The Good Life Lab

by Wendy Jehanara Tremayne

  I decided that if I acted like a Sufi, if I did what Sufis do, I might find out more about them. So, as though it were some kind of game, I did what I thought a Sufi might do. The Sufis are known for wearing whatever cloak is necessary for the task at hand, and so I changed the way I looked and acted, to see what I would learn. “I wonder what shy people experience?” I queried. I practiced being meek and went out into the world in the guise of a bashful person. People who had never before noticed me found me approachable. They were scientific types and other shy people with personalities too refined to have approached the animated personality that I now hid away. Life opened up; my perspective widened. When I felt boredom, I switched it for an itch on my foot. I changed anxiety to curiosity. Each experiment led me into worlds that had always been there but I had not noticed.

  These games prompted me to consider that the most ordinary aspects of life could be awe-inspiring. Magic was buried in the obvious and plainly evident but not noticed. To apply this new view to the world around me, I made time to notice the veins in the leaves that fell to the ground, studied the sound of the wind with marked interest, and savored the scent of whatever the breeze carried my way. I was stunned to realize how much I had missed the richness that permeates life. I included people as part of nature and met each face as a representative of the natural world. The shared thoughts and feelings of others became treasures.

  After many months of playing Sufi I determined that it was time to seek out the mysterious dervishes whose secret keys to nature would surely help me to discover a decommodified life.

  In a small community garden near my Brooklyn apartment, under a giant tree that canopied the lot and the two that neighbored it, I opened my laptop and punched the words Sufi New York into a search engine. The first thing to pop up was a four-year study in Sufi philosophy. It was laid out in 10-day increments two times a year. It was set to begin in two weeks. Without hesitating, I enrolled.

  Twelve days later I was surrounded by old forest and lush medicinal gardens, at a former Shaker village upstate, a couple hours’ drive from Manhattan. I was with the Sufis. I had absolutely no idea what to expect of the adventure about to begin, but I did know that I was where I was meant to be.

  As surely as we inhabit the environment, the environment inhabits us.

  — Pir Zia Inayat-Khan

  I kept the rubber breathing tube clutched firmly between my front teeth. I probed it with my tongue to make sure that a small movement would not separate me from it. What if a bug above ground crawls in? I’ll have to blow it out. . . or eat the critter.

  I didn’t know if I could get out of my earthen grave. The weight of the earth above my naked body prevented me from taking a full breath. When I inhaled, the earth pushed back on my lungs, informing me of my limited capacity. I took small sips of air and imagined the winter woods above as the cold came through the narrow plastic tube. In thirty minutes my partner, Isfandarmudh (“angel of the earth” in Persian), would dig me out of the grave. Then I would bury her.

  I turned my attention away from the fear of things that could go wrong. I relaxed my active mind with a long, slow exhale, imagining my skin fading into the earth that pressed against it.

  My bones, teeth, and nails conversed with the minerals in the stones and tectonic plates of the earth. The heat in my body reached out to find the molten core of the underworld. I wondered if the bugs that crawled behind one of my ears, under my arm, around the top of a fingertip, and all along my body were taking in moisture from the thin layer of perspiration on my surface. I felt something behind my knee.

  I am made mostly of water, I thought as I considered the geothermal waters that filled veins in the earth and made up most of my body, the rain that poured from dark cumulonimbus clouds and saturated the ground from which I myself drank. There is one water on earth, I reminded myself.

  From head to toe I felt life wiggle and walk. Don’t panic, Jehanara. This was my new Sufi name. This is what it feels like to host life. Giving up fear to the forces of gravity and the magnetic fields that banded the planet, I knew that I could never overwhelm the massive systems with my worry. I felt no different from a tangled root or a wedge of clay. The grave smelled like mildew and growth.

  It was good to be the earth. I reviewed a long history: a singularity split in two, gaseous explosions, a hot lava-covered sphere of volcanic eruptions and shifting plates, a cooler water world, a single cell advancing to more complex organisms, fish, bird, mammal. I was curious. What next?

