Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  This is the vital step between the wet, still flightless thing that emerges from the cocoon and a soaring butterfly: giving up the idea of being a butterfly. I noticed that writings about humility abounded in the 12 × 12, as if when Jackie reached certain levels of success as a physician, an activist, and an “enlightened” human being, she had to fortify herself with ordinariness to maintain simplicity, joy, stewardship, and compassion.

  Gandhi knew this peril. When he felt even a shred of pride over his accomplishments, he stopped and imagined himself as a speck of dust that is crushed underfoot. And when he was that piece of dust, he didn’t stop. “I imagine myself,” he wrote, “as so small that even that piece of dust would crush me.” Gandhi went to such extremes for humility because he was in such a perilous position. The leader of a movement that would free hundreds of millions from colonialism: hearty fare for the ego. He could have had all the money, power, and self-sufficiency in the world, but he figured out a secret: we must remain atomically connected to others to feel truly happy, and we don’t feel that way when we’re on top; we feel separate. So he gave all of his money away. He cleaned toilets, wove and washed his own clothes, and lived in voluntary poverty in an ashram.

  In one of his diaries, Thomas Merton writes of humility: “The proud man loves his own illusion of self-sufficiency. The spiritually poor man loves his very insufficiency.” By stripping myself, at the 12 × 12, of some of the manifestations of independence — a car, a phone, electricity, piped water, a home — I’d come to “love my very insufficiency.” In 12 × 12 simplicity, I discovered my nothingness and began to love it.

  I looked into No Name Creek. The sun was setting, the water in gleaming flux. The creek’s beauty took me further out of myself into the country murmurs around me, to the soft new leaves on the breeze sounding like paint going on. To frogs that sounded like crickets. To the voice in my head, now just a whisper, and then silent as the waters calmed momentarily and I saw my muted reflection below. It was no longer sharp edged, as it had been when I arrived. Half of my face was clear, but the other half was who I really was: nothing concrete. I laughed a little, and then laughed deeply, right from the belly, at that fluid person, edges loosening on the water’s surface. The gloriously softening boundaries of the ego. Jackie, silently, was taking me by the hand and walking me through the gate of humility, which leads to the deepest, most lasting source of joy: simply being.

  THEN ONE DAY, just as I was discovering the joy of ordinariness, as I felt the smallness of ego identity loosen its hold on me, I was yanked out of my bliss as I walked into the Smithsville public library.

  “You’re William Powers,” the librarian said to me. She was flanked by another librarian. They were staring at me with dewy eyes and a little apprehension. A silence stretched out. I shifted from one foot to another.

  The other librarian clarified: “You’re an author.”

  “I read Blue Clay People a couple years ago,” said the first, still gawking. “I still think about it. It’s so … Can you …”

  The other librarian finished, “Can you autograph our copy?”

  As I signed, I noticed my ego expanding slightly and said to myself: J am a piece of dust. One woman said, “We’d love to invite you to speak at the central library. But here we are taking your precious time.”

  Then, checking my email on a library computer, I found a letter from a reader in Australia. “You don’t know me, but I know you. I’ve read both your beautiful books.” Be so small that even a piece of dust can crush me.

  Soon half of Pine Bridge was reading my books, the Thompsons included, as the librarians spread the word. Gone was the pleasant ordinariness I’d felt, the joy of being. I’d been an obscure nobody, and suddenly the people around me were telling me I was “special.” It became increasingly difficult to practice what I was learning about humility. Specialness and its close cousin, competition, are a kind of disease. We make this up as an American culture, taught since childhood enough one-upmanship and hyper-individuality to make Ayn Rand look socialist. The ego is the fountainhead of your worth; I think — and do — therefore I am.

  When this disease begins to invade, I consult Rule Number Six. It’s something a manager-friend would use in his humanitarian aid projects. Whenever ego wars, slights, and offenses would surface, someone on the team would say, “Rule Number Six,” and amazingly, harmony would return to the situation.

  I asked him what Rule Number Six was, and he told me: “Don’t take yourself so damn seriously.”

