Burning and Believing

Yosemite is burning.

Let those words sink into your skin for a moment. One of our most iconic public lands is being ravaged by fire. These are the mountains that called to John Muir, the mountains that he answered with the force of his writing, his communities, all in celebration and fierce love for these lands that spoke to him. This is a place that appears in countless family photo albums, in unknowable scores of memories of uncommon times in a common place. This is a place I have never seen but love, in abstract, for what it has meant to friends and strangers.

The reality is that our grotesque consumption and fear of change are leading us to destroy some of our best protected homelands, that we are proving unequal to the gift of these places. That sadness sticks.

I do not want to assign blame for climate change, for the burning forests and melting glaciers and eroding shorelines and shrinking alpine zones. Instead, I ask for responsibility.

And I am as responsible as the next person. While Yosemite has been burning this week, I have been dealing with the headache and expense of a blown out tire. If a thousand things were different in the structure of America, of the world, then it would not matter that I ran over a nail, punctured a tire, and now need four new rubber donuts for my OPEC-supporting, dinosaur-fossil guzzling, climate-changing, metal box, in order that I may drive each day to work, to earn the dollars that will feed me, house me, keep the lights and heat on via unsustainable fuel sources, clothe me, back-pay for my education, and pay for the repairs to said automobile so that I may continue the same old cycle.

If a thousand things were different…and I begin to imagine what that could look like. All I want, truly, is to live in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone so badly, including myself. That doesn’t set National Parks, or any other land, on fire. That doesn’t melt snowpacks and acidify the sea, that doesn’t have entire ecosystems migrating, that doesn’t entrench a national and global caste system deeper and deeper.

I have some ideas of what thousand things I would revise to re-make a better world. And everything I think of calls me to make my own world smaller and smaller—less distance between me and my food, between me and how I earn my living, between my electricity and heat source and my home. I do not think these things to become insular and isolationist, rather the opposite. Something good, some best bit of myself, seems to grow larger whenever my physical world becomes limited and that is the person I want to be in this or any world. We have allowed ourselves, encouraged, limitless growth in this land since before we were her people. So much so that we had to set aside pockets and parks, protecting some of the richest landscapes from our own insidious manifest. The same American attitude that led us West, always West, always looking for more and faster and easier...the child of this destiny is a world on fire, a nationally beloved landscape destroyed by the same nation. I suspect that more of us know than are saying so that the empire has no clothes, that the empire and the corporate-bought emperors are killing us and forcing us to kill our beloved places, our beautiful world.

It is hard to say those things when you worry that you are alone. You, we, are not. This is the one thing about a climate-change fueled forest fire rampaging through a National Park that I find good—this is a place that lives in the souls of millions of people. And, as such, I do not believe its damage and the cause of that damage can escape an increase in responsibility for its continued health.

I have seen too much good, too much that is beautiful and seemingly eternal to believe that our destiny must be one of fire and destruction. There are other ways of being. A thousand others, if we let ourselves think of them, if we speak of them. And, if we can think them, speak these words and ask these questions, then we can begin to live-find the ways and answers to these better lives.

Now. Even as we have more questions than answers, even now, this is the time to begin living out our thousand different, better ways of life. 

(Photo from NPR.org)

Of Mice and Mountains

Here is my confession: I still look for silver bullets. For all that I have written about the future being better and richer and more varied than anything that has come before, for all that I whisper these hopes to myself in the doubting nights, and preach them to friends on sunny days, I have dark times when I am looking for The Answer to present itself.

Of course this will never come. And, even if it did, I’d be fundamentally unlikely to trust it to be real and comprehensive.

It has been almost a month since I saw the mountain of coal sitting beside the ocean at the Brayton Point Power Station. I’ve been afraid to look up the rate of use per day and calculate how the mass I saw could have shrunk or re-grown in that time. The challenge of how to build a better world than the one that requires us demolish real mountains and make ourselves sick in order to live our daily energy-sucking lives…this has kept me awake some nights and made my days a little sadder now that I have some better grasp on the physical enormity of the problem. It’s terrifying and daunting and now I have tears in my eyes again about this.

