It's time to come clean. I am guilty as charged of feeling ambivalent about this great creative venture called Talking Leaves, as well as every element involved in its production. Nearly twenty-five years after first taking writing too seriously, I am still in recovery from that period; the process of attempting to transfer my experience of reality into written words is still just as often grueling as liberating. What's more, it is always merely a pale representation of what I actually see, feel, and would like to say. Not only am I a frequently-blocked, reluctant writer, who generally enjoys most other things better than reading or writing--but I'm frequently busy with things that seem much more real to me. And, like the firefighter in I Heart Huckabees, I am sometimes overwhelmed by the absurdity and contradictions inherent in the activities we seem to need to engage in as we go about our lives. In this case, the technological infrastructure, materials, and energy use involved in creating a magazine sometimes seem to be poorly aligned with the spirit of what I am hoping TL conveys in its pages.
And yet, when I spend too long without writing, or without putting together a magazine, I sense that something is missing. Too much time goes by "living in the moment," and at the end of it I can be left feeling an emptiness, as if an opportunity to appreciate life and to make a positive contribution to the world has been squandered. The process of putting some of my experience into words and sharing it--and of providing a forum for others to communicate their experiences and perspectives with one another--can help prevent or heal that feeling of emptiness or missed opportunity. Writing and reading can be a way of sharing things with people at a deeper level than what we normally encounter in everyday interactions--and it can be a way of communicating with people all over the country and around the world, and with the future as well.
Right now, then, I will try to turn two problems (or, more charitably, challenges) into one opportunity--or, metaphorically, to eliminate two classes of election fraud with one lawsuit (since I'm not enthusiastic about killing birds and don't want to bloody any stones today).
My problems are that
1. I have to complete this magazine, and I don't have quite enough suitable text to fill it. In fact, there are exactly four empty pages left.
2. I have the aforementioned love-hate relationship with the written word, which can become a major impediment in my ability to easily cultivate Talking Leaves as a forum for my own and others' self-expression. It's hard to get excited about something that half the time you can't stand or that drives you crazy.
The solution, of course, is to transform my attitude and my relationship with writing and editing so that this becomes a TL issue with which I am once again happy. This process has happened with every single past issue of Talking Leaves, but it usually has not been transparent. It's a process of transformation with which I repeatedly engage, overcoming demons and embracing angels (or, if you will, eschewing lawsuits and writing love poems instead, which end up eliminating all election fraud because of the change in heart they produce in the world-at-large).
So, you guessed it, I am going to try to provide the missing text for this magazine by writing about the very process of transformation in which I need to engage to provide the missing text for this magazine (about the process of transformation). Brilliant! Or, at the very least, shrewd.
Now this plan introduces another problem. What kind of self-indulgent writing project am I proposing here? How can I possibly justify dragging readers through the inner torments of the editorial/writing process, which themselves are not even real suffering at all? (To see real suffering, take a look at war, poverty, disease, etc.--and then consider whether, in the interests of better combating those things at a global level, an election fraud lawsuit might actually have been the best idea after all.) My justification is this: we are each a microcosm. Trying to pretend we know more than we know, about the "big picture," does not really serve anyone. What we each do have, all we can really be experts about--if we pay attention--is our own experience.
But what is my experience? Over the course of several hours, since I started this essay, I have been interrupted at least half a dozen times by various people and events. I guess I invited this by attempting to write this article on my laptop in the front part of the Eco-Resource Room/TL office.
But my mind couldn't help wandering back to the topic of Transformation. Had I really done it justice with my "Notes from the Editor" piece, and with the other articles I had collected for this issue? Was I going to be disappointing the many readers who've told me they appreciated my writing, by not including more in this issue? More important, was I going to be blocking an important piece of creative expression that would actually serve the world in some small way? Or was this desire to write just an ego trip? Was I actually bored out of my skull with attempting to express the ineffable?
These were just gnawing little flickers of thoughts, understand; nothing to interfere with my daily life enough to actually sit down and write.
