The Only Good Fight There Is

“if you’re going to try,/ go all the way./ there is no other feeling like that./ you will be alone with the gods/ and the nights will flame with/ fire./ do it, do it, do it./ do it./ all the way all the way./ you will ride life straight to/ perfect laughter, its/ the only good fight there is.”

—Charles Bukowski, “roll the dice”

On Monday Aylee presented her project on Bronson Alcott and the “Fruitlands” community. Before you laugh about a place called Fruitlands, you have to know that it was actually a pretty amazing place, situated near Boston during the height of the Transcendentalist Movement in America. The founding of Fruitlands itself is evidence of the human willingness to break away from society and try to live life in absolute accordance with one’s values; and also a demonstration of the virtues and difficulty of living in such an extreme manner.

Bronson Alcott, Lousia May’s father, has been ridiculed in time’s backward gaze. (A lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking if you ask me). Alcott was an amazingly high-principled man. First, in “The Dial,” a literary magazine central to the Transcendentalist movement, he wrote his “Orphic Sayings.” Some of us might take a cynical view of the scribblings of a religious ecstatic; on the other hand, if we are open-minded and non-judgmental, who could not be inspired by a man who said: “Love designs, thought sketches, action sculptures the work of the spirit. Love is divine, conceiving, creating, completing all things. Love is the Genius of Spirit.”

Then he started the Temple School, a radical experiment in education. He believed that his students had genius in them, and his job was to find it. Unlike other teachers of his time, he didn’t practice corporal punishment on his students; he even had students hit him when they were bad. In accordance with his values and the values of the Temple School, he admitted an African-American child into the school. When parents protested, rather than back down, he held firm; however, the school then fell apart.

From Aylee’s presentation, we saw how miserably his next experiment, Fruitlands, failed. They ran out of food and had to disband the community within seven months. However, they were going to try and, to borrow Bukowski’s words, “go all the way.”

Sometimes going all the way like that means one will be alone with the Gods, or simply desolately alone. We weren’t sure if they made it to the place where they were alone with the gods, but they did go “all way all the way.” Aylee asked us if we would have wanted to live there. Many of us said yes, it would have been a great chance to see an alternative way to live, but that living like that has drawbacks. One view held that if you go that far way from the society of which you are a part, you no longer have the input of conflicting ideas. On the other hand, going all the way to live out one's highest intentions also could mean that one has found the core of one’s deepest ideas and no longer needs the input of outer society. The question then became: do we want to live in a society, or a classroom, that is filled with conflicting ideas and opposing thoughts? Or do we want to live in a purely harmonious place where we all agree in our core beliefs and in the way we each live out our lives?

Bryn wrote: “I think I would love to be free of society and the life that I lead here. It would be a chance to live away from the world, but together with people who wanted to be free too. To try to be different and to step away from the earth for a while, to know how to live with nothing, but to try to find what is in that nothing. To find truth in the smallest, hardest things is actually what I want to find.”

On Wednesday Sarah presented her project on the life of Henry David Thoreau, who said what we have been proud to think about here this year: “There is no remedy for love but to love more.” She told us about his childhood, his schooling, his teaching, and his “going to the woods to live deliberately” at Walden. We read aloud two children’s books, “Henry Builds a House” and “Henry Hikes to Fitchburg.” She sketched out his life, his ideas, his influences, the list of those he influenced, and his critics. At the end of the project she sent us outside to be Thoreau-esque, to go sit in the woods and contemplate a single small thing. Everyone scattered into the woods to contemplate what he or she could find. When we all came back in, we brought back a pinecone, a pine-cone seed, a piece of bark, a leaf with droplets of dew, a green fern leaf, a dead fern, a red berry, a pebble, a beech leaf, and, in the palm of Bryn’s hand, a seed-weed flower-pod thing. Sarah asked us: What do the small things we brought in from the woods have to do with Utopia? What does Thoreau’s life have to do with Utopia?

Each student put into words his or her understanding of what Sarah had told us and had us do. Get to bare essentials. Make small things “be what we need.” He did not think or talk about it, he did it. He believed in looking at the things he had, not what he thought he needed to get. He looked at things outside of the normal “groove. Going “away” to look a things. Look at something insignificant to see more, to see how much more can be seen in a small thing. HDT showed us how to look better. “Television” for him was nature. He took his self out of the complex world. A showed how a “room full of people crowding and talking at once is not as important as a room of two people where the words have room to bounce around to be heard.”

