Not Defeated, Defooted

 

I broke my foot. All it took was a simple stroll through a small forested park behind grandma's house. The walk lasted less than five minutes. At the doctor the next day he told me the ligaments in the ankle tore the cuboid bone out of place when it rolled, breaking it. It's called avulsion. That's why I can't walk now. Of course the timing of this injury is atrocious. For 4 - 6 weeks I'll need to wear a boot and keep weight off the foot. Once the boot is off the damage will need to be reassessed. According to sources online, some number of additional months will be needed for the bone to recover, if at all. There goes my dance career.

What this will mean for our current journey in the van is still unclear. In this condition I cannot work as a farmhand or laborer in any capacity. It goes without saying that this threatens to entirely derail our plans. Our upcoming trip to Ireland, slated for next week, will need to be cancelled or postponed. Now I find myself jobless, homeless and disabled. When it rains it pours. I'm trying not to succumb to defeat, but it's hard when you're de-footed. Currently, I'm horizontal in Austria. Previously we'd made plans to join Asia's family down here for an extended weekend of hiking. They'll be pulling me up the mountain in a special extreme off-road wheelchair. 

Yesterday I recorded a podcast episode in an attempt to make sense of all of this. Perhaps it's too soon to do so. How long after the house has burned down should we wait to begin asking ourselves why? During this recorded session of sad self-inquiry alone in front of the microphone, I tired to explore the rich range of feelings erupting inside the confines of my skull. A great stirring of birds; anger, sadness, frustration, guilt, shame, helplessness, confusion, remorse. They caw and screech and cluck and wheeze with tormenting alacrity. One topic which emerged during the process was of certain archetypal or mythological energies: The Wild Man, The Trickster, The Disgusting Man, The Lawnmower Man, etc. In particular, I was contemplating the role of alcohol as an anti-moderating agent on some of these forces. For the most part, I've stopped drinking. Admittedly there's still the occasional beer or, even more occasionally, the glass of wine, but all-in-all my drinking habits have improved steadily over the past 5 years. Still, though, complete sobriety hasn't been something in the cards for me. Why?

Something about alcohol opens the lock on the door where I've hidden the clandestine, bastard love-child of these three mythological men. The wild, disgusting trickster rears his ugly, cackling, salivating, flatulent head when enough booze has entered my bloodstream. A possible hypothesis is that I haven't yet found a way to summon this entity in a socially acceptable way, so when it appears, it expresses itself in a kind of compensatory fashion to make up for lost time. So badly it wants to elicit a reaction, to discover a boundary, or to bend the shape of a conversational container, that in its excitement it leaps balls-first into the most depraved, raunchy and puerile end of the pool. Obviously, this can be jarring for some. Particularly if those people - listeners in this case - are of modest sensibilities, or have a more conventional sense of humor.

This morning I woke just after 6:00 thinking about the episode I'd published the bay before. Instinctively I felt that I needed to delete it - that it should be pulled. It's too lewd, too crass, too dangerous. My mind went on. What if a previous guest listens to that? Or an upcoming one? Don't you have a duty to your listeners and your guests to conduct yourself in a way that doesn't unsettle them? Do you really want to shoot yourself in the foot for a blowjob joke? Look what happened to Bill Clinton! Is it that important to talk about shitting and farting? The answer, I think, is yes - but perhaps not for the reasons you might initially think. Ultimately it comes down to authenticity and self-censorship. A podcast is an experimental space. It's a mixture of art and conversation. The medium is inherently expressive and it rewards - at least in the current climate - vulnerability and the honest presentation of self...even if some of those parts of the self are uncomfortable. Imagine for a second a child afraid to tell her parents that she's gay. She lives her life concealing a part of her identity for fear of rejection, or fear of offending her parents' conservative values. Isn't it better to be rejected for who you are than to be accepted for who you're not? Sure, my situation is different (some might say, perhaps rightly, that it's incomparable and easy for me to say as a straight white male), the stakes are not nearly as high, but the guiding principle underneath is the same. Being seen and accepted for who we are is something fundamental to the human experience.

