up against the walls when the revolution comes

I woke up at 3:00am parked in the Post Office parking lot. I'd been asleep for 15 minutes, when my phone rang. I met Stefanie and her boyfriend Drew 370 days ago, on the train from LA to Chicago, and this was our first non-facebook communication since that trip. We talked until my phone died; we talked until nearly 4:30.

Right now I'm feeling the wreck that my body experiences when I eat or drink too soon after waking up. In the light of that wreck, all my conversations from last night are crashing together. Stefanie and I (and, earlier, Leslie and I) talked about our experiences over the past few months. Like everyone else I know right now: life is changing like earthquakes. Like everyone else I know right now: we talked about how these changes appear to have huge implications for The Future. Personal experiences finding resonance with community experiences; social experiences full of synchronicities and connections. I am glad to see this happening in my life, and am encouraged to see this is happening to others around me, and excited to hear it happening to Stef on the other side of the country.

She asked me, "Have you ever made an attempt to do something other than the get-a-job, life-as-normal life?" It struck me as odd at first, considering when she met me I was homeless and talking about a farm and Leslie & Charles & Adrienne & Valerie & Scott & I occupying it with hopes and dreams and intentions.
It also struck me as odd that my answer to her question was, "No."

I've had some relatively epic adventures over the past five years, and many (if not most) involved or flirted with being homeless, jobless, and discussing alternatives to that "normal" life. But when she asked me that, I realized that I never took both feet off the "normal" path. I only stepped far enough off to appear to be on the adventure I craved--appear, to myself as well as others.

Right now, I feel like I'm in a place much different from anywhere I've been before. Over these months... hell, over these years, I have tested and discovered my beliefs. I have always wanted to live by those beliefs HARD. And yet, only one foot off the path of security. And now, revolution seems nigh. It feels like time to move forward.
I don't want to be swept forward.
I want to walk forward, boldly. I have allowed my beliefs to represent me for so long; now I want to represent my beliefs.

I am up against my own walls in every direction. Any moving forward requires me to do things I am desperately afraid to do. I have to make myself vulnerable. I am so afraid.

I almost didn't go to Leslie's birthday supper last night, because that is one of my walls. And today will involve that wall and another: discussing intentional communities with her & others also faces my fear of having a role in a community; a role I don't want, a role I have refused to accept, but that Life keeps trying to hand me. Fear of vulnerability leads to my walls, and I feel like those walls would be faults in the foundations that I'm building.

--- -- - -- ---
Boom. This blog was expected to be cohesive, but the fact that I slept fifteen minutes, then almost an hour, then an hour, and then immediately drank coffee and ate.... as I said: a wreck. So, derailed.

Now about rationalizing.
--- -- - -- ---

In the book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, two characters (Richard, Dirk) are walking near a canal, talking. Suddenly, Richard disrobes, jumps into the canal, and nearly drowns. Once Dirk brings him out, Richard explains: he suddenly remembered that he'd missed his morning swim, and decided to take it at that moment. Dirk then plays a recording of Richard under hypnosis. "When I say x, you will take off your clothes, jump into the canal, and find that you cannot swim."
This is a shameful summation of the event that very elegantly describes how I rationalize things. An example from my own life: Whenever I drink to excess, I spend the next day experiencing intense panic attacks. It is a chemical reaction, however I feel something and so I create a story to explain the feeling. I tell myself stories about how everything I'd done the night before was a terrible thing.

Ugh... my brain is working less. My stomach is cramping. This topic will be returned to.

An Interesting Night

For Occupy, this weekend is kind of a big deal. Occupy Nashville is hosting the first state-wide rally, attracting protesters from all over the state of Tennessee. Several people from Clarksville even went the extra mile (well, sixty miles) by walking to Nashville, chanting and carrying a banner.