He made his own utopia in the woods and in his mind, and he inspired others to see and try to replicate the process. He was a patron saint of original thinking. He did not try to organize a squad to do his action, he just did it. A how-to guide for a minority to oppose the system. He found the god in little things. He left life to live. Focused on one single fragile thing. One can understand something by getting away from it or by living in the absence of it. He cold not change the way things were, but he changed the way he looked at things. Or, as Rider put in the terms of the little objects we brought in from the woods: “This pebble is not just one thing, or one color, it is many things, and many colors.”

I don’t know if Bronson Alcott or Thoreau rode life straight to perfect laughter. But we are trying to learn that there is always something else better than we could imagine. Finding it means mostly learning how to look better. Looking better, and going all the way.

Wild Men Who Sing the Sun in Flight

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

When we watched “Amadeus” on Friday everyone, it seemed, was open to receiving the meaning of the story, or if not the meaning, then at least the pleasure of an exciting story well-told. In the movie we see a wild genius who appears, to Salieri at least, to have been chosen to be the voice of God. Mozart’s genius is multi-dimensional: it is bawdy, profane, tender, bold, unpredictable, relentless, disciplined, and original. His vision is open to everything. But it has at its core neither logic nor reason, but something wild and untamed and infinite, which is embedded in his own true words: “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”

His character is, without a doubt, that of a wild man. Earlier in the day Yared had read Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Thomas speaks of another Wildman, the “Wildman who caught and sang the sun in flight.” The poem is an exhortation to live possessed of wildness and “blazing eyes.” In “Amadeus” Mozart lives with blazing eyes. Winston lives with blazing eyes, and they both live to know what it means to be human.

At our best, we live with blazing eyes, too, and when we do, we rise up from mediocrity to greatness. In the classroom it comes in little flashes of word or deed, moments of greatness, of profundity, as when a student can see what a fellow mate is saying: or when a fellow mate can say what another student is seeing. When we see that we build protective shells around the best things in us because we want to protect those things. When we realize that the shell is a barrier which keeps us from living and feeling. When one of us asks the question that breaks the shell another of us has built. When we break the shell ourselves and find ourselves living more fully, more able to apprehend the sights and sounds around us. When we are able to apprehend the nature of the world we live in, the corresponding rise in our feelings of love for the world.

These moments happen in the course of a morning, when the lights are still off, before the dust has risen. Or while discussing the sound of the thrush in 1984. Or creating a metaphor to describe Annie John’s metaphor of the black ball covered in cobwebs deep in her center. Or when Yared leaps from his chair to get a poem he has been carrying around for six weeks. Or when Rider tells Luke that he is proud of Luke. When Rio’s football logo comes in finally and it is an image of a sitting Buddha under a strange tree in the light of the moon; or when Aylee draws an image of the Proles fighting over a sauce-pan; or the symmetrical, wild beauty of Anneke’s mandala. Or Henry prodding his mates to work harder, commit more, and his mates rising the challenge. When Rider pushes himself to consider how much love he does has to give, and brings forth the question: is the love in me infinite; when Nathan uses the old intergoogle device to debate and write a definition of the word “love” which he shares with the class. When Cassie responds to a beautiful character sketch of her by Reed Me., with seven “points” of response; when Henry’s character sketch of Cassie, in which he says he wants to get to know more of her, is answered by Cassie’s in which she says she wants to give more of herself. When Lydia, Hannah, Bryn, and Cassie take on the challenge to be the Ninety Girl Bakers and make the school three purple cakes from scratch, with “NBS” messily written in icing patted on with the end of a plastic fork; Jesse saying that she wants to have close friendship, and she wants that others to have the same; when Luke writes a sketch about a girl whose beauty he admires; when Bryn works steadily for hours on a watercolor mandala and then decides it’s not right and starts again; when Reed Ma. uses her hands to describe the layers of thoughts and feelings inside Sophie, showing Sophie where her best thoughts lie, and Sophie can see it too, finally; when, in Anneke’s character sketch, Anna’s face lights up with understanding—at either math problem or the interactions of her classmates, or both at once; when Miles runs to help Tal set up the digital projector; When Ollie penetrates to the core of a conversation with insight that is at once wise and original; When Isabel condenses a four page sketch to one page, leaving only the feeling, reduced but clarified into intensity; when Claire knows that her feeling is not resolved so she keeps pushing late after school to get it clarified, and later her sculpture by the North Branch River is made by laying up thin panes of clear ice in front of the cave made by a large boulder; when Calder says he does not want to be friends only with one person, but with every one; when Evan remembers being able to be friends with a girl and it wasn’t strangely awkward; when Edgar sees that Tal is worn down and despairing at his task, so Edgar mimes everything he can think of to make Tal laugh; when Kiley offers Tal a mint because he is tired; when Sarah, in a fit of feverish hallucinations, pushes herself to finish reading Walden, and comes into school bubbling with ecstatic excitement because she did; or when Rose talks about Utopia, that it comes when we are able to act out our highest ideals, or, conversely, dystopia, which comes when we act without awareness of our highest ideals—and then she has everyone make Peanut-butter clay football teams. When Eric pushes and urges and gives us the time to make our greatest physical sculpture—the clubhouse of fire, earth, and wood—the bread-oven; or when Tal realizes that he only has time in his life to read 480 more books, give or take a few, and this numerical fact impels him to read more deeply, to mine with greater intensity, to savor every word. When we are all thinking that what we leave behind can be a trail of slime or of gold.

