Outward

I was consumed Monday afternoon by the national drama in which our banking and governing systems now find themselves. I read both news and commentary on the news voraciously, looking for those special hidden messages that would reveal a truth. Frustrated, I declared, "I'm just not sure what to do!" My daughter calmly replied, "Milk the cow."

Sigh. She is right. Jeff and I did begin paying attention to those hidden messages several years ago and were able to change the path we walked upon to avoid what we saw as inevitable pitfalls. It was really hard a lot of the time. We went against most of what we'd been taught to expect of our "future" and certainly against the expectations of our friends and family. We just kept putting one foot in front of the other when we couldn't see any obvious path to the goal we had in mind. We've worked for peanuts, lived in a teepee, and learned skills most folks consider "unskilled labor". But the payoff is that we now feel flexible, adaptable, healthy, cohesive, and thus, in most ways, secure. So why am I still scared?

Because so many times in my life, I've experienced situations that were blatantly unjust, damaging, and irreversible. We've put blood, sweat, tears, and all of our cash into home and business contracts that were abruptly terminated. Without cause, without notice, without recourse other than protracted, expensive legal battles. I've also experienced times where I was flat out wrong myself and needed some serious adjustments to attitude and behavior that took time, intense focus, and no little personal pain to correct. I've made bad decisions, been in the wrong place at the wrong time, been victimized by those I respected, and frequently gotten the short end of the stick.

In short, I've had a grand human experience. Life is good AND Life sucks. Sometimes both at the same time. We have crashed and burned and gotten back up again. And crashed again. And tried again until we felt that our daily living more closely represented our deepest values. My life certainly doesn't match the "American Dream" anymore if what is meant by the term is a big house and a big car and a powerful job title. However, we are absolutely engaged in Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I am angry that the folks who have the ability to seriously disrupt my life continue shouting that they have to save the credit system or something really terrible will happen. They never say what - it is not to be named. Sheesh. Crashes are terrible. Depressions are terrible. Lack of food and shelter and warmth for our elderly and our children should not be tolerated. But sometimes, the bad stuff cannot be avoided without giving up what we were initially working towards. I've pasted below a few of the most articulate articles that seemed to scrape the fear smear from the facts. We are in for a rough time no matter if Congress approves total immunity of the current administration or not. I want our government, of the People, by the People, and for the People, to hold onto a last remaining truth and go into the tough time without telling me it is for my own good. It is going to be bad. And we are going to come through it.

Perhaps the one news "find" that disturbed me most was this article from the UK Telegraph from October 30th, 2006. The depth of the playacting in Washington is revealed by this paragraph (remember, from 2006!):

"They should examine a recent report by the New York Fed warning that whenever the yield on 10-year Treasuries has fallen below 3-month yields for a stretch lasting over three months, it has led to each of the six recessions since 1968.

The full crunch hits 12 months later as the delayed effects of monetary tightening feed through, even if the Fed starts easing frantically in the meantime. By then it is too late. "There have been no false signals," it said.

As of last week, the yield curve was inverted by 29 basis points, was continuing to invert further, and had been negative for over three and a half months. If the Fed is right this time, the recession of 2007 is already baked into the pie. Those speculative positions may have to be unwound very fast."

This article was announcing the reactivation of the Working Group on Financial Markets created by President Reagan, now known as the Plunge Protection Team. You'll note that the membership of this Group is nearly identical to the Oversight Committee proposed by many Congressmen. The real prophecy is this line: "The only question is whether it uses taxpayer money to bail out investors directly, or merely co-ordinates action by Wall Street banks as in 1929. The level of moral hazard is subtly different."

In response, many Representative on Monday actually seemed to hearing the hundreds of thousands of Americans asking for a higher integrity:

Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio): "The normal legislative process that should accompany a monumental proposal to bail out Wall Street has been shelved. Yes, shelved! Only a few insiders are doing the dealing. These criminals have so much power they can shut down the normal legislative process of the highest lawmaking body in this land. All the committees that should be scanning every word that is being negotiated have been benched. And that means the American people have been benched. We are constitutionally sworn to protect this country against all enemies foreign and domestic, and yes, my friends, there are enemies....The people who are pushing this bill are the very same one's who are responsible for the implosion on Wall Street. They were fraudulent then; and they are fraudulent now.We should say No to this deal".

