The Good Life Lab

by Wendy Jehanara Tremayne

  Our life cycle was a patterned loop of working to earn money to buy what we could have made ourselves — better and more responsibly. Our creativity, our most precious gift, we traded for money. The results of our labor hardly contributed to making the life of the earth any better. Deep down, we felt this.

  With newly opened eyes we watched the same food supply trucks pull up behind all sorts of restaurants. “It’s all the same,” we said to each other while watching the same truck deliver to a run-down deli and then a fancy health food café across the street.

  Documentaries about genetically modified organisms (GMOs), pesticides, and factory farming practices encouraged us to become food aware. We memorized the categories of goods that contained GMOs and avoided them. At the time the list consisted of cotton, corn, canola, and soy. Today the list is longer and harder to memorize.

  We dumped our televisions and turned to online news sources. We started making more of our goods ourselves. Instead of buying new things, we favored what could be trash-picked. We modified junk to fulfill our needs. Changes in habit helped us see the relationship between our choices and the world. We avoided participating in sweatshop and child labor, pollution, and the abuse of resources worldwide by not consuming and by living out of the waste stream.

  We started taking note of the things people did to reward themselves for the hard work they gave to their careers. They were things that Mikey and I had rewarded ourselves with all the time. Once out of our office cubicles, we had run off to fancy dinners and bought consumer goods and designer clothing.

  I held on to the pledge that I had made a year earlier after months on the road. With Mikey, I added a promise.

  Everything Is a Tool to Change the World

  Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than one’s fear.

  — Ambrose Redmoon

  As I scraped by teaching yoga and doing freelance PR, my savings dwindled. Was it sane to think I could live an uncommodified life in a commodified world? Then I realized that my job had armed me with useful skills. I knew how to engage the media and produce events. I decided to use these skills to produce an event giving peace a voice.

  Standing under a bridge in Central Park at not quite 7 a.m., I watched the biggest snowstorm in decades dump white powder. Bare-naked tree trunks that seemed drawn in charcoal swayed against the backdrop of white and gray.

  I knew that if I didn’t take off all my clothes and dart out naked into the snow, none of the volunteers who had followed me there would either. I bolted. I let my still-warm, blood-filled body cut through the sideways-falling crystals. When I reached Bethesda Fountain and looked up toward the bronze Angel of Waters perched high in the air, I imagined that her outstretched arm beckoned me. I slowed my pace in front of her and the four small cherubim standing below her: Health, Purity, Temperance, and Peace. Nearby, a plaque, now covered in snow, had been mounted to honor veterans of the world wars. In 41 days, America would go to war with Iraq for the second time. We were in Central Park to tell the world that we did not agree with that plan.

  A high-pitched sound grew in volume. It was the other women, who, upon seeing me dart out from the bridge, followed. Their red-splotched naked bodies were coming my way. In less than three minutes we spelled out NO bUSH with our bodies. The snow felt hot on my back as I lay in my spot in the S. I stared up at the snowflakes falling on my face. I was broke, unemployed, and out in the middle of a snowstorm doing something kind of scary and kind of magical.

  I wasn’t just expressing my objection to the war that day. I was taking back the skills that I had given to industry, and by doing so I was redeeming myself. I had wanted to become an artist and had instead chosen marketing as a major in college — because it seemed the safe road. Years later, I found myself without artistic skill, at least in the traditional and commodified sense. I didn’t paint or sculpt. I had not apprenticed in an art form. I had nothing to sell or hang in a gallery. I’d never had time for art as a hobby. I had gone from full-time student to full-time employee. Producing NO bUSH showed me that the skills I had learned over the course of my career could be themselves artistic, and they could be put to better ends. Anything can be used as a tool to transform the world.