These moments all occurred in one week; this all happens in one day. All of this is what is in us, is what we are tying to bring out. It comes out in the way we arrange rocks into sculptures, or make nests out of dead ferns, in a collective sculpture down by the river; or in the way we try to hold ourselves together when 1/3 of the class is sick; or in Simon’s project on Emmett Till, where we have to learn how to look at difficult event in order to understand how the course of history changes for the good; of the hyper-delight in making 35 fantasy football teams which are really assertions of 35 personalities, organized into 5 haphazard divisions: Food, Social Tribes, Animals, Misfits, and Music (which could sort of describe our collective essential being). It happens when we realize that we do have moments where, like Winston Smith, we live in a clear glass sphere and we are touching the red coral of love; It happens when we hear a poem, understand a theorem, understand the way that heat is generated beneath the crust of the earth, and we realize that what we are doing here is a way of creating a human heat which is slowly changing us, transforming us under the surface of our days. It happens when we realize that we are making our own Golden Country, right here. It happens when we try to speak words that have the power to fork lightning, when we cry fierce tears and rave at the close of a day, or see the brightness of our deeds dancing in a barren wood. It happens when we hear our writings about each other, when we hear that John Adams, no more or less than any of us, simply wishes to do a little good.

And Where is the Sweet Harmony, Sweet Harmony?

"And as I walked on/ Through troubled times/ My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes/So where are the strong/ And who are the trusted?And where is the harmony, Sweet harmony?"

-Nick Lowe/ Elvis Costello

Last week, in connection to our reading of 1984, I brought up a story I had recently read in the Wilson Quarterly.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany the protest movement, the loose association of individuals opposed to the oppressive communist government, sometimes met in the St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig.

A renowned dissident, looking back on that time and discussing the efforts resist government control, said, “It wasn’t always easy. Once a participant said to me, ‘we shouldn’t give up, because if we do there won’t be any hope at all.’”

At one point there were sometimes only ten people showing up at the Monday evening “Peace Prayers” in the cavernous St. Nicholas Church, most people staying away for fear of being black-balled or fired from a job. These were the strong, and these were the trusted, because they kept their eyes on a still-living beautiful thing—spiritual freedom and individual truth.

But people kept coming. And by 1988, attendance had grown to 600. “The church was the one space someone could express themselves,” said the dissident. We had a monopoly on freedom, physically and spiritually.”

In 1984, Winston imagines the Proles expressing their collective power to overthrow Big Brother’s government. The problem, he realizes, is that the Proles exhibit no hunger for complex intellectual considerations: the Proles' concerns revolve around gambling, football, and pints of sour beer. They do not care about politics, poetry, philosophy, or truth. Winston is alone with his thoughts, his hopes, and dreams. He has no one with whom to talk agree, share ideas, or feel his feelings. This aloneness and entrapment in the cell of his own thought, is part of the terror and tragedy of “comrades” like Winston. And it leads to his despair—that he could be in a world where no one can be trusted.