Risk is a necessary ingredient for any artistic endeavour or creative project, and sometimes things don't land as the author intended. In this regard, imperfection is essential. Without missteps it's impossible to properly calibrate the artistic impulse. Despite this, something about the concept of artistic self-censorship bothers me. I'm my own content creator, editor, and music maker, and by virtue of this, I'm not beholden to the interests of any sponsor or label. Artistic liberty is one of the hallmarks of being an independent creative. So then my mind whispers. Isn't it possible to channel the wild disgusting trickster without talking about adult themes or using offensive imagery. Yes. That's the task. But shouldn't offensive content always remain on the table!? While reading Robert Bly's Iron John I came across the following passage:

Sometimes when friends are talking in a closed room, the heat of the conversation begins to increase: witty things are said; contributions flow from all sides; leaps of imagination appear; the genuinely spiritual follows an instant after the genuinely obscene. Hermes has arrived. At some beautiful moment of the conversation a silence falls that feels mysterious; everyone hesitates to break it. In Spain until the fifteenth century that silence was called "Hermes' silence." So Lopez-Pedraza says in his fine book on Hermes.

The old tradition maintains that true learning does not take place unless Hermes is present. That is depressing, because university English departments, and sociology departments, and religion departments usually get rid of teachers with Hermes energy first. The whole Ph.D. system was created by Germanic Hermes-killers. Hermes is magical, detail-loving, obscene, dancelike, goofy, and not on a career track.

I've bolded the portions of the piece that I think get at the heart of what I'm trying to name. It should seem obvious then that Hermes is the patron saint of psychedelics. What are psychedelics if not the mystical alchemical chemicals of the trickster? Left to its own device the modern mind, conditioned by capitalist interests and a compulsive optimization towards comfort, seeks to think in straight, orderly lines. Our lives, by virtue of the larger society in which we currently find ourselves situated, is predicated on forecasting, planning, prediction - logical repeatable laws and patterns, which, above all else, are knowable, observable and measurable. Then, unexpectedly, the trickster comes along. Suddenly those straight lines begin to bend. Abrupt blind turns appear. All predictability and knowability are lost, replaced with frightening irregularity and a bewildering, dreamlike imagination capable of catapulting us to towering heights or unfathomable depths. There is little to hold onto as we spill into the void. Sprawling. Falling. Drifting. Floating. Dissolving. The edges of our conscious container rattle and warp. Reality is reborn anew. Once this occurs, once this new Hermetic energy unseals the old self, an enchanted awareness emerges. This new state of being is charged with curiosity, creativity, mystery, and a dizzying elasticity. It is no small wonder that from this deformed yet formless container the liminal and numinous give rise to the mystical, the spiritual, the sacred and the obscene.

Personally, I've always found the blending of the genuinely spiritual with the genuinely obscene to be deeply satisfying and essential. The sacred needs the profane. Just like the darkness needs the light; each produces blindness absent the other. But how to profane while holding all things sacred? Does that seem a contradiction? It needn't be a paradox or a puzzling Buddhist koan. Is nature perverse when it strikes down one infant while nurturing another? When it culls an entire forest in a fire? How can such a live-giving, life-serving force be so heartless, destructive and cruel? Perhaps because it's both and neither. We as humans have the tendency to perceive things in binary, dualistic terms and then stretch that map over the fabric of reality like some cartoonish condom preventing us from interfacing with reality as it is. We do this in our evaluations of people, too. We seldom view a person in their totality. Instead there's a tendency to define others by their best and basest aspects...

A backpacker is traveling through Ireland when it starts to rain. He decides to wait out the storm in a nearby pub. The only other person at the bar is an older man staring at his drink. After a few moments of silence the man turns to the backpacker and says in a thick Irish accent:

"You see this bar? I built this bar with my own bare hands. I cut down every tree and made the lumber myself. I toiled away through the wind and cold, but do they call me McGreggor the bar builder? No."

He continued "Do you see that stone wall out there? I built that wall with my own bare hands. I found every stone and placed them just right through the rain and the mud, but do they call me McGreggor the wall builder? No."

"Do you see that pier out there on the lake? I built that pier with my own bare hands, driving each piling deep into ground so that it would last a lifetime. Do they call me McGreggor the pier builder? No."

"But you fuck one goat.."

Stop Resisting!

 

We were there for three and a half weeks, in Poland. It was to be our first adventure together in the van. In preparation we'd given up our apartments and our jobs to work at farms, intentional communities and eco villages across Europe. This was our first stop. Technically Asia had started the journey before me because of a last minute flight to New York which stole me away to another continent over the Atlantic. You know the story. Wilma (our trusty German steed) was a joy to ride in. She hummed along on Polish highways, carried us for hours and hours through forests and green hills, past fields of radiant golden rapeseed, until delivering us finally to our rural destination in Western Pomerania. Late on a Friday evening, we arrived. The grounds of the community are lush and hilly over the approximately dozen acre settlement. A thriving ecosystem of birds, insects and various frogs create a lush soundscape. On the eastern side, opposite to one of the several small ponds, cranes could be heard early in the morning and late at night. Near to the house, in the center of the land, atop an old concrete electric tower, a pair of storks constructed a giant nest housing two small chicks. Throughout the day the distinctive cluck-clapping sound they make with their beaks would send the resident canines into a frenzy. The dogs would bark and howl and chase the enormous birds all across the place. 