  We both laughed, and I asked him, “What are the other five rules?”

  “They’re all the same,” he said. “See Rule Number Six.”

  I consider humility as closely tied to gratefulness. Thus, if someone praises me, I’m grateful; if they don’t, I’m also grateful. Even when I’m criticized, it’s an opportunity to be grateful for the breath I draw in that moment, for the sunshine and breeze, and for whatever lesson there is to learn. By being grateful, appreciating all we have instead of focusing on what is lacking, we allow more of the same to flow toward us. When I focus on missing Amaya, for example, I create a drama out of lack, of not-enough, and that becomes my reality. Instead I can focus on how much I love her, how grateful I am that she’s my daughter.

  Jackie talked about this — the mystery of being grateful and “allowing” — in a letter she sent me after my time in the 12 × 12. She spoke of the first days of her walk to the Nevada Atomic Test Site, sending a line from John O’Donahue — “At its heart, each human life is a pilgrimage, through unforeseen sacred places that enlarge and enrich the soul.” She wrote:

  Been walking in the desert’s emptiness, in silence. On the third night, a priest talked with us. We are all on pilgrimage, he said, a literal one to the Atomic Test Site, and also on an inner one. Using the stories of Moses and Abraham, he talked about being “called out of our captivities into unknown places … not able to see where we are going.”… Transformation. I am grateful for the gift of going into this pilgrimage with no expectations, open to take what comes. And it is a gift, not something I’ve been able to achieve.

  A few days later, I looked into No Name Creek. Before, half of me had been blurred, half clear. Now the clear part was blurred, too. “I” had completely vanished.

  But this was not the dull facelessness of my reflection in the Durham industrial park lake on the day of the 5K race. This “me” was full of color and leap, a dynamic jumble. Two frogs, on either side of me: one, lime green with patches of beige, its feet twice the size of its head; the other, a big old bullfrog that suddenly splashed into No Name Creek. Like the creek, I don’t have a name. I felt a surge of gratefulness for this feeling body, this thinking mind, this heart, and for my precious Amaya.

  “Hola Daddy!” Amaya said cheerfully on the phone, when I called her the next day.

  “Hola Amaya, how’s my hijita preciosa?”

  She told me a story in half baby talk about Mama Martha and Tio Eduardo, about her kittens and puppies, about a world where she had little consciousness of herself as separate from the One Life, a natural humility.

  CALLED OUT OF OUR CAPTIVITIES,

  INTO UNKNOWN PLACES

  21. NOISE AND WAR

  WHILE I WAS SITTING IN JACKIE’S ROCKING CHAIR, a sonic boom crashed above the 12 × 12: military planes flew overhead, reminding me that America was at war.

  Test flights from North Carolina bases like Fort Bragg, Pope Air Force, and Camp Lejeune regularly sent down a thunder that caused the surface of No Name Creek to fluster. At the time, North Carolina citizens had already spent $12.3 billion in state taxes to keep state bases running — to say nothing of the hundred billion and more in federal taxes Americans had paid to fund the war. These were the taxes Jackie was resisting. Body bags came back to North Carolina, particularly from poorer families: Brian Anderson (Durham); Patrick Barolow (Greensboro); Leonard Adams and Mark Adams (Morrisville); Darrel Boatman and Charles Buehring (Fayetteville); Larry Bowm
an (Granite Falls). Fifty-three North Carolinians, who had been stationed at Fort Bragg alone, died in Iraq while I was in the 12 × 12, just a few of the thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who had perished.

  Not a half mile from the 12 × 12, by the railroad track stoplight, stood a US Army recruitment billboard with a GI Joe–type fighter, a blond young American, against a comic book background of war. The caption: FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM. One time I biked past a girl kneeling beside a dented old car, a camouflaged leg coming out of it. I looked away just as she looked up and saw me. I guessed that he was about to head off from Fort Bragg to Iraq.

