The Good Life Lab

by Wendy Jehanara Tremayne

  In a gift economy a gift must always move. If it is kept something of similar value must move on instead. If it becomes property it perishes.

  — Lewis Hyde, from The Gift

  In a gift economy, value is found in people and not in things. People who are in the know give their gift. The recipients do not at first realize that their end of the stick is the shorter one — not until they themselves give, which is a natural reaction to having been given to. Then they arrive at the secret destination and seek out a recipient for their gift, knowing that they have become the new treasure holders. If the giving were to stop, if everyone suddenly were to hoard, the value of the entire city would be reduced to nil — bankrupt! But the giving doesn’t stop. Life in Black Rock City is more abundant than life in the default world. There, giving is infectious and even competitive.

  I understand that there were real reasons why the seemingly ideal way of life in Black Rock City existed only one week out of the year. The material the city was built from and everything in it was produced under the weight of capitalism and paid for with money earned by the same people who went to the desert to escape money. People with impressive careers and good salaries pioneered the gift economy. Each year they made the pilgrimage to Black Rock City as if to set free something that was all but lost. Like a snake eating its tail, Burning Man, a paradox, was the by-product of capitalism, a response to it, and, if one but knew how to look at it, perhaps its cure.

  It was living in Black Rock’s gift economy that caused me to press my life’s reset button, quit my job, and hit the road to try to piece together what had happened.

  I should have known better than to volunteer at 80 Acres. People out there bend hot metal wearing garden gloves. Rosie, a metal artist from New York who had moved to San Francisco, was the right type. Rosie confidently exhibited a 4-inch-long, three-dimensional scar that marked the spot where an out-of-control welder had nearly met her jugular vein — while she was building a 100-foot-diameter chandelier for Burning Man. She had classic Burning Man appeal: she was knowledgeable, creative, independent, and fearless. Some part of me wanted to be as self-assured as Rosie. Another part naively believed that I already was as tough as she was. That’s how I messed up my hip, trying to pick up a railroad tie. After the railroad tie incident, the manager of 80 Acres, a surly old guy who could easily have been mistaken for a pirate, told me I’d better “go git” to the doctor. Defeated, I drove my Honda 500 miles south, using only my left foot to control the pedals of the car. In Los Angeles I met up with a helpful friend who took me to the doctor.

  Days later I signed a hospital release form, bought a set of crutches, and drove left-footed out of the hospital parking lot. I left behind the ready-and-waiting surgeon who had hoped to have a go at my hip’s repair. Being on a road trip allowed me to believe my imagination to be mightier than my mind. I placed a risky bet on my own strong will rather than a surgeon’s hand. Besides, he’d be there later if I needed him. I had heard stories about people who used yoga to work through physical difficulties. I was willing to try anything to avoid the surgeon’s table. It was a winning bet. Yoga worked. In a few weeks, I kicked the crutches. Recognizing the treasure that I’d found, I made a promise to begin a lifelong yoga practice. To ensure that I would never forget the significance of the treasure, I decided to become a yoga teacher one day.

  Since volunteering at 80 Acres was no longer an option, I spent the next four months on the road reviewing the decisions that had led me to quit my job.

  It is no sign of wellness to be well adjusted to a sick society.

  — Krishnamurti

  Driving on Highway 1, I remembered taking a crappy job just to obtain medical benefits. There were always good reasons for making bad decisions, I said aloud to a 4-inch plastic troll that I had mounted to the dashboard with a glob of glue. My plastic patron saint came from a thrift shop in Topanga Canyon. She made a good road companion. Her hair was burned in spots, and melted wax covered her toes. We’d both been through something. My homely idol had skirted getting whisked away and dumped into the landfill by capturing the interest of a Topanga Canyon shopkeeper and then my own. An excellent listener and devoid of judgment, she welcomed the few words that broke the silence that I was learning to love.

  On a moonless night in front of a cave on a beach in Southern California, green phosphorescent waves illuminated a black ocean. Gazing out, I remembered lying for several employers. It felt awful, but I had done it anyway. “Didn’t everyone?” I asked the troll that I unstuck from the dashboard and placed in the sand next to me. With a candle lit by her side, she cast eerie shadows on the earthen wall at our backs.

  In Moab, Utah, under a blanket of stars that seemed to multiply every hour, I remembered my first job offer after I got my bachelor’s degree. I turned it down, even though it came from Grey, a top advertising agency. I couldn’t survive on the $14,000 they offered me. I had loans to pay. Instead I moved into the future, head hung low, to meet an unknown fate that expressed itself through a string of featureless gigs: promotion manager for an engineering company that made multimeters, sales-team manager for a company that sold devices for attaching tags to garments, and promoter of magazines (including one for ham radio operators).

  While cruising pristine Amish country in Pennsylvania, I remembered times I had compromised my better instincts. In college, knowing that no financial support was waiting for me after graduation, I turned away from art and chose instead to major in marketing, with a minor in business. It was a practical decision. I had student loans to pay back, and living in New York was going to be tough.

