Terra Nova: Tamera in London, October 17

Folks from Tamera, the eco-village in Portugal, are giving a talk in London on October 17th with Alternatives at St James' Church, Piccadilly, at 7pm.. I am reading the book Terra Nova at the moment and I think these folks are really onto something.

Disorganised Dancing

Sometimes, walking alone on a forest path, a dance comes upon me. And if I know I am really alone, I put down my bag, take off my shoes, and let the dance have me. 

If there is any music at all, it is in my imagination.

It’s a pretty solid equation: if you want to feel good, dance. Dance at weddings. Dance at celebrations. Get drunk and dance. Take E and dance. Entwine your cultural musical forms with dance forms.

Just because… Dance :)

So. Why can’t we, can’t I, do, disorganised dancing? You see, In the woods I have to make sure that no-one is around. Organised dancing happens on a dance floor. You pay your ticket, join with other people for the allotted space and time, and dance. You don’t dance in the street. Or the supermarket. This would be disorganised.

But… when you take the people away… I just dance! 

(And, by the way, I have a pelvis, which I intend to dance with until my dying day :)

So, why don’t we do disorganised dance and…. what if we did?

Here is a beautiful music video of people doing very publicly what I do secretly.

This is the dance that no-one sees. This is the song that no-one hears. These are my strong and bare bare feet. This is the secret, wild and beautiful me.

Eros as Indicator

What if, as one indicator of national wellbeing, we took Eros. 

Are the people able to have sexual activity when they want it?

Are the people able to have the kinds of sexual activity they want?

And, what of our wanting? My pre-supposition (which may be wrong) is that a healthy human is a a sexual being, from at least the ages of 13 to 73; and that desire is an indicator of health. So, where desire is not existent, or where desire is socially dangerous, as in the case of pedophilia - what is going on there? It draws a healing attention.

I find myself wanting to take that snapshot of England, like a soil sample. How is the erotic health of the nation? How could I know?

It’s personal to me too. If I were to move home, would I have sexual activity when I want it? Would I have the kinds of sexual activity that I want? Here in the U.S. I pretty much have both, pleasingly.

Historically, in Judeo-Christian cultures, marriage has to some degree been the answer to organising Eros.

These days a lot of people are not married or partnered, and many within marriage are not having the quantity or kind of sexual activity that they would like.

I say this because, if home is yummy, do we reduce our seeking behaviour? And also, ipso facto. Sexuality is beautiful, and life can be good :)

It’s like, how is our soil; is it abundant and flourishing, or is it desiccating, or desiccated?

In the Network for New Culture camps I’ve been attending over the past year as a singing facilitator, I’ve appreciated the way they bring sexuality out of the private and into the public realm. Folks talk about it together in the Zegg Forum. Folks do it together in Aphrodite’s Temple.

It’s really rather interesting.

Experiencing this, I mainly think, thank you. Thank you for this transparency. Thank you for recognising that I am an Erotic being, and not shaming or avoiding this matter. Thank you for making eros more available. Thank you for the healing that you provide to the young woman who stands up and is safe to talk of the trauma she carries in her vagina, or the man who stands up and expresses his shame and struggle at being no good at sex, or the 71 year old grandmother widow who looks at least 20 years younger (her secret, she tells me, is giving up sugar and using EFT to overcome her emotional issues with food) who gets up in great delight because last night her fantasy of 30 years came true, and she was tied to a tree facing the tree, and multiple people came up behind her and did all sorts of things to her and she didn’t know who most of them were, which was totally thrilling and exhilarating for her.

NFNC, thank you.

Honestly I struggle with this pair bonding thing, and I am trying to address this. And I am still a sexual being, and what if marriage is not the only good way to hold Eros within a culture? What are the other good ways? I think NFNC, Zegg and Tamera have parts of the answer. I am questing for answers, and I am enjoying it :)

The Dying Forest

I took a hike yesterday in Lassen National Wilderness, Northern California.

