Twelve by Twelve (18 page)

The seduction of the 12 × 12 experience drew Leah and me in: organic food, fresh air and water, feeling God through feeling good. But looming in the background was the unsustainable lifestyles we both normally lived. Sure, I had the financial resources to drive a car, but is it sustainable? What is the larger cost of this mentality to the planet? I tried to be transparent about my own hypocrisy, of navigating the tensions of mindfulness. I began to see things in terms of what you might call false privilege, or any action that can’t be
enjoyed by everyone on the planet without compromising our ecosystems. Until that is somehow reconciled, clean living is all seduction and little sacrifice.

ON A LONG WALK ONE DAY,
Leah and I talked about living honorably in the environmental era, a time when all of our planet’s life systems are in decline. Before we realized it we were a couple of miles into the countryside, near a pond freckled with leaves and seeds. We stopped and sat on its banks.

An hour passed in silence. I let my gaze glaze the pond’s surface. A flying insect made perfect circles, two feet in circumference, and then began lazily carving figure eights. After a while I was no longer looking at a pond; it had in a sense seeped inside of me and merged with the nearly two-thirds of my body that is water. Closing my eyes I felt its dimpled surface, its cool foreign depths. The figure eights started to tickle. I was smiling when I opened my eyes. The feeling was more than a little weird to the rational mind. What was going on? Something inside me was shifting. I was getting glimpses into the mystical experience — the sense that everything is intricately connected into a grand unity. It’s what Thoreau meant when he called fish “animalized water,” or what Whitman meant when he called grass “the journeywork of stars.” It’s Van Gogh’s wheat fields and starry skies bleeding into their background; Gauguin painting people in colors as earthy as the world around them.

“I feel different,” Leah said, walking back to the 12 × 12. The sun was setting in red and orange pastels. I looked over at her. Her soft blonde hair fell over bare shoulders, just the strap of a black tank top. A bit of perspiration covered her forehead, matting a patch of her hair. She brought up a hand to push it back, and then her hand came down and took hold of mine. We stopped and kissed for a long while. It wasn’t our first kiss. Though we’d initially hesitated to become lovers — as if that would somehow obscure the spiritual and societal
questions we were grappling with — we eventually allowed ourselves to express what we were both feeling. We held each other, and I looked over her shoulder into the thickening green of the oaks and dogwoods. Spring was now here.

We walked on. Another mile, then two, and I felt something catch in my chest, beyond the budding romance with Leah. Is there any limit to what I, what she, what we humans could become? I felt a sense of awe, as if all of my former boundaries had melted and I was now a pile of clay ready for molding.

Back at the 12 × 12, we lit the candles and cooked up a stir-fry with freshly picked shiitake mushrooms, sipped heirloom tea, and entered into a kind of stillness that I thought was possible only in solitude. It was cool outside; the full moon lit up some dark gray clouds passing over. We heard the first spring frogs calling, and some cicadas, and saw Venus through the window. I was thinking about Jackie; she’d emailed me from her Nevada desert peace walk and dropped a hint that a big change was afoot in her life. I wondered what it was. And then I wasn’t thinking about anything at all.

“There’s a roominess to the present moment,” Leah said. We lapsed back into silence for the longest time. Actually we had little conception of time. Sitting there in Jackie’s goosehead rocker, hearing the slightest bubbling of the creek, I entered into a kind of trance.

I felt the house and me overlap with a click; we fell into place together, fitting each other like shoehorn on heel. A similar thing would happen again several times when I was alone in the 12 × 12 at night. But on this, the first time, with Leah, I felt a shiver. Most of the time, of course, I was just in the little house cooking, baking, writing, dressing, sleeping, marveling at the sky through the window. But then it would happen, suddenly, on the rocker:
I feel the house living inside me
. Not metaphorically, but actually inside me, doing house things like warming, illuminating, freezing, getting dirty, getting clean, boiling, baking, inspiring, being still. Grounded, but
stretching a little toward heaven. Breathing through a flung-open window or door, breathing through my mouth. Inside me.

