Twelve by Twelve (33 page)

Finishing my work, I notice the peace around me. I look down from a bougainvillea and passion fruit terrace toward the village, a couple hundred modest, whitewashed adobe homes with clay-tiled
roofs. Above them, on the cliffs at the far side of the valley, crouches a jaguar-shaped Inca temple.

I reflect on how profoundly the 12 × 12 experience has changed me. When abroad, I used to live in large homes or apartments. Now I live in a rustic two-bedroom bungalow without a television or any other appliance besides a refrigerator. I’ve put my secular missionary days behind me — no more converting the Idle Majority to a Western idea of Progress. Now I try to join the Idlers as much as possible, thereby freeing up time to grow my own food and be with my daughter, who is with me on the weekends. I don’t own a car anymore. Instead I walk, bike, or take public transport.

These external changes flow from inner change. I’ve released most negativity: no more Nazi dreams, no more anger toward the people who physically assaulted me or guilt over the shape of my fatherhood. I realized that such negativity does no good and I gradually let it go. Above all, the 12 × 12 experience catalyzed more mindfulness in everything I do. I’ve come to increasingly inhabit “the other world inside of this one,” that state of consciousness that Jung and Einstein talked about, where durable change happens. It’s not about “me,” but rather about overcoming the dim, narrow space of ego — and humbly dedicating my life energy toward a broader process. I find myself listening to my intuition every day, and it tells me, very clearly, about my place in the whole.

I walk over to my daughter and mother. On a large sheet of paper, they’re now painting the idyllic village below, a place where corporate globalization touches lightly. Samaipata has little advertising, absolutely no chain stores, the town’s three thousand people surrounded by some three million acres of nature. Inca culture goes back to 1500 BC and is still present in the village’s robust way of living with instead of against the earth. Amaya and my mom paint some of that: the neighbors spinning raw wool into yarn and gathering medicinal herbs.

A side of me wishes to freeze this scene. But can we? Amaya, for one, doesn’t seem to think so. She’s added something to the painting, above the brush-stroked circular garden and the Inca temple: a rainbow-colored airplane with butterfly wings.

In the past this might have saddened me: “globalization” in the form of noisy 747s roaring over this traditional village; my daughter, disconnected from place. Now I’m less fearful of change. There’s a suchness in that detail, something to be traced to its source and transformed. Jackie doesn’t suggest that we constrain ourselves to cookie-cutter eco-austerity, copying her. Quite the contrary; she suggests we be still, look deeply inward, and then act.

Change will come; it is coming. For me personally, Amaya’s mom may accept a master’s scholarship in the United States, and she would bring our daughter there for a time. And a think tank in New York has asked me to use my years of field experience to help shape US global warming legislation aimed at conserving the world’s last rainforests because of their role absorbing greenhouse gasses — in other words, work toward a paradigm shift.

There are trade-offs. I admire my expatriate friends who have come to settle in Samaipata for good — one runs an organic café, Tierra Libre (the Free Earth); another manages a sustainable farm, La Vispera (the Eve) — and I aspire toward a more physically rooted life. But I know that my place in the whole, for now, remains global.

Even in large cities, it is possible to maintain warrior presence and scale back from overdevelopment to enough. By planting a windowsill or community garden; doing yoga; walking and biking; and carrying out at least one positive action for others every day. Nor do we need to live 12 × 12 to experience the subtle joy of being. Whether in the city or the country, leave your cell phone, books, and other distractions behind and sit or walk — very slowly. Pay attention to your senses; feel the breeze, notice smells and sounds. Try the meditation three-times-ten: Breathe in to a slow count of ten, drawing in
light and gratitude. Hold that abundance for another count of ten. Then let your breath out slowly, counting to ten, exhaling any fears, negativity, or resentment, all that inner charcoal. Doing this during a busy day, I find myself much more patient and relaxed with myself and with others. We decide what gets globalized — consumption or compassion; selfishness or solidarity — by how we cultivate the most valuable place of all, our inner acre.

As I cultivate that acre, it naturally links with others. There is enormous hope for more mindful internationalism. One million community groups, NGOs, and other grassroots efforts have sprung to life around the world, the biggest upswell of people power ever. Thinking of this, I feel new questions bubble up: If we are globalizing, why not globalize a reverence for the still, the small? Can we globalize planes with “butterfly wings”: ones that run clean? Can we globalize maladjustment to empire by linking those one million soft spots within the flat — Samaipata and Pine Bridge; Quechua culture and permaculture? While the current global economic downturn might challenge these NGOs in the short term, in the long term it might get people living on less and closer to the earth, and turning away from a life of excess. Because of the financial crisis, even some of the captains of industry I’ve talked with are finally understanding that another kind of globalization is necessary. The current world — built on a shaky platform of blinding wealth and grinding destitution — is not in their interest, either, because it makes the whole system unstable.

As Amaya and my mom put the last touch on their painting — a bright red and orange sun over the whole scene — I’m reminded of the quality of light at Jackie’s on my final visit there: eight months after I’d left Pine Bridge, and right before I came to the Bolivian village.

I spent the night in the Pauls’ 12 × 12 guesthouse. Jackie came over to their place for dinner, and we all caught up by candlelight.
The Pauls were doing remarkably well. They had negotiated a don’task, don’t-tell arrangement with the state inspector; they eventually signed a statement saying they did not live in their 12 × 12 year-round so as not to have to install electricity, plumbing, and so on. But — wink-wink, nod-nod — they still live there year-round.

