We can intend to shift our home environment (chuck everything plastic and eat well) and our external environment (live and work in a calm and nourishing place). But let’s face it, one or both of those is a complete luxury. Two other Crucial Minutiae-ers and I recently email chatted about internal environment versus lining all the externals up in a row. Perhaps an inner peace is the ultimate healer. Then the word “disease” came up and one of them passed on the reworking of that word into “dis-ease.” A brilliant understanding. You can live a pristine, wholesome, uncluttered, chemical-free life and still feel emotionally burdened and insane. Or you might, like a monk I once knew, live in the rush of mid-town New York surrounded by smog and the throng of unpredictable people, somehow maintaining the deepest ease in your heart.

What surprises/shocks you about your knowledge as you try to place each country?

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/just_fun/games/mapgame.html

**Thank you to Samantha Dabney for sending this map to me many moons ago. It continues to educate.

Being from nowhere once made me feel like I had no place and therefore no “people.” Of course, I have many tribes, probably three of four that resonate most with me. There is something poignant about Arnold’s quote below, with its wonderful teenage-hood ness and cultural context. In 2009, how relevant is the fact that we are being asked to step away from the one or two tribes we clutch to in order to breed some tolerance in this world? Very, I think.

But how does one do this without watering down an identity? 

I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in my loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream.

I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms.

And the tribe of cartoonists.

And the tribe of chronic masturbators.

And the tribe of teenage boys.

And the tribe of small-town kids.

And the tribe of Pacific Northwesterners.

And the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers.

And the tribe of poverty.

And the tribe of funeral-goers.

And the tribe of beloved sons.

And the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends.

It was a huge realization.

And that’s when I knew that I was going to be okay. 

In pursuit of wisdom, I grew up trying to define it. I assumed that it looked serious–a solemn face furrowed in Deep Meaningful Smart Thought and often staring into the grassy distance. When I spotted people like this, I gazed upon them like a dutiful servant, terribly impressed by what they might know about the world, but never particularly soothed.

As I step into my 30’s (and therefore become supposedly wiser, though I’d trust a toddler’s insight over anyone’s my age), wisdom is begging for a new wardrobe. Be-gg-ing for it.

What I’ve noticed is that the people I respect the most do one thing consistently… Giggle. This does not mean they lack Deep Meaningful Smart Thought. They just don’t look so burdened by it, or so damn serious. They are airy. They are light. They do that bending like a reed in the wind thing.

Desmond Tutu has toiled to transform brutal circumstances into reconciliation. But watch him; he laughs a lot. I once knew a Hindu monk who just laughed and laughed at all of my so-vital-to-me questions. An older friend dying of cancer continues to be about the jolliest, most smiley man you’ll ever meet. Often trauma lives behind the laughter. Like, for example, my neighbor. He and his wife trudged through the snow for dinner last night. I called them beforehand to make sure they liked the purple-red root vegetable that so many people despise. He laughed into the phone, “That’s a long story, but I’ll tell you over some beets.” As we forked roasted beets into our mouths, he told of growing up in the Netherlands during World War II. He, his parents and four siblings survived on beets and tulip bulbs alone–as did the Jewish family they were hiding in the basement. He was laughing as he recounted this memory, but his laughter contained both a profound acknowledgment of that awful reality and an undercurrent of godly bliss. I don’t know how he did it. 

None of this comes naturally to me. I sigh sadly over tragedy. And I like to dig up the dirt, examine it under a microscope and then ponder over it for days. My family teases me about being so serious and my friend Katinka recently chuckled as she read my horoscope out loud to me: “Some people might think you are an intense person. Well, this month…” 

But my brothers do thrive on making me pee in my pants from laughing. So these days I’m trying (and it’s hard!) to spend more time in that place, that geography on my face. The hard-working crowd saving-the-world-with-a-frown doesn’t catch my eye anymore, nor do the forever-analyzing intellectuals. I’m impressed instead by the belly-laughers–those whose wisdom is finding a collective humor and buoyancy in the muck, those who sparkle with awe, those who allow that childlike simplicity to take them right over.