The area used to be marshland. Around the farm there are many beautiful lakes. Unsurprisingly, there are many mosquitos. A walk to the surrounding forest would result in sheets of mosquitoes stalking your every step. They would gather in droves along my pant legs - or across the backs of anyone depraved enough to venture into their territory - and stab madly with their proboscises trying to penetrate and extract warm blood for their young. Giant hornets and moderately sized wasps would patrol the village looking for anywhere and everywhere to install a nest. One had to be taken down from inside a stationary camper, another inside the entrance to the stone house, or inside an outdoor toilet, so Asia and myself had to take great care to leave the van door closed to prevent them from exploring the cool dark space within. The entire property was teeming with life. Ambitious blades of grass raced upward with ludicrous speed. It seemed as though they were being cut every week with a scythe. Over the course of one of the weeks we watched a patch of asparagus sprout up from the earth and grow into an intricate lattice structure almost as tall as me. Who would have guessed asparagus capable of such rapid and thorough transformation?

Everything was transforming, it seemed. Our bodies, unaccustomed to daily physical labor, began to grow harder and more durable - though they felt flimsy, sore, and brittle during the slow transition. So too did our emotional capacities begin to expand and deepen. The work at the settlement focused primarily on addressing the question of what it means to be human in the times of poly-crisis. Much of the discourse, practice, group activities and practical interactions hinged on this inquiry. Each day consisted (at least at the beginning) of an hour's meditation at 7:00, breakfast at 8:30, work from 9:30 until 14:00, lunch from 14:00 - 15:00, more work until dinner at 19:00, and then a group activity at 20:00 with bedtime at around 22:00. The schedule was full. As a lifelong introvert and desk worker, the shift was dramatic. So much learning happened every day; new tools (physical and otherwise), new concepts, new insights, new ideas and activities; a new me in the mirror. 

One morning, near the end of breakfast, there was discussion about meditation; Zen and Vipassana. A member of the core team spoke of her spiritual journey in search of insight and clarity, but how she hadn't yet had even a glimpse of enlightenment. She mused on how frustrating the process was. Have you ever felt a glimpse of it while under the influence of a psychedelic? No, not really, she said, maybe, but nothing that stuck with me. Yeah, it sometimes seems you can cheat your way into nothingness through self obliteration and that enlightenment doesn't care how you get there, but those shortcuts are just shortcuts and aren't likely to provide any lasting changes: you need to put in the work. Our conversation was cut short as the leader of the community interjected. C'mon, most of the people at these retreats and meditation workshops are just self-interested and want to get to enlightenment as quickly and as easily as they can. It's irresponsible and just reproduces the systems of consumption we see in modernity. It's a way to escape and retreat into yourself and hide from the harsh realities of the world. Sure, maybe for some people, but most people? Yes. Most people. It's bullshit and we should be honest with ourselves about it. That's not my view on things. Anyone who's read even a single book on Buddhism understands - hopefully - that the whole purpose of enlightenment is to be in service to others. It's why the idea of the Bodhisattva is so beautiful. So all of us can sit around and talk about how enlightened we are and spend our days meditating and hoping for a better world without doing the work to actually make the world better? What's the difference between that and denial, he asked angrily. His judgmental tone and imperious attitude suffocated the space. He seemed to be glaring at me. It was unclear why the casual conversation took such a sudden and severe turn. You're entitled to your opinions but I didn't hear any of that in anything either of us were just talking about. I invite you to have more honest discussions about your denials and notice when you're participating in or perpetuating these kinds of things. Do you want to have that discussion now, because to me it doesn't feel like the space is safe for that discussion. His eyes were unwavering. The world isn't safe, he said. Everyone at the table looked around nervously. My upper lip twitched with anger and confusion. Breakfast was over.

