Final Narrative, IHP 09-10

I wonder if any part of this project could ever be final. I feel as though this "final narrative" will still be forming in my mind even as I present this, even as you read these words. This is one moment I am capturing, one thread I am following in order to provide a snapshot of something beautiful and fleeting. I have spent a year thinking about textiles, thinking about why they draw me in the way they do, and have found myself less grounded than before but perhaps more free to explore. I have found that I will continue questioning, continue sharing and continue walking.

For now, I want to stroll along this loop I lay out in the final pages of my portfolio. Once I began looking more closely at my own fascination with fabrics, I realized it went beyond the cloth itself. The body interacts with textiles in a unique way: they are an intimate part of our lives yet are largely taken for granted. There is a poem in the way fabric hangs from the shoulder...there is so much grace in a crumpled sock hugging a pink ankle. We have surrounded ourselves with textiles, so flexible and fine, so durable and dynamic. Our horizons are marked by clothes on a line and the sweeping curve of a sheet in the breeze. Our second skin is made of cotton and wool. We live in a cloth ecology. Yet even this glorious truth has shown its dark side. The damage caused by producing textiles at a massive scale is undeniable, and thus our bodies are interconnected with textiles in another way. By alienating ourselves from the practice of creation on an intimate scale, our clothes, our sheets, our woven environment, have become poisonous.

This brings us one step further along this little loop to the important aspect of textiles as a focal practice. There is an immense and important difference between production and creation, just as there is a difference between violence and power. They may both appear to reach the same ends, but the process of getting there makes all the difference. The producer produces for the sake of the product, while the creator creates for the sake of creating. The latter is an act of love, care and patience. Creation demands attention at every level of detail. Creation actively links the body to the process and in this way is the antidote to alienation. When we are alienated from the process of creating something as central as cloth, we are lost.

This brings us to the final piece of the circle, the bit that ties it all together again. Communities are woven literally and figuratively by textiles. People identify culturally through their clothing, and not only aesthetically. Think of the camaraderie found when you see textiles that you recognize being worn by someone you do not know. Think of the patterns and textures that fill the spaces in your memory. Our communities are knit out of these things. Without a relationship to our clothing, we loose our relationship to our places.

Weaving has also become a meaningful metaphor for rethinking a way of being in the world. To live as one thread in a tapestry of millions of threads could be a viable mode of being, rather than striving for dominance and control. Cloth is resilient, it is flexible, because it is made up of so many tiny threads. Some threads cross, some do not but they all add their strength to something greater. This larger entity is forever changeable...it is nothing but its threads.

After all this, after this year with all the beauty and struggle we have seen, this is what I have come to. Perhaps we should live in the world like a thread in the cloth.

There are spaces between hopelessness, tiny slivers of inspiration that do not claim to be anything other than life. It is in these places that something amazing happens, like a lightening of being, or some nonsense like that.

What I really mean to say is that two days ago the hibiscus blossoms were brighter than I have ever seen them. It made me want to cry just to see them dotting the hedges along the dirt road, the road I walked along in peace for the first time in a while. The things you learn when you stop trying to learn! You realize that the earth is spinning when you spend a day watching the sun cross the sky. Sometimes it feels like I have been tossed up in the air and I am just waiting to come down again...but I have to admit, the view is pretty spectacular from up here. I have nothing real to say at this moment, just something deep inside that feels like a jello-sculpture of calm. Green lime jello on a hot day. I am pretty sure you all know what I mean, so I will leave it at that.

But I have to say, the hibiscus was so brilliant on that day, right when I least expected it.

The Countdown Begins: 19 days

I am on my way home, slowly but surely. Of course, the end of my adventure is obscured behind a mountain of final projects and the unbearable grief of saying goodbye to a new found family...but nevertheless, the calendar does not lie.

Also, the end of this adventure acts as the beginning of another adventure. Only this one will last for the rest of my life. Sitting in class today listening to one of the last doom and gloom lectures of the year, I was struck by a strange anxiety. When the capitalist system collapses and the nation-state disintegrates, where will I get my clothes? Hmmm...re-entry might be more painful than I thought.

I have been warned that many of the things I now say without second thought will not be readily accepted back home. This perplexes me, because I am thinking the most incredible, glorious, radical things. Let me enlighten you:

The first thing I want to do when I get home is cook. I want to cook every meal, with my family, with love, with joy. Then I want to go for a hike. I want to hike a different hill everyday. I want to make T-shirts with obscurely witty slogans on them and laugh about it later. I want to make a puppet theater with my sister. I want to plant a garden. I want to fix my bus. I want to make everyone around me feel good and free. I want to go to Basalt town council meetings and ask obnoxious questions and take too many notes. I want to buy land with my love and partner, Jeremy. I want to build a dry toilet, a bike-powered washing machine and grow cotton. I want to host full moon bike-in movies to fund my personal revolution. I want to play the banjo really really well. I want to have babies. I want to dance. I want to have a lot of friends. I want to say that I think the nation-state is falling appart and then toast the end of the nation-state. I want people to calm down. There will be dancing at the revolution, and beer, so chill out.