Winston then discovers an antique, a glass paper-weight, which serves no purpose, except for one thing: "It’s beautiful," he says. The shopkeeper, Mr. Charrington, replies, “It is beautiful.” Finally, for the first time, Winston has someone who can reflect to him his deepest feelings and impulses. This is the dialogue of trust. For Winston, Mr. Charrington is a kindred soul, a man with a connection to beauty and a hunger to preserve the past, and this lifts Winston to such heights of light-heartedness that he begins to hum a song and forgets to check for the thought police.

This longing for beauty, this hunger to share it, to touch it—he is looking at the world, and seeing textures than what he knew before. Before he knew the stink of cabbage, the sour smell of beer, the clogged drains. The red coral encased in the paper-weight reminds Winston of the beauty he wants but has yet to touch, the truth that absolute beauty does exist This is a great turning point in his own inner revolution and reminded us all, in our little school, of the great blessing it is to have freedom of expression and thought, to be able to move towards what we feel is beautiful in us and around us, to have a space of spiritual and physical autonomy.

But when we are angry, our vision of what is beautiful is obscured. I see this again and again: when anger, disgruntlement, or confusion, or the feelings which breed those surface feelings, are coursing through the classroom, it is difficult for us to apprehend beauty or complex ideas. We become unable to see, listen, or speak. The natural joyous agitation becomes muted and stilted, sometimes deadening.

So we always try to make the school be a place to create, or discover, or say what beauty is and express it freely. Sometimes, of course, we run into difficult strands that have to be untangled. This is our work. Being a seer means looking at the good, the bad and the ugly in ourselves, and not only what pleases or comforts. It is always complex, no matter how much we try to simplify what we do.

Thoreau said: “Will you be a student merely, or a seer?” We spent some of the week talking about how we see, what we gather in from our direct observations. We did this for character sketches, and on Thursday we did the same thing, but this time for drawings. We went out into the woods to collect some leaves and stems and then came inside to study them and then to try to draw what we saw, or felt, in the looking. We are working toward the time when we will be able to see as much in the veins of a leaf or the delicate hairs on a beech tree stem or our own thoughts as Winston sees in the coral; toward the time when we become like those who could listen to the song of a thrush and understand the volumes there filling up the branches above us. Then we will truly be seers.

North Branch School Students Learn Lessons of Less

By John Flowers

NORTH BRANCH SCHOOL student Edgar Sherman lays leaves on a large 350.org-themed mandala the students created in the lawn next to the school last Thursday morning. Students in the small Ripton private school spent last week not only reducing their carbon footprint, but also depriving themselves of various creature comforts. Independent photo/Trent Campbell

RIPTON — Ensconced in a former farmhouse tucked away amid the tree-filled slopes of Ripton, one could already argue that attending classes at the North Branch School is akin to going back to nature.

But the more than two-dozen students and faculty at North Branch took that concept a step further last week, as part of their contribution to the more than 5,200 worldwide global warming action events that occurred on Oct. 24 through the efforts of 350.org.

The students in the small private middle school — located in the hometown of 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben — spent all of last week not only reducing their carbon footprint, but depriving themselves of things they believed smacked of consumerism.

“In order for us to change behavior, in order for them to have an interior mental revolution, it has to be physical and tactile and direct,” North Branch School head teacher Tal Birdsey said of the philosophy behind the weeklong project.

In that spirit, classrooms were lit only by candles and/or oil lamps; computers and photocopiers were unplugged; water was rationed; heat was used very sparingly; and at least one assignment was done on birch bark.

Participants honored the assignment outside of the classroom, as well.

Some students walked to school and participated in classes barefoot; others either took cold showers or dramatically reduced their use of bathing water; most everyone wore the same clothes for the entire week; and virtually all refrained from wearing brand-name attire.

Birdsey explained the global warming warning of 350.org fit into what will be the North Branch School’s theme for this entire academic year: Utopia.

“We thought that we wanted to do something that pertained to having some influence over their world we’re in,” Birdsey said. “With 350.org happening this fall, we thought that would be a great opportunity.”

McKibben in fact paid a visit to the North Branch School last month to talk about 350.org and other environmental issues. That motivated the students to sign up for 350.org activities.

North Branch members decided not to join regional 350.org gatherings.

