What does a bad day look like for me?
It's been raining non-stop for a week in a month that has seen only three dry days. My family are all irritable and edgy from having spent the whole weekend cooped up in our one-room house. I am frustrated because my "variety in work" has left me with uncompleted projects wherever I look, and my backlog of phone messages and correspondence waiting to be answered has grown to an absurd level, causing me a continual, low-grade sense of guilt. The food orderer has been on vacation and we're out of fruit, vegetables, and bread. Our recent deep freeze, in addition to bursting many pipes, killed most of our overwintering crops in the gardens. Several community members are sick, in the throes of yet another microbial onslaught, delivered by one of our continual stream of visitors, apprentices, and conference guests who have partaken in our touchy feely lifestyle. Consequently, every pre-meal circle now ends with a frenzied flight to the washrooms, where we queue up for the anti-bacterial soap to disinfect ourselves from our hygienically corrupt handholding. The phones are malfunctioning, causing every other incoming call to get cut off, and our computers all have viruses.
At our morning circle in the kitchen, everyone is soggy and puffy eyed and the energy is grim. Someone is heating up week-old rice, which is burning in the pan, and another is looking forlornly at the barren toaster. During Lost Valley winters, our primary diversion and comfort is toast, and the empty breadbox is a cruel insult. We circle, and after a long silence during which everyone looks at the floor, someone finally begins a song. Several of us join in despondently, with dirgelike effect, until the song raggedly peters out. It is Monday morning and on the plate for today are the cheery tasks of trying to figure out why our sewage system, water system, and phone system are all malfunctioning. We also have to work on our 1999 budget to find a way to recover from our deficit from 1998, and to once more redesign our organizational structure so we don't end yet another conference season burned out, frustrated, and broke. Several of us are beginning to feel desperate because it seems like it will never get done, should have been completed a month ago, and probably won't work anyway. Add to this mix occasional Y2K panic attacks, relationship blowouts, existential crises, automobile breakdowns, lice, pinworms, mysterious rashes, and seemingly irreconcilable philosophical differences, and I begin counting the hours to bedtime.
I sometimes think of Lost Valley as a whirling centrifuge, where all our impurities, both individual and cultural, are pushed to the surface at an accelerated pace, continually erupting to the surface like boils. While this affords tremendous opportunities for growth, self-discovery, and healing, it also makes for an unrelenting intensity, particularly in the summer, when dozens of new people are thrown into the hopper every week. Depending on my mood and frame of mind, this can make for abject agony or blissful ecstasy. And I can switch from one to the other without warning. This way of life is not for the faint of heart nor the weak of spirit. It is a warrior's path, for those whose vision (or bullheaded stubbornness) is stronger than their desire for comfort. Comfort, however, can be a good thing, and in my weaker moments I have succumbed to thoughts of returning to the good life, from which I bid a hasty retreat five years ago. Then I remember. Wherever I go, there I am. This is as good as it gets.
Yet we have succeeded, as Chris says, in holding love as our center. Something is working. Perhaps all this is what it takes to create the space in which our love and compassion can grow. Welcome to community. And don't forget to wash your hands before dinner.
Larry Kaplowitz is associate editor and art director of Talking Leaves. He has recently been enjoying a string of good days, due, in part, to a bumper crop from the bakery.
�1999 Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 9, Number 1
Cultivating Community
We welcome your letters!
For a sample copy of the Spring/Summer 1999 issue, "Cultivating Community," send $6 to
