Renewal Pages

Three-legged stool

Several years ago Light Morning experienced an unprecedented population explosion. In response to a heartfelt but naive prayer for renewal that some of us had raised, the community tripled in size. Seemingly overnight we morphed from a quiet family of six adults and one child into a bustling warren of sixteen adults and six children. The transition was chaotic, disorienting, and exhilarating.

Almost as rapidly as it had formed, however, the bubble burst. Within a year and a half, all of the newcomers had moved on. And of the seven original residents, one died, one went into deep retreat, one took a full-time job, and another left for college.

Once some semblance of equanimity had been regained, the three remaining active crew members took stock. We began by reaffirming the need for patience, given that the full realization of Light Morning’s core vision will span at least several generations. Then we nurtured a willingness to give renewal another go.

Acknowledging that the tuition for round one had been pricey, we resolved to approach round two with a greater measure of caution and awareness. Finally, we decided that an online Journal would help convey Light Morning’s mission, especially (and perhaps subliminally) to potential members of the next renewal crew.

These and other realizations came into focus during a long midwinter pilgrimage. As we coaxed the insights into consciousness, they spontaneously coalesced around the recurring image of a three-legged stool.

The Three Criteria of a Healthy Community

The driving is treacherous. A major blizzard is tracking up the east coast toward New England. Creeping along the single northbound lane of Interstate 81 that the teams of snow-plows are able to keep open, it dawns on us that only fools would be driving in weather like this. And perhaps, given our destination, the description fits. For if we make it safely to the Vipassana Meditation Center in western Massachusetts, we’ll be spending the next ten days in complete silence, our tushes parked on meditation cushions for ten to twelve hours a day.

The hazardous road conditions aren’t the only source of stress. Three of us are the active crew members left standing after Light Morning’s recent population expansion and contraction. The fourth is a friend who had lived in the community for many years and has stayed close to it since leaving.

We’re all needing to talk. What have we learned over the past year? What went well? How might renewal be approached differently next time? Will there even be a next time? For each of us is coping with significant bruises and blown fuses. Will we have the gumption to go through even a muted version of this renewal process again?

Brooding on these questions, my mind drifts back to an earlier Vipassana course. One of the evening discourses had pointed out that, “Vipassana is the art of learning to die smilingly.” We cultivate the ability to die smilingly, moreover, by learning how to live smilingly, rather than by placing ourselves at the mercy of circumstances.

Pondering my mortality, I had become aware of the preference to leave behind a healthy community. “What might such a community look like?” I had wondered. “What is a healthy community?”

Into the meditative stillness had come an intuitive response to this unspoken question. “There are three criteria for a healthy community–a healthy community knows where it’s going; a healthy community helps provide for the physical, social, and spiritual needs of its passengers and crew; a healthy community has no indispensable members.”

As we follow the blizzard through Pennsylvania, frequently stopping to scrape ice from the windshield of our van, these criteria of a healthy community become a structuring device for looking at the renewal of Light Morning. They become the inter-locking legs of a sturdy, three-legged stool.

Light Morning’s Core Values

Considering the first criterion, that a healthy community knows where it’s going, we associate to Light Morning’s core values. Prior to the recent influx of new residents, the community had clarified its priorities. Realizing that flexibility would be called for as more people joined the community, we had needed to know in which arenas we were not likely to be flexible, what values we were not willing to relinquish.

Many had come to mind, including consensus decision-making, environmental beauty, shared meals, organic gardening, welcoming visitors, and creative problem-solving. At a still deeper level, we had re-affirmed three foundational values that truly define Light Morning. For take away any of these three and you won’t have a Light Morning. It is to these core values that the four of us now turn as we peer through the veil of falling snow, trying to discern where Light Morning needs to be going in order to be healthy.

The first core value is choosing to live close to the Earth. This involves transitioning from a cash-based to a labor-based economy, cultivating the qualities of frugality, sustainability, self-reliance, and cooperation, and striving for radiant health. Doing so enables us to experience our home planet not only as a teacher, healer, and friend, but also to know it as the greater Body within which we live and move and have our being.

The community’s second foundation stone is to gestate a new kind of family. A fully functional, warmly supportive, vision-driven family, well-suited to raising both children and awareness. A family capable of withstanding the wide array of challenges that all families face, as well as the fierce pressures of transformational intent.

For Light Morning’s third core value is to embark upon a transformational journey. The slowly ripening vision of a new creature, freed from parochial self-interest and outmoded restraints, underlies the gestation of a new kind of family.

These foundational values form the second three-legged stool that comes into view during our long journey north.

