An Ongoing Project: Condemned to Narrate

A project of my introductory seminar for my Sustainable Communities program is the public narrative. The public narrative's aim is to articulate the connectivity of the individual to her/his family, community, and history. To do this, one writes of oneself in a matter that elucidates one's character and history, reflects on a particular personal project, and explaining the way that such a project blends into the larger social project in a specific and demanding way. It is part a memoir, part creative nonfiction, part political rhetoric, and part activist cheerleading.

I dislike this project.

I dislike this project because I believe it disagrees with me on a fundamental level which I hope becomes clear in the examples below. I have attached the second and third attempts I have made at writing a public narrative that is simultaneously satisfying of the project (and the professor) and honestly descriptive of myself and my position concerning the project itself. I hope that they might be found to be enjoyable and illustrative.

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From 29 August 2010

When you begin to bake, you have some notion of what you'll end up with. Hopefully the product of your labor will have certain qualities: savory or sweet, a quality crumb, lightness or heartiness, perhaps a satisfying crunch, maybe some medley with cheese or jam or honey. Starting out, though, you can't really say it has any of these things, nor can you say for certain that it will have any of these things If you put all your emphasis on the product, on the goal, then when it comes up short or surprising or something entirely new you don't know what to do with it. On the other hand, the process, the building, the character of the ingredients, sponge, dough, and final loaf have their own subtle wealth to enjoy. When you take the pieces as they are, embrace them, and turn them loose, then each incarnation is its own manifestation, hopefully delicious but definitely a joy through and through.
When I think of the places I have lived, the people I have met, the projects completed, I don't think of it as part of a grand scheme, a plot with a riveting conclusion. Rather, I take each subtle spice, each substantial encounter, each aromatic episode for itself; each contribution yielding something greater than what you can determine from the beginning. I would like to think that that something greater is myself, my person, my virtues and shortfalls and delights. In a way, this is true: I am the medley of all these ingredients into something else, to some evolving, blending, maturing, rising, proofing concoction. In the process, I cannot emphasize the final run, but can affirm the efficacy, the quality of each incorporation in the expectation, the aspiration to yield something of special character.
I am tempted to remark on each place I have lived, each neighborhood street, the friends with their challenges and light-hearted expectations, the confounding family politics, the frustration and triumphs of high school or college; and if I were to, you might understand something about me. You might even appreciate or identify something in me that I do not myself recognize. In speaking to me, working with me, celebrating in my company, sharing those episodes to be fondly recalled again in late night sessions, you will not be handling those inputs; in the end, you will be dealing directly and unadulteratedly with me, the all of me, even the bits that I leave out and the facets that have matured or spoiled.
If I were to explain where I have lived, with whom I have lived, and how I have lived, you would know certain things about me. Knowing the wheres, hows, and with whom doesn't really get you into the texture, the aroma, the sensation of my life. That is, whatever narrative I might construct is inadequate to describe the context not of choices, but of conditions that I have fostered and that have been fostered around me to shape myself into who I am. My commitments have not been singular moments, but peculiar mutations that metamorphose me into that reality, to that jewel lying somewhere in Indra's Net that reflects and is conjoined with or into the world.
When I was in middle school, I was dealing with potent emotional instabilities and socialization issues. The transformative moment was triggered by no specific entity, no person or place or time, but this rich context of striving in a certain direction. A new friend, my first girlfriend, and a multiplicity of supportive communities committed me to being a more outgoing, energized, and community-oriented person. When I discovered the delectable rigors of academia and philosophical inquiry, it was the result of a community of intelligent, impassioned, and challenging friends, classmates, and instructors that infused me with that particular drive. Their presence and participation in a particular social and political world that transformed me. When I was in Brazil, it was inadequate to have the interest in agriculture and policy and trans-cultural justice to develop the skills, questions, and inertia to complete the work of my independent study project; rather, I required the support, guidance, and frustration of those around me in a place that seemed to force me in that direction. The reality of Brazil was as much about being pushed, dragged, and pulled in a certain direction than any success at finding my own way; I had not way of my own, only that which was shown me.
Claiming responsibility for paths taken is quietly misleading. I do not deserve the commendations for the hard work I have accomplished, the celebrations of the sights I have seen, the delights in the experiences I have luxuriated in or trudged through. These are feats accomplished by myself-in-community, as part of a world I can only glimpse from a certain perspective. I have been mixed and kneaded and sculpted by innumerable hands, only some of which I can claim where guided by myself alone. These triumphs and travails are the result of a fantastically unrehearsed collaboration in which I am only one actor. In this presentation of my life, I am much more of a node than a unit. Whereas a unit is atomistic, sharply defined, and solitary, a node carries the energy of the network and transforms its potency, defines a message, and moves it along. What we need today are transformative channels, new and reawakened connections, and the lively current of social energy in between. The necessity is not to abolish or atrophy within the concoction of our communities, but that of a deeper activation and foundation of ourselves together, in a transparent and knowable world.
The increasingly recognizable and personal motif around which many are reinventing that notion of a common world-place or world-vision is through food; including the means of its production, methods of distribution, the justice of the harvest, the ethos of sharing it, the culture of preparation and dining, and the politics and society that a new understanding necessitates. The current agricultural system is not only inadequate but clearly destructive. It endangers the soil, pollutes the water, poisons those who work with it, debilitates those who consume it, and fosters a culture divorced from the reality of agriculture and sound eating. The policies in place support magnitude over health, consumption over nourishment, and price over community.
When we think of a new conversation, a new society, a new social ethic we ought to reflect on forming it not for an end product but for a rewarding process, a series of ends to be savored and appreciated for their own. Take the richness of the soil and a healthy agroecology, not the endless field of fertilized and sprayed corn and soy. Absorb the pleasure in the contact with families of farmers and artisan chefs rather than cheap freeze-dried meals. Savor the treasure of time spent with loved ones preparing a meal together and dining at one table. And at the close, celebrate a community not of indebted farmers, wealthy corporate distributors, and the questionable health of children, but the unity of a system understood, a community interwoven, and a landscape rejuvenated.