The creek had run dry. Many of the trees were dead and dying. Tree corpses lay everywhere, their arms outstretched, still reaching out to give and receive, as they had fallen. Some standing trees were brown, singed dead by their own heat. Others were still green, but many or most of the lower branches were dead: they were focusing their energy upwards, towards the sunlight.

Everywhere the buzz of flies, and big ants crawling with their heavy job of clearing this up.

Initially, I just didn’t like it, like a consumer. “This isn’t pretty! Why have I come here?”

Then I became more aware of what I was surrounded by. I began to weep, bitterly.

We are in an Epic War, I realised. It’s happening here, now, all around us, and right here uphill from the beautiful lake.

It’s like being a German citizen in 1940. It’s just like that, but much worse.

On one level, it seems like a war of Humans Vs Nature.

The weapons are strange. Our weapons seem to be the making of our sources of comfort, pleasure, and freedom. Our cars, plane rides. Our fridges, air con, dryers, meat. And it’s all of us, well, all of us privileged enough to have these things; it includes me. Sure, there are little islands of peace here and there, like Dharmalaya. But mainly, we are all in this war. The victims at first glance are the trees, the waters, and the fish and animals who depend on them. Nature’s retaliatory weapons are strange; heat, floods, typhoons, fires, tsunamis.

But back up a second; these distinctions are ridiculous. Both the Oxford and the Google dictionaries define Nature as ‘all the trees and rivers and animals and systems and everything apart from humans.’

I was born from Eros and womb, live in cycles, and will die and rot and become, I hope, soil enrichment. I breathe air, drink and pee rivers, eat and poo earth via plants and animals. I am nature. Nature is me.

So it’s a stranger war, I think as I walk in rivers of heat, the soil scorching my bare feet. 

These trees are so close to the lake. But the lake is a storage system not a distribution system. Rain and rivers are the distribution systems, but the rain has stopped and the rivers are dry.

It’s somehow a war against ourselves, and nature hurts everywhere as she suffers and retaliates. If our sources of air, heat, food and water struggle, we struggle.

I was told recently of science that found that every plant has a song. I could feel the song of the forest; of thirst, heat, weariness, sadness as the standing trees were surrounded by the corpses of their kin, none cleared away. They seemed to miss humans, who would clear dead wood and make fires from it, to gather around and share songs and stories, weave tribe. 

For perhaps six thousand years, Native Americans lived here, planting oak for their acorns (from which they made flour), and having managed fires to reduce the firs to make room for sunlight to reach the oaks. This relationship has been replaced in the last hundred years by the Nation Parks, a managed leisure system. I pay $20, come and put up my tent, walk on the trails, and look at the trees. But I don’t tend them; and they miss us. The miss the Native Americans, whose way of life never created this heat, this thirst, this neglect, this tragedy, this death.

“Climate Change” seems an abstract term referring to weather reports, scientists and graphs. A better term might be, expanding-death. It’s actually a gradual growth of death and dying, the way the light comes gradually across the lake when the sun rises. For a while it’s just at the other shore, but before long, you know, it’ll reach most everywhere.

I think of the argument that, “it’s ok, the earth will be ok. We’ll all die but the earth will right itself in due course. This is just what is happening, it’s too late, we’re killing ourselves and maybe we need to.”

Huh. But, what of the song in the process? Honestly this Epic War we are living in is like the Holocaust multiplied by, say, a billion. A billion because it’s not only humans who are dying from it, over time; it’s the trees, rivers, fish, animals and birds. Over half of animals living on earth have died in the last 40 years, basically my lifetime. As a student I read about “ecological homogenisation” - the process by which with climate change, delicate and magnificent species cannot survive but rats, ants, and pigeons flourish. 

Twenty years later, in this wood of ants, flies, little wood squirrels and rotting trees, here we are. And this forest is but one patch in the pattern that is dappling the globe.

So to participate and letting the death-spread continue is like doing just that in the holocaust. But worse. 