Because I do not know what to do, and nothing that I do know how to do is anywhere close to what I would deem “enough.” I don’t know what enough looks like, and I know that even when an action isn’t enough, you have to do it anyway.

I ran away from all this darkness and doubt over the weekend. I went to the mountains, surrounded myself with the crisper air and the colors of sunlight on granite and schist and balsam fir and good people all the rest that I love up there. When I lived in the mountains, when I found my mountain people and we engaged in the common work peculiar to those beautiful hills, one of the best things I learned was how very capable we humans can truly be. An action needs to be done, and there being no one else there to do it, no one to pass the buck to, you quickly learn to jump in with little knowledge and cautious instinct. You have to trust yourself to be able, and to correct any mistakes you make. And to feel no shame in trying and failing, in learning.

When I look to my time in the mountains, there are things that I want to mine, to bring down the trails and into the world as so many treasures. There are the obvious things, that a hotel sleeping 100 people can run off of wind and solar and propane, that we simply do not need so much stuff, that physical labor is not something to avoid, that the best times of life happen when you least expect them, and so on. But, above all that, I would bring down that spirit of willing-to-risk-capability.

If we’re going to escape the nefarious grasp of the Normal—the American unfillable hunger for new and more and bigger and shinier and faster, the race to the top that tramples our hearts and happinesses—then we’re going to need to trust ourselves of being capable of anything and everything beyond that tired way of being.

Specifically, I went to the mountains this last weekend because Madison Springs Hut was celebrating it’s 125^th Anniversary. Anyone who has spent an appreciable amount of time in those walls will have many and sweet memories. I love this. But there is a strange dark side up there too—in general the huts, in my experience were lousy with mice. I cannot begin to quantify how many traps I set, how many mouse carcasses I sent flying into the krummholtz. It was disgusting, it was horrid to think of those naked pink feet and tails scrambling over your foodstuffs, it was a stark lesson in mortality and human entitlement to empty their gray-brown bodies from the traps. But it was part and parcel of being there, just another piece of life that needed doing. So, we all did it, and now we know.

When I came home to Cambridge on Sunday night, exhausted body and soul from my time at Madison, the first thing my housemate said was “could you set the mousetraps?”

I do not believe in Destiny, but often, the answers we’re looking for are closer than they seem. I want to bring the willingness to try and fail and learn and become capable out of the mountains. I had not thought that it would be through the mice. But then, if there are no silver bullets, then the multitude of answers and actions we need can and will and do come from anywhere, from everywhere.

My words are braver and stronger than I am—no matter what I say or do, I’m still haunted by all the specters of a changing climate and unhappy people questing for a sick version of Normal that is killing our planet. That’s still a big pile of coal--and it's far from the only one. Neither my blogs nor my mousetraps are evenly matched opponents for such harsh reality. But, one has to start somewhere.

I’m off to check the traps, you come, too?

Laundry Day

I’ve spent a lot of time of late thinking about how to build better worlds, how more and more people can find happiness and feel connected to their people and this sweet earth. One thing I’ve hit upon is the theme of common labor. Our bodies are lovely when they are in motion, when we’re bending and lifting and doing. I emailed with a friend this week about this quest and question—he responded with Khalil Gibran’s words that “work is love made visible.”

Earlier today, I watched my backyard neighbor bring in his laundry. I could see this from my third story fire escape, where I was hanging out my own laundry. His movements and his drying clothes were reflected in the large window at the back of his house—I didn’t see him, only the reflection of his actions. That I mirrored those same motions, up three stories, across two backyards, and at least a generation removed…I can’t quite say how sweet I find this.

Amid all the good talk of solar and wind replacing coal and gas, I find that the question of why we need so much energy is rarely asked. To advocate for and build clean, renewable, sustainable methods of creating energy are laudable goals, ones that I heartily support.

