Twelve by Twelve (25 page)

FAITHFULNESS TO THE PATH GIVEN

WHEN I WAS BY MYSELF,
I’d sometimes pause to look at the inner walls of the 12 × 12 by candlelight, or regard it from outside as the evening sun warmed its wood siding. The house looked like a sculpture of solitude, art shining through utility. Jackie’s honest choice. She had chipped and carved away the clutter, releasing something essential.

A 12 × 12 doesn’t distract. I recalled my reaction the first time I saw it, the horror of the small. How I craved something that proclaimed the glory of the human, ten thousand square feet in which to lose myself. Jackie, I believe, went into solitude so that her outward life would contain more presence. I already knew about this process from meditation practice. In meditation you sit and allow thoughts to surface, like bubbles in a glass of champagne — and then allow them to float away. A deep well might open up, coal black and filled with dragons. But you maintain presence.

At the 12 × 12 I sometimes thought of Kusasu’s solitude in the Bolivian Amazon. The last speaker of Guarasug’ wé, she once said to me that she had no one left to speak her language with. On the
surface it’s axiomatic: she’s the last speaker, hence no one else to speak with. My first emotion was pity. Which chamber of hell is that, where the Flat World has eliminated everyone who speaks your language? Not only are your parents and grandparents and siblings gone — leaving you with only the memories of meals and hanging laundry and trading jokes, all of it still fresh in your mind — but so too is every person you might share those memories with in the language in which they were created.

My pity for Kusasu didn’t last. The light in her eyes dissolved it. I didn’t see any self-pity there, nor any rage against the world that had eliminated her race. She reached out her skinny hand, veined like the air-roots of a cambara, and touched my hand, telling me something through her touch:
I’m complete. I may be incomplete as the member of something, but as Kusasu there is nothing missing.
Before heading into the Amazon’s seven skies — and, considering her age, it might be soon — she seemed to have found the radically present place of her own solitude.

When you pray, who hears your prayer? You do. Prayer is a concentration of positive thoughts. Once, at the end of an exhausting eight-day yoga retreat, the instructor asked our group: “Do you feel the energy around you?” I did. Muscles burning, joints oiled, tendons warm and light, I felt an overflowing reservoir of what the Chinese call
chi
, or vital energy. “That’s your protection,” he said. “Nothing else.”

IN THE SUMMER OF 1996
, on a break from teaching Native American seventh graders in New Mexico, I volunteered as a human shield in a remote hamlet in the Lacondon jungles of Chiapas, Mexico. It was one of my first experiences with solitude. The previous year, the Mexican military had flown bombing sorties over the Lacondon and killed a thousand people, aiming for Zapatistas and their sympathizers. I was part of a hundreds-strong volunteer team of
international observers to simply
be
in Zapatista villages. The thinking was that the Mexican military would not hesitate to kill innocent Chiapan peasants, but they would not risk the terrible global publicity of slaughtering Italians, French, and Americans. Our presence was “official,” part of the San Andres Peace Accords, but the military refused to recognize us, so Mexican NGO workers had to smuggle me past military checkpoints in the dead of night. Then I had to walk for a full day, deep into the jungle near the Guatemalan border, before finally arriving at my designated village.

All went smoothly to that point. But soon the reality of my role set in. For weeks on end, I had absolutely nothing to do but “be” in the village. My Spanish was terrible back then, so I could hardly communicate. Because Zapatista guerrillas were camped in a secret location right beyond the hamlet, I wasn’t even allowed the pleasure of a hike. So I spent a lot of time on the straw bed in my mud hut reading, thinking, staring at the walls. After a week, I began to go stircrazy. I wanted to at least explore the jungle. I wanted out. After all, I was using my vacation time to do this; I could have been exploring the pyramids at Chichén Itzá, Palenque, and Tikal or scuba diving in Honduras. My vacation time was precious; was I spending it uselessly, in the solitude of a mud hut?

Amid these doubts, something happened. I was making rudimentary coffee one morning over a wood fire when I looked up and drew a quick breath of shock. Towering over me was a beautiful Zapatista woman, in full camouflage, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, rounds of ammo slung around her shoulder, an antique machine gun held across her chest. She was so iconic she looked surreal. Up to that point I hadn’t seen any of the actual Zapatista
guerreros
— they kept to their hidden camps in the forest, where the villagers brought them food. But here she was!