I'd crawled into my sleeping bag, resolved to skip the planned midnight march in favor of what warmth and comfort I could muster. (If you know me, you know that I'm kicking myself now that I've recognized this. Meditative awareness fail.) But when the Clarksville bunch showed up, after a day of anticipation (and after, on their side of the story, thirty hours of walking), the camp got loud. Chanting, cheering... Revelry. A desire to recognize these heroes compelled me to get dressed and re-enter the cold.

They were on the ground: sitting, laying, smoking and exhausted. They were served coffee and pizza, and we helped set up their tents.

And then it was midnight. We gathered at the top of the stairs, where Will-from-Legal addressed the crowd. "When marching, you will not be arrested if you stay on the sidewalks. Walking in the street is illegal... You have been advised. Do what you want." Upon hearing that, I expected to see a handful of us stepping out into the street from time to time. Our Clarksville friends came to the front of the crowd, and the march began. Almost everyone walked right into the street; we on the sidewalk were the handful.

Deaderick, at midnight, is not a bust street. I was amused by our group's "daring" display of civil disobedience, as we inconvenienced a single driver. And then we turned right onto 2nd Avenue. The front line linked arms, and chanted "This is what democracy looks like!" as they walked into oncoming traffic on the one-way street. I happened to be walking near Will-from-Legal and heard him say to himself, "Really? Oh my god." Not what you'd normally like to hear fro your legal adviser. Is this what our democracy looks like?

To many people, yes. It is.

Of course, many people support the status quo. That's what makes it the status quo. The perception that we in Occupy are reckless, crazy people is not only due to misunderstanding or lack of information It is also a recognition that we are rocking the boat--a boat that a large percentage feel does not need to be rocked. The idea that people would disagree with us and speak out was not surprising to me, but being in the center of it was nearly overwhelming, Not all response was negative. I'd say 35-40% of the people around us seemed supportive, but it was the other 60-65% that impressed me in the moment. In the street, the cars changed lanes or stopped to avoid contact with Occupy; on the sidewalks, however, people were drawn to us. My natural inclination to be invisible was bruised and beaten. "What is your problem with America?" "What does your sign sa--oh, it's just a bunch of Democrats."* Yelling. Insults. Mocking. At the plaza, people often drive by shouting, "Get a job!" The march gave us an opportunity. When somebody shouted at John, from Knoxville, to take a shower,** John fell back to talk, and as I walked on I heard the start of his conversation: "I did. We all shower. They're really good people..." And at one point several guys we passed started chanting, "USA! USA!" to counter our own chants. We took up theirs: "USA! USA!" They shut up.

Unlike Deaderick St, Broadway is the heart of Nashville tourist-driven nightlife, and the street was plenty busy. After a couple of blocks, a police car had stopped and the officer approached the group announcing, "If you get move to the sidewalk, you will not be arrested." Those at the front of the group turned to mic-check the announcement, but before they'd finished the sentence, two people were arrested. I felt like everything should have seemed like it was in slow motion, or else that everything should have "happened so quickly." The lack of time distortion disoriented me. I'm a fan or trespassing and other boundary-crossings, but at that moment the fact that some of us were not standing on the sidewalk seemed like the scariest thing in the world. The Complacent Citizen training I'd endured for most of my life kicked in, and I just could not understand why my friends were still in the street. Of course, they didn't move, Court--civil disobedience doesn't stop when the cops show up. But after five arrests, we were all on the sidewalk. Several of our group had their cameras and phones out, recording the scene and chanting, "The world is watching! The world is watching!"

I was so confused. Were they trying to chastise the police? The chanting of "Bullshit! Bullshit!" a moment later seemed to suggest that they were. The world was watching... what? Watching the police do their jobs? They probably didn't have to shove people so hard against their cars, but there was nothing near what I would consider excessive force. We've seen the videos and heard the reports from around the country... were we just feeling left out? Were we fantasizing a chaotic scene? On one hand, I felt the reaction was irrational, but on the other hand, so was it all. Awhile the police were slamming Matt and Jen and Jeremiah and the others against the cars (and I am, by the way, making an effort to not e sensational--I do mean slamming) and handcuffing them, other people were walking out into the street yelling and swearing and flipping us off, without looking first (and, therefore causing a much greater risk than we had), but nobody outside of Occupy Tennessee got so much as a casual glance.