My deepest support, though, is reserved for the simpler goal of using less. We cannot buy and buy and buy our way out of a problem that has its deepest roots in mindless consumption. There is no other planet to upgrade to when this one’s operating systems become obsolete. We are on the brink of, as Toadvine says in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, running out of country. We are reaching, surpassing, the limits of what is livable, and we are running out of places to run away from ourselves and our habits.

In light of this, I propose a decidedly un-American idea: go back. If the heart of the climate crisis has to do with using too much, perhaps the solution lies in using less. This will be more work, undoubtedly. It takes more time to hang my laundry out to dry than to pop it in the dryer. It takes more labor to make dinner than to nuke a burrito in the microwave. It takes more effort to bike than drive. To limit what technologies you use, to become your own cap and trade program, this takes forethought and planning and effort. It forces us to take more responsibility, to be more accountable to ourselves. And it is freeing—to make and hold your own life as you wish life to be.

My nightmare is to become like the isolated, liquid diet, technology-suckled, balloon-humans of Wall-E. Taking steps back from the robots, from our “need” for constant contact, from the tethers of our devices, from the demands that outside forces place on our time, these are hard. This is work. To take the time for this work is the highest expression I know for the love for the world.

And, like all good loves, these labors return as much as you give into them. The physical joy of using your body to walk or bike, the better taste of food you’ve given your time to, the sweet smell of the sun and wind in your clothes and on your sheets, the immense satisfaction of rebelling against expectations, of finding yourself capable of what simpler, better worlds you believe possible, these are the rewards for your work. 

No matter what powers it, what technology can compete with a full and working heart? None that I know.

Fezzik and Inigo

It is no secret that I love a good fairy tale. Or, if you prefer, “classic tales of true love and high adventure.” Let’s call it that. On the hottest night of this summer, I sat on my roof and read William Goldman’s adaptation of S. Morgenstern’s “The Princess Bride” cover to cover as the sun burnt down through the hot copper and gold clouds. I cannot recommend the book enough—all the best bits of the movie are in there, verbatim. And, like most things, the book is even better.

It was the Friday at the end of the heat wave in Boston. I had spent the day being horribly uncomfortable in my sweat-soaked skin, while also being riotously sad that we’ve made the world this hot. I was landscaping all day, trying to keep the remaining flowers in the gardens of strangers from crispifying in the heat. It’s not that I particularly care if the petunias and hostas of the greater Newton area live or die, but to see living things in the soil crumble and die because of the temperature concerns me deeply. I like food and, despite the changing climates and erratic growing seasons that are coming, I hope to eat for the next sixty to seventy years.

It was in this spirit that I clambered up to the roof, where I could almost pretend that I might feel a breeze and opened my book, looking for escape relief from the Cliffs of Insanity and the Pit of Despair.

However, as they say, “wherever you go, there you are.” 

I am incapable of divorcing whatever is in front of me from my larger desire to find ways to save the world, from and for, our own sweet selves. My reading of “The Princess Bride” was thusly colored. And, perhaps not inconceivably, Fezzik and Inigo—the best adventurers of the book—turn out to be great models, if you’re looking for ways to rescue something important.

Here is the main introduction to Fezzik, as he is climbing up the Cliffs of Insanity:

“But his real might lay in his arms. There had never, not in a thousand years, been arms to match Fezzik’s. (For that was his name.) The arms were not only Gargantuan and totally obedient and surprisingly quick, but they were also, and this was why he never worried, tireless. if you gave him an ax and told him to chop down a forest, his legs might give out from having to support so much weight for so long, or the ax might shatter from the punishment of killing so many trees, but Fezzik’s arms would be as fresh tomorrow as today.”

We’ve all got arms. Fundamentally, I believe that every person has something, some talent or strength or gift that we can each put in service to whatever task we find before us. While I also believe as strongly in people being as capable as possible in as many disciplines as possible, I do think that everyone has a grounding passion that can be used without depletion. Whatever that is for you, it has equal power to Fezzik’s arms, Inigo’s sword, Westley and Buttercup’s love. It’s not fool proof, but if you’re looking for your arms, I’d suggest co-opting Rilke’s advice to a young poet: “acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to…”

Whatever fills that ellipsis are your arms.

