back home again

I'm home again in Oakland after a week in LA, the bulk of which I spent gloriously prone on the couch, under a blanket and reading a book. Fire crackling in the fireplace, cat sprawled on the carpet, parents napping and reading magazines. I feel mellowed, in the fullest sense of the word -- gentled, relaxed, unhurried. And I'm off to Harbin Hot Springs on Wednesday for a long weekend with the chosen family, cleansing and blessing the new year together. I feel renewed, restored and thankful.

On my first day in Los Angeles I was fortunate to spend the day with Deena Metzger and her community, for their monthly Dare', or community council. Deena is a life-long healer, spiritual teacher, author, activist, and elder. She is a true witch, and I am deeply moved by her fearless and continual turning towards the heartbreak of the world, medicine in hand. There is a whole volume to be written about this day, the peacemaking work of this community, the powerful and uncanny familiarity I felt with so many people in the gathering. The deep, low, rumbling profundity of what emerged from our day-long conversation, which closed with a sharing of our dreams and their relevance to the times in which we live.

What I will say now is that watching Deena apply her magical soul-salves and weave together the threads of community into an image of the possibility of wholeness, illuminated for me some understanding of my role, as well ~ the role of medicine-bringer, through my words and through the love I give. The story of our human folly is scrawled carelessly onto the delicate parchment of every living system, but instead of dissolving into despair I am beginning to understand -- when I look at my guides like Carolyn Raffensperger, Caroline Casey, and Deena Metzger, among others -- that what I can do is give my heart over, again and again, in service of that story's transmutation.

Something about the safety of being in the bosom of my family allowed me to fully feel the extent of the sadness that I have been feeling about the state of the world. Of course Copenhagen was a farcical sham; shouldn't we all have expected that, given what we know about politics? Nonetheless, it is true that I did walk around feeling stunned and light-headed after I heard about the non-agreement that wasn't reached about the future of our shared response to the climate crisis. The despair gnawed at my heart, and as I unclenched myself with my family, the cry rose up in my throat.

I spent some time, too, wondering if there is perhaps an amorphous and free-floating hopeless despair that I carry with me, that I pin on targets like the world and my body. I've gained ten pounds this fall, and as sad as that makes me, as burdened as I feel, as removed as I become from the dance of attraction, it is true this experience feels very, very familiar. And it's also true that for the past year I have been dancing on this edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting to become fat again because I don't yet know how to live into lightness and ease inside my own physical form.

I won't get into the gory psychological details of all that here, but suffice it to say, I have been inquiring into myself about it. And in the midst of an anguished, tearful moment, I asked myself, "What would my life be about if it was devoted and dedicated to whatever it is that makes my spirit absolutely light up and shine?" What IS that thing?

Immediately, the answer came: "To love. Love is the joy, love is the richness, love is the source of everything. Love is all there is. The heart’s expansive flowing freedom to be with, to connect, to share, to delight, to marvel, to light up with possibility. That is my gift, the gift of love."

Love is the true medicine. Love is the only medicine. It is not weight loss that allows me to feel free inside my body, it is self-acceptance. It is not the flipping of some omnipotent, cosmic switch that brings order to all the world that will allow me to feel happy and useful on this earth, it is my open heart and my intention to do my work with love, for love.

In remembering this, I suddenly understand exactly what to do and how to do it. There is no complicated formula to follow, no threshold of accomplishment to be reached, no signal that will arise from the dim chaos of the world that I am free to expand, unfold, relax after biding my time for so long in a posture of contraction. There is only love, now, to be offered and to be received. Bless the food I eat, bless the water that I bathe in, bless the day and night, bless the body. Bless the moment of communion, the redwood tree outside my window, the quiet afternoon. Bless the land and the women who give all of themselves in service of its sanctity. Bless all that is not yet healed, and draw meaning from it. Bless all that has been healed, and give thanks for the unceasing miracle of change. Bless the life that stirs in me at each moment, the force that animates all that we see and share. Bless the form, bless the journey, bless the spirit that abides within. From that place, and in due time: bless the sacred Other, and bless the future generations.