I don’t depend on a herd, but I am anticipating living in a cold unlike any I’ve experienced, partially because I’ll be living in a yurt. Winter blasted into Montana the first week of October with 1° temperatures, a foot of snow and icicles hanging like daggers from homes. The snow has melted and left us some semblance of fall, but aspens and cottonwoods never had a chance to turn golden yellow. The leaves froze into a mottled purple color; now they flutter like strange ghosts casting a strange purpley hue in the valley.  

A friend of mine hates summer. I love summer. Maybe for her, summer is the killing season, a killing of some piece of her, but I’m not sure anyone reading this blog or using a computer (like me) can understand what a killing season actually entails.

I am a chronic anticipator. I anticipate what will happen next, how it will happen, and often I anticipate the worst in order to pre-grief whatever might await. As Rebecca Solnit writes, “Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t–and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.” 

So when another friend of mine (a visionary artist) shared his debilitating worry about whether a commission would go through with an important client, I told him about what I try to do in those moments of self-doubt or worry. Imagine that “worry thought pattern” inside your brain. Give it a color and watch it traversing across your scalp. Now, erase it; start at one end and smudge it out inch-by-slow-inch. With that new vacant space, draw a vibrant healthy thought pattern in a different color. Do this every time that “worry thought pattern” appears. Eventually, you reprogram yourself. 

That’s an inner space I can visualize. We make grooves in our brain and our heart. Usually those grooves are worn-down roads. Despite the difficulty of traveling these roads, we like strolling down them again because they are familiar. I wonder about all the uncharted pathways in our inner spaces. There’s a fact floating around out there that humans only use 10 % of our brain. The possibility, the possibility, the possibility. And what of the heart?

“I have a fear of open spaces,” she shared. Before I could dredge up the word Agoraphobia (that anxiety disorder that Woody Allen, and even mermaid Daryl Hannah are labeled with), she launched into a lament about how her children and husband never understand and that she can only cross a street in NYC when someone walks with her. Otherwise, she spirals into a debilitating anxiety attack.

“What about fields outside? Does it happen there too?” I asked, because a life without the distinct pleasure of feeling tiny in the natural world seemed to me like no life at all. 

“Well, I’ve lived in the city my whole life, but anytime I have been in a field, it’s the same,” and she rambled on and on, as if I were the first person to listen.

Some people with Agoraphobia can never leave the house or “safe space”; most photos detailing it show people staring out windows with painful/longing/confused looks on their faces. As an open-space junkie (which isn’t to say that I don’t also love a nook), I had a hard time hearing this woman’s story and imagining all the lack of arms-thrown-open delight in her life. 

Are we each born with a unique spatial orientation? Why would the shapes I see coming at me look the same as the shapes coming at you? Like everything, it reminds me of the nature v. nurture debate. And then I tracked my own fear. Though I can lie in a sparse field for most of the day, at some point, the cells in my body register that animal-feeling of wanting to take shelter, to dash towards a cozy spot under a tree, or at least to know that there is somewhere to hide.

“Go a mile wide, not deep” has always been my family’s mantra. I lived in five different countries before the age of 11 and my parents instilled in me the importance of a particular mindset–global, open and evolving. As an adult, I have translated that vision into two principles: the need to continually change environments in job and place (not so hard) and to seek out, in our “like-attracts-like” world, a good proportion of friends who don’t think, look, act, or feel like me (harder than it sounds).

But, knowing that the flip side can be sweet, I also have a thing for the word local and the idea of being deeply connected to a community and a landscape. The instant I start to slip into reverie about such a life, my wandering self barks, “But you must always push beyond your comfort zone! DO NOT get stuck in your comfort zone.” So I live my life wondering, Which way is better?

For example, I recently emerged from the glow of a friend’s wedding. From my outsider’s perspective, it seems that his lifelong romance with Washington State informs his profound confidence and confirms that this place of his roots is the only place he wants to be. One week later, I met an American woman who spent 30 years living abroad, everywhere from Pakistan to Saudia Arabia to Brazil to New Zealand. Her eyes sparkled with the wild look of broad understanding.

What is better? There is no answer and, let’s be honest, it’s totally personal. I just can’t seem to side one way or another. This is my split. I crave a rootedness I don’t have AND my addiction encourages constant upheaveal. I grew up assuming that learning lies in new backdrops. 