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas): "We have seen no bill. We have been here debating talking points ...House Republicans have been cut out of the process and derided by the leaders of the House Democrats as "unpatriotic" for not participating in supporting the bill. Mr. Speaker, I have been thrown out of more meetings in the last 24 hours than I ever thought possible as an elected official of 800,000 citizens of N. Texas....Since we didn't have hearings, since we didn't have markup, let's at least put this legislation up on the Internet for 24 hours and let the American people see what we have done in the dark of night. After all, I have never gotten more mail on a single issue than on this bill that is before us tonight."

Rep. Dennis Kucinich: "The $700B bailout bill is being driven by fear not fact. This is too much money, in too short of time, going to too few people, while too many questions remain unanswered. Why aren't we having hearings...Why aren't we considering any other alternatives other than giving $700 billion to Wall Street? Why aren't we passing new laws to stop the speculation which triggered this? Why aren't we putting up new regulatory structures to protect the investors? Why aren't we directly helping homeowners with their debt burdens? Why aren't we helping American families faced with bankruptcy? Isn't time for fundamental change to our debt-based monetary system so we can free ourselves from the manipulation of the Federal Reserve and the banks? Is this the US Congress or the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs.

Tomorrow, October 1st, the Senate will vote on the Bailout Bill. BBC News offers this lovely summary:

It is possible that the sense of global crisis may - perversely - offer a way out of this.

American voters simply have not seen this as a crisis that affects their real lives on Main Street - it is seen as a welfare scheme for the humbled plutocrats of Wall Street.

If the problems deepen and people suddenly see unemployment rising because businesses cannot get money from the banks to pay their bills and honour their payrolls, then that sentiment might change.

That is the optimistic assessment - that American lawmakers and voters having registered their pain and anger will eventually fall into line and give the US Treasury the money it wants.

And lastly, I offer a true gem of reason and integrity I found on Sharon Astyk's blog:

"What is the distinction between “pathological poverty” and “ordinary human poverty?” Well, cast back in your heads to your grandparents or great-grandparents. Among the stories of hardship in post-war Europe and Asia, of recurring crises across the Globe, and of the Great Depression in America are likely to be moments that distinguish between the pathological poor. “We were very poor, but there was always food on the table.” “We were poor, but we didn’t really know it.” “It was a struggle, but we were happy.” We will also hear stories the other side of poverty - the pain of hunger, the blind terror of being turned off with no place to go, the deaths and the pointless losses and tragedies.

The question becomes how do we turn this story into one where most of us can say “We were poor, but we had enough - just enough, but enough.” And where our kids may grow up not really realizing just how poor we were? How do we accustom ourselves to the ordinary human unhappiness (which, after all, isn’t unhappiness every moment, merely a recognition that most people aren’t happy all the time) that is our shift in wealth, without allowing ourselves to fall through the floor, into the deeper stages of collapse?"

Grab the Truth

The current media coverage about our economic crisis centers solely on an external "bailout". As an individual citizen, I have no impact on the strategy formulation nor action implementation. Yet my life will be ultimately impacted in unknown ways, as well as the lives of my children and likely my grandchildren before anything close to "normal" returns. Where is my personal power? Do I have any option other than going along with what the administration and Congress put into play?

My friend Kara shared the most extraordinary example of personal power on her Mother Henna blog. Answering her summons to jury duty seems to me to have been a Hera's Journey deluxe. Day one brought this response:

"But, honestly, I felt so victimized and dis-empowered, that I was barely coherent and by the time they took us back to the holding room while judge and attorneys made their decisions, I was in all-out tears. A kindly older gentleman, a fellow juror, tried to approach and comfort me. He said something about how we can't fight the system and sometime things just can't be changed."