As fun and fruity as this sounds, it is radical. This is revolutionary and it has nothing to do with signing petitions or attending meetings. Social change should sprout from a place of joy, and it will.

I cannot wait to come home.

So, what does freedom mean?

According to a very perky and all around professional PR person at the World Bank earlier this year, Freedom is "...well...I mean I think we all know what freedom is. Our definition is the same as yours, you know...the freedom to work."

Well, if thats what freedom is then I am out. See you guys later.

And by "you guys" I am not really sure who I am talking to. Because the last time I checked, work has become, well, work, and a lot of people have come to dread their jobs. There is no choice not to work, just a thousands of things you could do at any given moment. And of course the one job you do choose is the wrong choice and you are stuck climbing the corporate ladder until the glory days of retirement when you realize all the money you saved was siphoned off by well groomed but all around unspectacular human being who smiles too much and eats all the shrimp cocktail at parties.

I really do not want that to be the moment when I realize that I should have just settled down with someone who made me feel wonderful, planted a garden, and had a potluck every single night. Because what is freedom worth if you cannot spend it with the ones you love? And what is freedom, exactly, if you do not get to create it yourself?

At this point, our freedom of choice is standing dumbfounded in the laundry detergent aisle, wondering how the hell there could 10,000 variations of the same simple product. And lest you do not feel free enough, the cereal aisle is just around the corner. Hold on to your hats! And our freedom of expression has become learning how to use words in just the right combination so as not to hurt anyones feelings or step on anyones toes, or at least stupify them until you have a chance to run away or change your mind. Another option is to create a catchy slogan that can be easily slapped onto bumpers and T-shirts, have a martini, and call it a job well done. Poets and songwriters barely suvive in the damp little corners of popular attention and can, every so often, Wow us with a piece of true beauty before it recedes again. Popular music beats its way forcefully into the eardrums of every citizen, until even your grandmother is wondering "where my bitches and hos at?"

In America, the land of the free, a good percentage of our population is, or has been, in jail. And just to drive all of this home let me lay out a well known and universally feared senario: going throught airport security.

There is nothing more freeing than taking off your belt, coat, shoes and jewlery for a apathetic stranger in uniform. And if the feeling of synthetic carpet between your toesies doesnt do it for you, why dont you put all of your liquids into a plastic bag, while a college-age, pimply grumpy-face empties the contents of your exuisitely packed bag onto the table in front of a bunch of rubber neckers. You feel as if you are hiding something, as though you should yell "I have a bomb!" just to cut the tension in the air. But you know that even a child sneezing will probably be slammed to the floor by a over-worked and underpaid rent-a-cop, and so you keep quiet.

Feel safe? Better yet, feel free.

Im guessing the answer is no. Solution? I got nothin. But living in the United States has become, I have heard, increasingly like living in a police state. So perhaps the best idea is to get together with your friends and family and create a space that makes you feel really, truely free: all the way from your Blackberry to your Bluetooth.

SHIT!

It did not occur to me until recently that pooping into a porcelain bowl of water was a little bizarre. But about a week ago, we met with a man who showed us the beauty of pooping into a little dry box instead of a bowl of water, and BAM, the clouds parted and I saw the light.

This revelation is about on par to the joy I felt when I learned how to properly wipe with my left hand, but I feel like it would be easier to implement the dry toilet than to retire our beloved Charmin Ultra. The dry toilet is a genius invention. The beautifully designed bowl separates your poop from your pee (I choose not to use the painfully sterile words "feces" and "urine") and allows your unencumbered shit to plop down into a box of its own kind, followed by a scoop of ash, to dry and compost into a rich yet texturless soil. The pee glides down its own pipe into a separate holding tank to be diluted and spritzed onto plants and trees, which gleefully accept your golden gift. Does it seem too simple to be true? Well this is no joke. In fact, the reality of the situation is not funny at all.

Today, in the average city, there are tons and tons of shit flowing beneath the feet of the cosmopolitan . Once the poop is flushed out of sight and out of mind, it is multiplied to 600 times its original volume by mixing with water alone. Thats how much water it takes to move your poop elsewhere. In other words, the amount of water used to flush one persons waste in one year could be enough for that same person to drink for 60 years. With statistics like that, we cannot be too surprised about the shortage of clean drinking water in the world: we are shitting in it.

Unfortunately for most, dry toilets go against various zoning laws in most towns. Its actually illegal to not poop in water. It is really too bad, because the soil produced from our poops could be incredibly beneficial to put back into our gardens. Imagine the joy you would get from knowing that you had completed the cycle from your seeds, to your vegetables, to your poops, to your garden! Maybe if we began to see the beauty of our own "waste," we would find a new found connection to our nether regions and bowel movements. If we knew that our poops would be feeding our garden, maybe we would put down the Twinkie and lay off the antidepressants. After all, what could be better for a bad mood than a nice, big shit.

