Is today Ecoday?
If you haven’t been amazed at least once today, you haven’t been paying attention.
Meaning, there are so many mundane tasks begging this moment of your life, and the next and the next, that quite easily – predictably, I would say – an entire day slips along on that bubbling and familiar current, sunrise to its setting, and nothing remarkable seems to have come of it. Yes: the employee or employer or colleague at work who never fails to get under your skin. Or: the story about someone that someone you know knows, who won some money, lost some money, recovered or lost health. All of it swirls along the surface, most comfortably, as one day becomes the next, the wheel of a month becomes the wheel of a year…
But you really should have stopped to look at that flower – no, not the flower itself: you should have stopped to look at one petal of the flower. No, still not amazing enough. Look at the veins in the petal of the flower, how they somehow, incredibly, draw water up from the soil, and open their palms to the light of the sun, and become a fragrance. There’s no need for there to be a fragrance; there’s no need for us to find pleasure when we smell it. Yet there it is, and there you are. Did you notice a flower today? Did someone give you one?
Thought not.
Here’s how to make the world stop spinning, and to start noticing things again. Sounds challenging, and more than a little fun, if you get into the sport of it, if you let yourself become a child again, where everything is possible, and every moment is learning. The intentional community we have been creating on the north shore of Massachusetts, Odonata, has education as one of its reasons for being. Education for ourselves and, in the process, the education of anyone else who wishes to drop in on one of our events, where we invite area experts to broaden our knowledge of the world. Last Sunday we heard from Tullio Inglese, a green architect from the Amherst area, who has spent a good part of his professional career building houses that get much of their heat and cooling from the earth itself, much of their electricity from the sun, much of their insulation from natural fibers or products… in short, using the smallest amount of energy possible, given the strength of current technologies and the wisdom of ancient ones.
Tullio, you see, was raised in a small farming community in Italy – he is not a product of the industrial fever which has taken our country, but one where people lived with a very clear knowledge of the value of energy. The communities were small, easy to heat, simple to share, and surrounded by arable land. Tullio said: “Houses should never be built on land which could be used to produce food!” When you think about it, at all… of course they shouldn’t.
Are you feeling defensive yet? Have you started to throw me in with some radical fringe of your imagination, who won’t rest until humans have gone back to foraging and wearing sewn skins? No: here’s the truth of it: the one greatest fragility in the western world today is the unconscious consumption of energy. Addiction is behavior repeated without the ability to control it, to change it, without the ability to decide. We cannot decide, we cannot choose differently than to feed our comforts, while we have no concept of what it is we are choosing. Last winter, I mentioned to a friend that I kept the heat quite low at night, dictated by a programmed thermostat to be below 60 degrees. Shocking. Yes, it is shocking when you sit in a home perpetually at 72 degrees or higher, and it is shocking when you have never actually worn a sweater indoors, or slippers, or put an extra quilt on your bed.
It’s most shocking, when you imagine that you would die if you were that cold.
Tell you what. Either you will learn that coldness is not the end of you, or you will see your growing children, and your children’s children, shipped off with arms to control a dwindling supply of fuel. When what parades as strength is in fact the greatest weakness… Addiction. Insanity.
OK, so make the world stop spinning already. You know how you do it? Play games. Here is a little game from New Zealand, brought to the Yoga Center of Newburyport on a crisp and clear Autumn day by our Italian import, Tullio. It’s called Ecoday, and it is not a game where you bind the eyes and swing at targets: it’s a game where you uncover your eyes, and avoid getting hit. In the middle of his presentation, Tullio removed the sweater he had been wearing to reveal a t-shirt which read:
So the rules are simple, and you just heard them. Pick a day, and practice this easy exercise: what could be simpler than taking it easy, not plugging in, not using external energy? Oh, ha ha, I forgot – we’re all complete amateurs at this. Best make sure it is a Sunday, or a Saturday, so you aren’t faced with a Very Difficult Choice: do you take an FTO day or do you lose the game before it’s even begun, by driving to work?
The first step to making any informed decision is to inform yourself. So enlist the kids – yes, I choose the verb carefully – see if you can win over the completely resistant spouse, and try living just one day, from the sun’s beautiful appearance to its gracious departure, using only the power of the amazing engine that is your body! If you ever stop yourself and say (as you may be saying now) “Oh! This is absolutely ridiculous!”, I would ask you to stop… just give yourself a short moment’s pause, to allow the possibility that it is not. Imagine withdrawing troops from an occupied territory with a shrug of the shoulders (and know that this is not the first, nor will it be the last war fought over oil). Imagine emptying your home of the dark news and biased opinions of the world. Imagine a day of silence.
For a Day of Silence
a day of a certain silence: not the stopping of mouths, but of gears a day we could say a dollar did not drive our cars.
where in the city a deep shudder runs below the sidewalks and through pipes through basements and buildings and the stonemason’s hurled arms or arms fitting seams into suits or the worried pen of the salesman; runs through the stillness of a house like thunder trapped in the dishes and pictures hung that wait to fall; runs under the skin, in our lungs, the heavy constant breath of industry; a silence, too, to that.
a day when nothing fills the grayed stacks of the grayed factories; a day the city would be stone
~
for hours we might lean at our windows, expecting the next sound
no electric voices to work the tongues of our white bedroom walls
no click from the clocks we had stopped to close the empty moment we had forgotten how to live
we would lean at our windows like hostages imagining the sun had grown suddenly too large that the wind had died
~
but soon a boy will lose his hat in a tree laugh like the bells of Sunday noon and two girls with songs rolled up in their hair will find a place between the houses between the sun and their shoes to try their music; the men who work in trucks will no longer grumble at their lack of travel, will deal hands beneath the cottonwoods; and I will talk to the couple downstairs who have been ghosts of their own footsteps
how a million strangers welcome themselves to the shaded roads of villages
how the sun falls slower that day behind the pedestrian circles
how the breeze borrows heat from the evening the flowers close their red; how a few doors swing gently to
how we find ourselves next to another in the darkness surprised to remember what it is we depend upon.
Minneapolis, 1987
Really. If you haven’t been amazed at even one little miracle today – you just ain’t payin’ attention, darlin’!