Once the police had gone, we reconvened at the next corner. Someone was shouting, "Do not let the police intimidate you!" Good advice for that moment. "They are evil!" Wait, what? The police have to accept that we are going to walk down the busiest street in town en masse... Was it so hard to accept in turn that they were going to arrest us? Other Occupations have been given good cause to distrust the police, but in Nashville more than anywhere else the police have been on our side. (They're unionized. They get it.) In fact, as we continued to march toward the night court, where we were told our friends would be taken, somebody on the sidewalk fell to the ground, unable to walk. Gathered around him in concern, several of us were in the street, and an officer drove up, blocking traffic to protect us.

A guy named Scott hadn't marched with us, but he came down from the plaza once he heard about the arrests. He and I got to talking, and fell back to the end of the crowd. We passed a car of young women who rolled their windows down and were yelling at us. I'd had enough of it. I ignored them. And then I heard a car door, and footsteps running toward me. A pretty (and very drunk) girl in a tight pink top, wanted her picture taken with a protester with a sign. So that was me. She handed her iPhone over to Scott as I tried to wrap my head around one of the strangest moments of my life. I had witnessed people getting arrested for something I had been a part of. I had been marching with people from all over the state, in support of an idea too big to articulate fully. I was cold, I didn't know what to think, what to feel, and now I was a prop for this bimbo's photo op. I'm glad that moment of my life will live on anonymously in a stranger's facebook photo album.

After that weird moment, Scott and I were well behind the rest. A police car drove past, away from the courthouse, and we saw one of our people in the back seat. The car drove on a couple of blocks, and then pulled over. We approached the car and the officer rolled down his window and told us to move back and wait; she would e released soon. We obliged. I recognized the girl as one of our visitors from Johnson City, and so when I saw the other members of OJC, I ran over to tell them where she was. The five of us waited, and eventually the girl was released. She told us that the officer had been taking her to the courthouse when he was ordered, over the radio, to give her a citation and release her. She said his response was, "You've got the be fucking kidding me." We walked her back to the camp, and from there Lance, Butch and I set off to meet up with everyone at the courthouse. By the time we got there, the rest of the people had been given citations and released, and we continued the march.

*For the record, my supposedly left-wing sign says, "Something better is what I'm after, and no less."
**For the record, John was well-dressed and clean-cut. How strange that we, as people, can see what we expect to see, rather than what is actually there.

What Am I Doing Here?

In every situation I've found myself in lately, the question arises in me: "What am I doing here?" It's a valuable question, which calls me to look deeply at the present moment--because to know what I'm doing here requires that I notice where here is; no know what am doing here, requires me to look at what I'm doing.

I'm at the public library in Bellevue (a Nashville neighborhood). What am I doing here? A dozen answers fly to mind, and perhaps it is only the result of the ton of meditation I've been engaged with that I can tell these thoughts to wait their turn while I acknowledge, "I am sitting."

I am also waiting for the message that I can return to the storage unit and clear it out. But that will be the future (or maybe it won't). What am I doing while I am waiting for the future? I wasted some time on the internet, since it is rare that I get to use it. And I finally watched the videos of the incident at UC Davis last week. Our children and grandchildren will be watching those in their history classes.
And, I am blogging. It's been too long... not because of the time that's passed, but because of the number of things I would have written.

- -- --- ---- ----- ---- --- -- -

Another circumstance that has caused me to ask, "What am I doing here?" is my involvement with Occupy Nashville. Being there and experiencing it, I find it easy to understand why I'm there. But almost every conversation I've had since October 29 has dealt with trying to explain why I'm there.
There is, of course, all the talk of the 1% and the 99% and the unfairness of it all. To say that I think these are valid concerns seems unlike me--because I think all concerns are valid. I think that even the concerns of the "1%" are valid. We are all Americans, here, like-it-or-not.