Learning, for me, happens not just through practice, but through dialogue, through interrogation, through rubbing two things together to see how they interact. It suddenly became clear that some of these methods were considered vulgar or disrespectful by the leader of the village. We are a community of practice, he'd say, talking is not doing. This struck me as strange given talking is verb, not a noun. He seemed defensive the day before when, during a conversation, the words my issues with authority leapt to his ear from my lips. He responded curiously to this and seemed to take it as a challenge. The topic was on masculinity and appealing to authority in the form of experts, high priests or elders. My perspective was that perhaps it would be better to come to our own conclusions through the examination of concepts and ideas and then check them against an authority instead of allowing any figure of authority to prematurely color our opinions. Unfortunately my view was not shared by our leader or his vocal, spectacled acolyte. My participation was then interpreted as hostile, resistant and blasphemous - for having questioned their gods. On a not so distant morning it would be added that in some villages, when you question their elders you are told to leave. And so began a series of conflicts and misunderstandings that would inevitably lead to a sort of intervention in the form of surprise tribunal which would put me on trial for committing crimes similar to Socrates. 

One evening, smack in the middle of this public hearing where the leader announced that he wanted to address some concerning developments in the community, he said that myself and another member had been showing signs of resistance to the culture. It soon was clarified that the bulk of these crimes had, in fact, been committed by me. The charges were as follows:

• Refusal to accept an invitation to an anger workshop
• Questioning Robert Bly as an authority on masculinity without having read Iron John
• Expressing resistance to authority
• Not attending a village dance party
• Refusing to wrestle in a men's circle
• Attempting to kill the men's circle

The main crime was described as general resistance to the culture they were trying to create. It seemed clear, at least to me, that the intent was to publicly pillory me - to excoriate and potentially intimidate via verbal flogging for my indecent disagreements. Of course, at the same time, it made sense that my behavior was problematic. It made their job harder, sowed seeds of doubt, challenged their research. But my problem was the approach. Why wasn't this communicated to me during any of the examples you've provided? Why did you wait until now? They wanted to wait until a pattern emerged. You wanted more evidence to have a stronger case for crafting a narrative. The anger workshop didn't interest me and, since it was - like all of the examples you've listed - proposed as an invitation, it was not clear to me that my attendance was mandatory. Are these things compulsory then? If resistance continues they will be made compulsory. This comment didn't make sense to me but we will return to that later. So, kill seems like a very strong word in my opinion. Ok, we can replace it with attacking, or questioning. When you come into a place and start questioning it, it weakens the space. You hide your anger and violence behind passive aggressive lines of questioning. We might have a fundamental disagreement on the purpose of questioning and what is achieved by it. It is my belief that questioning does not make a thing weaker, it makes it stronger. It's a way to help identify faults and inconsistencies, it helps shed light on what areas may need more support and which can be thrown out. It's how we can cut away the excess and focus in on what's important. You don't enter someone's home as a guest and start rearranging their furniture. 

That last line might be one picked up from another of the group's elders, Stephen Jenkinson. It makes sense and is hard to argue with, but it misses the point a bit and exposes a sort of paradox in this whole episode. One can enter another's home as a guest and hold views different than those of their host. The guest may have a preference on what's cooked for dinner due to dietary restraints, for example, or may have input on what movie to watch or which game to play. A good host accommodates their guest and helps to make them feel at home (as best they can). Guest and host can even exchange competing ideas and have healthy discussions about those ideas, so long as the dialogue is respectful and not offensive. This is not the same as rearranging one's furniture. But what struck me as head-spinningly confusing about this thing, was the charge being levied at me. Let me return to it and restate it: you are resisting and what we are trying to do here is create a container where people can push through discomfort and their inner resistances to grow and learn. Okay, this is all fine and good. But isn't it odd that the container being created doesn't seem capable of containing resistance? Why are you talking about sitting with resistance instead of practicing  it? To me it didn't seem like our leader was doing a very good job of working with his resistance to my resistance. A good container should grow more resilient and tenacious in response to resistance. How will it endure the resistance of those who aren't already, like myself, mostly aligned with the vision and values of the culture they're trying to cultivate? It needs to be able to assimilate and contain a diverse set of people with diverse sets of beliefs without excluding others if it is to grow and be a home for those seeking refuge from the consumptive machinations of capitalist modernity. No?

The group discussion went on for some time. It ended with a request for a contract or a set of agreements which would serve to reduce or prevent future confusion on the subject. The hour was late and everyone seemed spent.

