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

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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.