Bioneers Gathering

 I held my hand up to my mouth, wiped at my eyes as if my allergies were acting up, not as if I was convulsing in agreement, my heart beating out of my chest with understanding about this love and excitement for something as small as a seed. Yes, talk of seeds brought me to tears. 
Every. 

Single. 

Time. 

And not in a 'Hey lets buy this packet of Freckled Lettuce' type of excitement (although I love that, too), but in the 'Wow these are my people that KNOW that a seed is more than just a tiny speck of matter' sort of way. They know a seed is soil and health and freedom and revolt and pure life wrapped in the memories of ancestors and land and countless sunrises.

Each night I slept in my car so I could buy more books, be early to the keynote speeches (conversations), immerse myself in the energy of the gathering place. 
(and hell yeah, I was being cheap because the tickets were not)
(but at least the scholarships were plentiful and included this youth attendee who wrote about it too)

Each morning opened with drums and dancing and stomping throughout the auditorium. 

And coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. 

Each day was filled with talk, with listening, with clapping and snapping and sighing and screaming:

A mushroom hat-wearing Paul Stamets describing how mycelium can heal the world. I wanted to shout, “I know, I know! I learned how to grow oyster mushrooms! I get excited about mycelium running through the compost pile! The fact that mushrooms are closer to animals than plants kinda freaks me out, but it is soooo cool!” 

Eve Ensler passionately, poetically ranting about eating that apple of light and truth and becoming the Eve that flicked off the patriarchy. My fingers itched to begin writing plays then and there. Rise up with my old love (theater) and circle back with a revolutionary tongue.

The bizarre scene of Vandana Shiva sitting at a small folding table in a sterile hotel banquet room. Did they not know the space would be bursting at the seams with admirers? Couldn't they have picked a venue with at least one living plant? She spoke eloquently of farmers fighting back against Monsanto corn in Mexico, tragically of bankrupt farmers hanging themselves with Monsanto seeds in their pockets in India. She spoke of quantum physics, of undissolvable energy and matter, of hope.

I could list each speaker, each inspiration, each Yes! that erupted from my lips as the person in front of me read my mind. Or blew my mind open with possibilities. 

But I won’t. It lasted for three full days and my notebook is full.

I will say that gathering with community, speaking of the beautiful actions and thoughts we CAN realize even among the ugliness and despair- it changed me. 

I am still buzzing and plotting and growing.

Going to a forum like Bioneers is one way to get a dose of hope. 
We all need that. 

Find it. Get it. Grow it. Gather and nourish. 

It is up to us. 

Slow is Beautiful

Blown out hair and Paris Twilight nails. Frozen eyebrows and painted penciled lips. Suitcases stuffed with Lulu Lemon stretchy pants and coolers full of expensive juices. Spike heels and belly tops.

I am in shock. I tug at my skirt dirty with compost and oak leaves, wipe my face with the back of my hand and hope I sucked all the kale greens from my teeth. My fingernails are black with soil from the farm, my arms and face brown and freckled from living and working outdoors.

I help load a cart to help one of these LA yoga retreaters up the hill. She insists on pulling with me, a refreshing change from some of the others who call us porters or girls, their Om t-shirts and Namaste greetings thinly veiling impatience and a distant questioning about room service. 

I breathe in, ground myself, ask where are you from, how was the drive, have you been to this semi-wild land before? She is steps ahead of me, pulling pulling pulling and the cart starts to wobble with the disparity. “Am I walking really quickly or is there something wrong with...the cart?” she asks me. “You are walking pretty quickly,” I answer. She doesn’t slow down. I sense her frustration. But I am not going to speed up. I am quietly laughing to myself, not at her but because I am astonished with myself; I am usually the one who is pulling the hardest, glaring at the slow movers, wanting to get things done done done. 

But on this land I have slowed down and want to welcome that pace in others. How else can you notice all this beauty? I wake with the sunrise with roosters crowing in the valley below after the coyotes have sung their final verse. I move and write and sip and read. I wander through the oaks and wild buckwheat and stop to notice the scrub jay on a branch or how the lizard moves over the dusty clay road. I have time for two-hour meals and take even longer to chop, blend, press, preserve all those farm vegetables I picked this week. I have time to ask, “How are you doing?” and not mean it as a Hey. I actually want to know, want you to talk with me, want to hear your stories and dreams and what you cried about all morning in your tent or why you've been singing love songs all afternoon.

And I don’t want to go back to a place, a space where this isn’t normal.

I lead her to her sleeping space, this woman in a hurry to meditate, to retreat. She loves the view of the orchards in the valley, the rustic beds in the yurt. She wonders about finding the bathroom in the night. I say you can always just go here, motioning to the leaf-littered ground. 

She looks confused. 

I don’t explain. 

I leave her to unpack, feeling a strange pause, knowing that she wondered for a moment about tipping me for my help. I walk away, dragging the cart behind me. Slowly meditating on how I would explain to her that this is my service, this is my way of making this land a more beautiful place by welcoming those who may experience the magic too. That generosity with time and help is not a transaction here. It is an offering. An invitation for connection and interaction, with the people, with the animals and plants, with the everything. 

It took me weeks to get to this unwinding, slow, deliberate point. To the point where I am shocked at this group of “mindful” people and depleted by the searching superficiality I sense in so many of these yoga-fit bodies. I don’t want to judge; I’ve been there too and perhaps am better able to recognize this desperation because of my own struggles. My own weekend retreats (Fix me! Fix me! Give me peace and love in my heart by Sunday, goddammit!), my mala bead groping on the stern of a yacht (dissipate my anger! Maybe one more chant will make me see the good in these people!), my stack of expensive spirituality books (one more paragraph closer to enlightenment). 

I still have a long way to go. 

I am grateful for how far I have come.

I look forward to seeing the transformation. To seeing the woman who brought only heels barefoot on the land. To seeing clean, unvarnished faces sweaty with hope and motion. To seeing the inner workings rise and the chaos of LA fall away into the spaces between the flagstones where the bobcat preens and stalks. I don’t want to have too many expectations, to harbor too many dreams for this bunch. But why not? Between the moving and writing and sipping and reading, why not cast out dreams of healing for these wanderers? That is my service, that is my unbinding contract with the transactionless universe. That is what the land has given me: hope, dreams, and a heaping cart full of love that I can slowly pull and disperse as I go. 

This is what I will take with me when I pack up my car in a couple of weeks. 

This is what I will remind myself of when I slip on heels and brush on mascara and play Big City with the rest of mankind.

This is the space to which I will always return now that I've tasted it. 

Not necessarily to this location, 

but to this groundedness, 

this sacredness, 

this wholeness, 

this living.