After the interrogation ended we went to sleep. Something in me still didn't feel settled. It persisted through to the morning. So at breakfast it was time to voice some of these roaming feelings in order to once again be present with the group. There was a risk in doing so, though. The group could descend into chaos. Having clear intentions - to connect, to empty, to share what was an obstacle for being present - it seemed fine to proceed. Before my tongue could completely shape the sounds the leader interrupted and warned me that despite my explicit declaration not to take us into chaos, that's what might happen. That's not my intention. Wait, he said, is your intention to empty or to give feedback? That's hard to say. They're wrapped together in a way. Primarily it's to empty but via the emptying there may be feedback. It's very simple, he continued, if you're emptying then you're using I-statements, and with feedback you're not. Okay, then it's emptying:

Something about yesterday is still bothering me. It's unclear if we have time to work through these things now or if the day needs to get started, but for me, saying them is important, even if we need to have a meeting later to respond to these issues. Yesterday I felt hurt and sad - and also angry - in response to what happened. It seemed I was put on trial and singled out for violating a code of conduct or set of agreements which were never communicated to me. I felt a lot of judgement and accusation -- 

Are you familiar, he said interrupting, with the 'victim,' 'persecutor,' 'rescuer' low-drama triangle? What you're doing is making yourself a victim. Huh? Yeah, you're the victim and we perpetrated something against you. The existence of a low-drama triangle as a concept doesn't change the fact that victims and perpetrators exist in the world though. People perpetrate harm on others all the time. Yes, so you were unjustly attacked and just can shift the responsibility off of your shoulders onto the persecutor.

Suddenly the pattern became more clear to me: his space could be killed, or attacked without victimhood, but mine could not. My need for safety could be called into question, because the world is unsafe, but his need (hiding behind 'the space's' need) for safety and control could not. He could speak to me with veiled barbs of venom and vitriol but this wouldn't make him passive aggressive. A double standard. What to do about it though? Any attempt to talk or discuss things was met with instant defensiveness or subtle semantic games of psychoanalytical evaluation or judgment and coaching. It seemed obvious he wanted to teach, not be teached (sounds better than taught). Helpless stupefaction rolled over me, a hapless victim. A feeble request was made to hold space to continue this conversation later in the afternoon when there would be more time. Do you want to involve the whole community, he asked. Well, it seemed the preferred way to have these kinds of discussions were in front of the community or else why didn't we have a smaller group present last night? The whole group is needed only if there are useful learnings for the whole group. There might be. How can it be said for certain? Others from the group broke their silence and stated they would prefer to be present since they were present for the start and there seems to be something which could be learned. So it was decided the entire group would attend.

Later that afternoon we assembled our chairs under the hot sun and sat in a wide circle. The conversation went around. A couple of questions which would be great to clear up. First, yesterday when asked if these events were compulsory, it was said that they would be if resistance persisted. Can you explain what that means? A long response was given which softened that stance and clarified it and restated the need for a set of agreements to help explain and set expectations. Great. Second, I'm confused by what seems to be a double standard here. Confusion, the leader said, is an emotional state children and adolescents experience. Confusion can be used as a mask for not taking responsibility for your true feelings. That's not a fair characterization. Adults get confused all the time. You probably do, too. Are you afraid of me, he asked. No, promptly, I'm suspicious of you. It's unclear what your intentions are. I wonder whether you're manipulative or coercive. I find it challenging to trust you. That's because I'm provocative. Most people don't like those who are provocative because it makes them uncomfortable. I find provocation - and being provocative - can be used as masks to conceal cruelty. Not saying that's the case here, but it's happened in the past. Are you angry? I don't trust anyone who doesn't feel comfortable expressing their anger. Yes, right now there's anger. It's in my chest. Sitting in a circle and talking about my issues with you in front of a group of people who are looking at me isn't something enjoyable to me. The attention is unsettling. My anger doesn't have to make me mean or cruel though.  No need to raise my voice or point my anger at you like a knife. I can feel it and let it be there without wielding it. If you're angry at me though, and need to make insinuations, comparing me to a confused child, I'd ask you to be more clear and transparent when you want to insult me. Maybe you weren't trying to insult me. Only you know. 

The conversation went like this for some time. There were moments of vulnerability from myself and the leader, as well as others in the circle. My social anxiety, desire to do no harm, yearning to connect and learn how to live in community were all topics which were covered. All of the details needn't be belabored here. Honestly, many of the specifics have been forgotten and even the ones which have been recalled here are from my perspective and are far from perfect - potentially rife with biases and errors. But eventually it ended with a question from the leader: what can I do to help you? Well, when communicating from a place of anger, if you could also find in yourself compassion, kindness and love and let those things through with the anger, that would be great. Because we're not just these one dimensional angry beings who feel hurt or wronged, we have a rich palette of emotions all co-arising and coexisting within us at any given moment. It's very easy to let anger through. It's a cheap emotion. We have it on tap. We summon it when we stub our toe or when someone cuts us off in traffic. It's much more challenging to hold anger with love and compassion and find a way to express your anger in the presence of those other emotions. 

