The West
Under the strange dark swirled sky-wide farmscapes of Iowa into the cornfields of Nebraska, and Westward. I was following in the steps of those early Americans whose restless souls longed for the unknown lands, that mysterious magical panacea: “the frontier.” Of course, these lands were decidedly not unknown to those who already lived there, and those implicit, inescapably dark chords in the romantic songs of the American West - the twangs that cry for the land’s dispossessed - make such songs all the more complicated, the romance not quite so lofty, or maybe even - it ought be said - romantic. But the allure remains, the tales of bravery and vision (delusion?) and resilience, of individual confrontations with the wildness of nature, the wildness within the self, the wildness of others. No doubt this desire for wildness was not exclusive to the Europeans who colonized and settled on the Americas. Indeed, it might be argued (has been argued, will be argued) that the freedom to wild was among the rallying calls of the displaced indigenous tribes when going to battle with the invading white man.
To the spiritual traveler, this is seriously enticing. A sense of wildness rumbles somewhere deep in the individual spiritual experience, and the West as a metaphor ties this sense to both the mystery of the future, and the complexity of history: to the promises - dangerous and sublime - of exploration. Which is maybe to say, this entire trip has been into that metaphorical West, my travels taking me into that tense space where past and present coexist in varying states of peace and conflict. And all this well before I passed under the Archway to the West on Interstate 80 in Kearney, Nebraska (which, I suppose, is the second gateway to the West, after the St. Louis Arch, aka The (first) Gateway to the West).
So, all that said, the question remains: metaphors aside, what does the physical West hold?
Mountains. Desert. Eventually an ocean.
Arcosanti and Paolo Soleri
My next stop was about an hour north of Phoenix, Arizona: the desert urban arcological experiment of Arcosanti, a stone city built down alongside a mountain. “Arcology” is a mashup of the words “architecture” and “ecology” and was coined by the city’s founder and primary designer, Paolo Soleri. Soleri’s vision was both practical and futuristic. He sought to imagine a way for humans to live together sustainably in a way that is not wasteful, makes primes use of available usable space, and maintains access to a wilderness unsullied by sprawl. Unlike Earthaven and The Farm, where small groups of people spread out on large tracts of land in order to make less of an individual impact on the environment, Arcosanti’s population lives densely together in a city that is basically retrofitted into a specific environment, in this case desert.
Soleri envisioned a complete system for urban living within a certain ecological setting, and then, by some combination of will and the charisma, inspired followers to come and help him build it. It's this ability to inspire others that's drawing me in right now. My second night in Arcosanti, I had a conversation with one of the older members of the city, a woman named Mary. Over dinner, she told me that she arrived in the Arizona desert nearly forty years ago, a year or two into the beginning of Soleri’s grand lifelong experiment in arcology. When I tell her that I’m visiting Intentional Communities, she balks at the term. “That’s kind of a problematic designation for us,” she says, “we never did much of the ‘community’ stuff like other places did at the time. We were very much a dictatorship. Whatever Paolo said, went. Since he died (in 2013),” she adds, “it’s been hard on people. We still haven’t quite found our bearings.”
Paolo Soleri, The Gaskins, Kabir Helminski, and Elvis
Many of the communities I’ve encountered (though, importantly, not all) either have or have had charismatic leaders. These are the ones who are beacons to followers, acolytes, disciples. Soleri at Arcosanti, Stephen and Ina May Gaskin at The Farm, Sheikh Kabir Helminski of the Threshold Society, Elvis Presley in Memphis (just take a visit to Graceland, and you'll encounter the incredible power of a single personality); individuals who are able to recognize and utilize some of that mysterious truth of the metaphoric West, to shine some light upon, or perhaps to enliven, and sometimes to calm, that inner human wildness that intrepid travelers seek to capture or understand (and will fly toward like moths).
American history is built on them, especially American religious history. Joseph Smith, Carrie Nation, Elijah Muhammed, Dorothy Day, Mary Baker Eddy, L. Ron Hubbard, to drop a few of the more recognizable names. Some would call them visionaries or prophets. Some might call them crackpots and cult leaders. By most estimates, some of them were/are visionaries, and some them truly were/are con-artists. On my trek, from what I’ve read of the Gaskins and Soleri, and from my conversation with Helminski, I believe all four would call themselves simple, practical, truth seekers. Or at least, I believe that they would all likely maintain that that’s how they began their projects in Community/city building and/or spiritual development. Suffice to say that some are as likely to maintain their integrity and vision as others are to forget those things in favor of the allures of power, or to never have really had them in the first place.
So what exactly am I getting at? What is my purpose here? I'm not sure. I'm dipping into curious waters I guess, just swimming at this point from question to question. Here's another one: What is it that makes the Gaskins and Soleris of the world so compelling?
What's the draw?
