Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  Amid these doubts, something happened. I was making rudimentary coffee one morning over a wood fire when I looked up and drew a quick breath of shock. Towering over me was a beautiful Zapatista woman, in full camouflage, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, rounds of ammo slung around her shoulder, an antique machine gun held across her chest. She was so iconic she looked surreal. Up to that point I hadn’t seen any of the actual Zapatista guerreros — they kept to their hidden camps in the forest, where the villagers brought them food. But here she was!

  I mumbled something. She just stood silently, unsmiling, hand on her weapon. I didn’t agree with violence then, and I still don’t. But I understood and admired the Zapatistas. These are Mexico’s most neglected people, the disenfranchised descendants of the ancient Maya. Like Kusasu’s Guarasug’wé they are nearing the precipice of extinction, being pushed off the flat edge of the world — but not without a fight. Symbolically and practically, their uprising began on January I, I994, the first day of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. At the time, respected economists, since proven right, said that NAFTA would flood Mexico with cheap American corn, thereby undercutting the livelihoods of millions of Mexican corn farmers and turning them into the urban poor, forced off their land and into Mexico City’s dangerous slums to work at whatever they could. To make matters worse, corn remains a potent mythological symbol. Traditional Maya believe that corn represents the perpetual circle of life. They imagine God with corn in the blood and consider themselves to be children of the corn. They decided to resist.

  Today, the Zapatistas continue to wage what has been called the first postmodern war, using tools of media and global sympathy much more than actual weapons. When they captured Chiapas’s capital, San Cristobal de Las Casas, many Zapatistas had only wooden guns, a powerful symbol as CNN’s cameras rolled. Others had real guns, of course, including the mujer Zapatista who stood in front of me. I poured a cup of coffee and held it out to her and also indicated some corn tortillas I had on a wooden plate. She refused. But before she left, she shared a heartfelt smile with me, which I took to mean “gracias” for being present in the village. For the remainder of my service in the Lacondon, I relaxed into the solitude, knowing it was tied to a larger purpose.

  Solitude in service of being a human shield is clearly pragmatism in action. The silent force of a hundred European and North American people in Chiapas kept actual bombs from dropping. But conscious solitude is always pragmatic, always active. How else to learn to honestly look into the dark, infinite well within, to see those foreign lands that no one else can ever know?

  IN MYTHOLOGICAL STORIES, heroes face demons and thereby grow as people. In solitude you find the warmth and glow of the hearth — the deep bliss of the unity — but you must first go straight through the fire.

  I had a terrible, vivid dream one night at Jackie’s. An ugly old man, somehow connected to the Nazis, maybe earlier in his life during Hitler’s reign, lived in a deep woods. A younger man visited him, and something hateful was planned. The younger man had a contingent of a half dozen other young men along with him; they milled around outside. Inside, the old Nazi and the younger man laughed, and then the young man left with the others. The old man was once again alone.

  Until that point in the dream, I saw events from a distance, as if from the perspective of the forest itself. The scene seemed vague, the humans tiny against the deep forest. Then my perspective flipped. I was no longer looking at this as if perched on a distant branch in a tree. I was right next to the old man. I could see the black moles on his cheek, hear him breathing, even smell his sour breath as he sat alone. Not alone in a luminous solitude, but rather utterly lonely, the very definition of loneliness: avoiding the well. He wasn’t angry; he’d already resented and hated the world so much it had charred him into deadness itself. He had no feelings at all.

  I awoke from the dream and grabbed my bedside marbled notebook to scribble down the details. In my semiconscious state, I realized to my horror that I was writing the dream down in the first person, as if I were the old Nazi. Here is how I started to write, directly from the journal: “A younger man came to visit me, and we made a hateful plan, and then we laughed …”

  Tibetan Buddhist art is replete with horrifying statues, their grotesque faces displaying every kind of negativity, from bitterness and resentment to anger and outright murderous hatred. Western missionaries misunderstood these to be idols of gods and devils; they are not. They represent our own inner states that we “meet” when we go deeply into silence and solitude. After the Nazi dream, I biked into Smithsville and called Leah. “What’s sin?” I asked her.