It is because everyone's concerns are valid that I am engaged with the Occupation. Finally, people are tired of jumping through hoops, of playing the system's game, to have our voices [mis]heard. "[If] he wanted something other than the obvious to happen, he would have to do something other than the obvious."* For decades or more, people have been like children saying, "ow, quit it!" and the powers that be have been like the parents, choosing to ignore the children until they just stop fussing.

[and there's the call // later]

Change the World: spider web

We are flies caught in a spider's web. We start from a tangled mess, because there is no other place to start. We cannot start by pretending to stand outside the dissonance of our own experience, for to do so would be a lie. Flies caught in a web of social relations beyond our control, we can only try to free ourselves by hacking at the strands that imprison us. We can only try to emancipate ourselves, to move outwards, negatively, critically, from where we are. It is not because we are maladjusted that we criticize, it is not because we want to be difficult. It is just that the negative situation in which we exist leaves us no option: to live, to think, is to negate in whatever way we can the negativeness of our existence. 'Why so negative?' says the spider to the fly. 'Be objective, forget your prejudices'. But there is no way the fly can be objective, however much she may want to be: 'to look at the web objectively, from the outside - what a dream', muses the fly, 'what an empty, deceptive dream'. For the moment, however, any study of the web that does not start from the fly's entrapment in it is quite simply untrue.

We are unbalanced, unstable. We scream not because we are sitting back in an armchair, but because we are falling over the edge of a cliff. The thinker in the armchair assumes that the world around her is stable, that disruptions of the equilibrium are anomalies to be explained. To speak of someone as unbalanced or unstable is then a pejorative term, a term that disqualifies what they say. For us who are falling off the edge of the cliff (and here 'we' includes all of humanity, perhaps) it is just the opposite: we see all as blurred movement. The world is a world of disequilibrium and it is equilibrium and the assumption of equilibrium that have to be explained.

[from Change the World Without Taking Power by John Holloway]

Something the Moon Told Me

an excerpt from a journal

I called the temp agency to let them know I was available to work. They said they could get me in today, just have to fill out some paperwork at the office first, how soon could I be there?
Honestly? Thirty minutes. What I said? Maybe noon (it was 8:45). She said they'll be at lunch, come by at 1:00. I'll do the paperwork, but most likely won't work until tomorrow.
Convenience. Comfort. Whatever fight I have in me is because I see my willingness to bow to these things as a weakness. Not that those things make a person weak, but that I am weak against them. Like smoking & drinking & television as well -- I am wary of anything I can't not do. To be comfortable is not bad. To give in to comfort is. Like any action, its value is determned by the intention behind it. Even now I could shower, leave, be at the temp agency by 9:45. Even now. And now.

I was spoiled as a child. In 4th grade, I wasn't feeling well one day. The teacher asked me "Why don't you call your mom & have her take you home?" I had no idea that was an option. It became an option I exercised often. Once I'm allowed an inch, I'll take it and more. And never let it go. I never skipped school, but I went home early a lot. I allow conflicts and confusions in my relationships to be pacified rather than resolved. I called out of 25% of my shifts at T-Mobile. I work 1% harder than the person in good standing who works least. And even all of that wouldn't seem bad, except for I can see what it cost me. That's why I look at my tendencies like those as weaknesses.
Like the first line in the book Duende says, "Often we end up doing what we almost want to do because we lack the courage to do what we really want to do."
WHEN I make the "better" choice, it's not because I simply have the will to do the hard thing. It is because I have decided to view certain things as costly, and I don't care to pay the price they demand. But still, so often, I do give in.
Even now, I could get to the office by 10:00. But they said 1:00, and my weaker self says, "it's good enough, if not better, to appear willing, rather than to be willing."
And even though I KNOW I can go, and even though I KNOW the cost ($80+) (which is 4x all the money I have now), and even though I have NO reason to want to stay home, here I am.
Why do I settle for this??