  Within days, images created by other groups spelled out messages that were broadcast back to us through the media. People in Hong Kong, Milan, Texas, Paris, Sydney, South Africa, Hiroshima, Cuba, Spain, New Zealand, Cape Town, Antarctica, and other places across the world spelled LOVE, SOS, No War; they drew hearts and peace signs with their bodies. From the Middle East came salam, peace in Arabic. I was satisfied as I had never been in my previous career. I felt useful.

  Commodified People

  We’ve got the same genes. We’re more or less the same. But our nature, the nature of humans, allows all kinds of behavior. I mean every one of us under some circumstances could be a gas chamber attendant and a saint.

  — Noam Chomsky

  Some time later, when my friend Marina and I emerged from the subway, we were swallowed up in a crowd. Cops and protesters mingled with people in business suits going to and from skyscraper offices; there were cops on bikes, reporters, and a clown wearing a rainbow wig. It was probably the worst day to be picking up a friend from out of town in midtown Manhattan. There were protests all over New York that summer, and it was hard to avoid running into them. In spite of the crowd, we managed to find our friend Ben, who had just flown in from New Orleans, and we headed to the subway station a block away. A few feet short of the station’s entrance at Bryant Park, walking traffic slowed and then stopped. There was a commotion and an elevation of energy, some yelling, and fast movement. Some people standing next to me put their arms in the air and made peace signs with their hands. Our trio plus one piece of wheeled luggage dropped to the ground in response to a cop shouting, “Get down! Everybody get down!”

  Police in riot gear stood shoulder to shoulder, holding orange nets up to their chins. Ben, Marina, and I, along with about 50 other people I’d never seen before, were encircled. Trapped. One by one, cops pushed those captured inside the net over the edge of it, face forward, hands held behind our backs by uniformed police. Noses were bloodied as people hit the pavement too fast and face-first. I was cuffed tight and put on a city bus that had been taken over by the nypd. It delivered me to a temporary jail built for this occasion.

  I learned that the old bus terminal on Pier 57 on the West Side had been converted to a makeshift jail weeks before the Republican National Convention. Inside the terminal I was stripped of my possessions, ID, phone, money, and joy and pushed into a cell with 50 or so other women and a 12-foot-long bench. I was in jail. Not for any protest, but just for being on a New York City sidewalk at the wrong time.

  In jail the only water offered came out of black greased pipes sticking out of old rusty fountains protruding from the peeling cinderblock cell walls. While many did not pause over the water, I worried about my kidney infection. I’d left my antibiotics at home. How would I maintain the regimen of ten 8-ounce glasses of water a day that my doctor had advised? I’m going to die in this place, I thought as I watched others sip the water.

  The next day the group was bused to a real jail in downtown Manhattan. On the way a college student had a genuine panic attack. Crying, screaming, and panting for breath, she was dragged from her seat and chained to a metal pole that divided the bus as though this shift in position would calm her down. It didn’t.

  I met a lot of people over the course of three days in jail. A woman whose daughter was having a baby that week; she missed her first grandchild’s birth. A father from Wisconsin who had just finished cramming a U-Haul’s worth of his daughter’s belongings into her tiny New York University dorm and had stepped out to get Chinese food. We all had simply been taken out of our lives.

  After I begged hard, a cop slid his quarter-full water bottle through the bars to me. I asked the tall, soft-faced, middle-aged African Ame
rican man, “Do you know that your civil rights were won by people who protested to gain them?”

  “In just a few more years I get my pension,” he said apologetically, turning away.

  I thought back to the time after September 11. Letter-by-letter on the back of the fire barrels we’d made, Mikey and I had carved the initials nypd to honor the New York City Police Department. We had etched, Thank you for your service. It seemed bizarre now, mixed up. But I knew that the fear I felt toward the police was not a fear of the people who wore the blue civil-servant costumes. I feared what commodified them.

  Swap-O-Rama-Rama

  There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness.

  — Ghandi

  That same year, in 2004, Americans were producing 13.1 million tons of textile waste annually, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Where is value in a commodified world? I wondered. Before becoming trash, the goods that fill the plastic bags that line the streets were paid for with money that hardworking people earned. So why did we immediately throw our hard work away?

