In Love

It’s all just one big love story, you know. And we love it. We love every second of it. The ups, the downs, the twists, the turns, the heartaches, the triumphs… all of it. As I will point out again and again and again, our story is our world. We tell the story that we do, and live the story that we do, because we are in love with this thing called life. Forever seeking to get ever closer to its core, its heart, its mind, its essence, which at the end of the day is nothing but our own. The world reflects us back to ourselves perfectly. Even though we often don’t like what we see in that mirror, we intuitively know that there is something more, much more, beneath the surface image. So we keep engaging in an effort to find it, to find ourselves. 

Sometimes we make up stories that don’t reflect our true nature, or the nature of the world that we inhabit. It’s o.k., we all do it, and perhaps have to in order to come to understand what we are not. I do tend to think that is a necessary step on this crazy journey called life. One by one we can, through a process of deduction, cross off this and that as not the real me. Eventually there will be nothing left standing but the real you. Paradoxically, of course, that will be the same moment that you come to understand that there is nothing that is not you. Go figure. Ah, but what a moment of sweet liberty, and of complete responsibility at one and the same time. There is no escaping this end, but go ahead and try if you must. 

Houston is a swamp. There, I said it. The founders of Houston were speculators who sold it as something other than a swamp, something more like a new beginning in paradise. The Place upon which they laid out their new town, however, likes to send up reminders every so often. “I am a swamp,” she says. Houstonians pay her no mind. We are too busy writing a different story. We are busy creating a different version of paradise, which requires transforming the swamp into something that it is not. The swamp has her own mind with her own ideas about the paradise she once was, so in protest she sends out more frequent, more stark reminders. “I am a swamp!” The city floods. We think we must conquer this swamp thing once and for all, and so we try even harder to do so. This will not end well. The swamp will win. 

The swamp will win because you can’t fight millions of years of ecology, much less the billions of years of geology that it rests upon. We are infants in comparison to their hard earned wisdom. We would do better to start by examining our own story. Is it in alignment with what we now know to be true about the world and our place in it, or is it off somehow? When we begin to deeply ask that question, to face our unexamined assumptions, we begin to unearth not only ourselves, but everything we have buried alongside us. To jump to the chase, we must face that the worldview, the very foundation upon which Western civilization has been built, was off about the nature of reality: 

• The world is not an objective place, separate from our subjective experience of it.
• The world is not made up of dead, mechanistic matter that has been imbued with an extraterrestrial spirit (in the case of humans only).
• Life is not a competition. 
• Life does not unfold in a linear process of cause and effect. 
• We are not separate entities.

Yet while we may have been mistaken about these assumptions, our path has not been a mistake. We had to come to know what we are not before we could move into what we are:

• The world is intelligent and in a constant state of co-creation with everything in it.
• Matter and energy (spirit) are one and the same thing.
• Life is a collaboration.
• Life emerges out of a complex, integrated network of interactions such that every little action effects the whole in ways that we cannot predict.
• We are inextricably interconnected. We are One.

We have written this world into existence:

• We wrote patriarchy (hierarchy with its associated powerlessness) into existence.
• We wrote separation into existence.
• We wrote exploitation into existence.
• We wrote shame into existence.
• We wrote oppression into existence.

…and on and on. We can, therefore, write a different story. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, “When you know better, (write a better story).” 

The house that I now call home was a camp first built by a guy named Jack Murray in the late 1940’s. Jack loved both nature and culture, as evidenced by the library of photos that he left behind of his extensive travels (which we now possess). He also painted. His painting of his beloved Lake Hortonia still hangs in our house. Jack was a neighbor of Shannon’s family when she was growing up in Brandon. He shared his beloved spot with them and they, too, fell in love. Understanding this, Jack essentially willed his camp to them as one of his final acts of love. Shannon spent her summers here for most of her childhood, but summers frankly weren’t enough. They wanted to live on the lake year round, so out of this love they built up and out. They winterized and moved in. Permanently. Being good Vermonters, they did all of this themselves utilizing only the skills which resided within the family. They built their dream. They created a new life for themselves.

They created to the best of their understanding, skills, vision, imagination, and resources. They knew nothing of nutrient pollution into the lake. They knew nothing of species depletion. They knew nothing of climate change. They knew nothing of the dismantling of collective life. They knew nothing of the oppression that is associated with our way of life. But now we do. It is therefore up to us to imagine a better future, to write a new story, and to create a new reality. 

How to begin? With the foundations, of course. We must unearth our unexamined assumptions, bring them to light, and start over again with a new worldview based on our better understanding. Still in love. Still with a great sense of gratitude for the love that went before us. People ask us every day why we didn’t just tear the house down completely and start over. Well it’s because too much love had gone into that house to just throw it all away, into some landfill somewhere. Our job is to pay the love forward by constantly reaching not only for our true selves, but also for the true Lake Hortonia. There is a story that is true for everyone and everything, and it wants to be known. We must reach for it again, and again, and again, and again right up to our very end, so that we too may pass this place along to the next generation in our final act of love.