service and exile

A friend writes, on his blog: "the degree to which we serve is the degree to which we are no longer in exile."

This sentence resonates like the long note of a bell. Over the weekend I cooked in the discomfort of exile: after ingesting plant medicine, I found myself caught in a rushing river of thought which cascaded over all the events of my life, finding fault with each one and my role in it. Everything I've ever done is a horrible mistake, I "realized," and I am a horrible person for having done all those things.

This is not an unfamiliar experience for me, this shattering, devoid of self-kindness -- usually, however, it is a murky and subterranean unfolding, whereas I found it suddenly crystalline in the light of consciousness and my community's love. This weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and I spent several hours each day praying in synagogue with my community and then several more hours in precious moments of just being together. I found myself again and again in awe of the sweetness of sharing this life with those around me, so open-hearted and committed to growth and joy.

I'll spare you all the gory details of my personal process around this experience, and will just say that I had an experience I'd never had before in this particular go-round, which is that I felt for the first time able to share myself from within the experience and find myself received with unconditional love and positive regard by my friends. It was immeasurably healing, after having found myself guilty in the court of my own mind, to be guided back into the expansiveness of the heart by the love of my chosen family here (with a little help from Big Mama Ocean).

Today, at the Brower Center, there was a blessing ceremony for the building -- it's a new building (we all just moved in a few months ago), and today we gathered together to thank the ancestors for allowing us to be there and pray that our work for the healing of the earth would be good and successful. We stood in a circle as a beautiful Ohlone elder woman called in the directions and asked us each to speak about our work. It was a special ceremony, one that made me feel so blessed to be where I am today.

The photographer for the event was wearing a shirt with a quote from David Brower on the back: "Have fun saving the world or you are just going to depress yourself." It struck me, especially after my experience of going into my own shadow this weekend and then re-emerging into the light of love, that this is really the best thing that we can do. Love the earth, love one another, give everything. I am learning that I can heal myself when I give over all of myself -- in prayer and in action, when I offer my fullest heart, my fullest service to the need of the moment, my own experience is transformed.

I used to wonder what people meant when they say, 'the more you give, the more you have.' Wouldn't giving everything just leave me spent and empty? But I see it more clearly now, as I swim in the chaotic waters of creativity and collaboration, as I discover what it means to show up as a person in the world, being open to loving and being loved. Giving everything, having fun saving the world, is really the only way to go now. The alternative to having fun is depressing yourself. The alternative to service is exile. On this planet -- which could go up in flames soon if we don't all make profound changes, or possibly even if we do -- as scary as it is to be alive and do things and make mistakes and fumble and stumble on, what is the alternative? Safety, inertia, numbness. Exile.

It is a stark calculus for stark times, and the choice to serve requires constant sensing and re-calibration, like a baby learning to walk. But there's really no question about what choice to make, is there?

re:indigenous

During my second year of law school, I took a course called Law, Markets and Culture, taught by the only tenured female African-American professor on the faculty of the school. It was a ranging examination of the intersections of economy and jurisprudence, and the struggle for human thriving amidst these often-forbidding forces.

I wrote our 24-hour final exam in that class about Burning Man, analyzing the festival, in the context of Western culture, as an "alternative for structuring relations." I dug the paper out of my files as I thought about this blog post, and read through it with glee. I'd just returned from my first time out on the playa when school started, and suddenly I thought I had discovered the secret to fixing our poor, broken civilization. It was like I was in graduate school, or something: my Marxist-inspired critiques of the market economy flowed without pause into a discussion of race, gender, and morality. The final ingredient in this intellectual goulash was a statement on Burning Man's potential to revivify our humanity as we traded in goods and services:

". . . Burning Man participants bypass modes of market-based relations and their attendant alienation, and experience interpersonal interactions as holistic sites of creativity and growth. Festival participants spend each of the seven days of the festival in pursuit of joyful experience, creative self-expression, and basic survival needs; in these simultaneously common and radically divergent pursuits, participants interact not in service of the market, but in service of one another. This departure from traditionally limited, stifled and hurried relationships in the context of the market arguably allows participants to more fully reveal themselves and more fully witness one another, thus contributing to one another’s human flourishing."

(Yes -- yes, I did just quote myself in my own blog.) My main point, couched in all this clap-trap, though, was that Burning Man is a rare and valuable opportunity for urban-bound privileged folks to taste some form of indigeneity. How do we live on the earth together? This is the question that 50,000 people work to answer each year, albeit at the world's largest party, one utterly reliant on fossil fuel, from the gasoline in the cars to the plastic wrap on the Trader Joe's peanut butter pretzels.

I've been reflecting a lot on that tension in recent weeks, since returning from my own pilgrimage to the playa. Looking at other people's pictures on Facebook and remembering my own experience of all that wildness, all that tribal chic, all that effort in one great undulating paean to unpredictability, dancing with the flames of chaos -- I recognize the seed of remembrance of who we are. We go out there to lose our minds and find our way again. So many of the most magnetic Burning Man stories are stories of hearts cracking open, greeting the dawn in the arms of a friend or a lover or the mother earth herself, sobbing and rejoicing at the truth of our connection and the ultimate truth of the love that is everything. It is so easy to forget, but out on the playa, even in the midst of all the noise and excess, people can be reminded.