  The Indian spiritual text the Bhagavad Gita says in words different from these that it is better to do a crappy job at what you alone are able to do (your purpose) than to do a great job at what someone else is here to do. This felt like an appropriate description for the predicament I was in. I wondered what I was meant to do.

  Free of the cloak of my career, my ego regularly prompted me to think about the hole left behind by the part of my identity that I shed. It wanted to know who I was to become.

  That would take time.

  My journey concluded with a return to Burning Man to live in Black Rock City’s gift economy a second time. Then I headed home to learn what it means to be a yogi. Yoga studios were not yet as common as pizza joints. I searched out a seasoned, eccentric French yoga teacher and started an apprenticeship.

  Four hours after I returned to the city, the World Trade Center towers disappeared from New York’s skyline. I made my first pledge.

  Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

  — Rumi

  Many of my friends thought I’d lost my mind when I told them I was becoming a yoga teacher. A few months earlier, as part of my midlife fire sale, I had given up what some would say was a perfectly good career. I was earning a good salary. I had medical insurance and a nice office in Brooklyn. I enjoyed my clients, who were mostly artists, filmmakers, authors, and musicians. For a while I thought this was all that I needed to be happy. But being unemployed and on the open road gave me time and space to review my choice of careers. Being the creative director of a pop culture marketing company was a reflection of my own desire to be creative. By which I don’t mean the kind of creativity that shapes people and their ideas into products and advertising campaigns. The truth was, my job was unable to provide the substance that my heart demanded.

  Giving this up to scrape by teaching yoga suddenly seemed perfectly reasonable. But old habits are hard to break. I was prewired to turn ideas into profit. I considered starting a yoga business. After all, I had more business experience than yoga experience. Doing so required opening a studio, managing other people, taking on debt, doing accounting, and essentially becoming more like the person I was trying to shed. I found the cycle of business that necessarily followed every good idea tiring and bland. The gift economy I had encountered at Bur
ning Man had me wanting a skill that could be bartered, gifted, or exchanged for money. But in the default culture I’d been living in, to want a moderate amount of anything was practically a personal flaw, a weakness. Not wanting money did not jibe with the American way. I wondered why everything had to scale up in order to survive.

  Life is long, I repeated to myself often, to settle the rising feeling that I had to know what I was going to do in the future right away. It was a habit left from keeping pace in the sped-up world of business.

  In the four months that I spent on the road, I cried into 11,000 miles of American landscape and reviewed 33 years of life. I admit that I was a little disappointed when the trip was over and I pulled into New York in my Honda, not knowing anything more about what to do with my life than I knew when I had left. I did discover a few gems: yoga, silence, a taste of freedom, and a bit of courage.

  Teaching yoga would have to carry me to whatever was next. To uphold the value of the gift, once I became a certified yoga teacher, I offered yoga classes with the clause No one turned away for lack of funds. I accepted barter and gifts as well as money. It was a start.

  Broken Heart Seeks Giant Band-Aid

  The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.

  — Thomas Carlyle

  “Are you a broken heart? I’m a Band-Aid!” said the guy standing in front me wearing a large floppy Band-Aid drawn in green and blue illuminated wire. Like a beauty queen’s sash, the giant Band-Aid began at his right hip, crossed his chest, flopped over his left shoulder, and continued down his back.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am a broken heart.” I was wearing an illuminated wire heart that throbbed with red light and hung at the center of my chest.

  The Festival of the Hurting was a costume party put on by a group of metal artists in response to the disorientation New Yorkers felt in the aftermath of September 11. A Brooklyn warehouse was filled with amusement-park rides designed to injure those who rode them — not horribly, just a little. Flirtatious guys and girls dressed as nurses (but with thigh-high fishnet stockings) and folks with both real and imagined injuries relished the act of dressing one another’s wounds. A real boy-meets-girl mixer.

  I walked Mikey — a.k.a. Band-Aid Boy — over to a 20-foot-long teeter-totter set parallel to the ground. Step stools on each end waited for the next riders. I pointed. He hoisted himself up and onto the device. I got on the other end and immediately hunkered down with a squinted face and fists held tight, believing that I could, by effort, increase my body weight and become heavier than he. As if by will, I sent his end of the teeter-totter up into the air and pinned him to the ceiling at an uncomfortable height. He looked down at me, half excited and half scared to death.

  The next morning I opened my apartment door to find Band-Aid Boy with a skateboard under one arm and an echinacea plant in his free hand.

  “How’d you find my apartment?”

  Mikey recited the string of actions he had performed to bring him to my stoop. There was basic reasoning and practical logic to start, but also the writing of computer code, searching community lists for posts with my name on it and clues as to who I was, and finally a good guess that of the two Wendys his research produced, the one who lived on Sackett Street was the one he’d met the night before. Brooklyn boasts only a few locations where dirt and a yard are possible, and I had told him that I was thinking about starting a garden. The Carroll Gardens brownstone I shared with a roommate was in a part of Brooklyn known for having backyards.