So, after all this, on the plane I realized what my New Year's resolutions are. They're very simple: (1) Practice unconditional love (including of self). (2) Feel all feelings. (3) Count all blessings.

Should be a beautiful year. :)

cracks in the armor

You know what's wonderful? As soon as you make even the slightest opening, the Universe comes pouring in to offer all manner of unfathomable, unconditional love and support.

That's what this week has been like. I'm finding a new gentleness with myself -- a moment here and a moment there of softness, of the heart's upwelling. Glimpses of the truth that all the ways I berate myself are just habits of mind. Choosing kindness, choosing to feel. It sounds so basic, but it's momentous. My whole life people have said to me, "You're too hard on yourself," and I've never really understood what they meant until now, as I am finding the capacity to step back and just witness my mind's ceaseless stream of judgments.

So, what happens when that starts to let up? Well, I can tell you: themes happen. On Monday, it was trust. A whole series of events unfolded, reminding me of the power and sweetness and necessity of trust. Later in the week, it was rest, and my deep desire and need for true rest.

The other big one this week? Choice. I have been weaving in and out of a sense of despair, lately, from the state of the world. It came to a head this week when I learned about the "Danish text," a draft climate agreement between the major power players at the Copenhagen climate conference. This leaked document represented the power players' attempt to circumvent the negotiations process and write an agreement that would protect all of their (our) interests, essentially leaving poor and less powerful nations to suffer the mounting burdens of climate change and poverty without recourse. The discovery of this document was an outrage, and the conference fell into disarray until somehow negotiations were able to resume.

Upon learning this news I felt an overwhelming sense of defeat. What part of "the global climate crisis affects all of us" do our leaders fail to understand? Looking around at the world and witnessing the living hell that so many people and creatures must endure, the living hell that we ourselves have created, I find myself in a depression. And I grieve, too, for simplicity -- I grieve for our disconnection from the earth, from our bodies, from each other. My disconnection. Can my work really make any difference at all, especially if I feel numb and alone while doing it?

Last night I attended the opening party for the new restaurant that my dear friends Eric and Ari just opened, called Gather. Every element of this restaurant reflects a rigorous commitment to sustainability -- from the bench seats made of recycled leather belts, to the art on the wall made from packing materials, to the local/ seasonal/ organic cuisine, Gather is a paean to possibility in business and in community.

I love these two men so much -- one of them is married to my best friend and colleague, and both of them are like my brothers. Last night, more than ever, I felt so moved to be a part of the same soul family as them. They spoke of the initial vision that sent them on this nine-year journey: the vision that Eric received, out in the desert, of a place where people would come together to share delicious food and connect with the earth. From there, their company Back to Earth catering and outdoor adventures emerged, always with the foundational dream of this restaurant. And now it's a reality.

They were both lit up, not only from the strength of this beautiful vision itself, but from the accumulated strength they have actually received from their years of continual, conscious re-alignment with the vision, despite whatever setbacks arose. Ari spoke directly to the notion of choice: he told a traditional tale, where a grandmother tells her grandchildren that there are two wolves locked in a mortal struggle inside of her and inside of everyone. One wolf represents fear, greed, anger, hatred, and negativity; the other represents love, kindness, sharing and positivity. Her grandchildren ask her, which wolf wins? And grandmother replies: the one you feed. I've heard Ari tell that story a number of times, but each time I am struck by the profundity of it. Here we are, on this mysterious planet living this mysterious life, seemingly barreling inexorably towards our self-generated doom -- so what can we do? Choose life, over and over and over again.

Ari concluded his talk with this quote, from the Lord of the Rings:

Sam: I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam: That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for.

And then we went and enjoyed a feast.

So that's what I'm left with. That Life is worth my life. More than anything, that every moment provides the opportunity for me to choose between giving up and continuing on. What would nature do? Well, just look outside your window and you'll see. Rain, then rainbows, then green life regenerating in the sun. Then rain again, on and on.

It's astounding, what arises when you start to be kind to yourself and let yourself feel your own life.