Common Vision, Covenanting, and Coaching

Hardly a mile goes by that we don’t see a car, truck, or tractor trailer that has skidded onto the shoulder of the road or down the embankment. Abandoned to the drifting snow, these ice-encrusted vehicles are recurring reminders that carelessness is costly.

At a literal level they goad the van’s driver to pay close attention to the job at hand. And in the context of our spirited conversation, they inspire us to keep a watchful eye on where Light Morning is going. For here, too, carelessness can be deadly.

“Where there is no vision,” the scriptures say, “the people perish.” So accessing and articulating a common vision, and then drawing a viscerally personal version of that vision out of all who are led to explore Light Morning–that’s our job at hand.

For the shared vision to be realized, however, a transmission belt is required. Only then will the vision’s potential energy be converted into kinetic energy. Only then will the heavy inertial resistance of the status quo be overcome. The components of this transmission belt are covenanting and coaching.

Having been captivated by the beauty of the vision, and sobered by the recalcitrance of the resistance, we are brought to understand that we cannot “go it alone.” We therefore make vows of strong determination to each other and to Something beyond ourselves. This is covenanting.

Then we ask each other and Something beyond ourselves for support, encouragement, and accountability. We open ourselves, in other words, to coaching.

Common vision, covenanting, and coaching–yet another three-legged stool.

Visitors, Residents, and Caretakers

We finally allow ourselves a bit of cautious optimism. It’s late afternoon. The snow is still falling. The driving is still hazardous. But we are crossing the Tappan Zee bridge. Below us lies the bleak and mostly frozen Hudson River. New England beckons.

Nearly four centuries ago, a dream-driven Englishman sailing for the Dutch had skippered a small yacht up this river, searching for the fabled northwest passage to the Orient. Our conversation turns naturally to Henry Hudson and his Half Moon, for we have already been utilizing the nautical metaphor. A sailing vessel, for example, knows where it’s going. The needs of its passengers and crew must be provided for. And none of the crew members should be indispensable.

But what kind of sailing vessel is Light Morning? Certainly not a cargo ship or a cruise liner. Nor is it primarily a passenger vessel. Light Morning’s voyage is rather one of exploration and discovery, like Henry Hudson’s Half Moon. Or Columbus’s Santa Maria, whose image graces the cover of Wax Statues. Or the Starship Enterprise.

On board this vessel are passengers, crew members, and the ship’s officers, corresponding to Light Morning’s visitors, residents (the interns and apprentices), and what the community has come to call caretakers. Feeling our way into these distinctions, we see that for passengers wanting to join the crew, as well as for crew members wanting to become “commissioned officers”, the same essential question applies: To what degree am I deepening my passion, my commitment, and my competence?

This triggers another flash-back. It’s a sunny afternoon at Light Morning, at the peak of the population influx. I’m lying on my back under an old Dodge Omni, replacing its water pump. Jonathan stops by to share some frustrations about having to coax some of the newcomers into helping us build Rivendell, our new community shelter.

Trying to clarify his concerns, I ask, “What exactly do you want?”

He pauses for a moment, and then jumps octaves. “I want to live with people who are passionate about Light Morning!”

Recalling this story as we creep across New York raises critical questions about how to discover ones passion, or “path with heart”. About how commitment keeps us walking that path while our passion ebbs and flows. And about how competence, and ultimately excellence, come only to the degree that one truly cares. These are the key issues for anyone living at Light Morning, be they visitor, intern, apprentice, or caretaker.

The Dream Teacher’s Three Questions

It’s dusk when we reach Hartford, Connecticut, and turn north on I-91 toward Massachusetts. The snow has tapered off. The highway is well plowed. Soon we’ll be settling into the meditation center for the night. With our harrowing drive mostly behind us, we begin to relax.

Up ahead of us a car sloughs off a large clump of snow, which quickly drifts into the path of our oncoming van. We fully expect the impact to dissolve the clump into a shower of shimmering snowflakes, as has happened so many times before. Instead, the van shudders and our windshield shatters into an intricately opaque spider’s web of fracture lines. By grace, a small oval of visibility remains on the driver’s side of the safety glass, allowing us to limp cautiously toward our destination.

The abrupt transition from the clarity of seeing what we want for Light Morning, to near total blindness and the sudden fruition of our fears, is so striking that it shakes free the memory of a strong dream from several years ago, called “The Dream Teacher’s Three Questions.”

A woman is teaching a small group of us at Light Morning.

“The entire path,” she says, “grows out of three questions–What do I want? What am I afraid of? What’s my next step?

“Many people,” she continues, “get stuck on the third question, because they haven’t taken the time, or realized the importance, or discovered the courage to fully explore questions one and two.

