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.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
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.
Monday, April 12, 2010
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.
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.
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