  “Good guess,” I said as I opened the door to let him in.

  Days later I visited Mikey’s apartment on Houston Street, where I found him working on the creation of a dozen pairs of men’s and women’s underwear. Each featured a pocket that held in place a small motor that could be turned on and off with a remote-control device he had built. Mikey is a lover of mischief and always clever. He, too, had discovered Burning Man and was planning to return with his new invention. His plan was to give out panties and then mix up the remotes and give them to people other than the ones who had received the underwear. “Panty Tag,” he said, looking up from his soldering iron, lifting up a huge pair of magnifying glasses attached to his head, and flashing his mischievous smile.

  Our first date. I found Mikey soldering together a dozen pair of motorized underwear.

  Under my arm I carried a blanket that I was making for the desert pilgrimage. The blanket had two giant sets of arms: one for the person wearing the blanket so he or she could reach out into the world and the other for someone outside of the blanket who wished to reach in. “It’s for spooning,” I told him.

  Burning Man was a few months away, and those who planned to attend were working like Christmas elves, making weird versions of the goods used in what I was coming to think of as the default world. Burning Man gave those who craved creativity a venue and a reason to make wacky versions of familiar things.

  Our third date took place at the Madagascar Institute, a metal shop run by the artists who had produced the costume party. There I taught Mikey how to cut images into a 50-gallon metal drum using an oxyacetylene torch, a skill I had acquired only weeks before. The images illuminated when a fire was burned inside the barrels. Mikey helped me complete the image of a tree with branches that morphed into the face of a woman with outstretched arms. On the back of the cylinder, we carefully cut the initials nypd and fdny, for the New York police and fire departments. The barrels were part of a public art project to honor the September 11 rescue workers.

  Weeks later, with the city’s permission, we placed the decorative metal barrels along the West Side Highway on a pedestrian walkway. In the belly of the drums, fires burned and lured New Yorkers from their apartments. Some who came chatted by the warmth of the fire. Others were more contemplative. I imagined the flames burning up what hurt too much to say.

  Inspired by Burning Man’s culture of makers, I acquired skills that turned my inclination from humdrum to curious. Mikey taught me to wire LED lights. I taught him to weld. We built a pair of bikes part by part, greasing each ball bearing and truing the spokes. For the first 263 days of our knowing each other (he counted), we made things.

  Learning to weld and cut metal changed my life. Out in the desert the skill comes in handy all the time.

  To Live a Decommodified Life

  The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried in our bodies. Consumer goods merely bait that lust, they do not satisfy it.

  — Lewis Hyde, from The Gift: The Erotic Life of Property

  In 2002 the underground art community in New York City blossomed and grew. In a given week one could learn to sew and make a furry bear suit, learn about Central Park’s edible plants, find out how to read a schematic, learn the Hawaiian fire art called poi, solder, or go on an unsanctioned historical tour of underground subway stations no longer in use.

  Consumerism and money were themes that popped up regularly in creative projects. Performance artist Reverend Billy founded the Church of Stop Shopping. With a real choir preaching the pitfalls of materialism, Reverend Billy and his followers performed in churches around the city, then the country, and then the world. The Billionaires for Bush were regularly seen around town dressed in tuxedos and fancy gowns. In character, they argued for the rights of the wealthy: to tax, to maximize profit, to increase power. I added my own contribution to the theme by creating a project called The Vomitorium: Make Room For More!, a theatrical production modeled after the opulent parties of the Roman Empire, where guests infamously engaged in consuming astounding amounts of food, vomiting, and gorging themselves again and again. The play invited reflection on the fate that eventually befell the Roman Empire.

  It was a time of self-expression and self-reflection. Burning Man’s gift economy and its DIY ethos were shaping a culture back at home. This culture helped Mikey and
me recognize how commodified our lives were.

  We realized that instead of making the goods we needed to live, we bought them. We chose what to buy by copying others or by listening to advertisements. Wearing branded clothing, we were ourselves walking advertisements. Since we didn’t make things, we also didn’t understand how things worked. If something broke, we threw it in the trash. We were not privy to information that might lead to responsibility. We didn’t know which fibers and materials decomposed back into the earth or what toll the production of goods took on the planet. This information did not come on care labels along with the washing instructions or in owner manuals paired with gadgets. We had never considered that most of civilization was made out of petroleum and corn. Both can be abstracted and turned into a plethora of forms. Petroleum is turned into plastics and synthetic fibers that are then used to make consumer goods. It is also turned into fertilizers used to grow industrialized food. Living in the city, a place defined by its reliance on goods produced elsewhere, we consumed things with a cost that could be measured in petroleum, in both the delivery and production of goods. And we learned that the processed food we ate, which took varied forms from sweeteners to fiber, was actually modified corn. Animal products like meat and dairy we learned to view as corn products because animals not meant to consume corn were being raised on it at industrialized farms.