We ended the circle amicably. Most of the issues felt addressed and resolved. My sense of connection could return now that this emotional obstacle had been removed. But the weight of lifting it, rolling it up the hill, having it roll me over, walking back down to retrieve it and push it up again had me feeling as sapped as Sisyphus. It took a couple of days for my energy to bounce back. It helped me realize something about myself which I hadn't realized before. For most (maybe all) of my life I haven't done a good job at managing my emotional empathy. There's a concept of observing the emotional intensity of another without absorbing the emotional intensity of another. Someone with a poorly defined boundary will just let all the emotional energy of another in with their own and then have to shoulder simultaneously the weight of two human beings. This practice isn't sustainable. Particularly when the emotions involved are anger and sadness, I find it hard to not absorb them. In both cases my pattern is to diffuse the emotion to help relieve the suffering of the other person. But this isn't rational. The emotions of another are theirs, not mine. They need to process them. They need to make sense of them and integrate them. They need to ride the lightning. Doing it along side them helps me feel them, yes. But it leaves me drained and depleted. There will be future posts on this topic, I promise.

But to conclude this long chapter on our first longterm (!) stay at an eco village, there are still a few things left to say. First is that these events represent only a small facet of the experiences we had here. In this essay literary techniques were used to drum up readability via dramatic devices which may distort the reality of events. This is true for anything that has ever been written - especially by me. Attempts were made to remain closer to the facts than normal, but still, this piece reads like a condemnation of the place. It is not. The people there are trying to do a good thing. They have a shared vision and purpose and they are making a difference in their community and in the hearts and minds of those who visit them. No one there - I hope - is truly monstrous or villainous. We participated in rituals and creative spaces and had the chance to play and experiment in a unique social laboratory that is rare in this world. I'm deeply grateful for the opportunity and the people who made it possible. There is no ill will or bad feelings toward anyone there. Perhaps only differing opinions on the approach. Not every community is for everyone. Maybe my needs aren't met by the place. That's fine. It isn't a slight on the village. 

We may have different elders and different beliefs and different expectations, but that's the beauty of life and what makes places diverse and interesting is when people can come together and live in community despite their differences.

A Dumb Experiment / Matrimonial Jazz

 

Break open your personal self

to taste the story of the nutmeat soul.

These voices come from that rattling

against the outer shell.

The nut and the oil inside

have voices that can only be heard

with another kind of listening.

If it weren't for the sweetness of the nut,

the inner talking, who would ever shake a walnut?

We listen to words

so we can silently

reach into the other.

Let the ear and mouth get quiet,

so this taste can come to the lip.

Too long we have been saying poetry,

talking discourses, explaining the mystery outloud.

Let us try a dumb experiment.

-- Rumi

--------

Asia and I are well into our journey. Mine started in a way that wasn't entirely expected, but I guess that's the case with many such adventures. I decided to take a trip to New York instead of joining Asia at our first planned destination: a Polish permaculture farm run by an older couple we know through Community Building. My mother's health has been in a precarious position for a few months now. She's wrestling with a series of blood clots; 7 of them. A cluster of them formed five pulmonary embolisms in her lungs while the remaining two are trapped in each leg. It's been a bit of an ordeal for her. They are painful and frightening, since any one of them can dislodge and travel to the brain or heart with fatal consequences. The situation was weighing heavy on me. My sleep was affected. Underneath my thoughts a current moved. Always it spoke of danger and dread - awful thoughts of my mother's death, or of her reduced to a vegetative state in a sterile hospital room - until it convinced me I should take a flight over the ocean to go spend a few weeks with my mom. So I did. It was the only way I'd be able to settle into this trip with Asia. Otherwise in the back of my head I'd have that lingering, haunting feeling that I should have gone home while I had the chance. The visit home was time well spent. My mom appreciated the gesture and we had some good talks. There is always a stressful aspect of being home. Ram Dass says, if you think you're enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents. Quickly I noticed all my training and conditioning that I've undergone here in Europe was no match for the historical traumas and patterns of behavior which emerge once back inside the family unit. I'm grateful for that insightful and humbling experience. Not that I actually believed for a moment that I was enlightened, of course, rather that I would be less vulnerable to the familiar feelings I associate with going home. To my surprise I found this was very much not the case. In fact, it generally seemed quite the contrary. I happened to feel things more deeply, not less.