Earl: Part 3

What a sight Earl was, all bear arms and mountain legs, and sky eyes. He stood there, quite still, and watched, scratching one big hairy arm with the other. Next to where Earl stood, there was a brook, a noisy little brook that tumbled and flowed over pebbles and stones. The brook saw Earl, with all his goofy extremeties, and laughed out loud. All the little water particles were doubled over laughing and giggling at such a strange sight, and the brook began to froth and foam. Little droplets of water flew up and landed on Earl's face and, where they landed, a sweet little mouth began to form. Earl began to play with his newly formed mouth, and opened it up wide. Right at that moment, the brook decided to play a trick on Earl, and spouted a little fountain of water right into his open gob. Earl swished the water around for a moment, and then suddenly, without warning, let loose a wild, carefree laugh. He laughed and laughed, and the brook laughed back. This was how Earl got his mouth and his voice.

A little round robin heared this laughter and alighted on a branch near earl. She looked him up and down, as it was difficult not too, and decided that Earl was an interesting creature, but was lacking something very vital. It was something that every other creature had, yet Earl stood there without it as though nothing even mattered. The robin hopped to and fro trying to figure out what exactly was the missing piece, when suddenly it dawned on her that Earl was missing his heart. This made the robin nervous, for she has never met a heartless creature before, and she twittered uncertainly. The robin knew what she had to do to remedy this empty state in which Earl had been existing for as long as time, so she hopped off her branch and landed on Earl's breast. She puffed herself up and tweeted a little tune, and suddenly Earl was filled with a warmth that he had never felt before. It raced through his boulder legs, and flowed out of his bear claw hands, and he opened his new mouth in awe. Earl had a heart, made of robin love and spring-time grace, and he could finally feel. Earl stopped merely existing, and began to live.

He looked around with a new appreciation, and saw the splendor of the trees and the softness of the clouds. He touched the grass with his paws and felt...good! This was the first time that he felt anything at all. Earl longed (yes longed!) to race through the forest and picked up his legs one and a time and bounded through the shrubbery like a jack-rabbit. The breeze tickled his face, and he laughed, and the branches caught the hair on his bear arms as he flew past. He saw a pretty tree leaning daintily over a river and hugged it with all his might; he watched a little ant crawl on is hand and it made his heart swell. Earl was feeling, and Earl was truly alive.

As the sun began to set, Earl became tired, and looked for a place to rest for the night. The stars began to come out one by one, and Earl took in their beauty hungrily. As he entered a small clearing somthing small and white caught his eye: it was a little dove, lying in the grass. Earl was curious, and went over to inspect this wonderous little creature. He picked it up gently and turned it in his hands, and realized suddenly, with horror, that this poor little thing had no heart beat. The little dove was dead. This was Earl's first experience with death. A sudden pain pierced his chest, and tears began to well in his eyes. He held himself with his bear arms but it made to difference. He tried to run but his legs buckled beneath him. Earl was scared that his heart would break into a thousand pieces and he would lose the abilty to feel. He sat in the grass, rocking the dove gently, and wept. These were the first tears to fall from him new sky eyes.

After a while, Earl lifted his head and asked, to nobody in particular, "What is the point of having eyes if they can cry? And what is the point of having a heart if it can break?" A moment later, a thousand tiny butterflies flitted out from the darkness of the woods. They surrounded him, and for a moment he was soothed. All the little butterflies began to speak in unison, as soft as a flap of a wing. They said "Dear Earl, poor thing, the pain you feel is a very important part of life. You have felt the sunshine on your skin, and now you have felt the pain of heart break and death. You are complete, dear Earl. Now you are whole." The butterflies came together and landed all over Earl, and he began fuller and more tangible. His heart felt a little stronger and he wiped the tears from his face. This is the moment, the very special moment, in which Earl found his spirit.

He stood on his boulder legs, and lifted his bear arms to the sky. With all the voice he could muster from his lovely brook mouth, Earl yelled to the world a great, resounding "YES!"


THE END

New Zealand

There is a way of putting up you guard against he sight of perpetual tragedy. You steel yourself against starving women and bony children, you fix your gaze just beyond the slums and lean-to huts. Everything is seen from behind a veil, from behind the bus window, behind a notebook, behind the security of always knowing you will go home.
But nothing, nothing, can prepared you for the velvet curve of a New Zealand hill. It enters your heart by way of your eyes and then expands inside you. There is simply no way of stopping it, and entering New Zealand is dangerous unless you are prepared to be forever heartbroken, always longing for the glistening bays and the floating islands. The sheep speckled hills melt into mountains and the mountains melt into sky, and after a while you feel the tears fill the spaces between your eyes. You realize that this is so beautiful that it is sad. It is so beautiful it makes you wonder what else could possibly matter...the slums melt away, and that woman's toothless mouth moves silently. The hunger and suffering in the world and in your soul are blown away with that breeze that fills hollow valleys. You can give yourself to the water that turns your body to ice. You can give yourself away. And that is what breaks my heart.