What's next, true love? ;)

en las noticias

I haven't done one of these in a while! It's late at night and while there are many things happening in my world right now, most of them are personal and subterranean and might bore you. So in lieu of musings, I give you Gentleheart's Week in Review.

First, of course, is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember exactly where I was when it happened. I'm nine years old, and my mom is telling me that this is an important event in world history, that someday I'll remember where I was when this happened. And so I remembered it, and still do -- we were driving on Fountain Avenue in Hollywood, probably on the way to a piano lesson, listening to the radio. I remember feeling some upward rush of hopefulness, not really knowing why, but sensing that the world's interest was converging on something good and right, and feeling a part of it, even there in the car on a sunny November day in LA. I've enjoyed NYT's coverage, particularly this feature.

Second, equally of course, is the passage of the health care bill in the House. Can I say this? I don't understand the healthcare debate. Why is universal health care even a question? The reticence, at best, that American citizens and leadership display at the prospect of government-funded health care -- even as an option, co-existing alongside private insurance -- is apparently just one more facet to the Glenn-beck-veins-bulging belligerent individualism that is ultimately such a self-destructive force. What is so frightening to us about the prospect of ensuring that each of us is cared-for? . . . Don't answer that.

And third, of course, is the Maine gay rights defeat. I don't even know what to say about this. After the gut-punch of Prop 8, I just can't get emotionally involved. I'm so glad there are amazing people like Kate Kendell who are still so powerfully strategizing and moving on this issue.

Finally, the fork in the road in Pasadena. My favorite thing about this is that the folks who clandestinely set up this 18-foot tall silver fork statue dressed as Cal Trans workers to pass it off.

Ah, the news. Lest you despair at this world, let me leave you with something beautiful.

birthing feminine leadership

I'm in the midst of getting trained as a doula. I've spent the past two days learning about child birth and the role of the doula -- the one who mothers the mother, who offers labor support -- and tomorrow I'll go back for a final day. It's been beautiful and is happening amidst, or perhaps also provoking, a couple of important realizations.

The first realization is about the similarities between my work as a doula and my work as an advocate for and with women environmental justice leaders. The doula is spoken and written about universally as an advocate for the mother in an often-rushed and confusing birth environment; the teacher of the workshop, Felicia, also emphasizes the element of collaboration. It is not the doula making choices or speaking for the mother; the doula ensures that the choices and the voice of the mother are elevated above the din, to guide the birth process.

Same with environmental justice lawyering. Luke Cole wrote frequently about the role of the environmental justice lawyer as an advocate who is not out in front, but instead occupies a "tech support" position, making sure that grassroots leaders occupy a place at the table that is equal to all the other players, and making sure the community's agenda drives the process.

Felicia spoke about the doula's crucial service of ensuring that the mother always has the opportunity to provide her informed consent to the doctor's decisions about what should come next. One of the major items on the advocacy agenda of indigenous environmental justice leaders is the principle of free, prior informed consent -- no industrial project or mining operation will take place on indigenous lands without the rightful occupants of the land understanding and freely consenting to that endeavor.

The laboring mother, the Mother Earth -- whether subject to rushed, clinical interventions during the most intimate moments of birth, or plundered for minerals or fossil fuels, the feminine body in our culture is disregarded and desecrated. Her power, her choice, her wholeness, her agency -- all are undermined by invasive procedures performed on the hospital bed or at the strip mine site.

Again and again, as I access these stark and painful understandings I am nonetheless confirmed in my purpose in the world. First in Israel in 1999, then in the Inyo Mountains in 2007, I heard it clearly: healing the feminine principle, at every level. My body, the bodies and lives of women, the earth's body. Big task, for one kind of lazy, sort of naive only-child, isn't it? Yeah. But what else do I have to do?