I've been back in Europe a bit over two weeks now. It's been busy. Asia and I are living in our van. Her name is Wilma. She's a reliable two-toned Volkswagen Transporter; white and baby blue. We're staying at an intentional community in Poland called Osada. I believe it means settlement in Polish. It's been exactly two weeks that we've been working here. The work is challenging. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally as well. At Osada they try to more deeply understand what it means to be a human being during the times of polycrisis. Each day consists of breakfast, cleanup, work, lunch, cleanup, a group activity, dinner, cleanup, and a second group activity before retiring to bed. Needless to say, the days are full. The activities are aimed at fostering a community of practice wherein participants are invited to push their boundaries and learn something about themselves in ways that we can't easily learn inside the container of the modern world. We're encouraged to experiment, to lean into discomfort, to explore and express and discover what it is that's really alive in us. It is a kind of playground.

I'm a fairly introverted person. I cherish my alone time. When I'm alone I can read, or write, or play music, reflect, meditate or take a nap. For me these times are necessary for balance and integration. During the two weeks I've been at Osada we've had only two days off; one each week. This puts me in a position of scarcity in terms of time. It is hard to find balance. I've struggled to make time for my podcast, for checking in with friends and family...with myself. We're here two more weeks. Thirty days of intensive learning and practice are plenty for someone like myself. The time we spend in groups is centered around practices like community building circles, forum, anger workshops, and men's and women's circles, amongst other things. When we eat we hold hands. Poems are often read. They're trying to create a different culture here. An admirable goal. There are some strong personalities. In the past I've been told the same about my own. Predictably, this has been the cause of some tension. Experiences like these offer valuable insights into my own relationship with anger, discomfort, fear, resistance, authority, masculinity and femininity and many other things. I noticed that I find myself baited into butting heads with figures of male authority, particularly if these figures are angry or forceful with their expression or beliefs. These are qualities I abhor in myself; reflections of my father. When I see them in someone else I want to melt them the same way I try to soften and liquify them within myself. 

My idealized version of masculinity is one which embodies the feminine. It is vulnerable, firm yet soft, tender, nurturing, kind, compassionate and patient. Any definition of masculinity missing these components, in my opinion, is imbalanced and uneven, lacking that rounded wholeness which makes it mature and sensible. Otherwise it is just farce - forceful, manipulative, coercive, controlling, militant and mean; soldiers slaughtering civilians, raping their women, exterminating villages; games of conquest and brutality. Look at the world around us. What are the motifs associated with masculinity in the modern era? Masculinity as decreed by patriarchal structures of power rapaciously extracts and pillages Mother Earth. The cultural messaging and the language we use to talk about men and women helps generate these gender ideologies. I'm not sure they exist on their own. If it's true that they are abstract, human-generated constructs, then we can change our narratives and create more meaningful mosaics of meaning. But I'm starting a tangent I don't wish to continue at this point in time. The purpose of this post was to relay a story about a dumb experiment Asia and I made a few days ago.

Osada is a place for experimentation. One such experiment was offered to Asia and I in the form of creating a closing ceremony to conclude a week of work about a dozen of us had participated in for the first week of May. We were invited to produce a ritual. Having never formally made a ritual, and having precious little time to do so, I was of course hesitant. Instead of declining, however, I agreed to give it a try and try to learn something by doing. This is when things got interesting. The universe begin conspiring not against us, but with us. After breakfast, where the proposal was made and accepted, Asia and I briefly discussed what we would do for this important occasion which would bookend the week for the participants and impart a lasting memory. A space had to be decided on, a theme, the event's duration, gory details, speeches, all the logistics. It felt a bit overwhelming given the day would be packed full of work and group events, leaving little time to prepare. Then Asia read a poem she thought we could use. It was perfect. "There are even some walnuts we could use," she added. Shape was beginning to form. Ok, this sounds interesting, I thought. The idea was to gather the group together, have them contemplate the outer shells they use to hide their true selves from the world, ritualistically crack them open and discard them to extract the meat of the soul inside. Fantastic, but where would we discard them and what would happen to the discarded shells? 

One week-long ritualistic ceremony I'm familiar with is Burning Man. For many (perhaps most) rituals, the presence of some elemental force is required; be it water, fire, air, wind, or earth. It became clear the shells should be set on fire somehow. Burning would signify dissolution and transformation, a liberation from the shackles of our shells. All of the components were coming together. Of course there would need to be some good linguistic glue to hold it all together and facilitate sense making, but that could be decided on later. I had an idea to construct a small wooden coffin which we could place the shells into as a vessel that we could then deliver to the fire. And a torch! I wanted to make a torch like in the movies. A few days ago I'd seen a perfect piece of wood for this, gnarled, hefty, covered with bits of green moss, beautifully weighted and shaped. I'd wrap a piece of cloth around it and soak it in diesel so that Asia could light the torch before I walked to the fire pit to ignite the pieces of wood there. But then there was some tension. Asia wondered if we really needed a coffin, and if we needed to go through the trouble of including a torch in the ceremony.