Beyond the disciplines of determination, I see three qualities in such people: clarity, reason, and vision. When I visited the Sufis in Louisville, I wrote about the ideas of stripping away one’s possessions - outer and inner - to get closer to experiences of the Oneness. When it comes to understanding what it means to strip away inner possessions, I come back to the experience of competing voices in the mind, of stripping down to silence, and then listening for the first voice to speak. When it comes to those personalities that are able to galvanize and inspire others, to enact the creation of a community in the desert of Arizona, or the wilds of Tennessee, or in the hearts of music lovers, a singular voice is compelling. When reason is used to shape this voice into something clear, it is profoundly powerful, revolutionary even. This is the clarity of a voice that’s awake to something within the self, able to articulate it, and so awakens something in others. The articulation of vision.
Some Kind of Vision of Vision
The poet William Blake was famously a believer in visions. All human beings have visions, he contended, but most build walls and barriers (or are oppressed by imposed walls and barriers) to ignore them, or to stop themselves from seeing them. As a writer, this is at once a comforting thought - a propellant into trusting the imagination, and justifying its use - and a challenge to continue having my eyes open to such visions.
But how to cultivate vision? How to get around the walls and barriers, or better yet, tear them down?
I don't know that there's any fixed answer to such a question. Some vacillation or balance of submission and argument, of struggle and quiet, with the self and existence, is maybe as close as I can get to it in words. To experience the Oneness, to get there, to do faith, to take time to breathe in grateful and aware, to sanctify space through ritual, to be, that is the source of vision. Once one becomes aware solely of one's being, strips down to the beating heart, vision has a chance to enter the mind. And what comes of vision? Pretty much everything. Art, innovation, religious doctrine, stories, texts, words, gods! Perhaps some better understandings of ourselves. These are powerful manifestations! And yet, if left unquestioned, visions become hardened, ossified, stuck, and this is an easy path to absolutism, dogmatism, immorality. Mark Twain said, “loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human spirit,” and it can equally be said about vision as opinion.
Which is to say that vision is only a beginning. If visions come to us unhindered following the work of cultivating being, what to do with those visions is a personal trial, and it is one every individual has the capacity (maybe the right? Or even the responsibility? (Maybe the unfortunate fate?)) to undergo.
The West Revisited
I'm afraid I've spent this post wandering absently through a field of thoughts and observations as they've come to mind, without a particular center or conclusions. This is all new territory: mysterious, unknown, powerful. I'm still in the West. Soon to cycle back around.
Under the strange dark swirled sky-wide farmscapes of Iowa into the cornfields of Nebraska, and Westward. I was following in the steps of those early Americans whose restless souls longed for the unknown lands, that mysterious magical panacea: “the frontier.” Of course, these lands were decidedly not unknown to those who already lived there, and those implicit, inescapably dark chords in the romantic songs of the American West - the twangs that cry for the land’s dispossessed - make such songs all the more complicated, the romance not quite so lofty, or maybe even - it ought be said - romantic. But the allure remains, the tales of bravery and vision (delusion?) and resilience, of individual confrontations with the wildness of nature, the wildness within the self, the wildness of others. No doubt this desire for wildness was not exclusive to the Europeans who colonized and settled on the Americas. Indeed, it might be argued (has been argued, will be argued) that the freedom to wild was among the rallying calls of the displaced indigenous tribes when going to battle with the invading white man.
To the spiritual traveler, this is seriously enticing. A sense of wildness rumbles somewhere deep in the individual spiritual experience, and the West as a metaphor ties this sense to both the mystery of the future, and the complexity of history: to the promises - dangerous and sublime - of exploration. Which is maybe to say, this entire trip has been into that metaphorical West, my travels taking me into that tense space where past and present coexist in varying states of peace and conflict. And all this well before I passed under the Archway to the West on Interstate 80 in Kearney, Nebraska (which, I suppose, is the second gateway to the West, after the St. Louis Arch, aka The (first) Gateway to the West).
So, all that said, the question remains: metaphors aside, what does the physical West hold?
Mountains. Desert. Eventually an ocean.
Arcosanti and Paolo Soleri
My next stop was about an hour north of Phoenix, Arizona: the desert urban arcological experiment of Arcosanti, a stone city built down alongside a mountain. “Arcology” is a mashup of the words “architecture” and “ecology” and was coined by the city’s founder and primary designer, Paolo Soleri. Soleri’s vision was both practical and futuristic. He sought to imagine a way for humans to live together sustainably in a way that is not wasteful, makes primes use of available usable space, and maintains access to a wilderness unsullied by sprawl. Unlike Earthaven and The Farm, where small groups of people spread out on large tracts of land in order to make less of an individual impact on the environment, Arcosanti’s population lives densely together in a city that is basically retrofitted into a specific environment, in this case desert.