The second realization is about my work in the world. Everything I am called to do, from coordinating advocacy for women environmental justice leaders, to holding space for laboring women, to dreaming up an activist women's health collective, is about supporting women to heal and to rise. And when I see it laid out so clearly, I finally start to make some sense to myself. In truth I can't separate the healing of my ancestry from my forward-moving participation in the earth's healing. All this work, I will be the first to admit, is deeply rooted in my lineage: my mother's mother was such a broken woman, whose brokenness damaged my own mother. But that brokenness stops with me. I am here to restore wholeness. That's my commitment to myself, to this world, to my future children.

Eve Ensler says: "when we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us . . . happiness exists in action, in telling the truth and saying what your truth is, and in giving away what you want the most." With all my various and seemingly incongruous work, I suppose I am giving what I want the most -- healing for the Mother. Wholeness, balance, respect, love. For my mother who did not have these, but who managed to survive and even thrive, nonetheless. When I see women who need support I go towards them with my light and strength, so as to buttress their own power and magnify their own radiance, so that beauty can live.

Last weekend at the Bioneers conference, women's leadership in the environmental movement was the concept on everyone's lips (along with the imminent urgency of fixing the climate). A diverse chorus of voices spoke to the redemptive power of women's collective, collaborative, inclusive orientation in decision-making and problem-solving. Nina Simons, who graced our WEA event earlier in the week, opened the conference on Friday morning with her wisdom on the essential qualities of women's leadership. I'll try to paraphrase them here, as best I can.

After telling us that the Dalai Lama in September said that "the world will be saved by Western women" (it's true, you can Google it), Nina shared with us the following principles:

• Women are learning that we already are and know enough.
• Strength comes from within, informed by the power of our love and service.
• Cultivating self-awareness is essential to grow beyond wounds.
• Power comes from purpose and inner authority, not credentials or permission.
• There is a dance between leading and following, speaking and listening.
• Every system has limits, and an ebb and flow.
• Reciprocity and synchronicity are essential.
• Flexibility counts: leadership can come from any position.
• Power is something sacred from within us all -- not power over, but power with and through.
• Vulnerability can inform our strength.
• We cannot do this alone -- our flourishing requires relationships of rigorous love and challenging support.
• We are learning to listen to land/ people/ intuition/ sacred spiritual traditions.
• We are learning to share authority and cultivate rotating leadership.
• Diversity is our strength.
• We are connecting and collaborating across boundaries despite our fear.

Reflecting on these, I feel relieved, buoyed and powerful. I am -- we are -- valid and valuable. Perhaps most significantly, I remember that there is something larger than me, larger than all of us individually, at work here, something to which I can and must give my life over.

Just recently a new bloom opened on my orchid plant, shining its long-awaited loveliness into the room. It was in bud for weeks and weeks. I wasn't sure if it was even going to open -- a similar bud had just shriveled and fallen off without ever blooming. But this one persisted, growing and changing from within until it was ready to reveal itself. And now it's here, and the world is a more beautiful place for it.

That's the other thing I'm learning: everything in time. All I can do is create the conditions that support life, and then allow life to do what it knows, by nature, how to do.

Come home. Write about it.

My old friend, with whom I was once in love -- he and I are back in touch.

I fell in love with him one night in my freshman year of college. There were many events leading up to that night, I suppose, but I remember distinctly the circumstances of the falling. We were at his dirty fraternity house. And I don't mean "dirty" like food on the floor and unsavory bathroom conditions. I mean "dirty" like loud music, cocaine, boys fucking girls and then hurting their feelings. (That's not what happened with my friend and I, exactly, but that's the kind of company he kept. Just trying to paint the picture.)

I should rewind, too, and tell you about the day earlier in the semester when our school flooded. It was the El Nino year, year of rains so torrential that an entire college campus infrastructure was overcome by water. The libraries flooded; important materials were lost. The day after the biggest storm, to all of our great glee, classes were cancelled. So my friend and I went on an adventure. He came and found me in my dorm and then we went to visit our french teacher. The sky was gray and the air was refreshing, moist, washed. We walked around our stunned campus that day. Spending time with him made me feel tentative and delighted.