Fezzik and Inigo rhyme all the time in the book. It is their private language of love, what gives them joy and sanity amid the controlling demands of Vizzinni, what keeps their fears of loneliness and failure at bay. So as they enter the five-storied underground “Zoo of Death” that culminates in what would more commonly be called the Pit of Despair. “I’m just scared to pieces,” admits Fezzik.

“Just see that it ceases,” replies Inigo. And so they go into the depths. When an enormous snake wraps itself around them both, squeezing the life out of the pair and immobilizing even Fezzik’s arms, Inigo says, simply, “Oh Fezzik…Fezzik…I had such rhymes for you…”

Fezzik, furious to know these rhymes before he dies, finds the strength to break both of them out of the coils of the snake.

We need to find our tools, and use them to save what we love, what gives us joy. And, what gives us joy, what we love, these feed into our strengths as well.

I don’t have a blueprint for this hope of world saving. All I know how to do is bumble ahead with my hopes and passions and a variety of skills. I know I am not alone—Inigo, Fezzik, Buttercup and Westley are unstoppable with their combined strengths and passions.

And for the scary, unknowing times when we are afraid and frustrated and cry through heat waves, we have the words of Inigo to Fezzik as they descend into the darkness and fight monsters and make up rhymes to cheer each other up while they quest: “Then let’s look on the bright side: we’re having an adventure, Fezzik, and most people live and die without being as lucky as we are.”

Let’s have an adventure, and save the world. You think a planet this nice happens every day? 

Alternatives to Convention

I write these uncomfortably true words with full admiration and support for the forty-five people who were arrested, with the utmost gratitude for the many organizers of 350ma.org who labored for months to pull the event together. I know that everyone who was there—in body or spirit—shares something vital and powerful in the deepest corners of our souls. As we chanted at the property line of the power plant, this is what democracy looks like. Here, democracy is wearing my broken, dissenting heart which still remains loyal to the unifying ethos of the movement.

My heart felt like a bitter raisin as I left the Brayton Point Power Station action on Sunday. What had been so full of hope, of love, was shriveled and heavy as a stone in my chest. The action was entirely successful to its stated goals. I was demoralized on a deeper level.

Friends and family who were not physically present, who followed on Facebook and Twitter and news and radio reports tell me that the action looked wonderful, that they are galvanized and jealous and proud and every good emotion I could wish them to feel. And, at a base level, gathering several hundred people together to walk towards a coal and fossil fuel burning power plant to demand its closure, for those forty-five people to trespass into the waiting zip-ties and unventilated paddy wagons, this is a strong demonstration of public outrage against coal and climate change and all the horrors held therein. On that level, I am proud to have been present. As my brilliant poet friend said as we walked together: “sometimes I guess you just have to be just a body.”

But in that, in being present, in being a body who made it her business to show up and be counted for the social media updates, for the eventual lobbying and creation of policy that will shut this plant and pursue clean and renewable energy, I felt keenly that I was counted, rather than that I counted. But, for the act of being counted, for that physical articulation of one more human for this cause, I'll likely attend  more of these events, in the same dutiful way I answer the Census and file my taxes.

That is not the way I wish to feel about making the world better, though.

En route to the action, another dear and wise friend asked what I hoped to see happen, what I hoped to gain from participating. I answered that I thought these things were a time for the choir to be preached to, for the choir to sing, that I was drawn to the idea of being among hundreds of people who share this passion for a better world, that I was excited to feed from that energy.

And as we left, he asked how I thought it had gone. “There was no joy,” was my deflated reply.

I am new to organized activism, to public actions and protests and rallies. I appreciate the efforts organizers made to communicate positively and proactively with the local police. I appreciate the intentionality and planning and structure of the event so that it was a safe space for infants and elderly and everyone in between. But, I also think that all that planning, all that negotiation, all that “dialoging” and agreeing and compromising and organizing, has sucked some beautiful vitality and fun and goddamn spirit of rebellion out of the revolution! 