Like any addiction, the solution to this one requires weaning. But not completely, because I hold to my conviction that changing it up grows your tolerance. That said, I need to start by slowing down and giving myself whole-heartedly to a place without feeding the repeated thought, “Oh, it’ll just be a year or two.” 

And, as a wise friend once reminded me, the silver lining might be that local and global aren’t mutually exclusive.

On these trains known as Ladies Specials, a weight has been lifted. Men are not there to do what they reportedly do onboard every day–pinch, grope, molest, threaten and shout insults at the women. Apparently, this harassment is the norm. Apparently, it was bad enough to warrant the government stepping in. 

Imagine a women-only train. It might be like a big slumber party. In my world, it would manifest as a man-free subway at 4am on a Saturday night. Oooooo. How fucking freeing! What about a man-free traveling experience? I would drive across America or any wild country and push deep into the night, until I collapsed alone and sleepy in my car, a tent, or a grassy ditch on the side of the road. I’d be relaxed, watching the stars sparkle without letting my imagination roar me into at least twenty minutes of heart palpitations: A man is going to find me here and hurt me. A man is going to find me here and hurt me. (An aside: I know plenty of women who are braver than me on that front.) Though I am deeply nourished by the different men in my life, I am also convinced, after 30 short years of living, that this fear of men is inherent in all women, even those who refuse to admit it.

Why? There are so many books that attempt to pin it down, so many poems. No need to descend into the messy discussion of biology (predators, the mechanics of body parts, sowing seeds, choosing carefully for your womb and all that fraught stuff). Instead, here’s some wisdom from a man on the topic…

Barry Lopez, writer and world traveler, shared a small anecdote in his essay, “Searching for Depth in Bonaire.” He and a friend were hanging around a remote part of Bonaire’s coast, entranced by and oogling at ancient pictographs of angelfish. To his surprise, a woman approached in a rental car, lowered her window, scanned the limestone bluff and then gathered speed to drive away on the dirt road. He first assumed that she was a pathetic tourist; he judged what seemed like her indifference to the historical sight. Moments later, his heart yanked his intellect up to the surface: “I realized she was alone, that two men were standing around and that this was an unfrequented part of the island. We had closed it to her.”

Any physical space, like a train, can change dramatically based on the people who occupy it. Eradicating all men from all corners of life is not a solution to the physical power dynamics that exist between genders. But when men are banned from the trains, the woman in India no longer exhaust their own energy fighting off insults, vulgarities and groping. The segregation was created to protect the women, not ostracize them–perhaps the only example of an oppressed minority’s isolation spun in their favor.

And speaking of minorities, I once found  myself in a gay bar with my gay brother and my very-straight brother. As the night galvanized my cheeky mood, I slipped up behind my very-straight brother and grabbed his butt. He, thinking I was a man, practically twisted my arm out of its socket. He hated being there; he felt, in his words, “preyed upon.”  

I don’t know how to relax around these issues; I know they are layered; I know they will always be potent. But it’s remarkable to imagine a whole train of women moving down the tracks, laughing and open and knowing that even a patriarchal government heard their pleas.

As we neared what we could not yet recognize as ground zero, we noticed droves of people moving inland, police officers cordoning off streets, a solemn collective buzz–the tell-tale signs of a gathering. We shrugged at each other and chalked it up to the wild ways of New York. “Must be some crazy event!” I laughed out loud, letting the wind whisk my voice out to the Hudson River.

It’s embarrassing now how oblivious we were to the date or the occasion. Later we learned that at the exact moment we coasted by on our bikes, on the eve of September 11th, President Bush stood at ground zero to address the world, the nation and New Yorkers. Hence, the crowds.

If I had paid detailed attention… to my surroundings on that bike ride, nebulous time would have plotted its fancy-footed self on a graph and the island of Manhattan would have exposed its boundaries. We would have been placed.

After that morning in 2001, my college-graduate heart was reshaped slowly from a distance. Those who call this home had their hearts reshaped in an instant. When land reshapes, those who dwell there have no choice but to reshape.

I wonder what growing has happened in eight years.

From my tiny isolated non-New Yorker perspective I only know one static fact and one tangible change:

September 11^th is still my deceased grandmother’s birthday. 

I can count at least two American friends who have moved to what many would call Muslim countries.