“What we think we want and what we think we’re afraid of are like the outward skins of an onion. Beneath these relatively superficial interpretations are more elemental desires and fears. And under those layers of the onion can be found still deeper yearnings and dread. Only as you explore your deepest desires and fears will your true path become clear–moment by moment, step by step.”

Then she points out the intimate relationship between the first two questions.

“It’s like driving,” she explains. “You very much want to reach your destination, so you’re pushing down hard on the accelerator. The harder you push, however, the slower you go. For a while you’re completely mystified. Then you finally look down and notice that your other foot is pushing just as hard on the brake.

“You’ve been focusing intently on what you want, in other words, yet strenuously ignoring what you’re afraid of. But what you want and what you’re afraid of are two sides of the same coin. When you fail to see that your desires and fears are the flip sides of a single coin, you become mired in a crippling ambivalence.

“Once acknowledged, however, this realization can be put to good use. For accessing your deepest desires will lead you to your worst fears, just as the cultivated willingness to face what you’re most profoundly afraid of will open the door to what you truly want. Only then will your path become clear.”

The dream teacher’s three questions offer a final permutation to the recurring image of a three-legged stool. We viscerally sense their relevance to our personal lives as well as to the renewal of Light Morning. The questions keep us company on the last few miles of our pilgrimage to the Vipassana Meditation Center and help prime the pump for a strong course.

Epilogue

Eleven days later we emerge from the intensity of our real pilgrimage. The snow has melted. The van has a sparkling new windshield. We drive home under blue skies.

*   *   *

Three-legged stool

For a deeper exploration of Light Morning’s three core values,
see the earlier articles in this Renewal Pages series.

Embracing the Earth

Tiger Swallowtail

How do I re-discover my love for the Earth? We experience human love in various ways–as children, parents, lovers, and friends. Love is a binding spell. It softens hard edges, blurring the sharp distinction between self and other. It induces a paradoxical feeling of both ecstasy (standing outside myself) and intimacy (going deeply within). How might I learn to experience such feelings for the Being which nurtures and sustains me?

It was, curiously, humanity’s desire to leave the planet–a bold, high-tech journey involving space ships, moon walks, and global TV–that offered us a moment of true ecstasy. Unexpectedly, as though by grace, we found ourselves gazing at the televised image of a small, blue-green sphere, set like an emerald against the luminous darkness of interstellar space. For one shining moment, the species literally stood outside itself. The haunting beauty of that image is so profound that even now, thirty years later, we are only just beginning to assimilate it.

But what about intimacy? If technology has given us a priceless glimpse of our home planet from a distance, perhaps fantasy can suggest ways of knowing it close up, from within. Albert Einstein once observed that, “The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.” Fantasy, like dreams, gives shape to our vague intuitions and secret longings, luring us beyond the hypnotically safe confines of the known.

During the same years that humans were first going to the moon, Patricia McKillip, inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was writing a fantasy trilogy called Riddle Master. The story revolves around Morgon, the young land-ruler of a small island kingdom. Land-rule confers upon a land-ruler the ability, “to become one with his rural homeland, his heart and senses bound to its every living creature.”

As the story opens, Morgon seems content to be ministering to his land, with its sheep farmers, ship builders, and brewers. Ancient forces, however, that had once destroyed the realm, are re-awakening. Soon Morgon is compelled to relinquish his comfortable responsibilities and to open himself, ultimately, to the land-law of all the other kingdoms of the realm. He does so through a highly refined, almost magical use of empathy.

Like Morgon, we live in perilous times, drawn by desires and driven by dangers that are difficult to name. Heightened empathy–for one another, for other cultures and species, and for the Earth–is essential. Perhaps a dream-like fantasy, such as Patricia McKillip’s artistically crafted story, can provide both inspiration and instruction.

In the following passage, for example, Morgon lets his awareness wander into the heart of a mountain.

He let his brain become stone, rich, worn, ponderous. He drew all knowledge of it into himself, its great strength, its inmost colors, its most fragile point where he might have shattered it with a thought. The knowledge became a binding, a part of himself, deep in his own mind. Then, searching within the stone, he found once more the wordless awareness, the law that bound king to stone, land-ruler to every portion of his kingdom.

Having touched this wordless awareness, Morgon reaches deeper. With the permission of Danan, Isig Mountain’s land-ruler, he extends an empathy which has been keenly honed by prolonged inner and outer stillness.