  Around that time, Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man, gave a public talk at the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts in downtown Manhattan. He pointed out that a hundred years ago, when people made more of their own goods, there was very little trash. He reasoned that this was because handmade objects contain a different kind of value: stories in the form of a memory, experience, a reminder of a life lived. It is easy to notice that goods made by faceless computers and industrial machines do not contain the kind of stories that people treasure. And one might also ask of the manufactured thing: Was sweatshop labor used? Fossil fuels burned? Life-sustaining resources pillaged? It is no wonder we throw them away. Perhaps the goods we make today are being kicked to the curb because they remind us of our participation in the diminishing of life.

  It was time to use the skills I had reclaimed from the commodified world to offer more than just a complaint.

  I called my solution Swap-O-Rama-Rama. It’s a clothing swap that makes use of the existing surplus of used clothing by creating new goods out of them. In DIY spirit and through workshops, creativity is reclaimed through the making of things. The barrier between consumer and creator is dissolved. Swap-O-Rama-Rama presents the hands-on discovery that the making of things is not an activity to be avoided in order to attain leisure, but a playful and leisurely endeavor unto itself.

  After a successful first event in New York City and a grant from Burning Man’s nonprofit Black Rock Arts, later that year at the first Maker Faire in California, thousands of people showed up for a west coast Swap-O-Rama-Rama. Glue guns, scissors, trim, patches, zippers, buttons, and board game pieces were passed back and forth by busy, inspired hands. With the swipe of squeegees, Trinity Cross’s crew of silkscreen artists styled the old into the newly interesting. Andrea DeHart taught a workshop on how to transform socks into iPod covers; Stitch Lounge (a local sewing collective) offered a T-shirt reconstruction class; Sandy Drobny brought a loom with her to demonstrate her process for weaving plastic bags. She made colorful aprons adorned with thrift shop hair curlers. Emiko showed people how to transform old board-game pieces into jewelry. Ten local clothing designers armed with sewing machines taught people who had never sewed before how to transform used clothing into newish versions of things they imagined. Finally, by rebranding clothing with celebratory “Modified by Me” labels provided at the event, attendees were invited to see each other through shared creativity.

  At the 2006 Maker Faire Swap-O-Rama-Rama, textile artist Miranda Caroligne deconstructed and reconstructed an outfit as a live performance.

  A few gems were placed in Swap-O-Rama-Rama’s structure. Nothing would ever be for sale, all the materials to create with were free, and there would never be mirrors. This encouraged everyone to turn to one another to ask, “How do I look?” Immediate intimacy resulted. Friends made.

  At a nearby table a guy from the botanical gardens was teaching a class on composting natural fibers like cotton and hemp using worms. In one arm he held a plastic tub with shredded paper and strips of cotton T-shirts pouring out of the top on all sides. Worms in sizes large to tiny slithered over the edges. A crew of ten-year-olds waited anxiously for a chance to touch the wiggling wonders of the earth. One asked if he could make something out of them.

  Mikey explained radio frequency identification (RFID) to an attentive group. Then he demonstrated how to line old pants pockets with a metallic fiber fabric. Metallic fiber turns a regular pants pocket into a Faraday cage, blocking RFID readers from picking up personal information on credit cards and driver’s licenses.

  Since I had first experienced the gift economy in Black Rock City, I had searched for value everywhere in the default world. The heaps of trash lining city streets indicated where value was missing. Consumer goods did not contain it. At Swap-O-Rama-Rama, I saw value for the very first time. Workstations were crammed with people sewing by hand, by machine, by serger, producing textile wonders. Shoes were unstitched then refastened; grommets were pressed into leather, pleather, and plastic; flip-flops were zip-tied together into welcome mats; bras hacked into handbags; sweaters unknitted and reknitted. The random variety of zigzag stitches, odd-sized snaps, and peculiar patches of mismatched scraps made a stunning bazaar of irregularity. The garments, oddball, cockeyed, and strange, were imbued with meaning.