STOP THE FUCKING WAR! I think. DISMANTLE THE WAR! LET SOMETHING ELSE GROW THROUGH!!

This must be the priority of our time!

What does that mean, I wonder? Well, obviously shifting to renewable energy for our heating, aircon, fridges and dryers. That seems underway, though we could be faster.

Then, much less driving, and more fast trains and little swipe-in, swipe-out city cars for the first-and-last-mile.

(This is the traffic my town, Berkeley, greeted me with (not in rush hour) when I got home).

Dismantling the war also means pretty much taking the planes out of the sky.

Ah. Dum de dum. Oh look a butterfly. I avoid the topic and think about something else for half an hour.

Then gently return myself to the question. I am part of the war. What part do I play in dismantling the war?

My life depends on two transatlantic flights a year.

I have what I consider to be a better life on the American West Coast than I see that I could have in the UK at the moment. But I want to stay close to my family and friends and their wonderful children, and I visit bi-annually.

What is it to stop flying?

We have to stop our seeking behaviour.

What is it to stop our seeking behaviour?

It is to feel good being at home. To live in a field we like to be in.

In this home; the region. In this home, the culture. In this home, the town. In this home, the building or place. In this home, the family or housemates. In this home, the body. In this home, the self.

O England

The children’s eyes call me back. My lover’s eyes call me back.

I am a third of a globe away.

A sense of foreboding came upon my heart as we saw the Gatwick signs above the motorway. I wept in the car, checked in with love and fear and sadness sweeping with a visceral tide through my heart, wept on the plane, pulled myself together, travelled to Vancouver, San Francisco, slept a few hours in Berkeley, drove to Oregon, arrived, and wept some more.

O England.

Those children are approaching school age, one or two have already began.

Aged 4, I was a singing, dancing creature. I sung on the stairs, danced in the living room, sung and danced in the garden, pinched my sisters’ dancing costumes and went and sang and danced in them the nearby woods.

School began; recalling it last month, my body bent over; compression.

I went through that pipe and came out 16 years later, aged 21, with very high shoulders, many addictions, and a depression so heavy I wanted to die.

I was a straight A student; society would shake my hand and say congratulations.

It's taken me a full 16 years more to find my way back to being a happy singing, dancing creature.

Those children are about to enter that pipe. Was it educational, cultural, familial ways that shaped me so, or a mixture of all three?

England, what is going on?

I arrived in Oregon, at the Network for a New Culture summer camp. I enter the tent. Sarito greets me, standing still, looking at me straight with eyes full of heart, full present, fully in his body. I return his gaze. And finally he says, in a soft voice so shaped by heart, “I love you.”

I burst into tears. I come from a culture where no-one will greet me that way. 

England, here is everything I struggle with.

Avoiding intimacy

Eye contact lasts for fleeting sub-seconds. A hug or handshake is brief. We’re always moving, offering the next good word, funny joke or interesting story, to keep us away from just… being here, now, together. 

What happens when we try it? We have to face the sadness and fear and vulnerabilities our eyes can’t hide but we don’t want people to see. Don’t see into-me. Don’t Into-me-see. No intimacy.

Until we get drunk, or have sex. Ahhhh finally thank fuck the restraints are off and we can connect.

Where is the heart?

I had some therapy with my parents recently. I said, hey, we have a culture of rejecting and resisting experience. You say to me, “no Briony… that’s a silly thought, don’t have that feeling, no Briony… we would have wrapped it up sooner if you weren’t there with your feelings.”

Hey, i’m a part of the family, and being a part, I have feelings. We say it to the children: “no Magdalena, don’t be scared.” They say it to themselves: “I mustn’t be pissed off, I’ve got to be a good host and make a nice Christmas. I mustn’t be f******g pissed off, no I’m totally fine, fake smile… what you FUCKING ARHRHRHDKFHDSUIEHRSEBI!” and drama is created that we’re still cleaning up six months later.

I say, what if we could give attention and respect to heart in ourselves and each other?