  Life’s lust is life, I thought as I considered that life’s persistence over billions of years has led to me. I felt obliged to use my senses so that this life could know itself.

  The feeling of earth that pressed against me from every direction changed my view. I imagined it as a hug. You are loved. That’s what the Sufi teachers said to do if I ever forgot that I was loved: Feel the tug of gravity. In this moment death did not feel definitive. My sense of self expanded to include all time. I remembered the words that I had read in that little book written by a Sufi. Nature is the truest book.

  The sound of a metal shovel breaking through the ground above me brought me back. I hope she doesn’t hit me with that!

  During my first year with the Sufis I learned that it is their habit to visit the outposts of the senses and by doing so extend the edge of the map that marks life’s reach. I had come to the Sufis to obtain the magic keys to access nature. What I learned from them is that we are those keys.

  Ladybugs in New York City

  To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

  — Confucius

  On the drive home from the Sufis, thick vines creeping along hardly visible fences spoke out to me as though distant relatives. Lush green meadows wooed me to stop the car and stroll. But sweet single-lane country roads eventually led me downstate and to the four lanes of highway required to handle the volume of activity that buzzed just north of the city. Then I was back in New York City’s traffic, but without the impulse to rush along with it. I was following different opportunities now, taking my time and noticing the life of this world.

  When I got back to our apartment, I found a package waiting in my mailbox. Open immediately was scrawled in black marker. I excitedly broke the tape seal with scissors, and then, holding the box out an open window, I shook it over the tomato plant that sat on my fourth-story fire escape. Out came the 2,500 ladybugs that I’d ordered on the Internet. At that moment, traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge above caused a familiar tremor and tiny lead-paint chips sprinkled down, covering me, the plant, and the ladybugs. It was a holocaust. The red-and-black nonpareils rained down into the foot-wide gap between my building and the one next to it. I thought about how odd this would seem to the people in the apartments below.

  Twenty-five hundred ladybugs was the minimum order. Until that very moment, I hadn’t considered that they would need food. I had read that tomato plants need pollinators in order to bear fruit. The plants on my fire escape grew tall and green but remained fruitless. I didn’t realize that ladybugs were a poor choice for pollination. And I didn’t order aphids to feed the ladybugs, though if someone had told me that it would help, I probably would have done that, too. I didn’t have a whole lot of common sense about the natural world. It’s probably a good thing that the tomato plant never produced a fruit — if it had, I may have eaten it and dropped dead.

  That was my first attempt at growing food. The intelligence that I had to throw at the problem was the kind that people gather growing up in cities and suburbs. I had plenty of the kind of savvy that helped me travel on public transportation, use a cash machine, or find a good Chinese restaurant. But not the kind of knowledge that helps one read the sky for signs of shifting weather, start a fire without a match, or grow plants. The ladybug experience was frustrating, but I recognized from it that I had a desire for another kind of knowledge.

  I told Mikey about the name given to
me by the Sufis.

  “Jehanara — it means queen of the universe!” I said. “Not civilization’s universe, that’s called dunya (the Arabic word for the false world glommed on top of the real). I’m queen of jehan, the real world that is everlasting.”

  A Sufi name indicates something that a person is meant to achieve, her purpose. I thought about the pledges I had made and treasured the meaning of my new name.

  What Is the Cost of a Job?

  Those who want to master the future must create it.

  — Traditional saying

  The next day Mikey and I took the subway deeper into Brooklyn to look at an apartment for sale. When we got off the train we walked a block farther into a neighborhood that New Yorkers call transitional. Which means that it probably had a high crime rate and a good deal of poverty, but young white people were moving in and things were soon to “turn around.” That’s what people always said when neighborhoods gentrified. I wondered if New York City was going to go the way of Paris, where the poor people who had been pushed out of the city moved into once-wealthy suburbs that themselves turned into slums. Poor people have to go somewhere, I thought. In the years I had lived in the city, I had seen people in “transitional” neighborhoods lose their homes and culture as people with more financial resources moved in.