  As a relief worker, I’ve seen war up close. I’ve seen the front lines in the former Yugoslavia, and the wounded shipped back to Zagreb. I’ve ministered to war-affected youth in Sierra Leone, including those who had had limbs amputated by rebels trying to terrorize areas. During Liberia’s civil war, I had to hunker down in the bush as a skirmish broke out in the capital, and I was at another point evacuated from my home to a compound closer to the airport and the US embassy as rebels advanced toward Monrovia. I’ve seen enough to know that war is disgusting business.

  The day Jackie had nearly reached the end of her pilgrimage across the desert, she wrote me a letter. Reading it, I was struck forcefully that while I was in her 12 × 12 cultivating peace in silence, she was, in her own way, making noise about war:

  It is a bit of a ragtag band, one could say — or one could say, it’s a bit of a nomadic beloved community of pilgrims called into the desert. Imperfect humans in imperfect community — what else could it be? We bring ourselves, our broken-nesses — and we bring hearts bursting with a yearning for peace, to love better, to go deeper into compassion.

  The outer pilgrimage of this nomad band is the Sacred Peace Walk — six days walking deeper into the desert, walking to the Nevada Atomic Test Site calling for an end to all nuclear weapons.

  Mornings — we drum till the sun rises over the mountaintop, circle, plan, and are smudged with sacred sage by Willie of the Western Shoshone, whose tribal lands are illegally occupied by the Test Site. Willie brings his willow staff and his wisdom. Every morning, he tells us again: remember, every step is a prayer for peace.

  And then we walk. Just keep putting one foot in front of another. Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe. Beside us mountains, before us mountains, behind us mountains. The desert enfolds us. We startle a rabbit, little birds in the brush. An inch of rainfall last year, we are told — yet the desert lives — branches of creosote bushes bend gracefully, as a dance…. The desert makes its way into your heart and soul as the dust makes its way into your evening soup bowl.

  We’ve dived deep into many ways of naming Spirit: sharing Muslim evening prayer, Friday evening Shabbat, bathing the Baby Buddha, re-hearing the Christian and Hebrew stories of pilgrimage, of our ancestors who were called to leave captivity, leave the familiar, and strike out into the desert, to places unknown.

  Today’s last full day of walking — carrying our banner and flags — brought us here, very near the enormous gates of the Test Site. We walked and shared the fourteen nuclear stations of the cross, graphic images of the horrors of war, the threat of nuclear annihilation and the daily death-dealing of resources poured into the nuclear arsenal. Palm Sunday mass was celebrated by Fr. Louie Vitale and Fr. Jerry Zawada, who’ve spent months and years of their lives in prisons for nonviolent resistance to war. The setting was a gravel lot at the edge of the desert, against a van covered with a banner to ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

  And now — we are spread out across the desert’s edge — the sun just set in unspeakable splendor behind the western mountains and the wind has died down. The moon is almost full and Orion hangs in the southern sky. Early in the morning we’ll walk to the Test Site to keep saying No, not in our name, not ever. It is good to be in this place.

  I read her letter several times, moved by it, but unable to see the beauty she saw. I read some of the books and articles on warfare Jackie had on the 12 × 12 bookshelves, becoming all the more horrified the more I learned. Humans have slaughtered one hundred million of our own species in twentieth-century wars. And the twenty-first-century has the seeds of something worse. Political scientist Chalmers Johnson, in his Blowback trilogy, says societies have had to historically choose between democracy and empire — but you can’t have both. He writes of “the last days of the American republic,” in which an entrenched military-industrial complex sinks the vestiges of democracy. The United States, according to the State Department, has 721 military bases in foreign countries (unofficially, it’s over one thousand) and continues to build new ones. In terms of its nuclear capability, America’s current plan, called Complex 2030, is to build a new generation of weapons, including a first-strike arsenal that could theoretically destroy an entire continent and intercept incoming nukes through a protective shield.

  Against the peaceful backdrop of the cabin, I read a refresher on the destructive effects of nuclear weapons. There are immediate, instantaneous effects — the blast itself, thermal radiation, prompt ionizing radiation. And there are delayed effects — radioactive fallout and other environmental impacts — that inflict damage over a period ranging from hours to centuries. Despite this, and despite the world having constructed 67,500 nuclear weapons from 1951 to the present, the United States continues to invest billions in tax money toward more.