  A career in marketing had taught me its aim: to divide people into categories based on lifestyle, habit, and socioeconomic status. When these categories become expressed as brands, people interpret themselves according to brand; they fit themselves and each other into lifestyle categories. In my own life I had been part Prana, part Apple, and even part Burning Man. Branding is an effective technique if you are a company selling products to consumers. But it teaches us to view other people through socioeconomic status and lifestyle before seeing each other as people. Brands say nothing of our creativity, our generosity, or the depth of our hearts; often they only represent how much money we have (or don’t have).

  At Swap-O-Rama-Rama people of all ages, ethnicities, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds gathered together; an unbranded identity broke through branding’s categories, and people defined themselves by something different: their creativity.

  After the first year, Swap-O-Rama-Rama grew to 25 cities, then to 125. Cities from Juneau, Alaska, to Huntsville, Alabama, to Waxahachie, Texas, and to places as far away as Istanbul, Jerusalem, Panama, Perth, and New Zealand have made it part of their way of life. I turned Swap-O-Rama-Rama into a nonprofit organization and collected donations from sponsors that I passed on to communities all over the world: sewing and silk-screening machines, scissors, fabric, and inks. I welcome all to join in and produce Swap-O-Rama-Rama for their communities. It’s growing still.

  Lukas silkscreened his own designs onto attendees’ used duds and sent everyone away happy.

  Can you believe this outfit was made out of old upholstery? Here it is at the 2006 Maker Faire Swap-O-Rama-Rama fashion show.

  Nature Is the Truest Book

  Nature loves to hide [Becoming is a secret process].

  — Heraclitus (trans. Guy Davenport)

  As a New Yorker I was well aware that my life was lived on top of a concrete shell that sealed the floor of a noisy metropolis. In Central Park, I celebrated 843 fortifying acres of lawn, garden, and frolicsome fountains. I knew where to find nooks to duck into for respite where silence could be imagined. The city contains niches for taking refuge made by people who know the value of the living. On the street I found nature persisting in window boxes and in 4-foot by 4-foot squares of soil breaking up the sidewalks, capturing stray litter, and providing a home to sturdy trees. As a city dweller, I was connected to the natural world only at the margins. The racket produced by commerce, dealing, traffic, merchandising, transactions, and negotiations was louder than the wind in the trees and the few birds that survived the concrete jungle.

  I made occas
ional recovery trips to Jones Beach on Long Island and to Woodstock upstate. Free of the restriction of a full-time job, I enjoyed a luxurious three weeks in Central America, where I noticed that I had reached a deeper level of relaxation than any I’d known before. Something unwound. Just when I started to feel it, I was due to fly home. I earmarked the feeling of calm and noted that it came, given time, in the presence of the natural world.

  When I was back in my Brooklyn apartment I dug out a book that had captured my attention years before. A scrap of paper still held the spot where the author, a Sufi, had written Nature is the truest book. The words seemed important to my pledges. A decommodified life must be related to nature. After all, if civilization itself were cleared from the earth, nature would remain.

  I thought of Sufis as a secret tribe that existed half a world away, in desert caves or atop remote mountains, unnoticed by all but those who had to seek them out. I pictured myself, a Jewish girl from Long Island, trekking across a sunbaked, windy world in search of them. Some must, I thought, wondering if I was one who must. Just those few words, Nature is the truest book, had inspired years of my gathering and reading Sufi books. The writings of Sufis throughout history have offered remedies for the impulses that drive materialism. Often they allude to a magic toolbox linked to nature. Embedded in a rich lineage of love poetry, a trail of clues points to a domain beyond the lust for stuff, a vibrant and abundant world waiting to be found. I spent my twenties and part of my thirties poring over the Sufis’ carefully woven words and trying to decipher their paradoxical and encrypted language.