  Ron, the building manager, pulled up in his new-model Volvo. We climbed through the dangerously unfinished building and walked on planks that bridged a three-story-high gap in the floor. “$750,000,” he said, though we had not asked. “Taxes are probably going to be around $6,000, maybe $10,000, maybe $12,000, hard to say. For an extra $50,000 cash, I can throw in a parking space.” I saw a clear and distinct image of Mikey and me wearing matching metal shackles attached to long chains, tied to desks inside the cubicles that fill the city’s skyscrapers. I turned to Mikey and said, “Let’s go.” We both knew that I meant, “Let’s get out of New York.”

  The next morning Mikey headed out the door to work in a navy blue jumpsuit with a zipper up the front and an embroidered white Con Edison logo on the large breast pocket.

  “Where are you going in that?” I asked. He worked for a bank!

  “I’m quitting,” he said, and winked.

  He wore a Chuck E. Cheese uniform the next day. The higher-ups in his department interpreted his odd behavior as proof of his brilliance — eccentric geeks are expected in the world of information technology — and they gave him a handsome raise.

  At home that evening, armed with a sewing machine and a soldering iron, he set to work replacing each pinstripe of a Brooks Brothers suit with strands of illuminated wire. He rigged the contraption to a homemade circuit board and set it to blink a variety of lively patterns. The one time Band-Aid Boy put on the wearable gizmo and went out into the evening, a spectacle and a silent protest.

  Mikey had been working in a cubicle at a Wall Street bank for nine years. Like the wife of a doctor on call, I was used to him running off into the night. Not to save a person’s life, but to protect the banking giant from technical vulnerability. The stock market must never stop and must never, ever be vulnerable. It’s no fun knowing that the fruit of your labor is being used to no-good ends, and Mikey winced each time his employer applied for a patent in his name. An open-source programmer, Mikey imagined a world in which knowledge belonged to anyone who needed it and not just to wealthy banks using it to sharpen their competitive edge. Both he and I wished to contribute to the commons rather than the forces that prop up a world whose priority is money.

  It was late 2005 and Mikey had just completed the several-year project of shifting the giant bank to a Linux operating system, an open-source system that connected the bankers to the world of what is shared. Mikey announced that it was time to make our move.

  We knew that leaving the city meant detaching from reliable income and the only lifestyle we knew, so we rolled out a whiteboard and grabbed our erasable markers to take inventory of the expenses of life. We noted, in particular, how many expenses related to having a job. We asked a fundamental question that had never before occurred to us.

  What Is the Cost of a Job?

  Expensive clothing

  Laundering of that clothing

  The need to live in or near cities where the cost of living is high

  Commuting (fuel/public transportation)

  Meals eaten out

  Sleep lost, health diminished by stress

  Time that could be spent making replaced with money to spend buying

  No time to learn to be independent

  Rewards to ourselves for what we’ve given up (vacations, expensive consumer goods)

  The list we made revealed that many of life’s expenses could be avoided altogether by just getting rid of the job.

  For the first time since I had quit my job and set out in my Honda, I felt that I had everything I needed to do just about anything. I had reclaimed my skills, found Mikey, discovered yoga — something I could barter or gift — and was learning the Sufis’ keys to nature.

  When Mikey announced that he was leaving, the manager of his department at the Wall Street bank said, “I don’t know how to process this — no one ever quits.”

  The Sky Is the Ocean

  Amidst chaos there is harmony. . . . He who is prepared to listen to it will catch the tone.

  — Swami Vivekananda

  A few months later we began to visit places where we might want to live. We traveled to Panama, where by a week’s end the host, janitor, landscaper, cook, and driver for our hotel, a guy named Eduardo, relieved us of a kitten we had plucked from a sewer drain and nursed with an eyedropper. In Panama, cats were of equal value to rats, but our host amused us with politeness. He took Pipito by the scruff of his neck with two fingers and, wearing a strained smile, assured us our surrogate pet would go to a farm and become a well-employed mouse catcher. We cat lovers didn’t fit in Panama. Besides, to live there, we quickly saw we would have to choose between being rich and being poor. The rich had nice homes and armed guards. The poor had interesting handmade shacks and indigenous skills. No one had a pet cat.