The king left him alone. Morgon dropped the torch to the ground, watched it burn away into darkness. He stood up, not fighting his blindness, but breathing the mountain-blackness into himself until it seeped into his mind and hollowed all his bones. His thoughts groped into the stone around him, slid through stone passages, channels of air, sluices of slow, black water. He carved the mountain out of its endless night, shaped it to his thoughts. His mind pushed into solid rock, expanded outward through stone, hollows of silence, deep lakes, until earth crusted over the rock and he felt the slow, downward groping of tree roots.

His awareness filled the base of the mountain, flowed slowly, relentlessly upward. He touched the minds of blind fish, strange insects living in a changeless world. He became the topaz locked in a stone that a miner was chiseling loose; he hung upside down, staring at nothing in the brain of a bat. His own shape was lost; his bones curved around an ancient silence, rose endlessly upward, heavy with metal and jewels…

Slowly, as hours he never measured passed, he touched every level of the mountain, groping steadily upward through mineshafts, through granite, through caves, like Danan’s secret thoughts, luminous with their own beauty. The hours turned into days he did not count. His mind, rooted to the ground floor of Isig, shaped to all its rifts and channels, broke through finally to peaks buried under the first winter snows.

He felt ponderous with mountain. His awareness spanned the length and bulk of it. In some minute corner of the darkness far beneath him, his body lay like a fragment of rock on the floor of the mountain. He seemed to gaze down at it, not knowing how to draw the immensity of his thoughts back into it. Finally, wearily, something in him like an inner eye simply closed, and his mind melted into darkness.

Part of the richness of the realm is its diversity. After leaving Danan’s mountain, Morgon journeys to the wild northern wastes of Osterland, which is as different from Isig as Isig was from Morgon’s island homeland of hop vines and plow horses. But though the terrain is unfamiliar, the bonding process is the same–fierce intent, inner silence, empathy.

He stood quietly, enfolded in the Osterland night. His mind opened to all its sounds and smells and shapes. He laid his hand against the wet, rough flank of the tree and felt it drowsing. He heard the pad of some night hunter across the soft, damp ground. He smelled the rich, tangled odors of wet pine, of dead bark and loam crumbled under his feet. His thoughts yearned to become part of the land, under the light, silvery touch of the moon. He let his mind drift finally into the vast, tideless night…

Slowly he began to understand the roots of the land-law. The bindings of snow and sun had touched all life. The wild winds set the vesta’s speed; the fierceness of seasons shaped the wolf’s brain; the winter night seeped into the raven’s eye. The more he understood, the deeper he drew himself into it: gazing at the moon out of a horned owl’s eyes, melting with a wild cat through the bracken, twisting his thoughts even into the fragile angles of a spider’s web, and into the endless, sinuous wind of ivy spiraling a tree trunk.

In Patricia McKillip’s poetic, fantasy-woven world, Morgon’s remarkable empathy grows out of his ability to be still.

He had a gift for silence. When he chose, it seemed to ebb out of him, the worn silence of old trees or stones lying motionless for years. It was measured to his breathing, in his motionless, scarred hands. He moved abruptly, soundlessly, and it flowed with him as he turned.

Silence yields knowledge. Knowledge confers power. And power must be tempered, not only by understanding the implications of power, but by love. By land-love. By the wordless awareness that binds land-rulers to the Earth.

Morgon’s lessons, then, as well as his sense of urgency, are not so far removed from our own. For we, too, are wrestling with the implications of power, a power derived more from science than silence. And we, too, are learning that if this power is not to destroy us, it must be tempered with love.

I open myself to love through the use of empathy. To the degree that a strong dream, or a story like Riddle Master, encourages me to develop this faculty, to that same degree will it gradually teach me to respond to the needs of my body and to embrace the Earth–creeks, stones, crows, and trees–in a new way.

The long journey toward such an embrace is, in essence, a homecoming. As one of T.S. Eliot’s poems suggests, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring shall be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”

Morgon awakens to this same realization. Late one night, having absorbed the land-law of yet another kingdom, he is confronted by the implacable silence of an ancient harpist.

Morgon waited for him to speak. He said nothing; he did not move. Moments wore away; still he sat with the silence of trees or earth or the hard, battered face of granite; and Morgon, listening to it, realized that his silence was not the evasion of an answer, but the answer itself.

He closed his eyes. His heart beat suddenly, painfully, in his throat. He wanted to speak, but he could not. The harpist’s silence circled him with the peace he had found deep in living things all over the realm. It eased through his thoughts, into his heart, so that he could not even think. He only knew that something he had searched for so long and so hopelessly had never, even in his most desperate moments, been far from his side.

* * *

Riddle-Master, by Patricia McKillip, was recently re-printed by Ace in 1999. It was originally published by Del Ray in three volumes–The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976), Heir of Sea and Fire (1977), and Harpist in the Wind (1979). A hardcover edition of the trilogy was also published by Nelson Doubleday under the title Riddle of Stars.

