3 September 1997 -- Settled in this single place
It has cooled off quite a bit in the last couple of days. Those
bound to the Northern Hemisphere calendar, of course, flip the page to
"September" and figure that the summer is completely gone, even though
it's still weeks to the Equinox. Ordinary, commercial vacation spots
recognize the passage of this point as the end of the tourist days, for
better or worse, depending upon individual vested interests. Out
here at the Cabin, of course, there's never been a rental business or a
souvenir shop, so no such abrupt boundary in time goes by.
At these higher altitudes, up in the headwaters of larger settlements
downstream, the cold will be upon me sooner, but it does not come according
to school curricula or the like. Actually, the nights have been cool
(or even cold) on occasion quite a few times already, thus requiring good
use of the down covers and woolen clothing. But then cold is such
a subjective feeling when you're not talking truly cold. Sometimes,
it just seems like a break from hot, and it's not too bad.
I am able to get out and work around the building a little easier today,
with the sky such a gorgeous blue from horizon to horizon. And it
is uncommonly clear, too--I can see farther into the distant ranges with
my 12x50 binoculars than most of the hazier days last month. This
is the weather I would enjoy when flying in a jetliner; peering out all
that distance towards the horizon, while at the same time listening with
the inboard ear for when the foodservice finally comes down the aisle,
those meals packed so carefully a thousand miles away in an industrial
kitchen.
I'm looking out now and can spot a con-trail moving across. Folks
on their way back East for more business, most likely. I take a closer
look with the binoculars towards the craft itself, which is barely visible
in a ghostly silver color. A whole column of 25 or 30 is sitting
there looking back from those windows in Economy Class, knees about ready
to hit the reclined seat back in front. Some, perhaps, having been
drinking coffee all day, need to get up and use the lavatory, wondering
when they can rightfully bother the two sleeping and/or exhausted business
travellers next to them.
The vapor trail draws out to where it passes over the ridge, and they're
gone. Two or three hours from now, they'll be in New York or Washington,
DC or Boston or Atlanta or Toronto or Montréal, stretching out and
looking for ground transportation, and later checking into hotels and hanging
up their dry-clean-only suits for the next day's dealings. I'll still
be here, perhaps needing to build a real fire tonight.
RB
7 September 1997 -- Undivided attention to the task
at hand
I'm sitting here today, thinking about time, and its various
methods of use, underuse, and overuse. Most city weekends these days
seem to disappear in a flash, with the number of information-based contrivances
that are plugged into a home like my one in real life. The office
is not much better, where I wonder why my production is failing at times.
My typical despair goes along lines like these: "why didn't I get
all of this basic, real-necessity work done, rather than goofing off, browsing
various forms of video, textual, or audio content?"
What I'm really starting to realize is that our tasks are best accomplished
one at a time, unfragmented by intervening and often unnecessary diversion.
It never really takes that long, say, to effect a given routine repair
or ongoing maintenance of something. I'm beginning to use Cabin-style
thinking in doing household work in real life. At the Cabin, one
does not think of immediately jumping back online to check for e-mail or
additions to a website or newsgroup. No, there is a job staring you
in the face, and it doesn't have as many places to hide.
This weekend, going to my real-life example, I decided that I was going
to place complete emphasis on getting my grass completely cut and close-trimmed,
which means lots of time with the power shears around the foundations,
since I have no string trimmer (yet). Then I realized how long I
had put off this job...maybe as long as 4 or 5 weeks. The grass had
grown a foot high in the rear corner, where my 2 phone lines, pair of
TV cables, and electrical conduit come from the ground. I'm surprised
the Owners' Association hadn't written it up.
Before I had all this online access at home, I had one fewer distraction,
and would get to the yard more. But then, back 5 years ago, I had
fewer distractions in general. That was then, and this is now.
RB
9 September 1997 -- A change in viewpoint
Today, I decide it is time for less thinking and more feeling; more
direct experience. This is how the ones who live in the present make
the most of it--by being aware of what's right there, rather than engaging
in mind-numbing ponderings of future events that never turn out the way
they were envisioned anyway. This is a great part of life at the
Cabin, with so much more to know in that way, and fewer reminders of other,
time-displaced realities, partial realities, and unrealities. With
the absence of electronic and mechanical noise, you have a great start.
