So we did indeed do our cooking and our bike riding, but best of all, we did a little exploring. After the rest of the family hopped a plane back to greener pastures, my mom and I hit the road north, to spend the night in an Earthship. (Photos here.)
I suppose this could just be a diverting trip to an unusual hotel. I could leave it at that… but you know me. Being possessed of an almost pathological compulsion to think deep thoughts, and being snarled in the long process of crafting my own future, this trip was bound to become part of the larger, ongoing a-musing that occupies so much of my frontal lobe these days.
Let me see if I can distill this down, fish the gold bits outta the pan…
Economics, the way we currently play that game, seems more and more to me simply another word for bondage. Entered into willingly (albeit ignorantly), and with gilded, velvet-lined bonds, maybe, but bondage nonetheless. The genius of the game, though, is that marketeers have married in our minds those chains with notions like freedom and independence–it’s your stuff that sets you free. And so we gleefully pull the chains a little tighter, and believe the slogans.
A little voice somewhere inside me started crying Hogwash a long time ago, and she’s only been getting louder.
I’ve dutifully played my part as money filter–passing dollars from employer to debtor for years on end, skimming off the leftover gunk for myself–but I think it’s time to slip outta this system altogether. Or better yet, to Rube Goldberg me another contraption, one that has a beating human heart at the center, instead of hunks of cheap plastic and glitter.
What I’ve been simmering on that hot plate in the back of my mind looks like an implosion or inversion of the American Dream–the house, the property isn’t the end of the means; it becomes part of the spinning gears of the means themselves. The end is my life itself, lived on its own terms. An Earthship, or something like it, fits right in to that plan, in so many ways: the garbage-heap building materials, the DIY subversiveness, the self-sustaining infrastructure, the basic realness of it all… even just the organic shape of the space when you’re inside it–all these things jive with a worldview that’s less and less about baubles and more about bliss.
It’s hard to talk about integrating compassion and integrity into your life in these pervasive, fundamental ways without sounding, well, a bit yoga-retreat-y. Like all that patchouli finally got to the ole brain cells.
But it’s about more than woowoo and Namaste-ing each other all day long. I’m talking about survival, both in a Love-Your-Mother-bumpersticker sort of way and in a my-soul-will-become-a-sawdust-raisin-if-I-don’t-get-out-of-the-rat-race kind of way. Both are critical, and urgent.
Raj Patel’s wonderful little book, The Value of Nothing, summed up what I’m trying to get at very well, in a brief discussion of Buddhist economics:
“The real value of something is not in its ability to satisfy a craving, a desire, a vanity, but to meet the need for well-being.”
It all stems from that simple truth. All of it–how I want to structure the rest of my life, how I will value my time and my labor, what role stuff plays in my life. An Earthship, or something like it, isn’t a magic elixir or a patent cure-all. But it is a tool, a means, a process, a question and an answer, about what and who and how we value.
Helping Hands
I’m halfway through Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees Broke, and more than anything I keep thinking I shoulda been there. It’s an unrealistic thought–the day Katrina made landfall I was just starting orientation at my first EMS job, the ink barely dry on my license. Matter of fact, I was in a media blackout phase, and I had no idea what was going on in the Gulf–I heard talk about a hurricane, but nothing’s unusual about a hurricane in August. I didn’t tune in until days later, when the scope of the problem finally trickled down into water cooler talk. But still, it’s there: I shoulda been there.
I don’t know if everyone has this reaction, but I know lots of folks do–I’ve seen it. And it’s not just ones who do emergency response or rescue for a living. In my line of work, and just in my regular day-to-day life, I’ve seen plenty of people without any training or professional duty to act spontaneously mobilize in the face of catastrophe, large or small. Some folks just seem compelled to help when it’s needed. It seems a very primal, undeniable sort of urge–when the screams or the blood or the flames appear, they run toward them, and probably couldn’t even tell you why they’re doing it. Others freeze, or run the other way, or whip out their phone and start filming for YouTube… but lots and lots of seemingly-average folks find they’ve got a big S on their chest that they didn’t even know about, when the time calls for it. It’s a piercing, urgent expression of compassion that moves me deeply every time I see it.
In Chris Rose’s book, 1 Dead In Attic, he recounts a moment that brought tears to my eyes for its fierce embodiment of this singular urge:
Though rude drivers and belligerent customers and newspaper headlines make it easy to forget, that little seed of fearsome compassion is inside most of us. Under normal circumstances, it may never see the light of day. But sometimes a flood or a gun shot or a stranger collapsing on the floor cracks right through the armor we throw around that seed, and sunlight pours in. That crack may close the same day, or it may not.
The point is this: the cracks happen, the light happens, the seed is there.
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Posted in Commentary + Philosophy, That's Entertainment!, Wise Words
Tagged 1 dead in attic, chris rose, helping, katrina, spike lee, when the levees broke