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1:13am September 3, 2014

soilrockslove:

At university recently, they’ve been talking about International Travel and Study Abroad a lot.  And how it’s broadening and exposes you to different cultures and such.  And what you can learn.  And how it will “change you forever”.

But there’s also things that you can only learn by staying in one place for a very long time. Watching the sun come up on the same pool again and again. Until you learn every mood and cast of light.  What comes in the winter.  What grows in the summer.  What visits at each time of day.  From opening your eyes again and learning each day.  And piecing together the lives around you.  Getting to know your neighbors.  And it will definitely change you, too.

And as for cultures… The Tohono O’odham nation is maybe 10 miles from here.  And the Pascua Yaqui community.  And there’s South Tucson, and the Jewish community, and the East side, and the super-wealthy fancy uber-east-side a.k.a. “the foothills”.  Which I know all have to deal with the same USA culture and politics, so they have some commonalities.  But if you can’t find *any* cultural diversity there, then you probably won’t find it in another country either.

On the other hand there are lots of good reasons to travel and lots of different kinds of people in the world.  I’m just speaking for the other side.

So here I am. place-bound, rooted.   And maybe the roots will go deep enough to be beyond frost and drought.  Maybe they might hit hidden water.  Maybe not. I guess I’ll find out!

That’s a lesson I learned from being bedridden for long periods of time – six years, at the longest.  People don’t understand the value of being in one place for ages.

It also reminds me of this verse from the Tao Te Ching:

Without going outside, you may know the whole world.
Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven.
The farther you go, the less you know.

Thus the wise know without traveling;
See without looking;
Work without doing.

I only wish I had the capacity to stay in the one place that needs me, forever.  I am lucky that it seems to have found a way to allow me to be there without physically being there.  But if I could spend my entire life there, physically, then many things would be even better.  As it is, I have to rely on sensing in order to be there every day.  

There’s a part of me that never left and never can leave, and it’s that part of me that I rely on to stay there.  It’s outside of time, and outside of space, and therefore it is there, forever, complete.  And on that level, I don’t have to be there physically at all, as long as that part was ever there, as long as that part remains there outside of time.

But that is a very hard thing to explain to anyone.  Especially to people who are stuck inside a very limited view of what time is.  They think you can go somewhere, be somewhere, do something, and then stop doing it, not be doing it, never do it.  And that’s not how it works.  I am still in the redwoods and always will be.

But it would still mean a lot to me if I could go back and spend the rest of my life there.  Unfortunately, it’s become a costly place to live, I would not have services, I would not have an accessible apartment, and I would probably be homeless entirely.  Yuppies from Silicon Valley have taken over the general area and it is vastly changed to fit their lifestyle and their cost of living.

But if I could – if I ever could – live there, and live there safely, and live there for the rest of my life, I would go back in a heartbeat and never leave.

I feel strange… at least I feel that I am strange.  In that I know several people like me, you included, where our spirituality is intensely tied to a specific place.  Where we have been invited into this situation by the place itself, not by any human spiritual or religious people.  But most of the people I know who are like this, they live in that place.  I’m the only one I know who doesn’t.  

It sometimes makes me wonder if what I’m doing is authentic enough, real enough.  If I need to move back to the redwoods in order to practice my faith.  But when I put that question to the forest itself, it says no.  It says I’m already there.  It says I was born there.  It says I am under its protection for life.  It says I will always be there, no matter where I go, and that I will always be there above and beyond any place that I might go to otherwise.  That whatever connection I have that allows me to do what Kathy Mattea describes as:

In the dead of the night, in the still and the quiet
I slip away, like a bird in flight
Back to those hills, the place that I call home

And I do that, I do that readily, because I am still there.  Because I will never leave, because I can never leave.  Because I have put down roots so deep into that soil that the rest of me can go wherever it wants, and the roots don’t move at all.

I would still like to be there in body, though.  Forever.  But I assume there’s some reason that I’m not, that I can’t.  Because I get the sense that if the forest demanded that I be there as part of my spiritual practice, I would be there.  And yet I’m not there, not physically, not now.  But sometime, I am always there, outside of time, I am always there, in the roots I have grown, I am always there.

Does this make any sense to you?  It has seemed very strange to me that I have a spiritual practice that is so tied to a few square miles of land, and yet I am not on that land, in fact I’m 3,066 miles away, according to Google Maps.  So how is this possible?  Why is this happening this way?  Do you have any idea?  I have so few people I can ask, because we are scattered all over the planet, doing our part to keep the marona of the places we have been attached to.  I imagine I can’t be the only person in exile, nor the only person who, despite that exile, finds that I am not in exile at all, I am still there.  And who can’t make sense of this.  Can you?