“Doing something on (Sept. 24) would have meant driving somewhere and defeated the purpose,” Birdsey said. “So we thought we would spend a whole week doing it here.”

Together, students and teachers spent around a month brainstorming what they wanted to do for their 350.org contributions — as a school and as individuals.

“One of the things they realized is, they’re not going to alter the climate this week,” Birdsey said. “So really our work this week has been about them becoming more aware of the dimension of the problems and how we are all a part of it, enmeshed in it. That gives them a sense of power, and sometimes a sense of despair.”

Thursday saw the students work silently and collectively on a mandala — a Buddhist or Hindu design that symbolizes the universe and wholeness — in front of the school that they fashioned out of various rocks, twigs, leaves, pine needles, ferns and sand that they harvested from the nearby woods. The school will send a photo of themselves surrounding the mandala to be posted on the 350.org Web site.

The week’s activities clearly made an impression on the young students in grades seven-nine.

Bryn Martin, a ninth grader from Lincoln, used the experience in part to understand the plight of those less fortunate than herself.

“When the moon was out, I would walk barefoot in the gravel and thought about people who didn’t have a home to go to,” she said. “I realized we take too much for granted.”

Nathan Wulfman, a ninth grader from Ripton, wore the same clothing all week.

“It raised my awareness of people in other parts of the world, where it is a luxury to have more than one pair of pants, a shirt and a pair of shoes,” he said.

Wulfman also calculated that if he could cut back his shower use by one minute per day, he could save 1,000 gallons each year.

Sarah Miller, an eighth grader from Ripton, has been studying the works of Henry David Thoreau, of “Walden” fame. The school’s recent activities have corresponded well with Thoreau’s thoughts on simple living, she noted. Miller has been taking two-minute showers; walked to school barefoot in the rain on Wednesday; slept on the floor; and did not touch a computer or TV for the school week.

“It all felt natural, really,” she said of eschewing modern gadgetry and creature comforts.

Luke Freidin, an eighth grader from New Haven, wore the same clothes and took a pass on showers last week. He and other students plan to incorporate some conservation efforts in their everyday lives.

“I think I will definitely try to lower my water use, maybe start brushing my teeth in the shower so I don’t use as much water,” he said.

That’s just the kind of talk Birdsey wants to hear.

“I think we’ll all probably be more conscious of what we’re doing,” Birdsey said.

Children Ardent for Some Desperate Glory

“…children ardent for some desperate glory…”

—Wilfred Owen

“What is a course of history or philosophy, of poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen. Will you be a student, merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.”

—H.D. Thoreau, Walden

We realized this week that we, alone, or we, the school, will not stem the tide of global climate change. We know, even, that many of our actions were not “relevant” to the task and problem at hand. And yet, the things each of us chose to do are making each of us think and see, and that seeing might begin to take us out of the worn groove of our daily routines..

At school we had class with no lights, except sunlight, or, if it was dark, an oil lamp. We kept the heat down. We did not use the computers, printer, or microwave. Many walked to school or biked. We double-sided papers and used birch bark for homework.

At home many of the kids kept the lights down or did homework by candle-light. Many used no computers; almost all took short showers or no baths. Many did not listen to their Ipods or recorded music at all. Some played more games with their parents and siblings and spent more time “downstairs.” Some did not check email and found they had more time. Many took cold showers, ate cold food, used no shampoo, eschewed jewelry, make-up and ornament. Some ate only local food. Others ate no meat. One head teacher didn’t shave, wore the same clothes for five days, and heated up a can of lentil soup in the bread-oven, while his students heated left-over baked potatoes and calzone and turned their shirts inside out as a gesture of rebellion against rampant materialism.

Many of these gestures leaned toward the idea that we are all enmeshed in a system built around using things, going places, and living in a lot of comfort. Many discovered they can do with less luxury, though it is somewhat uncomfortable. It is easier to flip a light switch than light an oil lamp. It is more pleasant to take a hot shower. But we gained insights through deprivation: by wearing the same clothes all week and we discovered our clothes do not always need to be fluffy, immaculately laundered, static-free and smelling like an Irish Spring in order to be successfully functioning humans.

