"Closed Chests Hold More Than The Open"
To my recollection, the quote from Bachelard is, "Closed chests hold more than the open." Anything can fit in a chest you have not opened yet, even the contradictory and mutually exclusive. But once you open that chest, it can hold only what it does. The years before us contain nearly all possibility -- that winter in Alaska, that slicing hull across the Atlantic, that watermelon-basil smoothie at a summer dinner on a farm with a family you love -- but once we enter them we have precisely the one year that we are living. And, in the end, the one life. An ecovillage, as an idea, holds more promise and potential in its ether than we could possibly crystalize into reality. Our work is to dream, but lucidly; to imagine the thing with its bones and sinews straight through; to understand that of all the things we can make, we can only make one thing, and, then, to make it make sense. If we are not clear on just what we want, and how it all goes together, when we open that chest, there's a pretty good chance it won't be there.
The Vision & the Evil Twin
We each enter into this with a vision, and like the constants of the cosmos -- the strength of gravity, or the strong and weak nuclear field, or the speed of light -- in which tweaking any one of them can change the world entirely, subtle changes to what seems invariable, and big changes to what we expect to change, can and likely will change the reality and how it matches that vision. We do not always live with the vision -- in fact, we often enough forget it -- but we are often consciously or unconsciously measuring against it. We know this because we feel happy or angry or sad, and might not know why. Our aim is to cooperatively share, grow, and align the vision -- all the parts where our lives overlap -- and to not end-up with the evil twin of what we wanted -- that is, something that looks a lot like what we thought we wanted, but just doesn't feel the same at all.
Freedom and Traps, and Dissolved Binaries
Some of us spend a lot of time and care designing or pursuing something, going to great lengths to finally get it. And once we have it, once we are there, we discover that we have built for ourselves a trap, have tunneled our way into a kind of prison. This end spares very few, as it is the most strong and flexible who are able to push and contort their lives into corners of the cave that others couldn't even get stuck in. Yet, by passing luck, or even the groove of life, we have also met with all kinds of paradise. For those traps we find ourselves free from, we should give wide berth; for those paradises we have found, we should contemplate whether they can only only ever be a gift -- given and never taken -- or a moon we can shoot for.
We are not here to just design a beautiful farm, home, and commons, but a beautiful life. In the alloy of beauty, mixed right through it, is freedom. It is in our heart that we find freedom as we meet the moment -- rather, it is in our heart that we can find freedom, though perhaps we often lack the presence that unleashes it. But with this kind of freedom understood, we should also consider how to build a life of the baser kinds : specifically freedom of time, and freedom of finance.
For the overwhelming majority of us who must work, it is our paying vocation that can both fulfill and free us; for the overwhelming majority of us who do work, it rarely does either. The particular trap to avoid here is the work that takes too much time, the work that gives too little, and of course that work that does both. "Metro, Work, Sleep" -- MĂ©tro, boulot, dodo -- hit me the first time I read it as "Metro, Work, Tomb." We have a lesson from our French compatriots who seem to have a stronger memory, if only that, of la belle vie. A beautiful life that knows the balance of its parts, and what a life is for. What a life is for!
It is farming that taught me these things. Farming, so big and beautiful that it touches all the facets of one's being -- in the contact with the earth, the working balance of the seasons, the movement of the body, the righteous challenge of each year -- that it makes one think that it alone might be sufficient. But nothing is everything -- no person, no place, no kind of work. And though we cannot have everything all at once or even at all, we are always more than we are letting ourselves be. If we can build the structure of our life to hold our greatest self, we should.