My parents say, hey, be gentle with us. We weren’t cultured to feel our hearts. We were sent to boarding school young. Feelings are disruptive. We’ve been trained to be as undisturbed by them as possible.

England I want to be able to feel! And I want you to be able to feel too! I want to be in my heart, and not turn it off when I speak, or work, or make love, or look in your eyes, or hug you.

And I want your heart!!! Otherwise… it’s so easy to go from thither to thy, thirsty.

Grey skies and rain

There’s not much we can do about this. But it’s a downer. Cold dampness.

Tea, cake and alcohol

Alcohol. If we’ve created these intimacy-avoiding, “heartless” persona to function safely in the world with, how on earth do we connect when it’s time to socialise? We press the off-button using alcohol, and come out of our shells a bit.

But what if we could connect, and be courageous, and play, and dance and sing and laugh and seduce, without it?

That takes a different way of being

and that’s what we need to find.

Tea and cake… God doesn’t it just make you feel so… boggy? In theory it peps you up but in reality it bogs me down… What is this tea and cake all about?

I can’t move back to England until I’ve really learnt to say over and over again, no thank you, I don’t want cake, no thank you, I don’t want tea, no thank you, I don’t want wine or beer.

It makes me a parya, but here in California with the rosy-cheeked dancing people who don’t seem to age, we don’t have this stuff. We never offer it to each other. It’s never around. Seriously.

England, wft, it makes us old and boggy and bloated and then we just accept these un-vital bodies and this un-vital culture and these un-vital sex lives (I have no idea to be honest) - wtf?

Small buildings

There’s a crampedness, a small pokey-ness to buildings. Look we’re bigger than we were 100 years ago. Honestly one of the really nice things about the American built environment is that it never asks you to shrink, offers you big windows and as much sunlight as possible.  Ahhhhhhhh

The puritan crackdown / Judgement / keep those hips square

Hmm maybe I’m conflating a few things here but there’s a) a shit ton of unconscious judgement, by which I mean, judgementalness that we’re not doing any work around. In my American circles, a judgement points to a wound of your own that you’re projecting onto others. (Humm is that the irony in this whole piece? Investigate)…. So you have to investiagate, then you grow, and then you become more loving of this world right as it is. And that love helps it to heal and grow.

Humm… I should change this…. to… England I love you just as you are…

But there are like… those cold little tea cups they have in church, the omnipresence of shitty little white sugar biscuits… and traditional styles of dancing in which the body stays entirely straight because.. what? we have hips? we are sexual beings?

No! They burned the witches for that…

Seriously. We’re living in a legacy of puritan, witch-killing that said women can’t be sexual and men can’t be vulnerable

and it’s high time for a new ear.

How does this connect… it’s like…. if we are in our bodies, and our hearts, and our eyes, then we have to face how much we are erotic creatures, and gosh, we might be attracted to one another, and that would disrupt something…

Not all cultures are monogamous. In some cultures monogamy literally doesn’t exist. Can you imagine that?

The judea-christian world strongly values monogamy, marriage, and the nuclear family as the social unit. In other cultures, tribe is the primary social unit.

I see people struggling in the nuclear family, much as I adore those children. “The nuclear family is radioactive” says Jon Young, a nature-connection teacher in California.

And it keeps us in high consumption; one washing machine per family; one kitchen with everything per family; then folks divorce because they can’t bear it (the radioactivity), so then it’s one washing machine etc each.

What if we tribalise.

What if we come into heart, body, connection.

How would we do it, in this world built to the principles of an old culture?

And, what would happen?

Living in America, I get all these things in droves; a hearty culture of embodiment, expression, love, spirituality, great weather, a wonderful built and natural environment, and a really healthy food culture all around me. I have abundant access to touch, intimacy and connection. I like it.

And, the longer I stay here, the more I sacrifice something heartbreakingly precious; belonging, family, connection to children, stability, long-term living. 

What am I going to do?