And that is really the project of our time -- the remembering that all of us are indigenous to this earth. We all live here, we all belong here. Martin Prechtel writes, "every human being alive today, modern or tribal, primal or over-domesticated, has a soul that is original, natural, and above all, indigenous in one way or another. And like all indigenous peoples today, that indigenous soul of the modern person has been either banished to some far reaches of the dream world or is under attack by the modern mind."

If we are to survive, we must remember.

I spent much of today lying in my cozy treehouse apartment in the rain, spending time with my mother who is visiting from Los Angeles. I was reading magazine articles by Prechtel, by an Ojibwe woman who developed www.fourdirectionsteachings.com to make indigenous teachings accessible, by Jesse Wolf Hardin of the Anima Center in New Mexico. I oscillated between these reminders of the immediacy and immensity of the challenge -- how we must utterly transform our way of being on this planet, grieve the failure of our culture, learn how to return home to the earth and to one another -- and work on the internet, punctuated by visits to Facebook.

I started to notice the difference in my physical feeling, even my own self-awareness, when I was reading Sacred Fire magazine and when I was scouring the web or looking through my friends' photographs. Connection and distraction. Remembrance and forgetting. A continuous loop.

It is no longer a question, though, in my mind, that remembering is the great task of our time. And how does this work take place? Another article I read today suggested that it ultimately requires a releasing of all thought, all preconceived notions no matter how grand and carefully-wrought, and instead allowing for listening. Listen to the earth, watch what is going on around you, and be with the web of life that will emerge before your eyes. Find your place in that sacred web by witnessing the living points spanning around you and beyond you.

Maybe the world wide web teaches us, in some way, how to think in a web -- how to intuitively track the thread leading from one node to another, how to recognize interconnection. Maybe it is our unique position at this time in history to re-indigenize even that gift, so that we can again find sight of our link to the life that exists around us, inextricably connected to us, and remember how to be with it now and into the future.

dusty and exalted.

I can barely stay awake right now but I am bound and determined to keep writing on this blog, so let me provide you with just a few highlights from my week of bacchanal.

First and foremost, methinks, was the moon. We got to see her wax into fullness, then start to wane again -- one night she even wore a halo. It is rare for me to be that intimately connected with the night sky, the night wind, the night earth. I let myself feel what moon light feels like, and it is somehow reminiscent of the feeling that I had at the saltworks in Moray, Peru -- dense, quiet, intimate, snowy. The moon was a silent and unwavering beacon for me, a reminder of the place within, which brought me to centeredness again and again amidst the noise and pageantry.

Next, of course, the community. The homies, the peeps, the familia. The big, sweet love. Not to mention our camp was more tightly-organized and smoothly-run than ever, with a separate kitchen tent, shade cloth over all of our personal tents, and a separate lounge structure. The gravitational pull of home and family, especially in the heat of mid-day, was hard to resist. I remember with fondness and bemusement my first year, basically all by myself out there, when all I had was a tent and a few cans of tuna fish. The co-evolution of person, friendships and city, to be sure.

Cannot fail to mention the airplane ride. A friend of a friend was in the skydiver camp, and she got us tokens to ride up in the plane as "fireflies," or passengers. Three things to say about this, primarily. Thing one is that I had, and still have, a good deal of trouble wrapping my head around the fact that four people, seemingly otherwise sound in mind and body, leapt out of the airplane in order to hurtle towards the ground! I myself did prefer to remain IN the plane. Thing two is that immediately after the divers dove, and the door closed, the pilot turned the plane essentially on its side. Pure, adrenaline-coursing exhilaration at that, as we ourselves made a relative plummet towards the earth again. And thing three is of course just the view of the city from above -- not only the place itself, but the beautiful rift valley in which it sits and the mountains on either side. Truly breathtaking to take such a bird's eye view.

Then, the WORK. I got some good ceremonial work done out there, people! Did some healing, moved some energy, opened some doors, released some long-awaited sobs, created some alignment. As a result: shift. 'Nuff said.

And of course: the flow. Somehow, not having any expectations this year, just intentions, made it really easy to drop into the glee/ sweetness/ gravity/ juice of whatever moment I happened to be experiencing. The more I allowed it, the more it astounded me -- my favorite was on Friday night, when my original buddy and I parted ways early in the night, and I kept flowing from beautiful interaction to beautiful interaction (including a serendipitous pee-squat next to a dark RV with one of the skydivers from our experience that very day!), until finally I found four or so of my favorite people from Women's Herbal Symposium. We brought in the dawn out at the trash fence, with a visit to my friend's beautiful installation of four five-foot wooden feathers, painted black and white, in flight along the orange netting. I asked her what it meant and she, woman of few but evocative words, said, "they're finally free." Ah, yes.

On the walk back to the city, the sun newly-emerged and the full moon sinking into the cradle of the mountains, we saw two black birds in flight. My friend, the artist, found a black and white bird feather on the ground. Mind you, there's no wildlife to speak of out there.

So that was what it was, and so much more . . . I still feel a kind of lingering momentum, an explosiveness, a desire for further and ever more dizzying expansion. So much of the magic of the playa is around What Could Be. The sense of possibility we find from walking amongst evidence of unadulterated human creativity, from being free to express ourselves freely together, from touching extremes of experience and witnessing our own awe in the face of all that exposure -- that sense is unique to the playa, and the inevitable passage of this yearly ritual brings a bittersweet taste. But -- but -- it just began! We were just anticipating it, a week ago! Amazing, how it all unfurls and then retracts upon itself, with nothing but an empty, dry expanse in its wake.

But really, words can't do it justice. If you want to know more, you'll just have to experience it for yourself someday.