I mumbled something. She just stood silently, unsmiling, hand on her weapon. I didn’t agree with violence then, and I still don’t. But
I understood and admired the Zapatistas. These are Mexico’s most neglected people, the disenfranchised descendants of the ancient Maya. Like Kusasu’s Guarasug’wé they are nearing the precipice of extinction, being pushed off the flat edge of the world — but not without a fight. Symbolically and practically, their uprising began on January I, I994, the first day of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. At the time, respected economists, since proven right, said that NAFTA would flood Mexico with cheap American corn, thereby undercutting the livelihoods of millions of Mexican corn farmers and turning them into the urban poor, forced off their land and into Mexico City’s dangerous slums to work at whatever they could. To make matters worse, corn remains a potent mythological symbol. Traditional Maya believe that corn represents the perpetual circle of life. They imagine God with corn in the blood and consider themselves to be children of the corn. They decided to resist.

Today, the Zapatistas continue to wage what has been called the first postmodern war, using tools of media and global sympathy much more than actual weapons. When they captured Chiapas’s capital, San Cristobal de Las Casas, many Zapatistas had only wooden guns, a powerful symbol as CNN’s cameras rolled. Others had real guns, of course, including the
mujer Zapatista
who stood in front of me. I poured a cup of coffee and held it out to her and also indicated some corn tortillas I had on a wooden plate. She refused. But before she left, she shared a heartfelt smile with me, which I took to mean
“gracias”
for being present in the village. For the remainder of my service in the Lacondon, I relaxed into the solitude, knowing it was tied to a larger purpose.

Solitude in service of being a human shield is clearly pragmatism in action. The silent force of a hundred European and North American people in Chiapas kept actual bombs from dropping. But conscious solitude is always pragmatic, always active. How else to
learn to honestly look into the dark, infinite well within, to see those foreign lands that no one else can ever know?

IN MYTHOLOGICAL STORIES
, heroes face demons and thereby grow as people. In solitude you find the warmth and glow of the hearth — the deep bliss of the unity — but you must first go straight through the fire.

I had a terrible, vivid dream one night at Jackie’s. An ugly old man, somehow connected to the Nazis, maybe earlier in his life during Hitler’s reign, lived in a deep woods. A younger man visited him, and something hateful was planned. The younger man had a contingent of a half dozen other young men along with him; they milled around outside. Inside, the old Nazi and the younger man laughed, and then the young man left with the others. The old man was once again alone.

Until that point in the dream, I saw events from a distance, as if from the perspective of the forest itself. The scene seemed vague, the humans tiny against the deep forest. Then my perspective flipped. I was no longer looking at this as if perched on a distant branch in a tree. I was right next to the old man. I could see the black moles on his cheek, hear him breathing, even smell his sour breath as he sat alone. Not alone in a luminous solitude, but rather utterly lonely, the very definition of loneliness: avoiding the well. He wasn’t angry; he’d already resented and hated the world so much it had charred him into deadness itself. He had no feelings at all.

I awoke from the dream and grabbed my bedside marbled notebook to scribble down the details. In my semiconscious state, I realized to my horror that I was writing the dream down
in the first person
, as if I were the old Nazi. Here is how I started to write, directly from the journal: “A younger man came to visit me, and we made a hateful plan, and then we laughed …”

Tibetan Buddhist art is replete with horrifying statues, their
grotesque faces displaying every kind of negativity, from bitterness and resentment to anger and outright murderous hatred. Western missionaries misunderstood these to be idols of gods and devils; they are not. They represent our own inner states that we “meet” when we go deeply into silence and solitude. After the Nazi dream, I biked into Smithsville and called Leah. “What’s sin?” I asked her.

“For me,” she finally replied, “sin is when I’m at the center.”

We often turn away from or ignore the darkness within, whether it’s labeled Christian “sin,” Jung’s “dark side,” or Eckhart Tolle’s “unconsciousness.” But I am glad when I meet the dark places on the shadowy borders of solitude.
The black moles and sour breath, the deadness.
On the surface, my dream arose from my time living in the SS barracks in Buchenwald. Sleeping each night beside the ovens made National Socialism very visceral for me. But the dream hinted at the lifeless, the flat inside of me.
A younger man came to visit me, and we made a hateful plan, and then we laughed.
Kusasu’s death is in me. The destruction of the Bolivian rainforests is in me. Buchenwald is in there, too. I’m complicit.

