Where are we?

Coming home Moon

Last night I stayed up later than I normally do, chatting with two volunteers at our farm about the concept of community. One of the volunteers is from Turkey and one is from India. I enjoyed learning more about the places they call home, their understandings of the histories of their countries and how they have come to define what “home” is to them, what community is, and what it means to be in Right Relation.

Being as we are a relatively well-established eco-village (Pun Pun Farm has been here for over 20 years now), these topics come up regularly. Visitors to our farm are understandably curious about how we manage to live so communally and it inspires inquiry. I suppose in many ways I have taken our life here for granted, and it is helpful to reflect over it all with our guests and consider the unfolding experiment of coming again together.

Over the years, coming from a world that values the nuclear family over radical community living, my definition of the universally shared yearnings for belonging has taken on many forms. As a child, it meant my bedroom in our little house in the middle of the street, my mom and dad, the kids I played with at school.

As I came of age and morphed into a pachouli wearing dharma bum seeking eternal truths, I believed that home was in the heart, that it doesn’t matter where we are physically located, that our only home is found “within”. I spent years thus seeking out meditation retreats with the aspiration to learn more about my inner world and make peace with myself. I got really comfortable with myself. Then I got lonely.

In the mountains of Colorado and certainly where I reside now, with my wife and daughter and our village of like minded kin, I have often found myself shifting the notion of home to a mandala of outward foundations, people coming together to create something, to commit to each other for the long haul. I have begun placing great emphasis on the food that sustains us, the actual materials of the houses we live in and, the clothes we where, the tools we make and use. The physical, outer world has begun for me to “matter” just as much as the unborn, indestructible inner realm. Then I looked up.

Both these views are essential as far as I can tell, simultaneously depending on each other for optimal health, together offering crucial foundational pillars to what seems something akin to, well, “home”. Yet what modernity, and late-stage capitalism in particular, has so successfully taken away from most of our awareness’ is that in addition to the little worlds we make when we come together with other people, or the arguably enormous worlds we merge with when developing rich inner lives through the practice of say, “mindfulness”, if we still fail to come into Right Relation with the cosmos, we will never know where we are and as such, even in the midst of a seemingly lovely family and/or “community”, the strange nagging sensation of being lost will always leave us feeling disoriented and out of place.

Do you know what phase of the moon we are now in? Do you know how much of our world pulses in constant rhythm with the waxing and waning of Her hypnotic glow? Have you genuinely set time aside to consider that all water, which is in essence all life, is forever rising and falling in sync with Her ebb and flow? The grand annual dance this magnificent celestial body graces us with, though we so often neglect to see, blinding her out with big city lights and big important plans, still does not forget us, eternally orchestrating our fluid anchoring.

I grew up in a predominantly white, lower-middle class, midwestern Christian household. I was taught not to think too deeply about “nature”. To be fair, the wilderness was presented in a sacred way of sorts, for it was the place Jesus went to when he really needed to talk to God the Father. But to look too deeply into Her aliveness and consider that we might be a part of Her and thus risk falling into the witchy sensuous spell that might seduce us into thinking that we are but a speck of dust in a grand cycle of decay and becoming, that humans are not the center of the galaxy but one of countless other glorious temporal manifestations that in time, will be swallowed again into the Void, well, this was deemed the work of the Devil. I was not allowed to visit the World Tree. When my mother found out I snuck behind her back and watched the pagan film Fern Gully, she wept, certain that grave damage had been done to my very soul.

Older now, when observing how most of my old church friends care more about electing someone who claims to be Christian than taking the time to wisely reflecting over what “the tree” Christ supposedly was crucified on might have actually been when considering the awesome power of natures obvious disgust regarding how we are living now, well, some would say I have fallen from Glory.

It is not an easy thing to walk away from the views that one was raised with. In doing so we can easily drift into a yet deeper feeling of isolation and longing for home, community, and belonging. For years I have felt like a drifting feather neither from here nor there. I now live in a community of predominately Thai, quasi-buddhist people who were raised in small farming villages. It has taken me ten years to finally begin speaking their language only to find that you can learn another language, live side by side with another people, study their customs and faith for years on end and still not fully be a part of their world.

Yet I was never fully apart of “my world” either. I never felt at home in the hyper-consumeristic realm of what many now refer to as “America”. 9-5 lives built entirely on credit that view the earth as dead matter hurt me in ways I am only now beginning to understand. Not to mention the fact that I was taught to believe that stolen land was my home. That somehow I belonged to a place where no one around me could name but ten native plants and demonstrate how to use them. Not only was the history of the original inhabitants of the place I was told to call home lost but the actual natural history was overlooked as well. All we knew about was GMO corn, White Jesus, Abraham Lincoln and American football.

Nowadays, partly because of the inevitable grief that much of this brings up, I often find myself alone again, late at night, staring into the heavens crying out to the empty form, in surrender. And what I have found there, is kinship. Over the years the sadness has slowly transformed into an offering, a guiding compass of sorts. A mysterious echo resonates back in time as I learn how to approach Her. What once was pure despair has transformed into a life-serving prayer. The Moon, alongside me wherever I go, is not some distant stranger now. She has been with me longer than anyone. She has listened to me through all the triumphs, the moments of unease, the times I have fallen short and so too when I have shown up in a good way.

I used to take Her for granted. Yet now, just as I know when my wife is about to menstruate, to be again on her “moon time”, I know too what phase la luna is in. And just as my cycles are now in sync with those of my wife, my cycles are also now in sync with those of my closet friend, the one who causes oceans to rise and fall and poets to ponder our eternal quest. She is always there. We are in relation.

We have entered a “New Moon” phase this week. As such, yesterday my wife and I planted corn. It is good to put seeds in soil when the New Moon arrives. As Her light grows stronger she echoes back to us all here on earth the forgotten instructions for how to live well. She pulls the genetic code out from inside our hard shell, breaking the hard exterior wall over our narrow view, forcing new worlds into being.

Slowly coming again into Right Relation with lunar rhythms, the same ones countless ancient peoples built entire cities in alignment with, a deeply rooted recognition of Where I Am rises into view. The limiting understanding that I was raised with by a forgetful culture of orphans dissolves into memory-rich soil, offering sustenance to regenerating relations.

This work is never done and I am honored to be a part of it, simply by looking up. By breathing in and out in time with the pulse of oceans tides, I grow more aware of the deep interconnection between all unique beings. It isn’t “oneness” per se, but a dance of mutual respect. An offering that honors. And I play a crucial part in the well-being of this grand unfolding. I get to witness this. I get to feel, participate with and find inspiration from the ever-changing relational pathways that cannot lead to anywhere but home. What a precious gift.

Home is not something we create. Home is where we are. All we need is Right View.

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*Curious to learn more about how to begin aligning your rhythms more with those of the Moon? Please consider purchasing this beautiful moon calendar created by incredible artist Vanja Vukelic, who also incidentally has a wonderful Substack page entitled, Multilayered that “explores the connection with the living world, our shared search for home, the complex fabric of identity, and the interplay of synchronicity, imagination, and intuition.”

#mayallbeingsbehappyandfree