How many times every single day do we receive that same message. Resistance is Futile, Just Go Along, You Have No Choice. But there are those who do manage to resist, to block out the thundering drumbeat of conformity and hold tight to personal truths. Kara did exactly that:

"The morning of day two, I sat squished in a seat, next to another of the hundred strangers, all squished in their seats in the holding room. Suddenly a thought occured to me. I am a Reiki master and teacher. And there was absolutely nothing nailing me to that chair. I gathered my things and got up. I began looking around for a spot where I could take off my shoes, sit cross legged, and begin to do Reiki. I found a piece of rug near the entrance of the holding room. I sat down. I began doing Reiki on myself. At first that was my only intention. To calm and center myself. But someone walked by me, and she looked stressed out completely. I thought to send a bit of Reiki with her. And then I looked at the floor. This is the floor that hundreds of thousands of people summoned to jury duty would walk across as they were herded to check in with the office staff. I began to ground Reiki into the floor itself setting out an intention that every person whose feet touched this floor in the past, present, and future would be blessed and might walk in peace."

Please do read the rest of Kara's post. She shows how one person, even in the midst of the most accepted, rigid Power Over structure we have in our communities today can navigate through the situation not as a victim but as a personal power point for her own values.

This notion of distilling a chaotic experience into a focused channel of power is further defined by Starhawk in her posts about the riot control at this year's Republican National Convention in St. Paul. Didn't hear about those? Me either, which is very scary. Sometimes, the burden carried by those few who are speaking for the many can be lightened by a surge of caring sent by the many. The non-violent protesters in St. Paul had very little such support as most of us had no idea they were there. And yet, they walked forward with what they knew to be true:

"The march heads up the street alongside the Capitol lawn, and then tries to turn across one of the bridges leading into downtown. The police move in, and block us.

There's a tense crowd of people on the bridge and filling the intersection. Around us are police in full riot gear and gas masks. There's also a group of bike cops, looking slightly underdressed in shorts and gas masks. They've brought in the Minnesota specials-a line of snowplows across the bridge. On them are perched black-masked cops in heavy leathers holding thick-muzzled rifles that shoot rubber bullets.

The energy is unfocused. Nobody knows quit what to do. It could all fall apart, in a moment, with the cops attacking the crowd, or it could remain a standoff for a long time. I am softly drumming, not quite sure what to do, when a young, African American woman with long
curls and a ring in her lip comes up and says, "Do you know how to sing, 'Aint' Gonna Study War No More?"

I shift the beat, we begin singing, and soon gather a small chorus that forms around us. A tiny, round, young black woman in spectacles steps in front. She has a large voice, and she takes over as lead singer. The chorus grows and a space opens up in the center of the intersection, that is soon filled with riders on bikes, circling around and around, counterclockwise. A young man turns a cartwheel. A clown on stilts appears, out of nowhere, and joins the ride. Suddenly, it's a circus in the street. The mood shifts and becomes almost festive.

My own mood has shifted, too. I've been practicing a more Buddhist-style meditation lately, just watching my breath in odd moments and being present to what's happening. I'm doing that now, breathing and drumming with the bikes and the song and the riot cops, and for no rational reason whatsoever I feel a surge of pure joy."

A surge of pure joy, the giving of Reiki for the blessing of peace to all who pass by ~ do these changes pay the rent or stop unconstitutional legislation? Perhaps not. But the day's reality for these two women became something wholly different than an experience of hopeless unimportance.

My personal story does not end with being fired. The rent will be paid, the cows will be milked, new strategies for income will be implemented. But there are two pieces of truth that ground me solidly outside the drama of Power Over. One truth sleeps peacefully in their room ~ my daughters have watched my joy in working at the clinic bombed into oblivion, my trust in my own judgement of character take another nasty nosedive, my struggle to accurately assess my self-worth, and the scramble to remain sheltered and fed. Reality for them is not global, national, nor even as small as the financial viability of one particular business in our community. Power looked like the great big breath, the gathering around the table, the teary but calm question, "Okay, here's what we've got to work with. Who has suggestions about what we do next?"

The first truth was the gift I give forward. My girls are becoming young women who know that Power doesn't always look powerful. It's okay to feel small and scared and alone because sometimes that is exactly what you are. Power isn't about holding all the cards or being able to shop your way out of a corner. It's about the willingness to look at a bad situation right in the face and decide if you did the best you were able to do. Power grows from all the many times you do this until it becomes a glowing core that can bend and change and admit mistakes and hold steady trusting your own honesty.