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.

A Prayer Bead Necklace

Meditation room carpet_3

The fourth cairn speaks of choosing a “shared path” through the cocoon. Once again, paradox becomes our traveling companion. For a truly sustainable path doesn’t begin until we reach the final cairn. And while it may seem that we are choosing a path, the path also chooses us. Finally, although a shared path is essential, each person’s path is solitary and unique.

We live in a consensual reality, an elaborate construct that is conjured up by the prism of our imprinted beliefs, perceptions, and expectations. In order to extricate ourselves from this well-fortified reality, we are obliged to fashion a special consensus. A shared path. Transformation is therefore a team sport. It is music that may only be played by a group.

Just as team sports have different positions, so are musical groups comprised of various instruments. This crucial dance between the individual and the group is elemental. It echoes the dilemma of modern physicists trying to understand how the basic nature of light can be both wave and particle.

In more practical terms, as we embark upon a shared transformational journey we must guard against the tendency to mistake another person’s instrument or position for our own. Or to displace our personal responsibilities onto the group. Or to force fit the position of goaltender, for example, onto a baseball team, or a French horn onto a string quartet.

The task, then, is for each of us to discover an intrinsic personal calling. A “path with heart.” And to then discern how our personal path meshes with those of others. As the mythical Yaqui shaman don Juan Matus advises,

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use.

Both paths [ultimately] lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

Light Morning’s path with heart has emerged out of the “hidden story” alluded to in the Four Cairns. It consists of three interrelated practices or disciplines–meditation, dream work, and prayer. Skill in the use of these tools may be developed both individually and as a group.

Back in the hippie era, pilgrims and wanderers would occasionally bring home prayer beads from their journeys to the East. Cylindrical in shape, these were hand painted with lovely, intricate designs. Each bead was a story in itself. We would thread them onto slender cords and wear them as necklaces.

The following “prayer bead necklace” has three strands, one for each facet of our shared path. Like the Four Cairns, it is simply one person’s interpretation of that path. Others who have given their hearts to Light Morning would surely offer complementary interpretations. Yet if all these versions were to pose for a family portrait, as it were, one would surely discern, in their faces and features, a striking resemblance.

Meditation

Meditation clarifies the mind.
Meditation teaches us to live in the moment.
Meditation ripens and awakens us.
Meditation helps us harness our impulses.
Meditation facilitates prayer.
Meditation is a gateway to lucid dreaming.

Dream Work

Dreams are pictures of feelings.
Dreams are teaching stories that quicken, guide, and comfort us.
Dreams are love letters from a secret admirer.
The forgotten language of dreams is our mother tongue.
In dreams, our hidden prayers are made visible.
Behind the veil of dreams lies a vast realm–numinous and perilous.
One way to explore this realm is through shared lucid dreaming.

Prayer

Daily life is the child of prayer.
Posture is prayer.
Appreciation is prayer.
Our expectations are powerful prayers.
Formulary prayer, used wisely, is effective.
Dream images can become templates for prayer.
Prayers for oneself and for others are indistinguishable.

The Gift of Beauty

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Joyce and I are walking down a North Carolina beach at dawn. It’s mid-September. The twilit sky is pale blue-gray, with shadings of mauve and orange. We pause, moved by the muted colors and the soft background murmur of surf.

Then, without warning, we are overtaken by a flight of brown pelicans, eight or nine of them, gliding low overhead in perfect formation. Their watchful eyes are serene, their elegantly angular bodies motionless, as they drift slowly across our field of vision.

The beauty of the moment strikes both of us with an intensity edging on anguish. Joyce feels her fuses being blown, as though only a small dose of such high-voltage beauty may be safely taken in before the self-protective mechanisms go into shut-down mode.

Watching the pelicans recede down the beach, I recall C.S. Lewis’ tribute to Tolkien’s classic tale, The Lord of the Rings: “Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron.” A familiar Navajo prayer comes to mind: “May you walk in beauty.” Having just been pierced by unbearable beauty, I ponder the implications of this prayer.

Finally, my thoughts return to the closing lines from Michael Ventura’s passage about the soul not being human: “If only a human can become unafraid of the soul’s necessity to journey, then anything is possible. The soul is honored, and shares its beauty.”

Why does the gift of beauty move us so deeply, I wonder? The red disk of the sun rises out of the ocean, bringing with it an evocative response to my unspoken question: Beauty makes the soul feel at home. This simple, intuitive statement is then amplified by three subsequent insights, which float into my awareness just as the flight of pelicans had done moments before.