Instead, as I harvested vegetables, I found myself slipping into a contemplative, somewhat awestruck state in which I realized that the breakfast I and the garden interns ate on an April morning had fueled the work that prepared the beds for the transplanting of vegetable starts; and that, once grown, these crops had produced the nutrition, both physical and spiritual, that we took in when we harvested them mid-summer from this same bed. Those starts themselves had been seeded and cared for thanks to the transformation of many previous meals into human being and human activity. Having incorporated that mid-summer nutrition, we then re-prepared the bed, and stuck in another round of transplants, which were just now, in late November, ready to harvest. Meanwhile, all those other vegetables produced by this process were feeding Lost Valley residents and visitors, who were going about their work in the world perhaps not consciously aware that it all started with the garden crew's breakfast on an April morning.
But of course it didn't actually start there. That breakfast was composed of fruit harvested by us, and then frozen, late the previous summer, as well as some organic grains grown elsewhere, available to us because of the work of hundreds, thousands, millions of people who have worked in myriad ways to help guide our species onto a more earth-friendly, sustainable path than the one we've been on recently. And where did they find the inspiration to help in this transformation of agriculture? They couldn't have lifted a finger or a digging fork, or raised a voice or a greenhouse roof, without the fact that their bodies were constantly transforming the energy of other living organisms into human life force--and back again.
The more I contemplated these things, the more I realized there was no beginning (not even the Big Bang--I mean where did that come from? somewhere, I'm sure) and no ending either. I was bringing these late-November-harvested vegetables up to the community kitchen, where cooks prepared them for consumption by sixty or seventy people, most of whom would be going out into the world feeling inspired by the transformative possibilities of honest communication and self-reflection. And a few of those people would be playing music with me that night, re-charging me spiritually for another day of what we consider "productive" activity (generating food and magazines). This is not meant to imply that making music isn't productive in some way--the vibrations have innumerable quantifiable and nonquantifiable effects within both the makers and the listeners, who are ultimately the same. Every listener is creating the music anew--both with his or her eardrums and with the imagination--and every musician is listening (even Beethoven in his later years; the "inner ear" doesn't go deaf).
So transformation was all around me as I thought about Transformation. Anyone who examines any of the paragraphs above will find a thousand threads of connection not followed for every thread that I have chosen to put words to. It's an overwhelming topic. It's who we are, what everything is. It's so obvious it probably doesn't need to be said. But it's also one of the hardest things for us humans to understand and accept, wedded as we seem to be to forms we want to hold onto, and looking as we tend to do on the surface level, in the realm of immediate form, rather than seeing beyond it to the endlessly-cycling energies that animate us and everything we see and don't see.
I think it's just as well I decided not to complete that navel-gazing essay about the transformation of my attitude toward writing. I had much better things to do. I found them not by setting an overly-serious intention (like the production of an article explaining how I'd learned to be comfortable writing again when I stopped taking it so seriously), but by paying attention to subtle intuitions, almost whims--following where my feet wanted to go.
Sunday morning I ended up in the lodge, with the thought of labeling just a few of our subscription renewal envelopes before I headed to the office to do other things. I planned to organize a bulk mailing party the following day, when I knew more volunteers would be available. On Sunday, I just wanted to do a small amount of preparation and spend a few extra minutes around the woodstove. But that's not what happened. Three hours after I stuck that first label on, the 1500-piece mailing was entirely completed, sorted, and packaged. And a large part of the labeling was done by 5-to-8-year-olds (and a few even younger), who were so excited about helping me that they were disappointed when there were no more envelopes to label. I had never even asked for help--they insisted. I decided that the fact that a few of the labels ended up not exactly parallel with the top and bottom of the envelope was a small price to pay for the joy that these young helpers were finding in doing a productive activity together. And perhaps that personal touch would bring in more subscriptions: it should be obvious to anyone receiving one of those envelopes that it was not labeled by a soulless machine, but by a human being--one who appreciates that straight and parallel lines are mostly an adult-created artifice.