The second truth is the grace I've been gifted with and he also sleeps peacefully right now. In this window of cosmic Balance, a pageant of Male/Female, Power Over, Dictator/Victim blasted into my reality. I was able to recognize the abuse because it was so blatantly different from the relationship with which I have been blessed. It is not easy being married, no matter what your partnership looks like - it's the smallest and perhaps most often abused equal rights challenge available. It is entirely intimate, comprehensive, constant and rarely monitored by professional regulators. For me, power looked like Jeff wiping away my tears and saying, "Lisa Elaine, who are you? What have you got to work with?" Our vulnerability is external - a set of facts we don't often have control over. Our strength is anchored in truths that seem small in their very personal impact but with which we choose to move forward even when we don't know what will happen next.

For better or worse, I am adaptable - I've almost always got one more way of doing things that hasn't been tried and might just work. I have a strong task perspective - if a job must be done, I rarely consider the "status" of the work but get on with the small steps necessary for the big picture. I also cannot help hollering at big stone heads, even if it is only in my stories. Justice does matter.

On this Fall equinox, what is one truth about you? How can you give that one truth to yourself today? How can you give that one truth to the world today?

The Day the Cows Came Home, Part 2

I'm always ready to turn a regular day into an occasion. One of my most honest career aspirations as a young woman was to be a Wedding Planner. The guidance counselors and college advisors all let me know I *should* have higher hopes for my talents ~ If only they could see me now! But I digress...

The arrival of John Quincy Adams, aka Quincy the Cute or Darth Quincy, and his esteemed mother Martha Dandridge Custis Washington was heralded with friendship and feasting. We received Quincy and are borrowing Martha from the same great family friends for whom we moved irrigation pipe this Summer. Our gratitude for their mentorship overfloweth. Definitely part of the Bliss.

Quincy, Martha, and Carnation, the bred heifer we initially agreed to purchase, represent a significant development in our permaculture homestead. One of the fundamental principles of permaculture as outlined in David Holmgren's excellent, accessible book Permaculture, Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability defines the importance of relationships in self-reliant systems:

• each element performs many functions
• each important function is supported by many elements

The cows obviously give us milk. Looked at more closely, milk cows transform forage plants (which we puny humans with our single belly cannot utilize) into mineral and enzyme rich nutrition. What we don't consume as a beverage, we turn into butter, cheese, kefir, yogurt and cream. What we don't use for these high value storable foods, we share with our chickens either alone as clabbered milk or added to grains to aid in their digestion. (Chickens are notoriously poor grain digesters, utilizing only a small percentage of the nutrition in whole grains.) Someday, Jeff's dream will come true and we'll have pigs to share this sprouted grain recipe with as well. This Fall, Martha will be allowed to "clean-up" the finished stalks of our Summer garden crops - adding fertilizer as her pointed hooves gently aerate the soil and work in the cover crop seed.

If all this weren't enough to set the Whole Life meter a-howling, consider this: we will purchase our winter hay provisions from the same great family. They called this morning to find out which particular part of which hay field we walked through six days a week for the last three months we want baled for our animals. Our answer was immediate. One field had been a glorious combination of yellow sweet clover, alfalfa, Timothy and Orchard grasses, and wild oats. All during August, the field was a heady mass of color, sweet scent, and the hum of bees. I wanted to roll in it, to bathe in it, to eat it every day forever. Alas, my aforementioned lack of an additional three stomachs prohibited such meal time enjoyment.

But wait, now Martha gets to eat that lush bouquet. And I get to drink the milk she so graciously creates from the hay and our pure well water. Getting a hint of the bliss? Permaculture homesteads can take quite a few years to establish simply because of the time it takes for individual systems to mature to the point of an interdependence which is not dependent upon my physical labor to connect the pieces. Sort of like trying to build a functioning ecosystem from scratch.

The day the cows came home felt like the hand of Grace connecting the dots for us, laying the path of a beautiful old growth forest at our feet if we were willing to step up. In the company of wonderful friends, we accept.