He had this effect on me. He may have had the same effect on all the girls he hung out with, in fact I'm sure he did, because he paid such close attention. I always felt a little bit on edge around him, because he was, in fact, edgy. "Edgy" like you were never sure what he was going to say next. "Edgy" like he could leap across all boundaries of appropriateness with a single utterance. But he was also immeasurably sweet. People loved him. His frat brothers loved him. He clearly came from love, if not love and struggle.

And like I said, he paid attention. When I was around him I felt myself at a kind of tenuous balance point, teetering between a painful exposure, his piercing commentary peeling back layers before I was ready, and the surprising tenderness of being seen so clearly, with such generosity.

So, he kept after me in his odd way. Eventually, of course, we ended up making out with each other. And that night that I started telling you about: I don't recall if that was the first night that we spent together, but it was most definitely the night that the doors to my heart swung open. I remember him playing with me, locking me out of the room, and I remember how much I wanted to get back in to be with him. Then, back in the room: he rolling cigarettes, sitting at his desk, smiling at me.

I forget how exactly it happened but then there it was. The long, slow tumble towards another person, the heart's bright gasp of recognition. But it wasn't meant to be -- he fell away from me almost immediately in the ensuing days, in his maddeningly edgy and inaccessible way. I wrote him a letter demanding that he show up, be with me, let me love him . . . which, as you can imagine, was the death knell. We fell out of contact almost entirely for a long time after that.

But he found me again the following year, I think, and started reaching out to me again. And since then we've re-kindled something of a friendship. I've felt him kind of tracking me all these years, staying in touch one way or another, with a kind e-mail or a random text or chat. Our contact has been frustrating, compelling, loving. In the intervening time he got married to a beautiful woman and is achieving success as a producer. He could have gone in so many directions but he has triumphed, has chosen life. I see that and I am truly proud of him. We finally got together a few weeks ago for the first time in years, over lunch with another friend of his. It felt like no time had passed at all.

Tonight we chatted a bit online, and in our chat he wrote me something of a poem, that ended up cutting straight to my heart. It surprised me, but it also didn't, how swiftly I was transported back to our brief moment together, 12 years ago. The shock of being witnessed was as electric then as it is now, as veiled and elusive as the witness may have been. I was surprised, but I also wasn't, by the tears rolling down my cheeks.

Some living quality of our contact is frozen in time and space, caught, left behind. What has survived all the time up until now is just a piece of it, held at arm's length. But words like these cast light on the ice and melt it down. They're nonsense words, elusive, cryptic; nonetheless, they reach me. In being reached I can recall what's possible: gentleness at close range, ceasing to scramble away from contact and instead breathing quietly in its sight. And that gift yields a flood of further treasures. Later in the evening, after we chatted, I went to the dance and found myself opening up right to the edges of my body. Whirling through space I remembered trust. I remembered safety, my own; and perfection, the mystery's. I smiled wide and gave my life to Life, once more.

All because of a few silly words from an old friend.

Thanks, DOC.

~

i'll say this.

...

put your shoes on

the same way you did

when you were still under 20

and still excited to see something brilliant

or repulsive that defined you.

Come home.

write about it. You deserve the opportunity and command.

don't be so green.

You words may emit bad carbons.

or brilliant diamonds.

and that

exactly

is why it is so trying

and hard and sad

to be brilliant.

you are like you are.

there is a violin playing in my living room.

and a man speaking.

saying, "stand up"

but he is very young

and knows nothing of the world

like you

or I

which makes him so small

and you

and I

so big

and important.

feed your stream

of consciousness

and dance.

tonight,

you will not regret anything

except for not listening to yourself more

adding lamps to your bedroom

photographs to your wall

and removing the television from your home.

and of course calling me more often,

which makes me sad

because I always believed so much

in your capacity

to change the world.

and that, my dear friend.

...

is terribly sad.

the converse...

of your smile.

it is sad to wait there

and pass the last ten minutes of your evening

in something I wish i had a long time ago.

so sister,

please

live it out.

that is what the world needs.

the black and the white

the yin

the circle

the square.

and some dumb bastard to stop typing

when he's not getting paid to do it.

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.