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From today, 11 October 2010

Somehow I ended up here; Flagstaff, Arizona and staring out at sacred peaks, patrolled for centuries by those searching for healing, purity, and wholeness. Choices were made, certain words written here or there and key phrases inputted, but from here they feel inadequate for getting me to this particular location, this specific time.
I am somewhere else as well. The bus rocks with each pothole on the rise up the Himalayan foothills, my classmates and I balance on edges of seats or sneak ourselves tightly into corners as we round ever closer the ubiquitous edge, precipitous plummet adjacent to every road on which we find ourselves. A nagging thought has settled into my mind for days, weeks as I live out of a backpack, bathing with a saturated bar of soap and baking soda, always finding tires or wings or my own feet underneath me, every morning seeing different walls and a different bed. This thought has come with me through the poverty of Rajgir, the cold nights in Minneapolis, that odd weekend in upstate New York with well-loved friends, and back again to the cloud-strewn foothills of these ancient peaks.
I have thought of poverty and of necessity. I have seen lives defined by the rhythms of tourists and generous hands, houses built on military refuse, necks and backs curved by the weight of bricks and stone, and glimpsed the depth of lives rooted in community and practice and unity. The air up in Darjeeling and Gangtok is cleaner, clearer, lighter than the lowlands and the heavy exhaust exhaust of two-cylinder took-took pedicabs. The people dress in down jackets and odd amalgamations of knock-off brand clothing and illegal imports from the Chinese next door. No one sees the young men and women working midnight shifts at tech support centers up here.
Here, in this place intermingled with clouds and within eyesight on a clear morning of the very peaks of the world, I have seen people living within sheet-thin walls without running water, sparking up kerosene or trash or coal for light and heat, eating the produce of their neighbors or just down the hill. And through it I have been placed into a vantage of seeing, not of perceiving, but of clear sight. Somewhere in the image I glimpse the reflection of myself, of living a life on so very much less than I have ever known. I realize the impetus for a life defined within limits of an ecological space, an economic space, a spiritual space that is simultaneously smaller and so many times grander than what I have thus far allowed myself.
My trip to India was under the banner of a Buddhist pilgrimage. Any insight into Buddhism, though, ultimately relates the possibility of insight into oneself. I had put time, energy, work, and thought into conceiving a community, a world in which a more ecological lifestyle is practiced; it was not until my time in India that I considered the reality of a lifestyle for myself, a lifestyle of both less and of more. What I saw in India was both dire, painful, and sickened poverty and indefinable satisfaction and even joy. For many, not even the very least is made available; but for many, many others just enough is more than enough to live productively and even joyfully.
How strange, it now seems, that it was not until such a leap that I was forced to consider what it would mean to live a life harmonious with my own expectations of living any life. Perhaps it is the insulation of a certain school, a specific type of community, this nation instead of that which allowed me the limits of perspective and understanding. Being so divorced from my norm, from my expectations, from any sense of stability in my setting that stripped out the usual blinders on my eyes. When it happened though, when the sight and the questions emerged, the sense was more of familiarity, of finally acknowledging a deeply lounged certainty of my life.
We provide ourselves innumerable opportunities for distraction. Our leisurely entertainments and insufferable demands of labor each claim attention. When provided the least moment of serene contemplation, it slides into out minds like a stone through the membrane of a lake: Everything knows instantly of the change. The confrontation of that disruption, that keen edge of awareness requires either an effort to smooth out the waves, the chaos, the new knowledge; or we take the energy, each reverberating wave, capture the attention and ride the wave into something novel, fresh, and demanding.
No one can ride a wave forever, and any attempt to capture it just disrupts it. Indeed, it is easier to make smooth the lake and allow the stone to sink and be forgotten. Beneath the surface of the lake – mine, yours, ours – are innumerable stones, building, gathering mass and definition; and each has left its mark and potential for transformation. The question is of each disruption is increasingly clear: What does it mean to live on less? And its parallel question, What does it mean to live for more?
Somehow I ended up articulating the correct words on the proper forms and here I am. Still, I am bothered by these questions, by the experience of seeing those on whom the demand was placed to live on less but who I saw live for more. In one way, the latter question is easier: When confronted with necessity, we live more and more for one another, for a strong community that will hold us and our children up. Through that lens, we understand that living on less also means living on our neighbors, on our communities, on the tight local webwork of our families, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions rather than spreading our burden wide and far and deep.
Living such a life has proven neither cheap nor straightforward. One aspect has clearly been engagement; engagement with neighbors and the community and the reality of its politics. Another has been lightening my imprint, stepping lightly, leaving little wake; a practice manifested in working simply and well, purchasing less and wisely, and taking what I need and sharing the remainder. More powerfully and more rewardingly, I am learning the practice of living for more; whether that is for community, understanding, spirit, depth, ecology, rootedness, I cannot easily say. It is, I imagine, the practice of living organically, the practice of growing down and up and intermixed with those around me. Such an endeavor stretches through the times and places of my life, not just shifting my direction in one way, buy aligning my life with the project of wholeness, of depth, of more and of less.