It's a matter of separating myself from my choice. As an external force, my will is overpowering. But if I see myself as I actuaally am, empowered with my choice inside of me, this changes.
But, I'm still here. Because if I DON'T welcome that choice into me, if it remains an external force, then I am not accountable. "It's not my fault. I'm broken."
Well, isn't that what "my FAULT" means? It IS my fault.
And thus, "fault" becomes associated with "accountability."
Until I moved to Seattle, I used the name "fracturedguy." hat was how I saw myself. Inherently flawed. "Can you spot the break?"
But then I realized that I was just holding onto that illusion as an excuse. I was maintaining a constant excuse to do things I didn't even care to do.
Today Im not doing that. I have no excuse.

I am VERY good at making excuses, though. That is an almost direct result of going home sick in 4th grade. After so many times, they start to ask, Court, are you REALLY sick? The response? "Yes." Changing your story damages your credibility. Even a 4th grader knows that. But next time I wasn't "sick." I found some other excuse. Be unpredictable, be creative. Once they know one trick, move on to another. (I think you know this, too.)
I knew my weaknesses when I left Tennessee. I was very familiar with them, as I'd been their captive for years. I could anticipate the excuses that I would throw across my path, and I made ready. If I had waited until nearer the end, they would have been prepared for me. I bought my ticket to Hawaii, from Phoenix, for July, in March. I encouraged my roommates to move into a new place that wouldn't have room for me. Once those pieces were in place, quitting my job became the more convenient choice, so I knew I would do it.
I outsmarted myself, that time. I know I can do it.
Sometimes knowing you can do something is an impediment in itself. I know how to manage my weaknesses to get on the road. So, no worries. I'm free as a bird. I can clean this house over a week or months or a year. I can do whatever I want.
So why don't I?

Some of what I know of self-discipline comes from being shy--I learned to watch my mouth, to not act out, and so much more, out of a desire to not be noticed. When I would stay with my aunt Jo, she would spoil me rotten. Her kids would talk about how spoiled I was, so I felt foolish & guilty. So I became quiet, never asking for anything. (Not that that stopped Aunt Jo from spoiling me.)

The next I learned of self-discipline came from taking Tae Kwon Do. I couldn't tell you what I learned, and if it was part of the instruction, I was never aware of it. I found it through the awe and appreciation of motion.
People signing up for a lesson in martial arts expect to learn how to punch & kick, But they already have knowledge of punching and kicking, and apply what they already know to what they are learning. There was much, however, of what was beng taught that could be applied to what we already knew. We were given instruction on what to do, but also how to do it, and why to do it that way. Words and demonstration were only half. The other half came from doing. With the theory my instructor's teacher had established, I could see how the more right the motion, the more right it felt. A right-hand punch has much to do with the muscles on the left side, and we were taught to pay attention to that. We were taught the yin and the yang of every single movement. I could see that I was so much more focused in general after any week in whch I had attended three or more classes. I remember kneeling on the floor, staring at a spot on the wall (this was years before I learned anything about meditation) while others sparred. I remember the moment where I consciously thought, "You are becoming self-disciplined."

In the air again

Here I am at the Killeen airport, about to board a plane for the first time n a couple of years. The keyboard on this netbook is tiny, so expect typos.

This afternoon I'll be n Tennessee for the first time since August 2008. When I left Seattle, this was to be my final destination, so I'm glad I'm making it, I guess.
I feel like I'm going the wrong direction, though.

And... I'm flying. I had every intention of making the entire trip without leaving the ground, but this turned out to be the path of least resistance.
Um, so why am I taking it?

Everything about this feels wrong.
Anybody in the Nashville area up for a road trip?