To my dismay, the Thompsons’ freeholder experiment had failed. Their trailer park background hadn’t prepared them to farm. Under financial pressure, they had sold their animals and purchased a Rent-a-Center franchise to try to generate enough income to keep their land. When I went to visit them, they and all the animals were gone. Only a lifeless silence hung over their place.

I also learned some hopeful things. José had just made a sale in Siler City — and he would continue crafting his beautiful furniture. Graciela got her raise at McDonald’s and would continue to work there for a few years before retiring in her native Honduras. And Bradley had just completed a new eco-community; dozens of homesteads for wildcrafters-to-be were about to go on sale. And the 12 × 12s he’d built for the Pauls demonstrated the kind of fruition possible. When I woke up the next morning in their 12 × 12, I felt the peaceful absence of electricity. Paul Sr. wrote poetry longhand on his porch across the way; Paul Jr. smoked a pipe, staring out toward the curving paths that led to the creek.

That afternoon I went to Jackie’s, and I noticed that day’s card on her tiny stand. Hidden in the stack behind it were the ones I’d puzzled over, like
ARE YOU SURE
? and
ABANDON ALL HOPE OF FRUITION
. But this one was the simplest yet. It read:
MINDFULNESS
.

Something clicked. I recalled that this was the very title of the Mary Oliver poem Jackie had sent me in her letter, inviting me to stay in the 12 × 12. I looked over at Jackie, in the late afternoon sunlight, and asked her, “What do you think it means, that line in the poem about ‘this soft world’?”

Jackie didn’t respond. The light streamed in, illuminating her
bottles of homemade wine. It illuminated the cedar wall, the translucent rainwater catchment tanks outside, and the Sun Shower bladder hanging from a branch. As the silence stretched out, I knew this nonanswer was her answer. Ultimately, we must figure it out for ourselves, whispering alone into the well, attentive to what comes back up. Through the window, a radiant No Name Creek shimmered, and the sunlight gathered in brilliant intensity around Jackie.

This is the same light that infuses my bedroom in Bolivia. Amaya is the first to notice it, and she nudges me awake.
“Hay luz,”
she says. I mutter something about “ten more minutes” and hug her close. She’s quiet for a moment but then insists:
“Ya no es noche. Es dia.”
— “It’s not night anymore. It’s day now.”

We walk outside into a new place — the same one. The home I’ve been searching for, I now know, has always been millimeters away. Home is the luminous everyplace where spirit meets clay. Change is coming, but I hold Amaya’s hand. A dozen butterflies flutter over the garden, inviting us to grab tools and press seeds into this soft world.

MIND FULNESS

HERE ARE A FEW SUGGESTIONS
on continuing the journey. This brief appendix is a condensation of the much wider network of resources on my website,
www.williampowersbooks.com
.

PERMACULTURE AND WILDCRAFTING

• World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms
  (
  www.wwoof.org
  ): Help out on a family organic farm during your next vacation, in exchange for room, board, and sustainability skills.
  
• El Bosque Organic Garlic Farm
  (
  www.vrbo.com/118083
  ): Stan and Rose Mary Crawford have turned a circular stone cabin in their garlic fields into a B&B guesthouse; harvest with them in their revolutionary fields.
  
• The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia
  (
  http://permaculture.org.au
  ): Study the things our grandparents knew but our parents forgot with Bill Mollison, or check out his book,
  Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual
  .
  
• Being Self Sufficient-ish
  (
  www.selfsufficientish.com
  ): Twins Andy and Dave Hamilton give practical advice on extracting oneself from the corporate economy — even without taking an all-out permaculture plunge.
  

SOFT ECONOMY

• Find a farmers market
  near your home by visiting the US Department of Agriculture website:
  http://apps.ams.usda.gov/FarmersMarkets
  .
  
• Slow Food USA
  (
  http://slowfoodusa.org
  ): Support good, clean, and fair food through a local
  chapter of the nonprofit Slow Food group.
  
• Socially responsible investing
  can be done through Social Funds (
  http://socialfunds.com
  ). For financial advice and help cutting up your credit cards, visit Motley Fool (
  www.fool.com
  ).
  
• New American Dream
  (
  www.newdream.org
  ): Ideas for shifting American culture from overdeveloped to enough.
  
• CouchSurfing
  (
  www.couchsurfing.org
  ): Find places to stay for free worldwide through the nonprofit organization Couch-Surfing.
  
• Buy fairly traded goods
  from the Bolivian coffee cooperatives with whom I worked and from others on the creative edge of the Global South through the Fair Trade Federation (
  www.fairtradefederation.org
  ).
  
• Calculate your carbon footprint
  . Input information about your lifestyle, and the Carbon Footprint website (
  www.carbonfootprint.com
  ) will compare your carbon footprint to other averages around the world.
  

WARRIOR PRESENCE

• Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization
  (
  http://3HO.org
  ): This nonprofit kundalini yoga institute holds solstice yoga retreats and a White Tantric Yoga event. Their challenging eight-day retreat in New Mexico was one of the most rewarding weeks I’ve had.
  
• Thich Nhat Hahn Plum Village retreats
  (
  http://plumvillage.org
  ): Attend spiritual retreats at Thich Nhat Hahn’s retreat center in Plum Village, France.
  
• Alternative children’s education
  includes homeschooling and the Steiner Waldorf Schools (
  steinerwaldorf.org
  ).
  
• Thich Nhat Hahn Plum Village retreats
  (
  http://plumvillage.org
  ): Attend spiritual retreats at Thich Nhat Hahn’s retreat center in Plum Village, France.
  
• Alternative children’s education
  includes homeschooling and the Steiner Waldorf Schools (
  steinerwaldorf.org
  ).