The Road Into Hut Hamlet Neighborhood at Earthaven
The Naturally Built Council Hall In the mission statement for this project, I said - maybe a little blindly into the night, I think I can admit here - that I was going to rush headlong into “the details.” That’s where I thought I might find God, the Devil, and/or James Madison (“the details” being the home of the writer of our Constitution, with all its intricacies, according to Thomas Jefferson). I’m not quite sure about the Devil - I haven’t really seen anything starkly evil so far, although always there is the hint of the thick fog that can lead to it - but God and James Madison?
Well maybe so, there and here.
But before I get into all that, an important question: What's a detail?
This might sound silly. Most of us know this from our earliest schooling days. A detail is a particular, a specific: a color, a sound, a feeling. Something that is, perhaps, easily forgotten or overlooked, yet somehow inescapably essential. They are the significantly insignificant. In language we use them to reflect the nuance and subtlety of reality, to get as close as possible to the dense center of private truth that we strive, unsuccessfully, to articulate. For this reason writers tend to be obsessed with them (Paul Auster says that “the truth of a story is in the details,” and check out the comments section of the last post for an appreciation of the difference between "dirt" and "unpaved" with regard to roads). After all, they can be revealed and utilized in so many ways! A detail can give the sensory experience to a scene that brings it to life, it can show the kind of meaningful juxtaposition that elicits perspective on a situation, indeed it can become the very catalyst for the series of events that becomes the story, and that’s just to name a few of the ways details are useful. Consider the examples: the knocking legs of an uneven table quavering in the ears of a child as a storm passes over the house; the lizard wandering nonchalantly across a blood-soaked, corpse-ridden, plain of battle, spearing a fly with its quick tongue; the red dot on a cashmere sweater that wreaks havoc in the lives of a group of friends in New York City. Details are the basic unit of the world, the building blocks of perception and experience. I'd say that their importance can't be overstated: Without the great variety and specificity of details, or the ability to thoughtfully distinguish between them, all things would blur together! Life in this world would quickly become a vast blandness: dull, boring, and oppressive. All of which is to say, details, when noticed, provide completion and clarity.
Or, more pertinent to what I'm about to say: access.
So what is a detail?
Well here's a better question: what can a detail be?
Let’s say: a portal. A doorway.
(A quick hiccup of mine about doors in literature and culture seems appropriate to bring up here: In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell William Blake writes, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” This quote went on to inspire Aldous Huxley in his mystical pursuits to such an extent that he titled one of his books The Doors of Perception. Huxley’s book, in turn, inspired Jim Morrison to name his band The Doors. All fun facts. I bring it up for another reason though: to make a case against one small part of the sentiment. I’m not so sure that things are “infinite.” At least I’m not sold on it. There might be a multiverse with 936,005 universes inside of it, which is something well beyond human conception of the finite, but is finite nonetheless. Assuming the truth of “infinity” isn’t necessary, I don’t think, to believing in the Oneness. The answer might still be 42. Just a kick from the rational mind I guess.)
Quick Story: From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
In his famous book, Robert Pirsig tells the story of a student’s difficulty with one of his assignments in a writing class. The prompt? “Write about the city block that you live on.” Here’s the story: Two or three days before the paper is due, this student comes to Pirsig. She is distraught. She simply has no idea what to write. “I can’t think of anything to say,” she says, “nothing happens on my block. Can I expand the assignment?” Just the opposite, Pirsig responds. He tells her that the new assignment is to write about one brick on one building on her block.
So what happens? Three days later, ecstatic, she hands in a 6,000 word essay about her block. Pirsig describes how electrified this student is when she gives him the paper, raving about all the dynamism and life she was able to observe on her block once she began with the details of the lone brick.
What beauty in doorways!
Earthaven Details
For the sake of providing as many doorways into this spiritual community as possible, I present a few cool details I picked up about how Earthaven works:
Natural Building! Most of the buildings are constructed entirely from elements cultivated from the earth or recycled from other structures (recycled materials are obviously not strictly speaking, “natural” building materials, but using them does not involve the manufacturing and processing that comes with most building projects). This includes building with locally harvested (as in, from that very forest) timber frames, straw bale, cob, recycled tires packed with earth, earthen floors, recycled bottles, hardwood floors, living roofs, and designed for passive solar energy.