I was somewhere else. Nowhere, with a tiny house in there. Leah had a look on her face at once bewildered and astonished. She whispered, “Did you feel that?”

I did, and I still do. That’s the One Life about which words are only signposts. It’s the other world inside of this one, the place beyond contradictions. Are we to find the fullness of life in more things, in faster food and bigger shopping malls? Or is it to be found in the still, the small, the radical present?

WHAT‘S THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD?

Looking at baby lettuce coming up, the smell of fresh, loamy soil saturating my nostrils, and feeling around at the dewy base of the lettuce for weeds to release, I burst out laughing. An all-out guffaw. It’s the wrong question. When the Aymara philosopher Honamti told me, by the blue shores of Lake Titicaca, that the earth was round up into the heavens, round out to the horizon, and round into our inner selves, he was actually trying to destroy the idea of roundness. His trinity of circles — up, out, in — is an allegory meant to smash the idea of our earth as any geometrical shape at all. It’s not flat, nor is it, in any lived sense, round. So what is it?

Perhaps the world is not shape but rhythm. As my laughter died, I could hear something in the wind in the trees above; the slightly discordant bubble-gurgle of the creek; the peck-peck-peck of a giant woodpecker over the low baseline of buzzing bees in their hives. The search for a meaningful life is the search for the right chord, getting our rhythm in tune with the cosmic jazz improvised all around us. It’s not a national anthem, a pop song, or a tired waltz. It’s music that
dances unpredictably with the silence all around it, that’s a little off-key. The Russian philosopher and composer Gurdjieff talks about the Rule of Seven, where all of our lives metaphorically play out along a scale of seven notes, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti at first, but with one or two of the notes always changing, throwing the music into a constantly unstable state. This creates the problems of the world, which are then temporarily solved in the next bar of music. We’re germinated to a rhythm; our mother’s heartbeat is a conga drum beating beneath our racing little dot of a heart as our limbs, face, and fingernails take shape. It’s that beat that we lose when we come out of her.

A year after I left the 12 × 12, I returned to No Name Creek, and Jackie and I stood outside one night under the stars. They shimmered in the sky and on the creek. She left me alone for a minute, disappearing into the 12 × 12, and then returned with a pair of everyday binoculars and handed them to me.
What could I possibly see out here on such a dark night?
I thought. Jackie pointed into the sky, toward Orion’s knife.

I chuckled at the absurdity. Without a telescope, what could I possibly see? Nevertheless, I humored her, pointing the low-tech binoculars up at Orion’s bow. I traced the clear belt of three stars and then saw the weapon at his side, three dimmer stars, his knife. I squinted through the lens; nothing special. It hardly seemed to magnify anything. Looking at Jackie for help, I noticed her smiling. “Focus on the middle star in the knife,” she said.

I looked again. Remarkably, the point of that middle star loosened, blurred as if the lens were smeared. Puzzled, I relaxed my gaze and allowed the image to reveal itself. It wasn’t a star at all, but a nebula of stars.

“It’s the Orion nebula,” Jackie said, “an interstellar cloud of hydrogen gas, dust, and plasma.” She explained that it’s a star-forming region, where materials clump together to form bigger masses that further attract matter and eventually become stars. “The ‘leftovers’
are believed to form planets,” she said. “So it’s not a single star, but a million pieces of a future star.”

That nebula is a metaphor for Jackie’s effect on me. What before looked like one single thing was actually a million. Edges of the ordinary blurred.

There’s a rare and puzzling condition called synesthesia where your senses, in effect, cross. Swiss musician Elizabeth Sulston, for example, hears pleasant chords as the taste of sweet cream. Dissonant, grating chords taste bitter. Sulston, according to a study published in
Nature
, is the first known case mixing sound and taste. Much more common is the blurring of sound and sight, where, for example, the sound of a birdcall “looks blue.” Scientists believe the condition originates in the limbic system, a primitive region of the brain associated with behavior and emotion. Even more fascinating, studies on infants suggest that we all start out as synesthetes, but soon after birth, neural circuits are pruned and we lose this ability. “It’s not a short circuit in the system,” neurologist Richard Cytowic is quoted as saying, “but a primitive mechanism that was somehow lost to the rest of us.”

