When we traded from one side of the Atlantic to the other, not everything could come along. One of the items whose value was less than the effort of shipping was the home-made standing desk I had built on the cheap from a reused children’s desk and a few two-by-fours. In two years of use, that desk revolutionized my workday, magically removing (the causes of) neck and muscle strain that had plagued my seated self, making the flow between work and quick exercises “sprints” natural and easy, straightening that slump in my desk-riding posture and, according to the Aussies, had increased the quality and length of my life by a number of years.

The inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent liked the number forty. There are a couple of dozen references to 40, measuring days or years, in those ancient teaching scripts and histories that we’ve collected into the Judeo-Christian Bible. Forty days of rain, forty years in the wilderness, forty days on the mountain; forty years old, forty sons, forty cubits, forty baths, forty days’ fast.

Other than the numeric connotation (and the fact that everything is related to everything else), there was nothing biblical about the “Alpha” trial period for my standing desk. There was a flash of insight in the form of a worrisome news article, and a half-hour’s work shifting my office from the window that overlooked the garden and the apple tree at its center; the rest was riding out the alpha wave, waiting for a sign that would tell me to: a) land my standing desk in a more permanent place, b) take it apart plank by plank, or c) keep on waiting.

Physically, I feel good getting up to work in the morning. I think it’s because I don’t get up just to sit down again. My body feels energized most of the morning, mind alert, and my frame moves around while I type up the morning’s correspondence. Two weeks in, I remain happy with the switch to a standing desk, and am considering when to build my “Beta” version, levitating my old sitting desk one-half-person into the air on a hand-designed scaffold.

There is a certain volume of accumulated human knowledge — a kind of Encyclopaedia of Safety — that is based on the trial-and-error successes of generations. One entry in that tome might be as quaint as “don’t shit in your bed” (Any argument…?) Our Australian friends have several: “Don’t introduce species into an ecology with no known predators.” (oops), or “Don’t irrigate your desert with a limited aquifer.” (oops)

There are others:

When I was close to my daughter’s age, I would often stop in at the school library at lunch time, to take out books. There were a few favorites. One was Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein: the story of a boy (very close to my age, so I imagined) living in the colonies on Mars, with his pet, unlike any pet found on Earth. It was an adventure that could have, but did not, take place on Earth, and I was able to read and reread that tale without losing either my sense of wonder or my ability to live the story as I sat comfortably on our living room couch. If you were to find the card from the back of that book (we filled out our names and checkout date on cards, no computers in libraries back then), you would see my name scratched in ever improving cursive, over and over again, with few readers able to get their moniker in edgewise.

tech • nol • o • gy | tek’näl?j? |

noun (pl. -gies)

ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Greek tekhnologia ‘systematic treatment,’ from tekhn? ‘art, craft’ + -logia ‘knowledge’, originally in reference to grammar. In the mid-1800s applied to industry and industrial works. Finally, circa 1964, ‘High Technology’ was coined for the overtures of the digital age.

Like most words, its meaning has followed the pursuits of those who use it, mirrored the world in which it is uttered, and dissolved its connotations from one web of meaning into another, gently pulling its associations along with it.

If you are familiar with the Tarot – not the arcane, mystifying deck of cards employed by lesser guides, but the cards whose images represent archetypal moments and movements in life – you will recognize its patterns and elements in places and phases of your own life. They were, after all, the result of many years of inner science in the western world, a system of symbols similar to the Chinese I Ching, that could be used to shake up your habits of thought, and let you see deeper into a situation than you normally would.

In an introduction to his poem “Technology”, my son, during his eighth-grade graduation speech, wondered aloud if our technical advances were the hallmark of a New Age, or in fact its death-knell. His words rang with youthful and categorical vigor which is harder to come by in middle age, and so strident that they are easy to dismiss… until one picks up the newspaper.

This morning, for example, the New York Times published one of those articles which have recently come back into vogue: real data concerning the state of the planet. Apparently considered to be adverse to sales, and certainly politically unpopular during the current administration’s puerile governance, stories which whispered wisdom and spoke of the road not taken were rare, and support for anything but the paradigm of War seemed beyond our national conscience.

The human spirit and the human body seek to be refreshed. Seek to find: the human body feels movement in the cells, a one-way current of life through life, source to sea. The human spirit opens wider and wider as waves of experience crash against its sand and stone; we are carved into bays and bars by the tide.

We seek, at a conscious or subconscious level, to be refreshed, and apparent refreshment appears at our reaching fingertips. We scarcely need to make an effort. A student of mine brings a passage from a book she had been reading… on her telephone. A man or a woman walks down the street, slim wire running from ear-buds to hip, while at the hip a small white box contains hours or days of favorite music, presented in the order or disorder desired, at the highest fidelity.

Been writing over in the Odonata sphere tonight. I continue in this web journal, a journey of personal inquiry and spirituality, carrying an undying (if vain) hope that Señor Manuel will be back to join me some time… Eh, Mañuel, puedese hablar español también, amigo!

While the words here reflect an individual path, I have also begun to keep a day-book, with other members of the Odonata Ecovillage project, to track communal growth and inquiry, and to detail how that amazing, challenging, and already rewarding work is progressing.