Mark Schultz10/02/2006 08:56:16 PM
Once I stood at the edge of a cliff facing the southern ocean, with three hours of Javanese desa and rice paddies behind me, and only five hundred feet of vertical climb ahead. There was a rounded hole through a rock wall, through which you would step and come out onto a toe-hold, ready to edge down a ladder made of divots dug in the stone face. We were at a standstill, my friends and I: my lover at that time, and our two best friends. Below us was a famous sacred site, a cave in which meditators sat in silence, to receive guidance from the Queen of the South Seas; but the pilgrims had to weigh their fear of falling to their death against the promise of the sublime. My companions were not confident the experience was worth what would hopefully be an effort going down. They glanced over the edge at the water far below, several times. In the end, I said "I am going - are you coming with me?" And in the end, they all came.
The same road has wound through many places, and many activities. I have worked in publishing, co-managed a vegetarian kitchen, helped start a community-supported organic farm, lived on a small farm in Brazil where my children were born; I have written poetry and music (both good and bad) and written computer code (both good and bad); I have studied high energy physics and low-energy psychology, dance and music, forestry and cooking, languages and silences and love-making and arguments and giving birth and watching death and every other fleck of Earth which has fallen before my senses. And yet -- I can only smile and laugh as I write this -- it has all been beautifully unsatisfying and mysterious, as partial as reading a single page of a book, as complete as holding the entire book in your hand.
Every cliff you hop over with your potentially falling friends has its effect, toda língua, chaque langue, alle Sprachen, every language learned in a curve of the passage adds color and adventure to the pages, makes that good book heavier, so that when you put it down, at the end of that very fine day, and rest, you and everyone else who knows you can say -- Well. The plot was rather convoluted, but all in all that was a pretty good read.
Current Pet Projects
A couple of years ago I helped my friends Leigh Snow and Manny Muros (my travelling partner) refurbish and set into motion their Yoga Center of Newburyport, in Massachusetts. What a great gift to be part of such a beautiful project; it was like being involved in a flower, as though I were one of the roots of a beautiful flower that found good soil, good water, (good fertilizer!), and great admirers who bring their excellent spirit to the place. I guess I am some sort of silent partner: I offer my service now and then, my opinion as frequently, and have no financial obligation whatsoever. So nice to have a place to play and stay healthy, sound, and in community. Manny and I teach a regular awareness and health series there, Moving Into Balance. It has been as great a gift to us as I hope it has been to the participants. And to take ourselves to ground, for the past three years I have led weekend retreats to the White Mountains, filled with good food, great company, yoga and meditation: we give ourselves the opportunity to change by stepping out of the current of our days, and just breathing.
Next big-yet-small project will be our trip to India in October and November of this year. Hopefully it will be as transformational as my travels have been in the past; and hopefully my skill as a traveller -- as opposed to tourism -- will let this new country get under my skin, loosen the old layers of being, and help me shed some dry and useless habits and ideas. How they collect on your shoulders and your clothing, like dust! You have to swim naked in sulphur baths, or Nordic icewater, you have to die a little death to shake the stuff. It's the dust that settles in your grandmother's attic, the dust of memory, dust of used emotions and stodgy behavior. If anything has a chance of making me young again, or aging me quickly, it may well be the hallucinatory colors and sounds and sights of India.
When I return from this trip, I will probably be looking to create a small intentional household here in my Byfield Farmhouse. It is easy to be healthy when you are at the gym, when you are in church, when you are in the meditation center... it is difficult for anyone, for everyone, to bring that health into their daily, home practice. The Buddha himself made the value of the sangha, the community of common belief, crystal clear: it is one of the three essential elements for a healthy physical and spiritual life. So with any luck and with interested folks, the Byfield farmhouse will offer daily yoga in the morning, daily meditation in the evening, good shared meals now and then, some gardens, some music... ahhh.
This is all in preparation for the larger and most exciting project of all, the formation of intentional community on a larger piece of land, to include some 50-60 people: the Odonata ecovillage, initiated by an ex-community dweller, Lyra Engel and her husband Peter, who wanted to have that experience again, and provided the germ of the seed that had been waiting to take root in many people's hearts. I have been in numerous communities as an observer, travelled to The Farm in Tennessee, Sirius Community in Western Mass, the Sítio Pé-na-Terra in Brazil.. .and now will travel to Auroville, possibly the largest and most long-lived such collective on the planet today (my apologies to the Israeli kibbutz, about which I know too little). Of all the places I have travelled in my life, it has become clearer and clearer to me that, to be able to live with the things I most love -- the gardens and goats, and the good cooking, and music and meditation and yoga, aging with grace and dignity, with something really remarkable to offer the world -- that learning the skill of sharing lives, learning to navigate the complex waters of human community and human personalities, brings the most abundant and beautiful fruits. Without the companionship of community, whose commitment is to non-violent resolution of issues and a soft footprint on the world, the beauties I wish to experience quickly become burdens, as they have so often in the past.
Ask me, some time over tea, about 18-hour days on the farm. Or about 5500% inflation and physical insecurity abroad. About moving to another land without knowing the language... ahhhh. What an incredible, indelible life.
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