Water! Energy! Food! Money! The three hundred thirty-odd acres is equipped with multiple sources of running water to fuel the hydro-electricity (remember this!), two natural springs and a well for drinking water, and multiple solar panel fields in individual neighborhoods for household energy use. All electricity and water is off-the-mainstream-grid, and there is only one flush toilet on the property in the Council Hall. All other toilets are compost-toilets, which are basically a deep hole with toilet seats to do your business into, and a tub of sawdust beside them to use for throwing cup-fulls on top (over time this becomes natural humus to add nutrients to soil (here’s wikipedia on the compost detail)). And, in a beat: water in showers is heated from solar panels; food is grown individually and communally in gardens; money is private with people finding income in a variety of ways, from telecommuting to working for others on the village to giving tours or hosting groups and conferences, and the village has its own business called the Useful Plants Nursery, which sells all kinds of medicinal, permaculture, and fruit plants, as well as nut trees (all season and bio-region appropriate).
Government! Governance is handled by a handful of committees and a Council, which meets every two weeks for at least four hours and makes decisions by a process that strives for consensus and acts, carefully, on majorities of 85%, with dissent meticulously recorded. There was a Council meeting while I was there, and while I didn’t sit in, in favor of spending time with the NextGen Youth Eco Summit (I'll write about that soon!), I did manage a peak at some of the rules for their meetings. Most impressive to me was No. 1: that members with objections to an issue being discussed ought to address first the feeling within themselves from which the objection was coming. This is not to say that feeling is elevated over reason. Rather, that understanding the fundamental feeling from which one is speaking is necessary toward the end of getting to the space in which reasoned debate is not only possible, but really productive. What a lesson from such a small detail: that acknowledgment of emotion is actually a boon to rational thinking (who'da thunk it?). Can you imagine if a politician yelling angrily in Congress was formally asked to confront within themselves the fear that was making them angry before speaking? Or, while we’re pipe dreaming here, to confront the greed that might be motivating an expression of fear?
Appreciating the complexity in governance…Madison might’ve espoused different methods in his day, but I think the sentiment would make him proud (there he is!).
And here’s an especially juicy detail to dovetail into the next section: To become a member at Earthaven, people must sign an agreement - a “Remembership Covenant” - which states in the first line of its purpose that members be “Dedicated to caring for people and the Earth, and recognizing the Oneness of all life.”
Aha, the Oneness....
Distinctions within the Oneness: Appreciating the Transience of Doors
Okay, so now we've got a new tension (which might be the same as the old tensions): It seems conceptually paradoxical to laud the beauty and use of fine distinctions while also generally presenting a theory of the Universe as Essentially One (in which distinctions are illusory). In past posts I’ve mentioned the various, very different, metaphors I've heard for conceiving of the Oneness (the body in which we are all cells, the wave which engulfs us, the blanket that we all poke out of). So is there any way to reconcile the belief in the Oneness and the beauty of distinctions?
I suppose this might be where God meets the details.
Here’s Confucius:
“The sage, looking up, contemplates the brilliant phenomena of the heavens, and, looking down, examines the definite arrangements of the earth. Thus he knows the causes of darkness and light. He traces things from their beginning and follows them to their end. Thus he knows what can be said of life and death. He perceives how the union of essence and breath forms things, and the flight of the soul produces the change in their constitution.”
The phenomenal vastness of the heavens and the definite arrangements of the earth are therefore reflections of each other, the two pieces whose union breathes essence into being.
That clears things up, yeah?
Here’s my interpretation:
In the Oneness, every individual thing, person, place, plant, sound, feeling, every single tiny inescapable detail, perhaps especially the ones we have to work to notice, becomes a potential access point to….the dissolution of all those things. A door once walked through disappears behind us.
At least for a few seconds.
And then the work to find the doors begins again.
(Or you can just click here: Break on through, baby.)
Final Detail, A Personal Ritual
During my conversation with Kaitlin Lindsay Johnston, a Wiccan priestess who lives at Earthaven (that conversation in my next post!), we spoke some about ritual, which here I'm going to interpret as: the details of spiritual practice. As a Jew one of my rituals is to say the Shema prayer every night (or most nights, when I remember) before going to sleep. The usual translation of this all important Jewish prayer is “Listen O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” The word “Israel” is not usually translated, but lately I’ve been thinking that maybe it ought to be. “Israel” meaning “wrestles with God” after Jacob’s struggle in the night with an angel at the crossroads of his life.
So with that in mind, here’s my new interpretative translation of the prayer:
“Listen dude! You, the one struggling with Everything...shut up! God is God! It’s all One!”