Emma Goldman wrote: “I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.”

Granted, the entire climate movement certainly not anarchy, and very much is an intergalactic step away from most conventions, a huge release towards a life of joy. To me, part of this joyful life is where people don’t die of lung disease in one corner of the country so people in another corner can plug in their computer and blog to their wrinkled-bunny soul’s (dis)content. Or where polar bears aren’t drowning because I need to get from place to place. A joyful, unconventional life where I can laugh a lot and also be reasonably sure my daily actions do not have catastrophic repercussions is all I truly want. I know that there are private revolutions towards this kind of life. And I love that there is a public movement moving towards this life, or at least part of it.

But I worry that even climate actions and rallies and protests are becoming disturbingly conventional. We are trying, I think, to foment a revolution away from conventional ways of being in the world. We are looking, we are hoping, we are struggling to find our way towards those better lives and futures that are freer from corporate pollution and corporate control. I do not advocate violence or aggression against innocent or ignorant parties. I do not advocate for the damage of the property of citizens, or public property. (Corporate property I am more okay with damaging.) To have these sorts of safe, polite actions were every second is pre-scripted and planned, where we sing about taking to the streets while walking in a dignified manner down a narrow sidewalk past bored cops, to have all but eliminated spontaneity...this may all be entirely unconventional and effective as actions go, but it also speaks only to me as a body. 

It does not touch those deep places of my soul that I share with the other hundreds gathered there. 

I do not know how we create a strong movement of social change, of opening doors to other—joyous and unconventional, with dancing and laughter and undignified love and clean sources of power—ways of being. I have been on the brink of tears since I left Brayton Point trying to answer, even for myself, how to go forward.

After the march, I stuck around at the jail to drive the released arrestees back home. I saw three things there that spoke to me about how we proceed, that began to unwrinkle my raisin-heart:

First, the parents who did not want their college-aged, climate-organizer, daughter to get arrested, but came to the action to make sure she was safe and to see what she is so passionate about, and then came to pick her up from jail. The mother danced down the sidewalk to embrace her daughter. I don’t know that I have witnessed a purer articulation of love.

Second, a gray-haired couple with radiant smiles, both having been arrested, had a quick, sweet kiss upon being reunited. For all that the climate change movement is often viewed as a youth movement, I am continually impressed by and wanting to learn from those who have been fighting this fight, with stamina and passion, for longer than my entire life.

Third, one of the last to be released was a man about my parents’ age. He came out, laughing and clicking his heels together. It was the most joyful thing I’d seen in the entire action.

Based on those moments, I’ve got is this as a starting manual for going forward: 

1) We need each other. 

2) We need to love what we are doing, and to do what we do out of love above all else. 

3) Whatever we do needs to defy convention and definition and bring us joy.

How this happens, what this looks like, I do not yet know. But I trust it is possible. And that is the alternative I want.

(Photo is of the soon-to-be arrested folks as they set up models of solar panels and wind turbines on the Brayton Point property line. Well done, truly! Photo is from http://summerheatbraytonpoint.org)

  

Actions and Words

I am writing this while toying with the idea of being arrested.

This weekend, I’m heading to Somerset, Massachusetts to participate in a climate change action at the Brayton Point Power Station. It burns coal. I do not like this.

Thankfully, a few hundred other people don’t like this either. Last I looked, Brayton Point has 12 likes on Facebook. 350.org has 283,000. Boo yah. Sunday, many of those faces will grow hands and feet and bodies and hearts, and will be there, thanks to the organizing efforts of 350ma.org. We will demonstrate for the closure of the plant, for the hope that a peaceful gathering of well-intentioned people can provide a few hundred more people with the awareness that change from the status quo is possible. And from the awareness grows the spark of making that knowledge live.

I love that we are now calling such things actions, rather than protests. A protest is loud and angry and frustrated. Make no mistake—I am all of these things when I think of the damages wrought on the earth, my home, by broken systems and coal and fossil fuel reliance and ignorance and apathy. But say: “I am participating in an action.” This is a stronger set of words, this is forward momentum. Protest is a raised fist, alternately petulant and bloody. Action is a rising tide, inescapable and unstoppable.