  “For me,” she finally replied, “sin is when I’m at the center.”

  We often turn away from or ignore the darkness within, whether it’s labeled Christian “sin,” Jung’s “dark side,” or Eckhart Tolle’s “unconsciousness.” But I am glad when I meet the dark places on the shadowy borders of solitude. The black moles and sour breath, the deadness. On the surface, my dream arose from my time living in the SS barracks in Buchenwald. Sleeping each night beside the ovens made National Socialism very visceral for me. But the dream hinted at the lifeless, the flat inside of me. A younger man came to visit me, and we made a hateful plan, and then we laughed. Kusasu’s death is in me. The destruction of the Bolivian rainforests is in me. Buchenwald is in there, too. I’m complicit.

  “So what do we do?” Leah said, days later down by No Name Creek. We’d been talking about our inner flatness, how we were habituated to a central evil of our own time, what the late Susan Sontag called “an American-style consumer society that spreads itself across the globe, destroying the past, and enclosing all horizons within a selfish materialism.”

  Leah and I talked about Sontag, who in one of her last speeches warned of “the mercantilist biases of American culture.”

  But it isn’t enough to replace Thomas Friedman with Susan Sontag. Too many of us do this, if unconsciously; we think other people’s thoughts. Solitude’s richest gift is allowing one’s own thoughts to flow, and not through mental aqueducts built by others. That engineering is ecocide’s infrastructure. There’s so much mind control, more now in our hyper-mediated world than ever, and truly thinking for ourselves may be the hardest thing to do. Yet could this, ultimately, be the only way our society will achieve the necessary basis of change, a paradigm shift?

  DURING LEAH’S VISITS TO THE 12 X 12, we usually spent some of our time in solitude. Once we decided to spend the morning in the woods, separately. She plopped down on the banks of the creek, a hundred yards from the 12 × 12, dangling her feet in the water, her fingers stroking the mossy bank as if it were a drowsy cat. Meanwhile, I walked down the creek, as far as I ever had, until No Name Creek finally came to an end. It liquidated itself into a larger river.

  In the place where the creek disappeared, I stuck in a toe and then eased in my body. The chilly water cooled me, and the current massaged out tensions. I came out dripping and sat on the bank. An hour passed, two hours. A blade of rock sliced the water and the creek’s lacquered flow touched the edge and sent off caviar dimples of water that instantly grew into quarter-sized whirlpools. Another moment and twelve inches later they swirled into silver dollars reflecting the branches of the tree above. That reflection on the circle of water looked just like a dragonfly. And the water’s motion made it appear to be flapping its wings. Furiously. Earnestly flailing for its life, as if wanting to break free of two dimensions. Flapping like that, it actually became a live dragonfly to me. I focused on the spot where they were biggest, and they zoomed by, hundreds of them with their long thoraxes, heads, antennae, and translucent wings, to be killed in their prime, and by not very much: a nub of falling water slaughtered them.

  Watching all those dragonflies die, I thought of how thoughtlessly I’d squashed a fly the day before. I noticed it upturned, buzzing away on its back by Jackie’s front door. The buzzing sound annoyed me mildly. It would stop, b
ut every ten seconds there’d be another burst of buzzing. Its dying gasps. Hardly thinking, I got up, took one step, and the next one crushed its tiny body underfoot with a crackle of insect parts against cement. I sat back down, laptop in lap — but. But a single point, like a black magic marker dot, caught my peripheral vision, and I knew I couldn’t write another word with the corpse in full view. So I ripped off a square of toilet paper, scooped up the fly, and deposited it in my little trash bag, feeling better without an accusing corpse in plain sight.

