The Impulse Itself: This was all cement.

January 13, 2012

This was all cement.

One of my favorite things is riding in the back seat of someone's car.

As most people, I am a recovering control freak. I have several years of active recovery in this area, and one of the finest remedies for it has become a knack of mine: I'm really good now at just showing up to the moment if other people or new experiences are involved, showing up and being open, and going with the flow. Which is why I think that one of my secret joys is riding in the back seat of someone else's car with no say over where were headed. Just giving over to the moment, happy to be going wherever it is I am going. It is such simple fun. Five gypsy women, five thirty or almost thirty somethings riding in a car. Single, gypsies, funny, happy, wise. DeVotchKa on, sun almost down, radiant plume-air and shadows of pine canopies twisting all around.

In September on a date with me I randomly found this town called Sebastopol. I spent four hours there, in the buoyant sunshine of the market, on my knees in the used bookstore, smiling and milling on the sidewalks, grinning at strangers like they were friends I was about to meet. Today I went there, me and four gypsies, and also me and forty-five others, to our instructor's house one street away from sunny downtown.

"This was all cement" he said. One third an acre is what he was talking about, tho whole of his land. All cement when he bought it, an old ratty lot. We ooohhh'd and ahhhh'd. Now a food forest Permaculture Neighborhood Center only three years later. One of his six water tanks for rain catchment hold 4000 gallons of captured rain water, or the equivalent of drinking water for his family for three months. We ate fresh veggie cob-oven baked spelt pizzas for lunch. The awe goes on and on.

While he showed us his garden guild he paused at the nitrogen fixers and ran his hand through a literal stalk of sage. It broke mid way down in the most gentle way, literally fell in to his hand. He grinned and horay'd, it was white sage, what I and many other gypsy wild types love to burn for smudging. The group accepted it to take back to camp, an offering from Eric's most amazing land.

I make fun of hippies. I really do. But really, we have fun and love our lives and you can't make this stuff up, so fun is more than okay.