Soleri envisioned a complete system for urban living within a certain ecological setting, and then, by some combination of will and the charisma, inspired followers to come and help him build it. It's this ability to inspire others that's drawing me in right now. My second night in Arcosanti, I had a conversation with one of the older members of the city, a woman named Mary. Over dinner, she told me that she arrived in the Arizona desert nearly forty years ago, a year or two into the beginning of Soleri’s grand lifelong experiment in arcology. When I tell her that I’m visiting Intentional Communities, she balks at the term. “That’s kind of a problematic designation for us,” she says, “we never did much of the ‘community’ stuff like other places did at the time. We were very much a dictatorship. Whatever Paolo said, went. Since he died (in 2013),” she adds, “it’s been hard on people. We still haven’t quite found our bearings.”
Paolo Soleri, The Gaskins, Kabir Helminski, and Elvis
Many of the communities I’ve encountered (though, importantly, not all) either have or have had charismatic leaders. These are the ones who are beacons to followers, acolytes, disciples. Soleri at Arcosanti, Stephen and Ina May Gaskin at The Farm, Sheikh Kabir Helminski of the Threshold Society, Elvis Presley in Memphis (just take a visit to Graceland, and you'll encounter the incredible power of a single personality); individuals who are able to recognize and utilize some of that mysterious truth of the metaphoric West, to shine some light upon, or perhaps to enliven, and sometimes to calm, that inner human wildness that intrepid travelers seek to capture or understand (and will fly toward like moths).
American history is built on them, especially American religious history. Joseph Smith, Carrie Nation, Elijah Muhammed, Dorothy Day, Mary Baker Eddy, L. Ron Hubbard, to drop a few of the more recognizable names. Some would call them visionaries or prophets. Some might call them crackpots and cult leaders. By most estimates, some of them were/are visionaries, and some them truly were/are con-artists. On my trek, from what I’ve read of the Gaskins and Soleri, and from my conversation with Helminski, I believe all four would call themselves simple, practical, truth seekers. Or at least, I believe that they would all likely maintain that that’s how they began their projects in Community/city building and/or spiritual development. Suffice to say that some are as likely to maintain their integrity and vision as others are to forget those things in favor of the allures of power, or to never have really had them in the first place.
So what exactly am I getting at? What is my purpose here? I'm not sure. I'm dipping into curious waters I guess, just swimming at this point from question to question. Here's another one: What is it that makes the Gaskins and Soleris of the world so compelling?
What's the draw?
Beyond the disciplines of determination, I see three qualities in such people: clarity, reason, and vision. When I visited the Sufis in Louisville, I wrote about the ideas of stripping away one’s possessions - outer and inner - to get closer to experiences of the Oneness. When it comes to understanding what it means to strip away inner possessions, I come back to the experience of competing voices in the mind, of stripping down to silence, and then listening for the first voice to speak. When it comes to those personalities that are able to galvanize and inspire others, to enact the creation of a community in the desert of Arizona, or the wilds of Tennessee, or in the hearts of music lovers, a singular voice is compelling. When reason is used to shape this voice into something clear, it is profoundly powerful, revolutionary even. This is the clarity of a voice that’s awake to something within the self, able to articulate it, and so awakens something in others. The articulation of vision.
Some Kind of Vision of Vision
The poet William Blake was famously a believer in visions. All human beings have visions, he contended, but most build walls and barriers (or are oppressed by imposed walls and barriers) to ignore them, or to stop themselves from seeing them. As a writer, this is at once a comforting thought - a propellant into trusting the imagination, and justifying its use - and a challenge to continue having my eyes open to such visions.
But how to cultivate vision? How to get around the walls and barriers, or better yet, tear them down?
I don't know that there's any fixed answer to such a question. Some vacillation or balance of submission and argument, of struggle and quiet, with the self and existence, is maybe as close as I can get to it in words. To experience the Oneness, to get there, to do faith, to take time to breathe in grateful and aware, to sanctify space through ritual, to be, that is the source of vision. Once one becomes aware solely of one's being, strips down to the beating heart, vision has a chance to enter the mind. And what comes of vision? Pretty much everything. Art, innovation, religious doctrine, stories, texts, words, gods! Perhaps some better understandings of ourselves. These are powerful manifestations! And yet, if left unquestioned, visions become hardened, ossified, stuck, and this is an easy path to absolutism, dogmatism, immorality. Mark Twain said, “loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human spirit,” and it can equally be said about vision as opinion.
Which is to say that vision is only a beginning. If visions come to us unhindered following the work of cultivating being, what to do with those visions is a personal trial, and it is one every individual has the capacity (maybe the right? Or even the responsibility? (Maybe the unfortunate fate?)) to undergo.
The West Revisited
I'm afraid I've spent this post wandering absently through a field of thoughts and observations as they've come to mind, without a particular center or conclusions. This is all new territory: mysterious, unknown, powerful. I'm still in the West. Soon to cycle back around.
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