In real life, now, I find myself driving the truck
more and more with the radio off. But still there is the crush of
traffic all about, which is even worse when you're out on foot by the Office.
In contrast, there is no transportation noise to hear at this place, other
than the individual landings of each boot, in its own place, along some
of the paths up the hillsides that I've now had a chance to mark.
So I try to turn off the analytic rendering engine that takes my experience
as its operand and watch the raw input itself. This hardly sounds
appealing to the mass media-accustomed marketplace. Who is it that
turns a profit by providing a conduit for initial conceptions, rough drafts,
and sketchy notes? This is the beauty of experiencing the moment,
since it is not a crafted, manipulated product of market research and viewer
preference surveys. God is not giving me something in order to sell
me something else. With what would I pay him, anyway? The earth and
all that is in it is his to start.
On the cable channels in real life, I watch plenty of those documentaries
and history programs, but then I notice the sponsors...who want me to be
sure to add their fund to my portfolio and consider their line
of luxury sedan or sport utility. It is obvious what I'm supposed
to be learning there.
Today, I climb the path I found to a pinnacle that stands about 1000
feet above the river bottom and the Cabin. I stand on the topmost
rock, looking over to the other side of the ridge. Did the Creator
decide that there was profit potential in showing me this view; sending
the wind along in a steady stream; making the hawks to sail with such efficiency
over their range below? Will this program be cancelled next season
if I don't watch it often enough? If anything, I am the passing,
ephemeral part of this line-up. So then, by this analogy, I should
rehearse my own behavior and disposition to stand in accord with the viewership
I have as I appear; and yes, as I might intrude in the way of a television
screen, in the vast openness of this country.
RB
13 September 1997 -- Adjustment of concentration
and focus
Today, I'm pondering the two rather distinct ways I've noticed my mind
thinking about what's around me and what I have to do. Since I'm
fond of analogy, I tend to compare them to the depth-first and breadth-first
methods so familiar to computer science students. Sometimes, I'll
happen to see something and just think more and more about it, and it alone,
in greater and greater detail, until something in me says there's nothing
more to think about there. But at other times, I get the larger picture
of many things at once, sweeping my concentration around until the whole
scene has become familiar, before taking up any matter in detail.
I always like to think of the second of those methods of thought (based
upon "breadth") to be the one worth using if I can, since it keeps me from
needless obsession upon the first point I come to, which may not really
be worth that much time. But then sitting there seeing a forest and
not trees is only going to do me good for awhile, since eventually there
will be specific matters that indeed need the in-depth attention of the
first method.
What a difficult matter it then becomes, directing the mind between
the two modes, especially when it will not respond directly to my will.
I guess this really comes down to such subjects as distraction and concentration,
which contribute to overall "attention". When I learned to drive
a car, they told me about having the "big picture", so that I'd avoid dangers
I was not aware of. And here in the woods, sitting down and living
with a "big picture" view can certainly be wonderful--to hear such diversity
of sounds and see such diversity of creation.
However, since I am an element of that creation myself, it is not long
before I need to switch over and place specific focus on something.
People who go to school certainly know about this--honing in upon that
major, and perhaps the dissertation, a great-length discussion of an extremely
fine point. What I conclude is that I would ideally have an attention
that can stay as broadly-aware of my total situation as possible, yet one
which is directed by wisdom, inspiration, or both, towards just the right
individual in-depth concerns for my own situation and best abilities to
be of use.
RB
16 September 1997 -- Serving just one master, not
two
Freed from the city grind, in which I add enough value to the System
at work for it to keep me, and sitting for a spell on the sofa in the main
room just looking out the window, I think about what my true, intrinsic
worth might be.
As you have read, I am a person with faith in a God of unconditional
love, for whom I am valuable regardless of my actions, thoughts, or words.
But still, there are ways of living and being, even here in a more authentic
closeness to him, that are preferable to others. It seems that the
city life needs me to be continuously other-centered, while at the same
time looking out for enough of my own interests not to fall in the struggle
and no longer be of use to anyone.
And thus it is, that an obsession begins with economic productivity,
which can only be achieved by rendering what others will compensate me
for. Of course, God asks me to seek his kingdom first, and reassures
me that economic trappings will also come to the extent of my needs.
That one teaching concerning where to place one's emphasis seems so central
to living a life as serene as the setting out here. At the Cabin,
I need not imagine lillies of the field or birds of the sky...why, they're
right outside the window to remind me!
