not exact but precise

March 23, 2009

There are innumerable anecdotes regarding the paradox of the straight line - even modern physics has brought forward a brighter sun, which casts a shadow where Euclid (preferably) would have none. The concept that I am backing into – leaving the paragraph’s position statement back-to-front, and rather than simply telling you what this is all about, suggesting what it is instead, by wandering in oblique circles ‘round the real garden, whose flowers are blooming all over the Universe, while a visitor stands inside-out within a small brick cubicle, before a mind-sized door, holding a mind-sized key (hand won’t tell the mind it’s been there all along, will it?), imagine feeling a visitor in one’s own universe, with the bricks of imagination cemented all about, keeping the garden out of sight – is this: sometimes the easy way is quite the poorest way, however you or others might convince you otherwise.

Three months ago I lived in what most Americans (and quite a large percentage of the non-Americans) would have called arrival, or thought of as the dream of the western world. I lived on 3.5 acres of wooded and open land, rolling hills, a small marsh behind the hill of which I was also part owner, as my property line (straight, point A to point B property line) crossed a third of it, and returned by the far margin, collecting in the slice of its legal knife a whole swath of blueberry bushes and bittersweet vines, an enormous red pine of indeterminate age (diameter measured in two hugs of my arms), and a sluice gate by which I could, if desired, slow the flow of the marsh water to the lower field, raising the level of the marsh pond, and with the drop of a hand create an upland skating rink for my kids and neighbors.

They did that in the past, you know. Additions to my house were made in 1865, when someone was lucky enough to return from the Civil War, moved west, held onto a woman as though she were life itself (she was), and through her and with her brought several more lives into the world. The central structure (according to realtors and contractors) looks to be quite a bit older. The White House in Byfield (as it is called, as it always has been) overlooks the beautiful Parker River as it flows out to the sea, and flows in with the tide… and it has overlooked that same flow and tide for quite possibly 200 years or more. The great stone wall which surrounds the land was somehow muscled into place - judging by the size of the stone blocks, laborers familiar with the Egyptian pyramids were employed. On that corner lot, the wind sighs at nights, the moon lights everything, the traffic is slow, the space is large, the equity and location is unimpeachable, the value greater than most humans’ lifetime earnings.

Having labored under that dream for several years, and taken at least a year and a half to disentangle from its fantasy, I now rent a small space on the grounds of an advisor to our ecovillage project. It is a lovely place to live, though the Dream has diminished in scale significantly. I have a large bedroom (which I don’t own) that overlooks a field (which I also don’t own); a small galley bathroom; and a living room whose far end has been cordoned off as a sleeping place for my daughter. My son, who is fifteen, has nothing cordoned off. We are working out the logistics of fitting him into my room, for the nights he sleeps with me. At fifteen, the number of those nights is dwindling.

Tonight, however, kids and cats are scattered all over the place. Nicolas has taken up his alpha-wave vigil on the living room couch. One of the cats sleeps like a puff-emperor on Isabela’s bed, while Bela herself is breathing softly, rolled up in blankets on the futon-couch in my room. The other cat knows the bed I sleep in is hers, and has of course has claimed it again tonight.

…does there have to be a point? Maybe if you wiggle that key just a little…

More than two years ago I traveled to India with my friend Manny, to find (once again) everything that was and was not me. Near the end of the trip, we visited the temporary Tibetan settlements in Bylakuppe, an hour or so from Mysore. [aside: There were no straight lines from Tibet to Bylakuppe. Southern India is a transitory place: after forty-plus years since the Chinese invasion, the inhabitants of the settlement are not settled, merely awaiting the day they might return home.] The gracious family who took us in gave us their room to sleep in. Two raised, backless couches were set along the walls; during the day they were seats for the family, in the room where they lit incense for their departed parents and ancestors. I slept upon one, and Manny upon the other. In the room behind us, through an open window covered with a gauze curtain, the father and eldest son slept in a similar room.

In the mornings when we woke, the family prepared the children for school. Some kinds of conflict must have come up now and then, but we saw none in our short stay. Instead, a closely-knit family, parents working as second-class citizens in local hospitals, or as first-class citizens in Tibetan shops. We exchanged gifts at the end of our stay.

Should there be straight lines? I think: if a straight line appears in nature, it is an aberration; I conclude: if I believe there are straight lines in life, it is aberrant thinking.

Tonight Bela sleeps gently in my room, by the window. I love her dearly. This is her last year in elementary school - she is already so grown up and intelligent, I can hardly imagine what the next years hold for me, to learn how big a person is before we understand their greatness, so soon she will step from my door into her own life. Oops - she already has. There is no moon tonight. The cats are where they shouldn’t be, and the kids are where they weren’t. Four lives now three, bundled into odds and ends of corners, sleeping soundly and safely within earshot of one another, a house diminished in size but augmented in affection, nothing in its place but everything right, a circle I would not have created but thankfully have allowed to come round.

Sometimes the equations answer themselves, when you don’t try to work them all out.