search for the right chord, getting our rhythm in tune with the cosmic jazz improvised all around us. It’s not a national anthem, a pop song, or a tired waltz. It’s music that dances unpredictably with the silence all around it, that’s a little off-key. The Russian philosopher and composer Gurdjieff talks about the Rule of Seven, where all of our lives metaphorically play out along a scale of seven notes, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti at first, but with one or two of the notes always changing, throwing the music into a constantly unstable state. This creates the problems of the world, which are then temporarily solved in the next bar of music. We’re germinated to a rhythm; our mother’s heartbeat is a conga drum beating beneath our racing little dot of a heart as our limbs, face, and fingernails take shape. It’s that beat that we lose when we come out of her.
A year after I left the 12 × 12, I returned to No Name Creek, and Jackie and I stood outside one night under the stars. They shimmered in the sky and on the creek. She left me alone for a minute, disappearing into the 12 × 12, and then returned with a pair of everyday binoculars and handed them to me. What could I possibly see out here on such a dark night? I thought. Jackie pointed into the sky, toward Orion’s knife.
I chuckled at the absurdity. Without a telescope, what could I possibly see? Nevertheless, I humored her, pointing the low-tech binoculars up at Orion’s bow. I traced the clear belt of three stars and t
hen saw the weapon at his side, three dimmer stars, his knife. I squinted through the lens; nothing special. It hardly seemed to magnify anything. Looking at Jackie for help, I noticed her smiling. “Focus on the middle star in the knife,” she said.
I looked again. Remarkably, the point of that middle star loosened, blurred as if the lens were smeared. Puzzled, I relaxed my gaze and allowed the image to reveal itself. It wasn’t a star at all, but a nebula of stars.
“It’s the Orion nebula,” Jackie said, “an interstellar cloud of hydrogen gas, dust, and plasma.” She explained that it’s a star-forming region, where materials clump together to form bigger masses that further attract matter and eventually become stars. “The ‘leftovers’ are believed to form planets,” she said. “So it’s not a single star, but a million pieces of a future star.”
That nebula is a metaphor for Jackie’s effect on me. What before looked like one single thing was actually a million. Edges of the ordinary blurred.
There’s a rare and puzzling condition called synesthesia where your senses, in effect, cross. Swiss musician Elizabeth Sulston, for example, hears pleasant chords as the taste of sweet cream. Dissonant, grating chords taste bitter. Sulston, according to a study published in Nature, is the first known case mixing sound and taste. Much more common is the blurring of sound and sight, where, for example, the sound of a birdcall “looks blue.” Scientists believe the condition originates in the limbic system, a primitive region of the brain associated with behavior and emotion. Even more fascinating, studies on infants suggest that we all start out as synesthetes, but soon after birth, neural circuits are pruned and we lose this ability. “It’s not a short circuit in the system,” neurologist Richard Cytowic is quoted as saying, “but a primitive mechanism that was somehow lost to the rest of us.”
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