I’ve read and reread Orion Magazine’s “What Love Looks Like”—a conversation between Terry Tempest Williams and Tim DeChristopher. I have Walden and The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail on my bedside table. I have said that I would place my life on the line if it would protect the landscapes, the world, I love. A coal and fossil fuel burning power plant, this is an obvious a Goliath as anyone could find. 

And yet, I’m not getting arrested, there, this time. 

We live in a society that, on paper, values human freedom above all else. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as they say. To willingly give up that liberty, in the cause of something you believe is greater than your own ability to come and go as you please…this is not something that should be undertaken lightly.

Or perhaps it should. Perhaps we should all run out and chain ourselves to doors and gates and trains and fracking equipment and oil derricks and blockade coal ships and anything that threatens our vision of a better world. Perhaps if enough people do this, we will finally expose the lie of the ideal that we—American culture—value life and liberty above corporate profit and the ensuing devastation of all life as we’d like it.

That is the third of my heart that is actively wrestling with the question, that wants to, or wants to want to, get arrested. One third is, of course, occupied with the practical—how long would I be arrested, what are the fines for whatever the chosen charge might be, would there be incarceration, who would watch my dog if I spent time in jail, could I explain where I had been and keep my job, will it make it harder for me to find another job when the garden season ends, could I tell my student loan officers that I had to miss a payment or two because I had been arrested for enacting the lessons of my education, and so on. Things like could I ever run of public office are of less of a concern—chances are good that anything I’m willing to get arrested for will be central to any platform I ever run on.

And here, under the logistics of that third, lies the heart of the heart of the matter: the arrests that will happen, I do not see them as the only true measure of commitment to this cause. I want there to be other ways to register passion for this cause. Perhaps I am just chickenshit or perhaps I am only pretending to care about fighting climate change and creating a better world. Perhaps, I lack the passion and commitment and conviction of those who are willing to put their free bodies in service to this cause.

But I do not think so.

If a police officer zip-tying my wrists together, if my mug shot and booking papers, if my wading through the logistical bullshit of being arrested, if any of this would be truly weighed out and used to protect the landscapes and lives I love, then I would be there in a heartbeat. My freedom for the pure air of the mountains, for cold winters and reliable growing seasons, for more icebergs and fewer droughts, for a way of life that doesn’t hurt the earth or another human…Please, if I give up my most precious liberty, give me a better planet in trade and I will call it more than even.

But, the (alleged) justice system doesn’t work that cleanly. I admire those who get arrested for the peaceful demonstration of their beliefs, for following their hearts above the laws. But I do not think that this is the only way to demonstrate passion. And I see, above all, passion as the magnet that will draw more and more people to this movement, which is what it needs. We all need to be shaken awake that it is yet within our power to create a new and better future. There are terrible threats out there, and much has already been lost. But, not everything. And we need every ounce of passion and drive to hold and reform what is left into something that can be great. We need to not frighten people away with either dire predictions of fire and ice or promises of certain arrest. Not being willing to pay fines or go to jail, I and others must find other ways to demonstrate our passions, to call in the troops who stand still silent, unsure of how to join. Arrest frightens people—it frightens me, for all those logistical reasons, for the reality that I do not think my freedom will barter for what I would it could. We need to demonstrate other options of how to meld our love and fury for the state of this world into effective tools. Arrest is almost predictable, expected, part of the tired patterns we must grown beyond. 

Dr. Sandra Steingraber, who was jailed for ten days this year for her acts of civil disobedience while fighting against fracking in upstate New York, continually says that: “it is now time to play the Save the World Symphony.” Everyone has a different instrument, a different key and style and tone that suits their passion. But played together…

In her phenomenal piece, “The Clan of the One-Breasted Woman,” Terry Tempest Williams writes of being arrested at a nuclear test site. She tells the arresting officer that the pen and notebook in her boot were weapons. I just love that.