The Day the Cows Came Home

I'm fairly blissing out right now and said as much to my daughters. Having spent most of their young lives participating in our homesteading efforts, a lovely dairy cow and little bull calf are just logical, albeit exciting, additions to our operation. For my husband and I, the event marks a very solid anchor in truly living a Whole Life. I suppose I should take a big breath and begin somewhere more near the beginning of this moment.

We've been ardent fans of raw milk for several years. Two books, The Untold Story of Milk by Ron Schmid, ND and The Milk Book by William Campbell Douglass II, MD were among our first major myth busters when we began our journey off the beaten path. At a family birthday celebration, we brought milk to go with the cake we'd baked. My nephew asked if it was "regular" milk to which my daughter enthusiastically declared, "Yes! It's fresh from the cow yesterday - her name's Dinah - and there's lots of cream on top." The young man took a step back and responded, "Well, what's regular to me must be different than regular to you."

The most jarring aspect of this common attitude toward raw milk is that pasteurization itself is actually the true new kid on the block, becoming standard dairy practice only because of federal regulation in the early to mid 1900's. It's very strange to me how many of our "modern" (less than 100 years old) definitions of normal, regular, or standard practice are really very radical deviations from the way we have lived our lives for centuries. I've listed several links for more information about the diverse benefits of raw milk at the end of this post. The point for now is that we became loyal raw milk drinkers because of its superior nutrition.

Jeff has had the great good fortune to apprentice with a local raw milk man. Three mornings each week, he helps milk, filter, and bottle white gold for on-farm sales. It didn't take many mornings to realize that our bottle of fresh milk was only a small part of dairy on the farm. In addition to making value-added dairy products like butter, yogurt, kefir, and cheese, the farm utilizes extra milk and whey to ferment grains, making their nutrition more available to chickens, ducks, pigs, even the dogs and ducks. Truly, not a drop was wasted.

This Spring however, there was a hitch in the giddyup. The Holstein Jersey cross who was supposed to calve on May Day didn't. Nor did she a week later, or even two weeks after that. Turns out she had never actually been successfully bred. Jeff's boss decided to have his other milk cows checked for pregnancy. Nary a baby in the bunch. A cow's gestation period is approximately nine months and breeding through Artificial Insemination can take several cycles before successful . For a small dairy with a tight production schedule (Oregon rule allows owners of three dairy cows or fewer to sell milk from the farm), this was a serious glitch.

While some quick cow trading resolved the issue, the whole story really got me to thinking. It just doesn't seem right, especially in these uncertain energy times, to rely on transportation and technology dependent practices for farm fertility. Why didn't anyone have a dairy bull? Survey showed that dairy bulls have a terrible reputation for extremely aggressive behavior. While it is quite normal for me to mouth off about "someone" taking on the challenge, it was still a surprise when our good friends responded, "Well now, we've just had a beautiful bull calf born yesterday. When should we deliver him?"

In the next post, you'll hear the rest of the story. Here are some great links to get you started busting some mainstream milk myths:

"Back in the 20s, Americans could buy fresh raw whole milk, real clabber and buttermilk, luscious naturally yellow butter, fresh farm cheeses and cream in various colors and thicknesses. Today's milk is accused of causing everything from allergies to heart disease to cancer, but when Americans could buy Real Milk, these diseases were rare. In fact, a supply of high quality dairy products was considered vital to American security and the economic well being of the nation. What's needed today is a return to humane, non-toxic, pasture-based dairying and small-scale traditional processing, in short . . .A Campaign for Real Milk." http://www.realmilk.com/

The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized Nathanael Johnson’s article for Harper’s Magazine

"When I sat at Schmidt’s breakfast table early one morning, glass in hand, I understood the possible consequences of my choice. All the competing science was there, along with the stories of epic sickness I’d heard. And I have to confess, the thought crossed my mind that if I got sick it would make a hell of a story. But when it comes down to it, here’s why I drank the raw milk. The sun had just come up, and we’d already finished three hours of work in the barn. I was filled with a righteous hunger. The table was laden with eggs from the chickens, salami from the pigs, jarred fruit, steaming porridge, cheese, and yogurt. Although dairy isn’t for everyone, I come from the people of the udder: my ancestors relied so heavily on milk that they passed down a mutation allowing me to digest lactose. For many generations my forefathers sat down to meals like this after the morning milking. It felt unambiguously right.