  We visited northern California, but realized that city and suburban life there felt too much like the lifestyle we already knew well. We were seeking the unfamiliar — a way of life that offered the greatest possible growth.

  I had once visited New Mexico, a.k.a. the Land of Enchantment, to attend the spring wedding of friends who had left New York to move there. New Mexico greeted Mikey and me with the same white-yellow light that had drenched the skies on that trip. We’d left behind a gray winter in New York.

  “Imagine not getting seasonal light depression every year,” I whispered to Mikey.

  While waiting for a bus, I asked a man who told us he’d lived in the desert for 30 years if he missed the ocean. “The sky is the ocean,” he replied, looking up to receive a face full of white light from the blue dome above. The bright sun cast a movie-set sheen on his brown weathered face.

  We drove a long way south across what seemed a barren, monochromatic landscape of beige and brown before arriving in a small town called Truth or Consequences. We met up with the couple whose wedding I had attended and then spent Thanksgiving going from house to house nibbling turkey and sipping wine. The town’s newest round of residents, mostly couples in their thirties and forties and young retirees, were eager to meet us. They were new to T or C, as they called it, and to small-town life. They had come from places like Los Angeles, New Jersey, New York, Montana, Michigan, and Minnesota to search out a simpler way of life. Many had recently become the town’s small business owners. They ran coffee shops, clothing stores, consignment shops, art galleries, and hotels. A woman from Glen Cove, a town I’d once lived in on Long Island, ran a cozy bookstore called the Black Cat. Pioneers! I thought, flashing a look of excitement at Mikey.

  In a coffee shop that seconded as an art gallery and felt a lot like a movie set done up in a western theme, I observed several gay cowboys come and go, each we
aring a tall hat, pointy boots, and a fancy belt buckle. After an exchange of small talk with everyone in the place, each went out the door, back into the illuminated desert world. We watched the flow of customers. A team of paramedics took their caffeine to go. Everyone was enthusiastic about life in T or C, which was all they talked about. The stores along Main Street and Broadway featured nonspecific signs that indicated strange business hours, Open 1ish to 4ish and I’m Sorry To Say We’re Open. The town featured 25 art galleries, almost one for every church.

  The rest of the community of under 10,000 people, I was told, was made up of poorer folks, families who had lived in the area for several generations, ranchers, people let out of mental hospitals when the state stopped funding them, war veterans, and the standard fare of American meth addicts. A 30-something Italian woman from New Jersey referred to them as Methopotamians. Later I would learn that southwestern desert towns are hideouts for people who don’t want to be found. Thirty miles from T or C, Virgin Galactic was preparing to begin construction of a spaceport to offer the first consumer flights to the lower atmosphere. Eventually, the town grew to include a Buddhist stupa (shrine), which seemed to me a metaphorical cherry on top of an alien-themed Carvel cake.

  In late 2006, Truth or Consequences was booming. But the town’s growth was not the kind that Mikey and I had witnessed in New York, when each year we were forced to move to a rattier neighborhood with more muggings in order to make room for Starbucks, unaffordable gourmet groceries, and higher rents. It didn’t seem that the small desert town was going to fall victim to the kind of fast-paced gentrification that wipes out preexisting ethnic communities and then later makes tourism out of their culture — though this had indeed been the fate of the Apache Indians who had lived in the area decades before. A few doors down from the coffee shop, a local museum chronicled Geronimo’s fight to save a dying way of life. Talk in town was that an Apache curse had been laid on the land by Geronimo’s people. The curse had an expiration date of 2004. That was just about the time all the people we met had started moving in. New Mexicans like stories and have the time to tell them. They especially favor those about New Mexico, Native Americans, and space aliens.