Bouncing Into Graceland

Puuhonua.

Early Hawaiians had a strong sense of justice and morality which they codified as the Kapu, code of conduct.  They believed that violation of this code constituted a crime not only against their community and social contract but also against larger spiritual forces; a theft of mana.  The penalty for such a crime was Ko'o Kapu, death, typically enforced by chasing the offender down on foot and killing them by hand.

This strikes me as a severe system of punishment for what are generally known as peaceful and laid-back people.  It smacks of the unfairness of life, the lack of forgiveness and permanent nature of our mistakes.  Further, it shows how prevalent ruling with fear is, that the practice of social control through brute force is, and has been, pervasive among all human cultures.  The Hawaiians, however, have a loophole.  If you were convicted but could outrun your captors and reach a place a refuge, a Puuhonua, then you were granted immunity as long as you resided within its walls.  Some of these places of refuge were only reached by water.

I think it is important for all of us to remember that even in our darkest hours, even when faced with oppression, evil, or our own demons overpowering our better angels, there are always places of refuge, lands of grace, if only we can find our way.  

To Listen to Paul Simon's Graceland:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtT7Og2LBbE

References:

 http://www.aloha-hawaii.com/big-island/city-of-refuge/ 

For the Birds

Storm Home

This year the early snows and freezing frost have draped the Douglas Firs outside our house in white.  The fog has not lifted for a week.  With it has come an eerie and lonely kind of silence, like the whole world is waiting, suspended, for the light and warmth to return.  I feel this way myself; encased and cold.  I am in transition, pushing forward into something that I cannot quite define the edges of.  With my cup of coffee I watch the trees, stoic and waiting.  I wonder if the thaw will ever come.  

And then the sun breaks. A flock of bright yellow birds descends, announcing their arrival in a great cacophony of song and color.  I have not seen these birds before, and it seems impossible that they are here now, covering the branches closest to the window where I sit.  They disappear before I have a chance to document them with a picture, and just as quickly the fog wraps itself back around the house.  They do this for four straight days.  And when the fog lifts, they disappear, moving on to their intended destination, the grove outside our house having simply been a refuge, a layover until the wind shifted, and they could again find their path.

I take comfort in this and imagine myself perched, waiting for the fog to lift.     

Sitz Bones to Heels

Grounding.

Push against me friend, 

I shall push against you.

Lend me your weight,

Let us stack our bones.

Pause a moment in the air.

Place yourself beneath me,

Dance us to the floor.

Curl beside me,

I will cover you.

Pause a moment, on the ground.

Take my hand, friend

Let us walk together.

Swing our arms, 

Find the reaches of the space,

a moment in time.

Push against me friend, and I shall push against you.

Back in Black

I have been a busy beaver.  Check it out:

www.rubygonewild.com

Get On the Bus

hindsight.

In my 20's I bowed down at the alter of higher education. It was a ticket out of where I came from into the world of adulthood. For years, education remained a hallmark of legitimacy and success amongst my contemporaries, an essential in the development of an adult persona worthy of admiration and praise. As it turns out, what it isn’t, for most people, is a direct path to either a viable vocation or a sense of self definition and fulfillment. As it turns out there is no intellectual or financial shortcut to happiness or the pursuit of an authentic life. There is no end point, just the journey. Now, with all my tangible success as defined by modern society, I find myself out of pace with my contemporaries. The fruits of my previous labors have satisfied my early ambitions, and the expectations of society at large, but no longer satisfy my soul. For all the middle class comforts I may have available to me based on age, career, education, and situation, I appear to be unable to settle, either down, in, or for something less than a true manifestation of myself. I find myself, so to speak, unable to get on the bus. Ironically, I am returning to the University as a place of refuge. No longer a means to an end, education is now a way to practice and hone my craft, to live a life that satisfies my soul. I am often asked, with regard to my returning to school to dance, “And what will you do with your degree?” As a geologist, I was asked this question often enough, and was quite keen to answer it, with all my professionalism and all the things that make me look good on paper, to prove that my choices would serve a greater purpose, push me ahead, in to a new tax bracket, into a new house, a job, stability. I was keen to prove that the fruits of my labor would justify my path, that I would, in fact, be on the bus. Now, my answer is far more simple. What will I do with it? I will dance. I will not wait for outside fulfillment or validation, I am not working towards some future goal of happiness, I am manifesting it, right here, now, as I walk my path. I will dance as though no one is watching, and as for the rest, I’m not particularly worried about it.

A Laying On of Hands

retreat.

One of my favorite things to advocate for in terms of the promotion of a healthy environment and good nutrition is the formation of community. Or, put differently, the loss of community in the modern way of life appears to be intimately linked to the destruction of the environment and the deterioration of public health.

We began to lose community in the process of trying to create it. In building suburbs we created lifestyles based on long, isolating, gas-guzzling commutes that eroded our personal time making social interaction and exercise harder to come by. Beyond that, we designed our suburbs without sidewalks, town centers, or public play spaces, effectively isolating our children from one another and putting them and their caretakers back in the car in order to grocery shop or go to the park. Of course, once you’re in the car, the likelihood of each person on a particular street going to a different park or grocery store increases, decreasing the casual everyday interactions between neighbors that do so much to foster community. The time and energy required to prepare meals of whole foods from local sources was also squeezed out by the distribution of our lives across a greater geography and our increasing desire for “down time” and instant gratification.

And isolation breeds isolation. Once disconnected from our neighbors and surrounding community, we are more likely to tell ourselves that video tennis is a reasonable substitute for actually going to play tennis, forgetting that going to play tennis may involve taking a walk, running into the neighbors, getting substantively more exercise and valuable vitamin D, and interacting with our children and the environment.

And infrastructure breeds infrastructure. Once we are tied to our cars for all of our activities we need an increasingly large number of roads, increasing in size, to handle our increasing numbers and increasingly large cars. Retreating to our houses necessitates larger and larger houses, filled with more and more things, to fill the void left by the absence of regular social interaction and the necessary chores of a conscious lifestyle. Consumption itself becomes a hobby. Instead of community centers, our houses become show pieces, museums to ourselves with all the accoutrements of a modern lifestyle, televisions, stereos, Jacuzzi tubs, and little evidence of actual interaction with the world at large.

I suggest that the formation and fostering of community in and of itself is an act of subversion, or at least a tangible protest of the current status quo. I believe that community is one antidote to deteriorating pubic health, eroded social services, environmental decline and climate change, and the propagation of an unhealthy and unsustainable popular monoculture. And it’s easy. And it’s free.

The Re-education of Little Miss

release.

In the art of trapeze, during a release, there is a moment in which the performer has to let go of the bar behind them and reach out to the thing in front of them. They float, suspended for a moment, before reaching out to grasp their new anchor. It’s the moment that the audience comes to see, to witness someone put themselves into that space of vulnerability and risk to emerge, whole and strong, on the other side. It’s an art based on the concept of looking forward, fearless, and letting go of what’s behind you. This is the moment in which I find myself. I think, I hope, that it’s a moment that will be embraced by increasingly more of us, as we struggle to redefine ourselves in this new climate, economy, and global community.

Real change, whether we seek it out or have it thrust upon us, requires us to embrace this moment of release, with all its fear, uncertainty, and aloneness, trust that we will be alright, and reach out for the things that make us whole.

Fly.