Lying in my tent at Earthaven before sleeping, after days of trying to understand all the myriad beautiful details of that space, I did my best to do just that, to shut up the wrestling distinctions of the mind, to listen to the Oneness, and to be carried away through the door of the ubiquitous pervasive sound (did you remember it?): the rumbles of the waters rushing across the rocks in their creeks.
Well maybe so, there and here.
But before I get into all that, an important question: What's a detail?
This might sound silly. Most of us know this from our earliest schooling days. A detail is a particular, a specific: a color, a sound, a feeling. Something that is, perhaps, easily forgotten or overlooked, yet somehow inescapably essential. They are the significantly insignificant. In language we use them to reflect the nuance and subtlety of reality, to get as close as possible to the dense center of private truth that we strive, unsuccessfully, to articulate. For this reason writers tend to be obsessed with them (Paul Auster says that “the truth of a story is in the details,” and check out the comments section of the last post for an appreciation of the difference between "dirt" and "unpaved" with regard to roads). After all, they can be revealed and utilized in so many ways! A detail can give the sensory experience to a scene that brings it to life, it can show the kind of meaningful juxtaposition that elicits perspective on a situation, indeed it can become the very catalyst for the series of events that becomes the story, and that’s just to name a few of the ways details are useful. Consider the examples: the knocking legs of an uneven table quavering in the ears of a child as a storm passes over the house; the lizard wandering nonchalantly across a blood-soaked, corpse-ridden, plain of battle, spearing a fly with its quick tongue; the red dot on a cashmere sweater that wreaks havoc in the lives of a group of friends in New York City. Details are the basic unit of the world, the building blocks of perception and experience. I'd say that their importance can't be overstated: Without the great variety and specificity of details, or the ability to thoughtfully distinguish between them, all things would blur together! Life in this world would quickly become a vast blandness: dull, boring, and oppressive. All of which is to say, details, when noticed, provide completion and clarity.
Or, more pertinent to what I'm about to say: access.
So what is a detail?
Well here's a better question: what can a detail be?
Let’s say: a portal. A doorway.
(A quick hiccup of mine about doors in literature and culture seems appropriate to bring up here: In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell William Blake writes, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” This quote went on to inspire Aldous Huxley in his mystical pursuits to such an extent that he titled one of his books The Doors of Perception. Huxley’s book, in turn, inspired Jim Morrison to name his band The Doors. All fun facts. I bring it up for another reason though: to make a case against one small part of the sentiment. I’m not so sure that things are “infinite.” At least I’m not sold on it. There might be a multiverse with 936,005 universes inside of it, which is something well beyond human conception of the finite, but is finite nonetheless. Assuming the truth of “infinity” isn’t necessary, I don’t think, to believing in the Oneness. The answer might still be 42. Just a kick from the rational mind I guess.)
Quick Story: From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
In his famous book, Robert Pirsig tells the story of a student’s difficulty with one of his assignments in a writing class. The prompt? “Write about the city block that you live on.” Here’s the story: Two or three days before the paper is due, this student comes to Pirsig. She is distraught. She simply has no idea what to write. “I can’t think of anything to say,” she says, “nothing happens on my block. Can I expand the assignment?” Just the opposite, Pirsig responds. He tells her that the new assignment is to write about one brick on one building on her block.
So what happens? Three days later, ecstatic, she hands in a 6,000 word essay about her block. Pirsig describes how electrified this student is when she gives him the paper, raving about all the dynamism and life she was able to observe on her block once she began with the details of the lone brick.
What beauty in doorways!
Earthaven Details
For the sake of providing as many doorways into this spiritual community as possible, I present a few cool details I picked up about how Earthaven works:
Natural Building! Most of the buildings are constructed entirely from elements cultivated from the earth or recycled from other structures (recycled materials are obviously not strictly speaking, “natural” building materials, but using them does not involve the manufacturing and processing that comes with most building projects). This includes building with locally harvested (as in, from that very forest) timber frames, straw bale, cob, recycled tires packed with earth, earthen floors, recycled bottles, hardwood floors, living roofs, and designed for passive solar energy.