But a centering in direct economic betterment seems to suit so many,
so well, or at least this is the impression I get. I wonder, if I
could be in the shoes of some of these others who hustle about, if I would
also find souls who want to be fed first from above, so that they might
be truly thankful when they are fed here below. The System tends
to discourage such satisfaction, in the interest of "growth". And
although I am hardly an opponent of the pursuit of an improved standard
of living, which this "growth" will bring, I can only imagine it possible
when material resources get properly allocated. This, in my estimation,
requires a truly "unseen hand".
RB
20 September 1997 -- The insignificance of small
problems
The trees are starting to turn now, as Autumn by its definition from
astronomy arrives. I had the star chart out last night, as I was
looking at the rest of our Milky Way, to whose center my small amount of
mass is drawn as it orbits. I found the band of the Ecliptic, and
the point where the sun had been as it crossed the other way, south-to-north,
six months ago.
As so often happens to stargazers, this caused me to ponder the relative
significance of things and events. All of natural life in these hills
is governed by the location of that sun, and the angle of incidence its
beams have upon the trees and the sky. But then, what is a single
star, after all, when I see the galactic center as a backdrop?
And so it is with one's view of life and its trials. In the Western
Industrial world, I have been conditioned to imagine dire crisis lurking
in each trifling problem. The need for instant remedy to momentary
pain is well exploited by mass marketers, whose products promise a rapid
end to what might not have been such an emergency to start. In real
life, I have found myself so often driven by intolerance of short term
conditions that I have failed to see more significant long term trends.
Isn't this how so many fall prey to the maladies of stress?
Short term, the drive to succeed appears paramount. Projects are
undertaken and pursued with reckless abandon, until the mind and body finally
have to state their protest. Then, laid up on leave, or left in some
other incapacity, those earlier problems seem hardly worth the cost of
fighting them. Better living, I am convinced, will be a product of
knowing which struggles are worth it and which are not. But this
is a hard reckoning indeed, for it forces a person to stand back and evaluate
true priority; to ask what are the ultimate goals of a whole life, and
not what has to be done in a single working day in order to stay caught
up.
RB
23 September 1997 -- Taking a break to reduce sensitivity
When I was here last, I pondered the notion of relative significance.
Today my mind is on something similar, and that is its relative sensitivity
to external things; its reaction to and experience of the events and sensations
that may appear.
For example, people reading this Diary may wonder how many would really
seek the isolation I make into such an ideal in my description of Cabin
living. How is it, after all, that any rational man would want to
leave the blessed companionship of others and those fine big-city attractions;
the night life, the excitement, as it were, to come to this place
where all one hears at night are the monotonous sounds of the woods, for
which no one could publish much of a weekly entertainment guide.
They would see me stretched out alone on my rough-hewn cot in the alcove
under the low eave and surely label me as non-conformist and anti-social,
for shutting out the ordinary, "normal" experiences of collective living.
And at times, I have to admit that I do crave some of the commotion,
when I've been too long in inactivity and begin to feel silence closing
in about me. These are the times when my sensitivity has diminished,
and I think I need more than these walls of wood; that earthen yard back
of the kitchen porch that narrows into the beaten, stony path to the river;
that calendar that only lets me mark off one day each time the sun comes
up, and which has no appointments written on it. Then I hear the
legions of social devotees who could only imagine the one-man island as
doomed to remain barren and eventually sink.
But my real city life never lets me reach such a privileged condition,
since every path I must walk is complicated by the contrary walk of others,
others with the same "right" as I to be there. Living as a "free"
United States citizen in the midst of this enlightened, empowered mob can
leave me so thoroughly agitated by countless contacts that my sensitivity
remains on constant alert, lest I run directly into another, head on, one
of my greatest urban fears, whether driving or on foot.
"What's next?", I ask, not as one would when finding something to watch
on television but instead in the cowering voice of a beleaguered refugee,
who realizes that the combatants have business in which he does not truly
figure unless he decides to enlist. With one's reaction and response
adjusted to such hair-trigger vigilance, the Cabin is no deprivation.
No, the mind here then moves closer to its created ideal, when it must
deal with realities that are more meaningful than running to catch the
elevator, lest a precious two minutes be squandered waiting for the next.
