Epiphany in Green

No one will believe this happened because of Twitter, but it did.

I’ve only been using the service for a month. But I was happy and surprised to discover that two Taos residents, a frequent commenter on this site and a realtor friend of mine (neither of whom is remotely described by those terms), were also on Twitter, and over the last few weeks, I’ve gotten accustomed to checking in frequently. Both of them are very much into green building and living in harmony with the earth, very much like I thought I was until I met the real thing.

Today was a strange one in my digital life. I was angry and argumentative for reasons I didn’t understand and found myself snarling at my friends. Later I learned from an embarrassing voicemail from my brother in Tucson what had likely been stirring my unconscious all afternoon:

He’d called because my mother told him to — she probably wanted to talk to me — and of course I wasn’t here. But while he was in the process of leaving the message, the two of them (58 and 87 years old!) got into what in most families would pass for a fight (“He’s NOT THERE!”), but in my own background is the stuff of daily living, or dying, and he forgot to hang up the phone… For a full five minutes, I could hear them going at each other — the same ancient wounding from Helen (“There’s nobody here to help me!”) pushing my brother over the edge. The hurt and primal terror in his voice resonated with the old black monster I know all too well and scared me to death. The poor guy, was all I could think.

Good Lord! No wonder I’d been dark and twitchy in less than 140 characters. Everything in our lives is intertwined in ways we just don’t realize. And so I decided to revist the “argument” with my greener-living friends.

I’d been the only one emotionally invested in the game (they might not even have noticed), protesting much too much over someone’s stated preference for a manual weed-cutting tool. Yes, it was that stupid! After listening to my brother’s voicemail, however, I realized that I felt guilty about my Sears gas-powered brushwhacker in a way that pushed my buttons and clouded my mind. In truth, my friends were right! And I’d always known that deep inside, way before I knew them. Long before I came to Taos, in fact, and probably since the day I was born.

In reality, I DON’T “need” a gasoline-powered machine to cut the grass! I don’t need it to chop wild rose vines or whack the rabbit brush, either. There are lots of ways to deal with these things. (Got goats?) I’d been arguing in favor of saving time by pulling on that starter cord, but that’s not the only way to proceed. It’s not the only way to live.

We’re all trapped in the past, bumping up against barriers that aren’t there:

I “have to” use a noisy machine instead of a shovel and a scythe.
Time is something to be anxious about “saving.”
We “have to” have armies and banks.
We “can’t” all eat organic food.
And so on and so on.

ALL OF THIS IS BULLSHIT, because we make the rules, collectively, from billions of individual assumptions and intentions. In the prison of certainty, humanity is dysfunctional: the Garden of Eden is all around us, and we just don’t see it.

Share this post ↓

No related posts.