  Then — seemingly out of nowhere — Kusasu came to mind. Her people used to live in the rainforest. But over the years, logging and rubber operations — and big soy plantations — took over much of the land, destroying the forests and corraling Kusasu’s people into ever tinier areas. Others fled into far-off cities to become “pavement Indians,” unable to assimilate, begging for scraps on street corners. I thought of how the Amazon’s indigenous people are now “environmental refugees,” forced to migrate into Third World urban sprawl. And suddenly, that fly felt like a metaphor. I squashed it almost unconsciously; it was the evidence of that unconsciousness staring me in the face that bothered me. Bring it to light. Is it really a stretch to suggest that our civilization crushed Kusasu, the Guarasug’wé, and their rainforest home with its boot heel but quickly hid the evidence? Bring it into the light. Genocide is part of me; ecocide is part of me. Don’t repress it. Make it conscious. I walked quickly back up along the creek toward Leah, the ripples shining like blades. I stepped with splashes, then up onto the bank through the tangle, building up a sweat, feeling the sun burning my forehead. Rounding a bend I finally saw Leah.

  She sat in the same spot she’d been hours earlier, feeling the water with her feet. I stopped. She didn’t see me. There was no journal on the bank beside her, and she’d long since finished My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization. In fact, she seemed to read less and less. There is a point where we must let the feel of water on bare feet replace books and spiritual practices. They can be very helpful as guides, as structures, as inspiration, but can also, if we hold on to them too tightly, obstruct the most important thing: an unmediated facing of the world as it is, which is to say, as we shape it.

  I walked through the gleaming water up to Leah and asked: “What’s the shape of the world?”

  She looked directly at the earth. Splashed water with her feet, sank her fingers into the supple moss. “It’s not flat,” she said, squinting up at me.

  I looked into No Name Creek. No more suicidal dragonflies; here the water was woodcut, carefully etched with a sharp metal tool. But those neat streaks suddenly jumbled into a rutty swirl, like pasta loosening in boiling water. “The world is everything but flat,” she said, standing up. “Feel the smooth river rocks, the spongy banks.

  ” Colors tangled together in the creek: light purple, red, and orange. “The world curves,” I said.

  “It spins.”

  “It’s sandy.”

  “There’s clay.”

  “There’s jellyfish.”

  “Rainforests full of animals.”

  “Slithering anacondas.”

  “Giant pandas.”

  “Six-toed sloths.”

  I’d look back on this moment as transformative: Leah and I groping for softer language concealed the flat, proclaiming the immediacy of smells, sounds, and textures. The beauty of the earth grew as we chose its beauty as the focus of our attention. The world is wet, Leah said, getting into the creek.

  It’s cold! I said, following her in.

  Deep canyons.

  Snowy peaks.

  A million people die today.

  A million are born.

  The world is divine! The world is mine. It’s yours. No, it’s ours. It’s …

  Leah opened her mouth as if to say something else, but all that came out was a puff of air. Emptied of words, she collapsed onto No Name Creek’s yielding bank and pulled me down next to her. We listened. Trees shimmered; water flowed, and a hawk called out, urgently, thick in the south.

  19. SOFT ECONOMY

  LEAH HUGGED A GOAT and then paid the farmer for its cheese.

  Durham’s farmers market, a few blocks from Leah’s house, was alive that morning. Fifty farmers had come in from the surrounding counties with meat and veggies, and a thousand of us gathered to take those organic products off their hands.

  After paying, Leah and I lingered with Jim and Keisha, a farming couple in their midtwenties who had just bought thirty acres for fifty-six thousand dollars. “We love it!” Keisha told Leah while giving another customer change. “We’re now in a yurt on our land, but we’ll slowly sell enough goat cheese and vegetables to build a house. But there’s no rush.” Leah didn’t want to leave their presence. I could feel the tug, too. Both of them were so vital, full of zest and health.

  We went from table to table, filling our canvas bags. Leah floated through the place with an irrepressible smile, greeting the farmers, their kids, their dogs. She pressed a fresh blueberry between my lips; we sampled all kinds of cheeses, crusty breads, fruits that gushed juice onto our cheeks. Produce smells blended together. I felt joyful. This was a far cry from a supermarket or the Gold Kist factory. No heavy packaging, no corporate logos. Natural colors merged gracefully with the faded old pickups, the farmers’ tie-dyed Ts, the bustle of the place. It evoked a Bolivian or African market.