And yes, both these women who I idolize have been arrested. But, I am more drawn to the Save the World movement by the power and passion of their words than by the legal representation of their convictions. I see my own instrument more clearly for their words. And that gives me hope that the instrument I choose can and does work. All instruments and ways of being matter here, matter now. Actions are not always louder than words. And it is important, vitally, to not become pigeonholed into thinking that arrest is the highest, best, sexiest, rawest, rightest, sole way of demonstrating the depth of one’s convictions, one’s passions.

Not to discount arrest in the spirit of heartfelt belief. It is a crucial instrument for the symphony, and my heart is full for those who will and do go down this path tomorrow and other days. How lovely, though, and how magnetic, to have more voices singing, freely, in a variety of keys. 

A Love Letter and Invitation

I have met most of my best people through the mountains. Having this literal common ground is one of the brightest things in my life. We continually stumble over words to describe what it is that connects us—today I think that it’s as if we all discovered that parts of our hearts were painted in the same palette as the sunrise over a mountain range. Not identical, of course, but so coordinated and complimentary that the sum is ever greater than the individual parts.

If the world has any sense of justice, then I hope everyone has a place and community of this sort—like-minded people meeting and gathering in joy over an interest as common as breathing to this community. In the world of my mountain people, there is a combination of unspoken awe at the surroundings, a grateful delight in the strength and capabilities of our bodies to bring us to these places, a sweet riot of relief at having found others who share all this, and more. Somehow, believing that our hearts match, we open and are able to see and love each other deeply and easily.  The knowledge of that common core, this rides out the stormy times, the silent times, this is what, after years of absence, allows us all to pick up right where the friendship left off, as if it had been the blink of an eye.

We are, as one of my dearest friends noted a decade ago, the best versions of ourselves in these places. But here is the trick: we can, none of us, stay statically in these places. Practically, the needs of life—water, food, shelter—are brutal when the temperatures drop and the snows come. Also, these places are somewhat obvious constructs, simulacrums of life. At times, the simplicity starts to feel limiting, like one is coloring with only the original eight Crayola colors. These places, they comfort, and after a time, they do not challenge us much—if we could stay, there would be a marked danger of complacency. And so, eventually, and with full hearts, we leave the woods and mountains for the real world.

I am increasingly disturbed that this “real” world is built in such a way that almost requires us to seek out refuges. My friends and I, we try to make the tensile strength of the community the refuge itself. Sometimes we succeed. We come together, unquestioningly, in times of joy and sorrow, we often keep our non-mountain lives still close to each other, and we flee to the mountains together as often as we can, touching the touchstones, reassuring ourselves that this other way, this other world, is real and possible.

What I see now, as we grow up and are puller farther away from this place, is how deeply we all crave it. People grow and change, other parts of our hearts pull us all over the globe, and thankfully so. But there is always something, when we return to the mountains, something that falls back into place. That, whatever it is, is the thing that we crave, the thing that we are almost always seeking and lacking in the world beyond the woods. I do not know what that thing is—I suspect it varies as much as the complimentary colors of our hearts. But this I know—we share the place where our things come alive.

And that is what I do not know how to bring out of the woods, down from the mountains. I try, as best I can, to keep that fire burning in my own heart and bones, to carry the haven I seek in how I act in the world. But, when what I find most lovely is the concert of hearts and bodies working together, I cannot fully bring this way of being, this possibility of a better, more authentic world out of the mountains, alone.

I have thought of communes, of farms, of founding schools, of any of a thousand schemes were my people and I could live and work beside each other, but nothing seems quite right. I am not seeking to go backwards—the paths we have all taken from the mountains are magnificent and diverse. But, nothing else seems to have come close to offering anyone the joy, the peace, the unspeakable thing of communal life and work in the mountains. What I seek now is a way to live the good life of those places, amid the salt and challenges of the world beyond the woods.

And I am open to suggestions and co-conspirators on how to do this. On that front, as they say, the latchstring is always out. Please, come in.

(Photo by the incomparable Mary Kuhn)