Beauty is empowering. Whenever we become mired in a sense of inadequacy, beauty reminds us that creativity is our birthright. For beauty is the hallmark of creativity–be it a stirring piece of music, a well-turned phrase, or these ponderously graceful pelicans, their wingtips now barely clearing the breakers.

Beauty, in other words, is a sweet, powerful force. Artists train themselves to be conduits for this flow. And in a deeper sense, each of us is an artist, whether we’re preparing a wholesome meal and setting it on the table for friends, or we’re planting flowers and shrubs along the driveway, or simply because we’re privileged to witness the unspeakable beauty of this day.

Beauty is an antidote for loneliness. Loneliness is an occupational hazard for most highly individuated humans. Many of us have probably felt, at one time or another, a vague sense of exile. Gradually (or perhaps all at once) the world turns bleak, barren, and inhospitable. This feeling can become chronic.

Yet tokens of caring abound. The person who sits down to that meal, for example, or who walks past the flowers on the driveway, is receiving a subliminal reminder that someone cares. These gifts of beauty are deeply therapeutic, for the giver as well as the receiver. They diminish the distances between us.

If beauty, moreover, is the harmonious interplay between the whole and its parts, then a startling awareness sometimes arises, a realization that even we humans are ultimately embraced by something greater than our separate, isolated selves.

Personal inclination will automatically translate such realizations into an appropriate form. This form may be aesthetic or ecological. Or it may be religious. “For heaven’s sake,” Tony Hillerman once remarked, “if God didn’t love us, why would he give us all this beauty.”

Beauty heals shame. Shame is the primordial blight upon the human psyche. Its taproot is firmly anchored in the fertile soil of our Judaeo-Christian blood myth. It is the first emotion alluded to in the Book of Genesis and is the direct prelude to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden.

Shame seduces us into a subtle attitude of self-contempt. The attitude may slumber as a quiescent undercurrent, or be actively malignant. Yet each of us, in a profoundly mysterious way, is a carrier for this lethal virus of the human mind.

Shame and beauty, however, are fundamentally incompatible. Observing our reflection in one of the many “mirrors” that surround us, do we see a bad, inadequate, unworthy person? A member of a hopelessly flawed species? Or do we behold a beautiful creature?

Transformational journeys are undertaken in order to transform how we see ourselves, at the deepest levels of our being. As we begin to view ourselves in a new way, we will magically see others in a new way as well–other people, other species, the soul, the Earth.

Having paid for the gift of individuation with the high price of exile, we may now turn to transmuting the debilitating and often toxic residues of individuation into beauty.

* * *

In the years since these insights were first received, we have come across two passages which further illuminate the intimate relationship between beauty and transformation. The first is from Albert Einstein, who lived to see his spectacular flights of the scientific imagination translated into weapons of mass destruction.

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

The final passage is from a Navajo ceremony. It elaborates the earlier-mentioned prayer, “May you walk in beauty.” The ceremonial words help me recollect the insights that were triggered by an early morning flight of pelicans–that beauty is empowering; that it is an antidote for loneliness; that it heals shame; and that it makes the soul feel at home.

In the house made of dawn,
In the house made of evening twilight,
In the house made of dark cloud and rain,
In beauty I walk.

With beauty before and behind me,
With beauty below and above,
With beauty all around me,
I walk.

This continues the series of the Light Morning Renewal Pages, an attempt to clarify and communicate the vision and values which anchor us here. “A Transformational Journey” has four sections: The Soul Is Not Human; The Four Cairns; A Prayer Bead Necklace; and The Gift of Beauty.

The Soul Is Not Human

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Risking intimacy, by choosing to live in a new kind of family, is a worthy challenge. Beyond this, however, lies the still riskier challenge that drew us to Light Morning in the first place and that keeps us here–the whispered call to cast off our moorings and embark upon a transformational journey.

Such a journey grows out of the audacious assumption that we humans are mutable creatures. We certainly belong to a mysterious species, the atrocities and generosities of which are nearly inconceivable. How might one even hazard a guess, then, as to what the ultimate human capacity for goodness or godliness may be? As Gilbert K. Chesterton once observed, “If seeds in the black earth can turn into beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey to the stars?”

Several key paradoxes have emerged during our voyage of discovery. The yearning to become more than we know ourselves to be, for example, while innate, is intangible. And while the conditioned personality may be lured to the cocoon by its longing for the wings and awareness of a butterfly, it will distort and co-opt these images to meet its own parochial needs. Finally, what we most want is also what we most fear.

The importance of this last paradox can hardly be exaggerated. For by refusing to face the shadowy fear that lurks just below our desire for transformation, we work and pray diligently but never really get anywhere. We jam the accelerator to the floorboards, never noticing that our other foot is planted firmly on the brake.