“So what do we do?” Leah said, days later down by No Name Creek. We’d been talking about our inner flatness, how we were habituated to a central evil of our own time, what the late Susan Sontag called “an American-style consumer society that spreads itself across the globe, destroying the past, and enclosing all horizons within a selfish materialism.”

Leah and I talked about Sontag, who in one of her last speeches warned of “the mercantilist biases of American culture.”

But it isn’t enough to replace Thomas Friedman with Susan Sontag. Too many of us do this, if unconsciously; we think other people’s thoughts. Solitude’s richest gift is allowing one’s own thoughts to flow, and not through mental aqueducts built by others. That engineering is ecocide’s infrastructure. There’s so much mind control, more now in our hyper-mediated world than ever, and truly
thinking for ourselves may be the hardest thing to do. Yet could this, ultimately, be the only way our society will achieve the necessary basis of change, a paradigm shift?

DURING LEAH’S VISITS TO THE 12 X 12
, we usually spent some of our time in solitude. Once we decided to spend the morning in the woods, separately. She plopped down on the banks of the creek, a hundred yards from the 12 × 12, dangling her feet in the water, her fingers stroking the mossy bank as if it were a drowsy cat. Meanwhile, I walked down the creek, as far as I ever had, until No Name Creek finally came to an end. It liquidated itself into a larger river.

In the place where the creek disappeared, I stuck in a toe and then eased in my body. The chilly water cooled me, and the current massaged out tensions. I came out dripping and sat on the bank. An hour passed, two hours. A blade of rock sliced the water and the creek’s lacquered flow touched the edge and sent off caviar dimples of water that instantly grew into quarter-sized whirlpools. Another moment and twelve inches later they swirled into silver dollars reflecting the branches of the tree above. That reflection on the circle of water looked just like a dragonfly. And the water’s motion made it appear to be flapping its wings. Furiously. Earnestly flailing for its life, as if wanting to break free of two dimensions. Flapping like that, it actually became a live dragonfly to me. I focused on the spot where they were biggest, and they zoomed by, hundreds of them with their long thoraxes, heads, antennae, and translucent wings, to be killed in their prime, and by not very much: a nub of falling water slaughtered them.

Watching all those dragonflies die, I thought of how thoughtlessly I’d squashed a fly the day before. I noticed it upturned, buzzing away on its back by Jackie’s front door. The buzzing sound annoyed me mildly. It would stop, but every ten seconds there’d be another burst of buzzing. Its dying gasps. Hardly thinking, I got up, took one
step, and the next one crushed its tiny body underfoot with a crackle of insect parts against cement. I sat back down, laptop in lap — but. But a single point, like a black magic marker dot, caught my peripheral vision, and I knew I couldn’t write another word with the corpse in full view. So I ripped off a square of toilet paper, scooped up the fly, and deposited it in my little trash bag, feeling better without an accusing corpse in plain sight.

Then — seemingly out of nowhere — Kusasu came to mind. Her people used to live in the rainforest. But over the years, logging and rubber operations — and big soy plantations — took over much of the land, destroying the forests and corraling Kusasu’s people into ever tinier areas. Others fled into far-off cities to become “pavement Indians,” unable to assimilate, begging for scraps on street corners. I thought of how the Amazon’s indigenous people are now “environmental refugees,” forced to migrate into Third World urban sprawl. And suddenly, that fly felt like a metaphor. I squashed it almost unconsciously; it was the evidence of that unconsciousness staring me in the face that bothered me.
Bring it to light.
Is it really a stretch to suggest that our civilization crushed Kusasu, the Guarasug’wé, and their rainforest home with its boot heel but quickly hid the evidence?
Bring it into the light.
Genocide is part of me; ecocide is part of me.
Don’t repress it. Make it conscious.
I walked quickly back up along the creek toward Leah, the ripples shining like blades. I stepped with splashes, then up onto the bank through the tangle, building up a sweat, feeling the sun burning my forehead. Rounding a bend I finally saw Leah.