This, of course, is the very definition of bias: the conflation of what feels right with what is scientifically correct. But as it was, I could only hope that my biases were rooted in something more than nostalgia. Perhaps they were. The way a place feels won’t tell you anything about whether bacteria have breached the wall of sanitation, but it does reveal something about the overall health of an ecosystem. Humans have relied on such impressions to assess the quality of their food for most of history. Someday the uncertainties of dietary science will fall to manageable levels, but until then I will rely on my gut. I drained my cup and poured thick clabbered milk and apple syrup on my porridge. If any bacteria disagreed with my body, the conflict was too small to detect."

"People have been drinking raw milk from animals for thousands of years. Really, the term "raw" is a misnomer because it implies that all milk should be cooked, but that's a topic for another page! Onward..." http://www.raw-milk-facts.com/milk_history.html

Claim Your Character

We'd love to have you join us here at Journey School! While every real place has a real limit to its ability to provide for the physical needs of the local community, there is no such limit in the imagination. You are invited to come along as we work through new ways of living that respect each other, our natural world, and our beautiful souls.

Begin by creating a character here. We'll send you a handmade base - basic clothing, hair, face, and shoes complete - and you create from there. Who do you want your character to be? What skills, gifts, dreams and fears do you imagine you would experience here? Every two weeks, we'll send you an assignment to develop the life of our character. This is your chance to try on any set of attributes you'd like to explore through the bimonthly prompts and actually customizing your character base. How do they dress, what tools or toys do they carry with them, what home do they ask to inhabit?

Whether your character will be born to the Journey School community, travel through it as a trader, long to immigrate here, or plot secretly to run away from us as soon as you are able, we hope that you work within the context of Journey School as a real place where the Declaration of Four Sacred Things provides the foundation for our construction, our politics, our economy, our celebrations, and our plans for the future. Just to keep it real, every six weeks, your character will receive a package from Journey School. Whether it's a raw resource, a beautiful gift, or a challenge, we have found some of our most precious moments have come from the least expected lesson.

Not Defense, Not Offense, but Adaptation

When you are different than the majority of your neighbors, it can feel very vulnerable. On some level, we are always under scrutiny. While we don't often fear for our physical safety, the mental and emotional readiness to defend our choices is exercised regularly. In short, people want to know why we live as we do – are our beliefs somehow a threat to their own freedom to live as they choose?

If this were a clear cut challenge of defending our families and homesteads from an invading enemy, our response may be more in line with historical examples of defensive structures and offensive maneuvers. But these are our neighbors, our friends, sometimes even our extended family. It would break our hearts to close ourselves off from these folks just because we see the world through a different lens. We cannot allow ourselves the ancient mental/emotional armor of us-versus-them. When the only difference between people lies in the priorities or value system with which they make choices, then such tragic divisions are truly “all in our heads.” Instead, we admit that we cannot know for sure how people will react to perceived threats.

And if we cannot see for certain the dangers to our own way of life, our strategies cannot be primarily defensive or offensive. We must remain fully adaptive. Adaptive does not mean fickle, volatile, erratic, uncommitted, unstable, or unreliable. I know this for sure because of decades spent thinking and behaving as if it meant exactly that. I was the classic “pleaser” - trying to fit into my world by being whatever someone else needed me to be. Madeline L'Engle's novel Wind in the Door
cracked open this crazy assumption for me. A simple
challenge to one of her young characters to “learn to adapt while remaining wholly himself” stopped me in my tracks. I cried long and hard because I simply did not know what “wholly myself” even looked like. What do they say about the first step to recovery? In my case, I finally came to know who I am by a spontaneous list of who I am not. Extricating myself from the “Not” list became my path to a place unforeseen but somehow always known in my deepest self. Deconstructing a lifetime's worth of self-image and world view wasn't easy but the final, essential set of truths is an unparalleled gift. I'm still not confident saying what I will do in hypothetical situations but I know who I will be, what motivations will guide my choices.