RB
27 September 1997 -- Taking another look at the
crowd
I've driven back out the dusty track again, after several hard real-life
days of feeling "alone in the crowd". Since even the Cabin depends
upon external supplies from time to time, I've concluded that there is
no routine dismissal of contact and cooperation with others. This
must also be something essential to being human. Every early culture had
the cohesion of tribal units, etc.; places where one was known to "belong"
and felt accepted without condition.
This reminds me, for some reason, of the social disaster that were my
high school years. At one point, when I was in the 9th grade, another
student who was used to seeing me go back and sit alone by the water tower,
and avoid contact in other such ways, asked, "do you believe in loneliness?"
Perhaps this is the way an advocate of mass society would frame the only
alternative to the crush of anonymous crowds.
But now I ask myself just that question, 20 years later, as I'm closed
off into this place. "No," I answer, "how could a person believe
in loneliness?" It doesn't make any sense. My failure must
be in wrongly scoffing at urban conglomerations as incapable of supporting
meaningful groups. I could not live the Cabin life for real, full time.
Not many really could. Even the early American settlers, whom I think of
often out here, made much of their families and neighbors.
So then, I'm back out on the front porch, in the rusty old second-hand
chair, trying to think of what can distill the contacts I need from the
massing throngs of the city. I cannot light a lamp and put it for
all times under one of the bushels I have as utility containers out behind
the back door. There, perhaps, lies a clue: to have a real
friend I must first be one; to serve others without expectation of reward.
And maybe what we're really talking about here is what the pop-psychologists
would call "projected feelings". When stress so depletes me as I
have known it to, then I can only see others as having similar desperation
when I encounter them.
It is time to wake up to the truth, which can make me free!
Millions of people thrive in large urban centers, and despite recent movies
to the contrary, there are no barricades or high fences built around them
to keep the inhabitants in. So what is it that they do that
lets them suspect the good first in their day-to-day encounters?
Time to sit back for while and see if God can help me with any of this...
Focusing my vision outward, I can see leaves starting to drop and sift
to the ground from the oak, maple, and poplar that rise from the other
side of the clearing and up to the high ridge. I shall try to imagine
shedding my own harmful distrust in a similar way. It was useful
for a time in learning to avoid exploitation, but now, much of it is past
season.
RB
30 September 1997 -- The stream continues to flow
past
I just finished hauling several large containers of water from my favorite
collecting point, where the stream runs deep enough to dip in the bucket
and return with it up the path to the purifying filter stand. Tired
from this exertion against the contour of the terrain, I have come back
to sit and rest under the shade of the tree cover, which is now rapidly
falling about me.
There is a considerable watershed above this point, and the creek is
well-established and vigorous. I see a leaf drop some distance upstream
into the water. Here it comes to pass me, and I see it in great detail,
appreciating its shape. It spends a moment in the eddy near the collecting
point, then goes on its way. This reminds me of many people that
come my way in the city, especially in business, with its parade of casual,
"professional" contacts. Some I will need to know longer, like the
bit of river I have captive right now by the kitchen, but even that will
serve its use and be gone with the rest.
With such an outlook, this is the place where God forms great solace,
because of his invariance over time. Even the trees about me will
fall and be renewed. With my real human contacts, of course, I know
that I should not be so callous as I sometimes appear when I throw the
dishwater on the ground or put another piece of wood into the fireplace.
These other people, the ones I know according to one relationship
or another, have a standing with God just like mine, and so we should ideally
express some of God's invariance in the relationship.
This may be my resentment of real life in that world down below the
hillside here; my well-practiced and injurious habit of hesitation towards
knowing and appreciating others as I should for fear of inevitable loss.
It is a terrible misperception. I see in the formation of every interpersonal
bond a fragile vulnerability because of how tenuous the bond can be; so
subject to the world's attempts to frustrate it. I see only the eventual
pain.
So I sit, stream-side, having taken just what I can exploit for its
pure drinking and cleaning utility, and let the rest pass me by.
The cistern is full for now. The river, as I see it before me, does
its job well, as it runs past my eyes and through my hands. But suddenly,
I find cause for immense gratitude to God, from whom all good things--and
people--come. He sees fit to send me this life-sustaining water in
the rains that fall and collect upon the earth overhead. When the
filter is through up there, I shall pause a moment in this thanksgiving
before dealing with my thirst.
RB
Ahead to October 1997