  Farmers markets are like an emerging social contract between twenty-first-century polis and dumos; country folks produce healthy foods in an earth-friendly way and townspeople pay a little more. The number of farmers markets in the United States has more than doubled, from 1,755 in 1994 to 4,385 in 2006. They provide a lot more than food. Leah and the rest of us were there, you might say, to heal. Farmers markets, I began to realize, heal the edges of our über-industrialized economy, allowing a less chemical- and fossil fuel–intensive economy to flourish. They heal our relationships with each other as we reconfigure the buying and selling of food around fresh air and community. Most importantly, they heal our spirits, because if something pays, it stays, and those of us at the market that morning sensed we were voting with our dollars for a kind of independence: the right to farm.

  “Leah!” said Jack at the next stand, his T-shirt reading, “Fix Marriage Not Gays.” “You need some pork?” As he handed her a pound of meat, freshly slaughtered the night before on his farm, he asked me about myself. I told him where I was living.

  “Your neighbors are who? Mike and Michele Thompson?!”

  “Yes.”

  He silently shook his head, lips pursed. “They, how should I put this, are libertarian. Now I’m libertarian, too, and so is my partner, but we’re libertarians on the left. The Thompsons are libertarians on the rlght.”

  I said I thought they were good people.

  He laughed and said, “I wish them well with their farming. Just that I don’t know if they have it together. I hear their whole operation, what there is of it, may go on the skids. Hopefully it won’t be welfare for them again.”

  Our canvas bags full, we took a spin past an iron foundry and watched sculptors create. On the walk back to her house we passed the restaurant Piedmont, an art deco place that serves only local and organic food. All of this flourished within walking distance of her little white apartment.

  “This could be the new economy,” I said. “Healthy, community-centered.”

  “Eerie. That’s exactly what I was just going to say.” This was another change in myself I noticed. Since coming to Jackie’s I’d become more intuitive. Several times I knew exactly what Leah was going to say a couple of seconds before she said it. While part of this was simply our getting to know each other better, I also discovered how mindfulness — being fully in the roomy present moment — enhanced a natural sixth sense. Goethe talked about this, how he became so sensitive to his surroundings that he could predict the weather with precision just by opening a window.

  As we walked, Leah told m
e about her evolving dream. For years she’d fantasized about having a farm. Buy land, homestead, live with two chickens and goats and vegetables. Now it was economically viable to be an organic farmer. She could still be a journalist on a freelance basis, perhaps blend the two in some creative way. How empowering to discover that, if the culture around us was not working, we could join others who were creating a new culture.

  That night Leah and I went to the Full Frame documentary film festival in Durham. Out of nowhere I heard, “Billy. Billy!” Suddenly, my mom’s warm arms were hugging me.

  Billy, she kept repeating. Childlike. Happy and present, in all her sixty-eight years of glory. She wore an earth-toned outfit and a necklace I’d gotten her as a gift while in the Ivory Coast a couple of years before. She hugged me again and took me over to introduce me to three of her friends from their activist group, The Raging Grannies, liberal-looking gals, good Americans. I asked my mom, “How about we have lunch tomorrow?”

  She immediately agreed, as I knew she would. Leah came over. Introductions and hugs. Leah got a little stiff, as she always did when meeting new people, her “I’m-a-producer” mode, a professional young woman keeping a bit of distance. Mom’s three friends asked for Leah’s business card; all the while Mom’s face beamed love toward me.

  Then Leah and I disappeared into the film festival. What a pleasure to be in a place where your parents live, spontaneously bumping into them, setting up a lunch. To have a friend I adore at my side. To be at a film festival, in a smallish town in America, in spring. I wondered: Could I stop being a man without a country? Could this be home?

  AT THE 12 X 12 I STARTED DREAMING about a soft economy.

  Being with Jackie, being alone in her tiny house, provoked a question: How might personal economy and the leisure ethic come together as rebellion? Jackie’s lifestyle is a twenty-first-century Boston Tea Party, but she hasn’t thrown just one product overboard; rather, she’s tossed the whole lot of planet-killing junk. Today it’s not the British Empire colonizing us, but a pervasive corporate globalism. We resist through our vote, and I don’t mean for this political candidate or that, though that’s certainly part of it. We cast powerful votes for the kind of world we want to live in whenever we fish out a twenty or click BUY on the Web.