She had a point. Maybe it was unnecessary, a superfluous flourish. But it would be so cool! Sure, it would take some time to make a small coffin, and the torch was a wildcard - maybe it wouldn't ignite, or it would violently explode. Some research was necessary. I pitched the vision of the coffin and the torch and expressed how they were not only symbolic pieces of the puzzle, but they also added a healthy dose of theatrics to the spectacle. I cautioned her that the shells aren't the only kind of box we humans find ourselves in. We exist in larger, more abstract boxes: history, culture, time, place. A coffin, for many of us, is the final box we're placed in. There seemed something fitting about it. The flames feasting on the hard, well-defined wooden borders of the box, breaking them down, erasing them. Asia was convinced. In time I located a candle I could place beside the coffin to create the sense of a vigil. All of the pieces were in place. We didn't know exactly what we would say, but we knew we didn't want it to be very rehearsed. It should be spontaneous and improvisational, like jazz. We'd let the moment dictate what words it wanted from our lips. 

So the night came upon us. We gathered on the small hill where we'd placed a small bowl of walnuts and a nutcracker. I assembled the wood for a fire, hid the diesel-soaked torch, and had a backup paper egg-carton should the torch fail us. We even had a drum to help us transition to our dance party after the ceremony. Our villagers arrived and the ceremony began. I welcomed them and handed out a walnut to each participant. Asia read the poem. She explained that she'd like everyone to identify an aspect of themselves they'd like to cast off and invited them to step forward, crack their nut, and place it into the coffin. This is where things started to get interesting. In our test run, the walnut we cracked broke open cleanly and easily. But now, in front of us, we watched people struggling to extract the walnut from the shell. What should have taken seconds, was taking minutes. It was cold, dark, and there were an army of starving mosquitos stabbing at us. I was unsure whether we should intervene or just let the process run its course. Somehow the stubbornness of the nuts didn't seem to sway the determination of the participants. Calmly they cracked the nuts and cleaned away the shells. Once everyone finished, I said something about the shells and how the difficulty was symbolic of how hard it is in real life to remove our shells and extract the good bits - how these things take time and careful concentration. Then I explained the purpose of the box and revealed that we'd be using fire to dissolve the hard edges and alchemize the shells and coffin. I reached for the torch, Asia lit it, and to my surprise it went up in beautiful spiral of flames. It looked majestic. Sacred. I walked to the fire and placed the torch against the wood. The wood wouldn't light. I tried moving it to the other side, but still, the fire wasn't taking. I hadn't thought to douse the wood with a bit of diesel to get the fire going. This second hiccup was unpleasant in a cumulative way. 

I tried to level with the crowd and admit that maybe things weren't going to work as I'd planned. I shared that perhaps I should have put a bit of fuel on the fire. I wasn't sure if people were convinced. I asked the two people closest to the coffin to bring it forward and place it on the fire in preparation for the flames. They did, but still, the fire wasn't spreading. To buy some time I invited the participants to share what their shell had meant to them by first sharing my own story. I said that I wanted to shed the fearful part of myself that's terrified to look stupid and unprepared in front of a group, to be okay with looking like a fool. As I said this, suddenly, the fire clamored to life. It popped and hissed and burped and wrapped itself around the wood. There was the distinct feeling of visitation; that something had arrived through this portal of confession and vulnerability. It sparked others into sharing their stories. We all went around as the flames consumed the shells and the coffin and the rest of the fire. I started playing a drum prematurely. After waiting until everyone who wanted to speak had spoken, I began drumming an awkward beat but couldn't find the right rhythm, so I started walking away in the hopes that people would follow. They did. We walked to the area where the dance party would be and started playing the music selected by the community. The ritual was complete.

To our surprise, over the next 24 hours we received generous praise and compliments on the ritual. One of the leaders of the village expressed how matrimonial it felt with Asia and I holding space and collaborating together. It was true. Something unique and special had happened. We took a risk and learned something. We channeled something. A group of people shared an important memory and took part in a symbolic act. Even with its imperfections - perhaps because of the imperfections - the dumb experiment was a success. I felt closer to Asia. 

I wonder what other magic awaits us on this journey.