When the middle star of Orion’s knife fell apart through Jackie’s binoculars, I could practically hear the soft rain of a didgeridoo. I’m no synesthete, but coming into nature, into solitude, at the 12 × 12 broke down boundaries for me, including the boundary between the supposedly distinct five senses. They blurred together at times, forging music. Jackie is a scientist, of course, but she approaches nature with a creative eye rather than a dissecting one. Do this, and you enter a convergent world, where things fit together in fresh ways, rather than a divergent one, where an impatient eye dissects reality to intellectual minutia. I was allergic to hard science at school, but while at the 12 × 12 I opened the scientific books on her shelf — geology, hydrology, organic chemistry, astronomy, plant biology — and the landscape around the tiny house deepened exponentially like
cells dividing. Underground rivers surged through channels a hundred yards under the 12 × 12; the Jack grapes out the window turned sunlight into energy and exhaled the oxygen I breathed; the compost pile chomped up old straw, tough vegetable stems, and hedge clippings and made soil; the night sky, seen so gloriously with the absence of electricity at her house, became theater. “There’s the cup,” she told me, “and that star is the constellation’s only named star:
Alkes
. And over there” — she pointed to a spot above No Name Creek — “is the bear driver, which Homer mentions in his
Odyssey
.”

At Jackie’s, the edges of the “hard” sciences blurred together, and this is exactly where permaculture occurs. One of the books I discovered on Jackie’s shelf was Bill Mollison’s
Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual
, which has sold over a hundred thousand copies, suggesting to me how much the phenomenon is spreading. In a chapter called “Edges,” Mollison explains that the edges between ecosystems — for instance, between water and land or a hill and flatland — hold more variety than the middle. This is because they’re transition zones where unique and diverse life can flourish, such as amphibians that straddle aquatic and terrestrial areas. Home and farm become sculpture you gently shape, consciously cultivating additional edges, and therefore more richness, diversity, and surprise. Jackie, for instance, created a pond among her beds to foster more edges, resulting in frogs, insects, and aquatic plants. Likewise, I remember puzzling during my first earth mentorship with Stan Crawford in New Mexico over how to combine hydrology and biology so as to grow crops most effectively in that dry climate. The solution: I planted my blue corn in the furrows and not on the mounds, where they’d capture more of the scarce rainfall. And so on. Permaculture isn’t industrial agriculture; it’s art and music afield.

FINALLY, I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY
to visit the Pauls, a fatherson team who’d left a comfortable suburban life near Philadelphia to
wildcraft in Adams County. Jackie wrote to me about them: “The Pauls (Sr. and Jr.) are finishing up three 12 × 12s, much more elaborate than mine, but they have more money than I do. They have thirty-two acres about five miles from me. You might visit them. They’re just starting.”

As I pedaled along the Pauls’ half-mile dirt drive, their small pasture and vast woods opened up to me. They were to be the first people to live on this land, at least in modern times. The silence was immense. Out toward the edge were three 12 × 12s, the only structures on this vast property. I had that African safari feeling all of a sudden, of being in the middle of the veldt, as if a large mammal — antelope, zebra, rhino, hippo — could burst forth at any moment.

As I got closer and parked my bike, I took a closer look at the 12 × 12s; their rooftops stood taller than Jackie’s, and they had larger front and back porches. In fact, each of the porches had as much square footage as the entire house. I was dying to peek inside, and almost did, when I spotted an older man waddling out of the forest. “I’m Paul,” he said, his handshake much more vigorous than I expected. “Paul Sr., that is. Paul Jr. is dealing with a minor disaster.” He was sixty-seven, a retired American studies and religion professor from a Pennsylvania college. Paul Sr. reminded me of photos I’d seen of Robert Frost in his later years: waifish, stooped, distinguished.