Water! Energy! Food! Money! The three hundred thirty-odd acres is equipped with multiple sources of running water to fuel the hydro-electricity (remember this!), two natural springs and a well for drinking water, and multiple solar panel fields in individual neighborhoods for household energy use. All electricity and water is off-the-mainstream-grid, and there is only one flush toilet on the property in the Council Hall. All other toilets are compost-toilets, which are basically a deep hole with toilet seats to do your business into, and a tub of sawdust beside them to use for throwing cup-fulls on top (over time this becomes natural humus to add nutrients to soil (here’s wikipedia on the compost detail)). And, in a beat: water in showers is heated from solar panels; food is grown individually and communally in gardens; money is private with people finding income in a variety of ways, from telecommuting to working for others on the village to giving tours or hosting groups and conferences, and the village has its own business called the Useful Plants Nursery, which sells all kinds of medicinal, permaculture, and fruit plants, as well as nut trees (all season and bio-region appropriate).
Government! Governance is handled by a handful of committees and a Council, which meets every two weeks for at least four hours and makes decisions by a process that strives for consensus and acts, carefully, on majorities of 85%, with dissent meticulously recorded. There was a Council meeting while I was there, and while I didn’t sit in, in favor of spending time with the NextGen Youth Eco Summit (I'll write about that soon!), I did manage a peak at some of the rules for their meetings. Most impressive to me was No. 1: that members with objections to an issue being discussed ought to address first the feeling within themselves from which the objection was coming. This is not to say that feeling is elevated over reason. Rather, that understanding the fundamental feeling from which one is speaking is necessary toward the end of getting to the space in which reasoned debate is not only possible, but really productive. What a lesson from such a small detail: that acknowledgment of emotion is actually a boon to rational thinking (who'da thunk it?). Can you imagine if a politician yelling angrily in Congress was formally asked to confront within themselves the fear that was making them angry before speaking? Or, while we’re pipe dreaming here, to confront the greed that might be motivating an expression of fear?
Appreciating the complexity in governance…Madison might’ve espoused different methods in his day, but I think the sentiment would make him proud (there he is!).
And here’s an especially juicy detail to dovetail into the next section: To become a member at Earthaven, people must sign an agreement - a “Remembership Covenant” - which states in the first line of its purpose that members be “Dedicated to caring for people and the Earth, and recognizing the Oneness of all life.”
Aha, the Oneness....
Distinctions within the Oneness: Appreciating the Transience of Doors
Okay, so now we've got a new tension (which might be the same as the old tensions): It seems conceptually paradoxical to laud the beauty and use of fine distinctions while also generally presenting a theory of the Universe as Essentially One (in which distinctions are illusory). In past posts I’ve mentioned the various, very different, metaphors I've heard for conceiving of the Oneness (the body in which we are all cells, the wave which engulfs us, the blanket that we all poke out of). So is there any way to reconcile the belief in the Oneness and the beauty of distinctions?
I suppose this might be where God meets the details.
Here’s Confucius:
“The sage, looking up, contemplates the brilliant phenomena of the heavens, and, looking down, examines the definite arrangements of the earth. Thus he knows the causes of darkness and light. He traces things from their beginning and follows them to their end. Thus he knows what can be said of life and death. He perceives how the union of essence and breath forms things, and the flight of the soul produces the change in their constitution.”
The phenomenal vastness of the heavens and the definite arrangements of the earth are therefore reflections of each other, the two pieces whose union breathes essence into being.
That clears things up, yeah?
Here’s my interpretation:
In the Oneness, every individual thing, person, place, plant, sound, feeling, every single tiny inescapable detail, perhaps especially the ones we have to work to notice, becomes a potential access point to….the dissolution of all those things. A door once walked through disappears behind us.
At least for a few seconds.
And then the work to find the doors begins again.
(Or you can just click here: Break on through, baby.)
Final Detail, A Personal Ritual
During my conversation with Kaitlin Lindsay Johnston, a Wiccan priestess who lives at Earthaven (that conversation in my next post!), we spoke some about ritual, which here I'm going to interpret as: the details of spiritual practice. As a Jew one of my rituals is to say the Shema prayer every night (or most nights, when I remember) before going to sleep. The usual translation of this all important Jewish prayer is “Listen O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” The word “Israel” is not usually translated, but lately I’ve been thinking that maybe it ought to be. “Israel” meaning “wrestles with God” after Jacob’s struggle in the night with an angel at the crossroads of his life.
So with that in mind, here’s my new interpretative translation of the prayer:
“Listen dude! You, the one struggling with Everything...shut up! God is God! It’s all One!”
Lying in my tent at Earthaven before sleeping, after days of trying to understand all the myriad beautiful details of that space, I did my best to do just that, to shut up the wrestling distinctions of the mind, to listen to the Oneness, and to be carried away through the door of the ubiquitous pervasive sound (did you remember it?): the rumbles of the waters rushing across the rocks in their creeks.
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