I could have spent Sunday morning fretting over how to complete the written portion of Talking Leaves. Instead, I spent it enjoying the best in human nature, as revealed by the spontaneous helpfulness, enthusiasm, community spirit, directness, and nonstop entertainment provided by a group of children. My unexpected party guests that morning have not yet been (and hopefully never will be) confused or demoralized by the life-negating qualities of an adult world where that attunement to "the heart of now"--that sense of the sacred--has been lost.
It's true that the mailing party couldn't have happened without a lot of planning on my part. Magazines, address lists, and preprinted remittance envelopes don't materialize out of thin air. In creating a sustainable world together, we adults do need to cultivate an awareness of past and future, the ability to think seven generations ahead, an appreciation of what came before us, a "long view" of the ecological and social landscapes in which we reside, a practical attunement to day-to-day realities in an agriculturally-based society (which we do still live in, lest any of us forget). These practical "long view" qualities are important, and they're probably why our species has developed "adulthood" in the first place. (Also, heavy things sometimes need to be moved.)
But we adults also need to be in touch with the present, and be able to fully immerse in it. And how each of us experiences that present is unique--we're each slightly different. A spiritual ecologist might say that we each assume a slightly different niche in the ecology of Gaian self-awareness. A student of community would notice that at any one moment we each play different roles in our group's process, which vary and change over time. We don't need to be attached to those roles, yet we each have specific gifts that may predispose us to filling certain ones.
For example, in this moment, I am writing, rather than disco dancing. Some people might claim that I would be more immersed in the present if I were disco dancing, and that I am a hypocrite for choosing to engage with the written word instead. But I can only counter that I am immersed in my present. I hear the call of a winter wren outside my yurt. I hear the sound of a hammer, further in the distance, fixing someone's porch steps. I feel the pleasant coolness of the late-November air, especially against my legs, which, except for my fingers, have the fewest layers of clothing on (only two) right now. I see all the split firewood near my woodstove, which I have chosen not to light today because I enjoy the crispness of the morning. And I'm aware that my fingers need to keep moving in order to stay warm. None of this would be possible were I disco-dancing right now.
Nor would I likely be thinking about the trees that were harvested to create that firewood, or remembering how splitting the rounds into pieces warmed me up so much a few nights ago that I didn't even need a fire by the end of the process. I would not be noticing the sun just breaking through the clouds now, or looking at the clock on my computer and realizing that we need a few more salad greens harvested for lunch today.
So no, I am not disco dancing. I like this better. Everything is transforming around me. A vocalization produced by a small brown bird sets off a sympathetic vibration within my ear drums and ultimately warms my fingers and results in the rearrangement of some pixels on my computer screen. Eventually, it will determine the configuration of numerous little drops of soy ink on the page you are reading. That winter wren has set off a chain of events that will be just as real as they are impossible to trace or quantify. Everything and everyone, in his or her own way, does this all the time.
A few more reflections on transformation before I begin my next "fast" from writing:
Like that wren when it starts singing up a storm again later this winter, part of me keeps thinking: "love" is right around the corner. Someone, soon, will realize that we're soul mates, or at least a really good match. I get caught up in ego and fear. Then I realize: I am in love with almost everybody, on some level. And particularly certain people. But I can't define love in exclusive human terms anyway. When I am attuned to the process of transformation, I am in unconditional love, regardless of how close I am or am not to any other person.
According to my computer's word-count function, I have now generated enough material to fill those four empty pages, thus solving, at least temporarily, my two former "problems." I've also managed to keep my fingers warm, and have been rescued by the bell from getting any more personal. Without transformation, none of this would have been possible.
But right now, I need to harvest some vegetables. We can't eat words for lunch. I mean, not that we'd want to...although that might change once I see this in print.
Chris Roth edits Talking Leaves. If you think he should not be so verbose, email him at [email protected]. And while you're at it, send submissions (see page 2) so he won't have extra space to fill next time.
©2004 Talking Leaves
Winter 2004/2005
Volume 14, Number 4
Transformation: Endings and Beginnings