Living Close to the Earth: Part 1

This series of articles, the Light Morning Renewal Pages, is an attempt to clarify and communicate the vision and core values which anchor us here. “Living Close to the Earth” (which includes Stretching Toward Radiant Health; Working Close to Home; and Embracing the Earth) is followed by “A New Kind of Family” (which includes The Underlying Assumptions; Five Core Social Skills; and A Social Covenant) and “A Transformational Journey” (which includes The Soul Is Not Human; The Four Cairns; A Prayer Bead Necklace; and The Gift of Beauty). The series concludes (at least for now) with the account of a harrowing mid-winter pilgrimage, called “The Three-Legged Stool.”

Pink radiance

Stretching Toward Radiant Health

Transformational journey, a new kind of family, living close to the Earth–simple phrases, subtle connotations. Living close to the Earth, for example, implies more than mere physical proximity. It suggests emotional intimacy. An intimate relationship with the Earth, therefore, would be one marked by, “a warm friendship developing through long association.”

What are the personal and global consequences of not having developed such a friendship with this planet, and how might we nurture one? A good place to start is close to home. For those who live at Light Morning, home is the wooded hills and valleys of the Blue Ridge mountains in southwest Virginia. We learn to love the Earth by learning to treasure this one, small, precious portion of it.

Even closer to home, we cherish the Earth by loving our bodies. For our body is the closest, most intimate connection that any of us will ever have with the living Earth. No one will truly care for the planet, or for the special place they call home, any more than they care for their own body.

We demonstrate our caring and affection for our bodies by stretching toward higher octaves of health. If we’re in poor health, we strive to get better. If we’re blessed with what passes for good health, we aim for radiant health.

Can you recall a time when you were really sick? How hard it was to remember, while lying in bed, what good health felt like? How far away it seemed? There’s a comparably vast distance between normal health and radiant health.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to optimal wellness is that we have so few models for it, and that we have experienced it so rarely ourselves. It’s hard to stretch toward something if you don’t even know it exists.

In a recent dream, a future Hall of Fame cornerback for the Washington Redskins named Darrell Green was talking about the field of work he was planning to enter after his retirement from professional football. “It’s a field for which I am well-suited,” he said, “and the demand for it is growing exponentially.” He called it motivation training.

Motivation involves cultivating an evocative image of who and what we want to be. The image has to be personal and visceral, and it must be purged, gradually, of all hidden doubts and fears. Our motivation is, literally, what moves us to act. It is the want-to that precedes and energizes the how-to’s and makes them sustainable.

So what might motivate a person to craft such an evocative image and stretch toward radiant health? One compelling reason for doing so is that higher octaves of health yield higher octanes of energy. And since energy determines mood, and mood determines perception, and perception determines reality, then enhancing our health is one direct way of changing the world.

The how-to’s of optimal wellness are self-evident and hardly need elaboration. A healthy body requires sunlight, pure water, fresh air, and wholesome food, as well as sufficient rest and exercise. Living close to the Earth gifts us with direct access to these essential nutrients. If we are not fully utilizing them, we are likely suffering from a case of inadequate incentive and could probably use another round or two of “motivation training.”

Finally, there’s a direct correlation between a healthy body and a healthy mind. We can’t have one without the other. Excellent health, therefore, necessitates clarifying the mind. At a still deeper level, the duality of mind and matter is nothing more than an entrancing illusion. For energy is iridescent, the body/mind continuum is seamless, and the universe is playful. We experience radiant health by allowing this one, playful energy to move through us freely.

Blackberries

Working Close to Home

We live in a highly segregated society. Parents go to work, children go to school, and old folks end up in retirement villages and nursing homes. Food comes from the grocery store, houses from real estate agents. Healing is supposed to happen in hospitals. Likewise childbirth and death. And all the while, canned entertainment beams in through the TV.

Is it really any wonder families become dysfunctional? With the home so fragmented, how can a family be healthy? And if home and family become anemic, how can they serve as sacraments, as metaphors for That which they represent? When home, in other words, loses its meaning, how shall we find our way Home?

Living close to the Earth, and working close to home, helps one follow a path of re-integration. Physical proximity to our ancestral planetary home allows us to slowly deepen a relationship with what’s just below our feet.

Choosing to work close to home, however, means struggling against the rip-tide current of a cash-intensive economy. Since the Industrial Revolution, we have become increasingly dependent upon goods and services that can only be obtained indirectly. And now, with corporate ad agencies artificially inflating desires, and transforming luxuries into necessities, the average American’s need for income has escalated dramatically.

Over the years, Light Morning has attempted to disengage from this tractor beam by simplifying its needs, by adopting a do-it-yourself, pay-as-you-go philosophy, and by moving toward a more labor-intensive (as opposed to cash-intensive) economy. Some of what we are learning is shared below.

For starters, we still have expenses, of course, both individually and as a community. Yet the amount we contribute toward communal expenses is kept intentionally low. A much higher proportion of the energy we offer Light Morning is in the form of labor. With the community, then, receiving a strong influx of labor energy from its crew members, the responsibility arises for managing this flow wisely.