  Is this the world, I often reflect, that my daughter is to inherit? “All within me weeps.” This was the refrain of a Native American woman at another anti-nuclear rally in 2007. Hundreds of Americans gathered at the gates of the Los Alamos National Lab, an annual event. Along with the politicians and celebrities, a Native American woman rose to speak: her family came from the area, which was taken from her people by the US government to create the Los Alamos nuclear complex, the place where the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were put together. She described the destruction and suffering caused by those nuclear devices, the higher levels of cancer in her people, and the government’s plans for Complex 2030. When she finished, the protestors sat for a thirty-minute meditation, and they ended the day with the floating of Japanese lanterns, a tradition they follow every year in Hiroshima to remember loved ones lost in the nuclear holocaust. “All within me weeps,” she repeated.

  Even more than protesting, Jackie suggests that if we wish to lessen the nuclear threat, we must first look inward and take responsibility for our interior space. Are the conditions — the anger, resentment, and fear — that cause humans to go to war and support violence inside of us? Can we regain faith in the goodness of human beings, including, most importantly, of ourselves? Then, can we express this faithfulness in action and love, perhaps by joining a peace study group or participating in nonviolent action? As the plaque on the Pettus Bridge in Selma proclaims: “When you pray, move your feet.”

  Jackie’s brave response to darkness inspires me. So many of us get clobbered by the system and end up living what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation,” living, you might say, in Weimar and pretending that Buchenwald is not up the road. Social psychologist Eric Fromm astutely observed that the main reason people perpetuate evil systems is remarkably simple: they don’t love life. Sometimes I see it clearly in myself: a going-through-the-motions, an acquiescence, a living-with-it — but without the vital pulse of love. Jackie’s courage in the Nevada Desert arises out of a deep love for life.

  ONE NIGHT I SAT WITH PAUL JR. at his bonfire, in silence for a long while, thunder sounding in the distance. The candle went out in Paul Sr.’s 12 × 12, and then he came out and joined us. The flames cast a jagged glow on the left side of the old professor’s face, the right side in near blackness. “The neighbors turned us in,” he finally said. “They told the police we’re living in small houses.”

  “That’s a crime?” I said.

  “A misdemeanor. The inspectors came after the tip-off. You’re only officially allowed to live in a 12 × 12 if it’s for
part of the year, not year-round. And we couldn’t prove a permanent address elsewhere. Because we don’t have any other address.”

  According to that rule, Jackie wasn’t legal, either, and could be forced to move out of her 12 × 12.

  Paul Jr. chimed in: “And they said our front and back porches made the houses ‘effectively bigger than twelve by twelve,’ so we have to install toilets, pay various taxes …”

  “They’re also trying to make us install electricity,” Paul Sr. said. “Do you know it’s not legal to live without electricity in North Carolina? It’s not a choice you may make. it’ll cost us a fortune, and could sink us. Just like legal costs to defend an ecological vision are sinking Bradley.”

  Paul Sr. got up, saying he was going to bed. The entire right side of his body was now illuminated by firelight, his left side fading into oblivion. “Hell is other people!” he blurted out. “What does it matter to them if we live simply? It makes me all tense inside. I believe in community, but …”

  He paused. Paul Jr. was staring down at the beer in his hand, perhaps trying to think up a Carlos Castaneda rejoinder. His dad finally went on: “Do you know what? I can’t get beyond me. Do you think I haven’t tried group living? I’ve tried for so long to diminish my ego. It doesn’t happen. I’m Descartes’s child; I only exist at all because I think.” He hit his palm against his head. “With this brain!”

  I thought of what Leah said: Sin is when I’m at the center. Paul Sr. looked off, to an invisible point out in the forest someplace. “Individualism is part of our cultural DNA. We’ll never escape it.”

  I FELT AS IF A DARK CLOUD WERE PASSING OVER the Thompsons as well. One day, after waiting for a booming military jet to fly over, I asked little Kyle if he wanted to go biking. He shook his head and said no.