So, like the community of Starhawk's Fifth Sacred Thing, we here at Journey School often start with what we know we don't want to do, and build from our Dedication to the Four Sacred Things in our response to sudden crises, possible threats, and just everyday living. This passage from the novel is an excellent example of such adaptive strategy:

“After the uprising, we found ourselves caught in a dilemma. We knew that war was responsible for shaping the world into all the forms we wanted to change – and yet there we were, surrounded by hostile enemies who might, at any moment, attack and destroy us. This was the dilemma that every peaceful culture has faced for the last five thousand years, at least. And this was our one advantage – that we had history behind us. We had seen all possible solutions played out, from resistance to retreat to acquiescence, and we knew none of them worked. That saved us a great deal of time. We didn't have to waste our energies stockpiling weapons or drilling troops; we could jump right to the heart of the matter, which was magic.”

“In what sense?” Madrone asked.

Lily nodded at Maya. “You remember that Dion Fortune quote you've always been so fond of? That magic is the art of changing consciousness at will? You can look at a war as a massing of arms and material and troops, but you can also see it as something else – as a delicate web of interwoven choices made by human beings, made out of a certain consciousness. The decision to order an attack, the choice to obey or disobey an order, to fire or not to fire a weapon. Armies and, indeed, any culture that supports them must convince the people that all the decisions are made already, and they have no choice. But that is never true. So, odd as it may seem, this is the terrain upon which we base our defense of this city – the landscape of consciousness.”

“...But I ask you, what is practical? Would it have been practical for us to devote our scarce resources and human energies to building weapons and recruiting a standing army, when we needed every scrap of earth and drop of water and the power of every human hand for survival, for healing the earth's wounds? War is the great waster, as much in the preparations for it as in the waging of it. We learned that, at least, from the last century, as that same military drained the country and destroyed our true wealth. But we have nothing left to waste. We would have traded an uncertain future for sure misery and still not have been able to withstand the armed might of the Stewards.”

“And where does that leave us, when armies come marching up the peninsula?” Maya asked.

“It leaves us with what we have built of this city and this watershed, which is in itself a possibility not counted on by those who would attack us. That is where our hope lies. We are what we wanted to become,” Lily said.

How We Learn

Learning is a way of life at Journey School. In our early conversations, we found that while it seemed most families had a common philosophy of education, none of us could easily summarize it. Learning saturates all of our experiences, from toddlers to elder members of our community.

The world is changing so quickly, so dramatically, that we do not have the luxury of “the way things have always been done.” Flipping a switch, turning on a faucet, flushing the loo are reflex actions we have taken for granted. The first few times that the lights don't come on, water flow, or wastes disappear instantly are a shock. Our minds have become so conditioned to convenience that it is a real work-out to think through an entire sequence of actions required for generation, distribution, and disposal of daily functions – to track the problem back to the root cause and thus find a sustainable solution.

The younger community members actually have an
easier time creating and adapting to new strategies than those of us raised with quickie marts and online shopping. This effectively puts everyone on the same page – no hierarchies here! Of course, we all have our special talents, things we do better than anyone else. But the idea that the young are to be taught static lessons established by a disconnected authority has be trampled by necessity. We are moving into an unknown future. The lessons of the past can help us evaluate our situation but will surely mean our failure if we cannot move past conclusions already proven wrong. We don't have to crash into the brick wall just because we can see that we are speeding towards it!

One unforeseen benefit of this education philosophy has been the seriousness with which people approach special talents. So many “radical” improvements have come from following an idea all the way through to completion that it has become the norm immerse ourselves in our passions. I suppose this puts an element of responsibility, even discipline, on skills previously thought of as hobbies. Certainly, we listen to each other with our full attention now – too many times, a farmer's irrigation challenge has been solved by a computer programmer or builder's options for materials opened out by watching children play. Critical thinking, awareness, adaptability, and respect for the whole system within which our individual skill resides are the cornerstones of our education practice.