Most people face the same basic accounting questions–How shall I allocate my precious, limited resources of time and money? What is important to me? What are my priorities? When we share our lives with others, these visceral issues are raised within the context of a relationship and help to define it, whether it be a marriage, a family, or a community.

Almost inevitably there is a give-and-take, an uneasy dance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the relationship. Through trial and error, Light Morning has fashioned a creative balance between personal autonomy and group consensus. Part of each person’s financial contribution to the community, for example, goes toward agreed-upon expenses such as food and land taxes. The rest is for discretionary expenditures, where each individual, freed from the constraints of consensus, decides what he or she feels the community most needs.

Our labor system parallels the financial system. Each of us devotes at least half a week to the basic labor needs of the community, including time spent earning what we contribute financially. The rest of the work week goes to community projects that we’re drawn to discretionarily, as well as to our personal household and income needs.

Listed below is one articulation of the core labor needs of Light Morning:

• Construction
• Finances
• Firewood & Forests
• Food Preservation
• Fruits & Nuts
• Garden
• Homemaking
• Kitchen
• Landscaping
• Maintenance
• Paths & Roadways
• Visitors

Hiding behind this rather mundane list is an exceedingly odd creature–the “living close to the Earth in a new kind of family” lifestyle that is gradually emerging here. Drawing on patterns from the past and the future, it is both deeply familiar and disturbingly alien And we are so thoroughly immersed in the lifestyle that we can hardly see it.

The list, however, does not address two critical questions. First, from among these broad categories, how do we arrive at a shared understanding of what specific projects are truly essential–day by day and season by season? And then, having reached such an understanding, how do we manage our pooled labor resources wisely and effectively? Our ability to do so will help determine the success of this multi-generational experiment called Light Morning.

Different groups use different names for their managerial roles, such as honcho, straw boss, or coordinator. We settled on focalizer because the person serving in this capacity brings into focus the image of the project, as well as the community’s enthusiasm for it. Good focalizers see the forest through the trees. They develop bifocal vision–the cultivated ability to switch back and forth between the maze-like details of a project and the bigger picture. They put the particulars into perspective.

Good focalizers also learn to hold themselves and others accountable not only for a project’s completion, but for the spirit with which it is undertaken. Many of our deeply ingrained beliefs about work need healing. This becomes evident whenever we compare our culturally inherited attitudes with those that we’re stretching to embody, such as:

• Work is love made visible.
• Do what you love.
• Do what is needful.
• Leave few loose ends.
• Set high standards.
• Be accountable.
• Encourage synergy.
• See the work as service.
• Move into the moment.
• Be open to coaching.
• View the work as a dream.
• Integrate work and play.

The earlier list of core labor needs is the what of this living-close-to-home lifestyle; the “target attitudes” listed above represent the how. Needless to say, we have a ways to go yet before we fully embody them.

When focalization is weak or non-existent, a project falters. Enthusiasm wanes. People lose sight of what’s important and turn instead to what’s urgent or extraneous. Standards are compromised, accountability avoided, community resources are poorly utilized, and community morale suffers. Effective focalization is essential, then, if Light Morning’s labor-intensive lifestyle is going to thrive.

Just as a garden or wood lot, moreover, need the motivation and continuity that a good focalizer provides, so do the community’s overall labor efforts need someone to play a similar role. We call this person the bread labor coordinator, borrowing Scott and Helen Nearing’s use of bread labor to mean that portion of one’s daily life that is devoted to meeting one’s physical needs. As the focalizers’ focalizer, the bread labor coordinator has three main tasks:

1) To help the community, at the beginning of each season and each year, to clarify its priorities. Just as individuals must decide how many days a week they can contribute to community work projects, and into which specific areas they would prefer to channel their energy, so the community as a whole must look at the resulting labor pool for the coming season and determine its priorities. There’s an intricate dance here between the focalizers’ boundless enthusiasm and the compelling illusion of limited resources. The bread labor coordinator choreographs the complexity of this dance.

2) To be responsible for the community’s labor goals, and to encourage each crew member and focalizer to do the same for their individual goals. It’s one thing to establish strong goals, and another to carry them through the thirteen weeks of a season and see them realized. During this interval, the bread labor coordinator serves as coach, role model, cheering section, and alarm clock.

3) To nurture an environment in which high standards and peer coaching become the norm. This lifestyle can be challenging! The financial and labor benchmarks, as low as they are, are often a stretch. The attitude benchmark is always a stretch. As crew members, we try to be available to one another; to offer each other support, encouragement, and accountability. Cultivating and stabilizing such an awareness is one of the bread labor coordinator’s primary goals.

Developing a labor-intensive economy, therefore, in which many of our primal needs for food, shelter, and fuel can be met more directly, and within the context of a tightly-bonded family, allows us to work close to home. And close not only to the home that Light Morning has become for us. Close to our home planet as well.

Yet, as the dictionary reminds us, closeness goes beyond physical proximity. What is being called for in these deeply troubled times is not merely an approach, but an embrace.