An evocative passage from Michael Ventura clarifies this numbing, bone-deep ambivalence.

The soul is not human. Does not want what a human wants. But needs the human journey for ends of its own. It honors the human journey, but not by protecting what is human.

That’s why the humans are so afraid of their souls. The record of their fear is called history. They are scared most of all because every human knows itself [to be] part of a race possessed, precisely, by their very souls.

If only a human can become unafraid of the soul’s necessity to journey, then anything is possible. The soul is honored, and shares its beauty.

The word soul may carry too much baggage for some of us. Or it may come across as quaint. Or archaic. If so, one may paraphrase Ventura’s words by shifting to the butterfly metaphor.

The butterfly is not the caterpillar. Does not want what the caterpillar wants. But needs the caterpillar’s journey for ends of its own. It honors the caterpillar’s journey, but not by protecting the caterpillar. That’s why caterpillars are afraid to become butterflies.

Caterpillars feed on leaves; butterflies seek nectar. We humans are likewise driven by competing needs. We turn to worldly surrogates for solace–food, money, work, relationships. Through the grist mill of experience, however, we learn that such outwardly derived solace is ultimately shallow and transitory.

Weaving a cocoon doesn’t imply that we surrender all surrogates. We surrender, instead, our compulsive dependence upon them. Once our simplified needs can be met more directly, we will be less likely to squeeze the people and things around us out of shape in order to satisfy our voracious and insatiable appetites.

Light Morning often serves as a cocoon for those who live or visit here. This role goes directly back to our founding vision. (See Associations of the Light Morning.) The community’s primary work and purpose, therefore, is three-fold:

• To provide a supportive environment for those seeking a “path with heart.”

• To gestate a world-view which will encourage these journeys and make them sustainable.

• To model (in our personal journeys) passion, competence, and commitment.

What follows is a brief glimpse of the world-view that has been gestating here (The Four Cairns); the path or practice which grows out of this world-view (A Prayer Bead Necklace); and an intuitive exploration of the relationship between beauty and transformation (The Gift of Beauty).

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The Four Cairns

How does one condense twenty-five years of a slowly gestating paradigm into one or two pages without having it become unintelligible shorthand? The mind hesitates. Then, seeking reassurance, it reaches for a memory. The memory it retrieves is several years old by now. Yet, like a well-banked fire, it’s very much alive.

A book by Huston Smith, The Religions of Man, lies open before me. I have just returned from my second Vipassana meditation course. The practice feels strong and promising. Reconciling Buddhist theory, however, with the world-view emerging here at Light Morning is proving to be a struggle.

In a chapter called “The Man Who Woke Up” is the story of how Gautama the Buddha arrived at his Four Noble Truths. One sentence in particular leaps out at me. “Most persons, if asked to list in propositional form their four deepest and most considered convictions about life, would probably find themselves very much at sea.”

Still under the influence of the fey mood induced by ten days of silent meditation, I close the book and rise to the bait. Several hours later four deep convictions take shape, like seed crystals in a super-saturated solution. Lacking the chutzpah to call them noble truths, I refer to them as cairns, recalling the piles of weathered stone used by climbers to mark the path up a mountain.

The Four Cairns, then, is one articulation of the paradigm that has been forming in the soul of Light Morning for going on three decades. It is, of course, only one person’s interpretation. Others would no doubt tell a somewhat different tale.

These cairns are also being shared (at least for now) without commentary. They are, perhaps, like heirloom seeds, cradled in the hands of a gardener. Or a special blend of teas, needing to be steeped. Or freeze-dried trail food, ready to be reconstituted and then served to friends around a camp fire, under the night sky.

The First Cairn:
We Are Dreamers
Re-entering the Theater of Dreams
Viewing Daily Life as a Dream

The Second Cairn:
We Are Being Dreamed
Playing Roles in One Another’s Dreams
Finding Ourselves Alive in a God’s Dream

The Third Cairn:
We May Awaken Within Our Dreams
Learning to Induce Lucid Dreaming
Awakening in a World of Sleep-Walkers

The Fourth Cairn:
The Ego is a Larval Creature
Weaving the Glimpses of a New Creature
Choosing a Shared Path Through the Cocoon

Towards the beginning of The Religions of Man, the author states that his book is about religion that exists,

Not as a dull habit but as an acute fever. It is about religion alive. And whenever religion comes to life it displays a startling quality; it takes over. All else, while not silenced, becomes subdued and thrown without contest into a supporting role.