At school almost everybody wore “logo-free,” unbranded clothes. Or they turned logo-ed shirts inside out. They taped over brand-names with duct tape, a blow against brand-consciousness and conspicuous consumption, but a boon to the duct tape manufacturers. This brought up the idea that all of us are generally walking bill-boards for the very products we consume. Talk about tools of capitalism! And yet, we also realized that we have the standard of life we have due to capitalism, or, at least, an economy that is dynamic and flowing and creative, allowing us all to enter freely into the exchange of currency and goods, if we have currency or goods to contribute, allowing us multiple choices (of things to consume), and a relative amount of economic stability.

“It also makes me realize that there are plenty of people in the world, and the people of the past, who only had one set of clothes, that maybe don’t fit, and don’t get washed,” said one student.

“And Thoreau lived in a house with two chairs, a table, a bed, and a wood-stove,” said Sarah.

“I took a four minute shower but I was aware that I was using gallons per minute,” said another.

“I want to be less dependent on what my clothes say to define who I am,” someone said.

“I’m telling you, you guys look like walking billboards half the time,” said Tal.

“What about wearing a North Branch Logo?”

“That’s cool,” someone said.

“It’s all about what you believe, not that you shouldn’t support something,” said another.

Some of the kids wore no shoes as a visceral reminder, every step, of how much we do have—we all have at least ten pair of shoes, it seems, for different activities.Those who wore no shoes felt a different thing: having no shoes seemed to awaken an idea in those who did without them—a forceful reminder of the level of physical comfort we take for granted. They felt the cold or dampness of the earth, the dirt we live on but which we rarely touch, the extent to which we do not feel the environment of which we are a part.

Some tried to not look in mirrors for a whole week.

“What is the meaning of this? If someone says this has nothing to do with climate change what do you say?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you trying to say to yourself?”

“That I am thinking about other things beside me.”

“You mean, that you are thinking about the villagers in Bangladesh whose land will be covered by rising sea levels or what?”

“Yes, or anything!”

“What’s wrong with looking at yourself in a mirror?”

“Because in some cultures, and once upon a time, there were no mirrors. We only use mirrors to see if we look good, or to see that we look bad, or to see that we need to look better.”

“So not looking in mirrors, not listening to music, not computer or interfacing on facebook, or not taking a hot shower—all of that does what?”

“It makes us think about what we have that others don’t.”

“It makes me realize that what I think I ‘need’ is not the same as what one ‘needs.’”

"It makes me think I should have deeper thoughts than only about appearances."

“It makes me think that one day we will not be able to have these things because it is not possible for the earth, based on the number of people on it, to all have these things forever?”

“I think what it is doing for me is making me more aware. Aware of what I use, what I need, what I don’t need.”

Claire came in with an article about the amount of acreage needed to raise meat. Hannah came in with an article about revolutionary thinkers, whose ideas turned over what we once believed to be true—for instance, the idea that once held sway that “Humans have no affect on the climate.”

Someone asked how much carbon we put into the atmosphere when we drove to our soccer game. Someone said, “I realize it’s so easy to switch on a light switch.”

“But really, it is not easy, or simple,” someone else said. “We just don’t see or realize how complicated it is.”

All week Sarah read from Walden, which is the subject of her upcoming Utopia project

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

We are learning that living simply, for us, is not so simple. All week we felt the enormity of changing the way we live. It was hard to be “simple" or Spartan-like. Finding the matches in the dark, making a fire in the bread-oven, writing by candle light—the difficulty lay in the conscious, deliberate alteration of ingrained life patterns built on dependence and complexity. Some suggested that we call it the Week of Living More Aware. We were aware of how much we use, how much we can do, how disconnected we are from the material sources of what we use, and how comfortable we are. In our physical and tactile experiences we found ourselves wading in new ideas thoughts and ruminations. Lighting the matches, lighting the lamps, having class in a quiet gloom, all of us looking a little more rag-tag and non-descript, eating cold food, with no computers distracting, all of us playing football or soccer or sitting on the Doug Walker rock, not drawn in by anything but movement in the field—seeing how far we could push ourselves and stay sane and happy, or at least what we call happy while depriving ourselves of “needs.” We were each testing ourselves to see how we live and what we live with, and how we can adapt, and whether, in truth, we can change. We did not do anything heroic last week; nothing glorious, or world changing. But, we are desperate to do something, and things we did may lead to us to see better what is before us as we walk on into futurity.