A new world-view, therefore, isn’t merely some theoretical construct. It’s a story–one that is feverish, visceral, and alive. Like a live wire. It’s a quickening agent which throws all else (reason, caution, community, relationships) into a “supporting role.” It kindles passion, and keeps us walking the talk.

In short, a new paradigm is a new religious impulse. Because the need for it is both personal and collective, it is gestating not only in our individual psyches, or in the soul of this community, but in the world soul. Like a fetus come to term, it seeks release from the womb of our subliminal awareness into the dream-like world of our daily lives. The call going forth, then, is for midwives.

A Social Covenant

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The foregoing social skills offer an amorphous group of “chance acquaintances” the opportunity to forge themselves into a new kind of family; a family that may also function as a cohesive and effective crew. Whether or not this potential is actualized depends, first, upon the readiness of those individuals to expose themselves to the fire and the anvil, and, second, their diligence in acquiring the necessary skills.

If their desire has ripened sufficiently, they will know (at least intuitively) that in order for their deepest dreams to be realized, synergy is essential. They will therefore make promises—to themselves, to each other, and to the living Spirit within them—to master the skills that make such synergy possible. Their promises will serve as a covenant.

What is a covenant? The dictionary describes a covenant as an agreement that is “formal, solemn, and binding.” The word solemn suggests a spiritual or religious invocation. One that is formal rather than informal. And binding rather than casual.

This succinct definition is then elaborated. A covenant is, “a written agreement or promise usually under seal between two or more parties especially for the performance of some action.” The italicized words and phrases are evocative, leading us into a progressively deeper understanding of how we may harness ourselves to a shared vision.

Why are covenants necessary? Living lightly on the Earth, living communally, living with transformational intent—each of these paths is strenuous. And the journey that Light Morning has embarked upon combines all three!

Along the way we encounter fierce resistance, from our deeply rooted personal inertia, and from the consensual restraints of the conventional culture. To free ourselves from this gravitational inertia and these consensual restraints, we must fashion a special consensus—a cocoon; a space capsule; a covenant. There is no conceivable way of “going it alone.”

What might a Light Morning covenant look like? In these Renewal Pages we are bringing a Light Morning covenant into focus. In “Living Close to the Earth,” the labor, financial, and attitude benchmarks were clarified, as was the need for good focalization and for the role of a bread labor coordinator. Here in “A New Kind of Family,” the five key social skills, viewed as interpersonal binding spells, have been emphasized.

The binding spells must be “spelled” correctly. For each is composed of discrete, sequential steps, and only when these steps (or letters) are placed in the proper order may the “word” be spoken.

This is true for the bread-labor benchmarks and the social skills, mentioned above, as well as for the spiritual components of the covenant, which will be explored in “A Transformational Journey.”

Where does the willingness to covenant come from? Learning something new, whether it be an unusual dance or a new kind of family, can be exhilarating. It can also be awkward, uncomfortable, and threatening. Until the strange gestures become second nature, the learning curve may seem steep and intimidating.

We therefore return to our earlier question: From where do we derive the willingness to face our interpersonal challenges with a warrior’s spirit and an open heart?

Perhaps willingness comes from gazing into an unfamiliar mirror and seeing reflected there a startlingly beautiful creature. Just this one brief glimpse can be enough to keep us going.

Our resolve may also be strengthened as we are moved to help others find healing.

Or perhaps we discover that the five core social skills are relevant to any relationship, such as marriage or parenting, and this realization goads us to approach covenanting as an apprenticeship.

We may also be motivated by the pleasures inherent in stretching, be it physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. Perhaps we are seduced, in other words, by the joy of the journey.

Whatever its source, willingness helps us simplify our needs and live closer to Mother Earth. And it encourages us to jettison some of our muscle-bound independence, thereby enabling us to sense the guiding Presence which some traditions call the Father.

Willingness also permits us to share our daily lives with others who are choosing to become re-acquainted with their archetypal Parents. To embrace them as brothers and sisters. To covenant with them.

Finally, we should be forewarned that once true willingness has been activated (by formal covenanting, or by a strong subliminal intent), it manages to stir up a gracious plenty of what we humorously refer to as U.P.S.—Unresolved Parental Stuff.

If anything unresolved from the past is re-created in the present, through attraction and projection; and to the extent that our issues with our parents, both biological and archetypal, still await resolution; then, in a place like Light Morning, with its strengthening vortex of intent, we are more than likely to keep the local U.P.S. driver quite busy.

There’s no way to keep these “packages” from being delivered. Nor should we really want to, knowing that we’re able to heal only what we allow ourselves to feel. And knowing that it is only by transmuting this bone-deep, U.P.S. conditioning that we shall fully experience the promise of a new kind of family.