Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  I’ve since found this is a difficult concept to convey. Atheist or agnostic friends and colleagues furrow their brows, exactly as I used to do before I experienced it directly. Words are mere connotations, pointers at something that must ultimately be lived, felt, breathed. It’s helpful to think of persons who embody it — Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. They come from a nondualistic perspective, from a sense of One Life, while still accepting the existence of oppression and racism on the level of form. Instead of dualistically opposing these “evils,” they trace them through compassion and act through love — in other words, the enlightened master’s resistance.

  Allowing is the foundation, not the house. As I would soon discover, it is the necessary basis to achieve an even more sublime insight.

  ABANDON ALL HOPE OF FRUITION

  23. GOD’S FEET

  AS HUMAN BEINGS, we are suspended between spirit and clay. Spirit is the stuff of allowing, of detachment, of transcending the world. This is Buddha “overcoming the world” or Jesus “transcending the world.” Through spirit, we discover the level at which the supposed dichotomy between the world and ourselves is smashed, giving a sense of fearlessness and joy.

  But we are clay as well as spirit. We exist, earth bound, for some seventy or eighty years. The problem I have always had with any overly “spiritual” path is that it sometimes denies life. We have an eternity to exist in the soup of universal energy, but just a few precious decades to savor rich coffee, whether it’s bad for us or not. To plant zucchini; to people-watch in a subway car; to love jazz. To love others, even if it gets messy.

  If we take “allowing” to the extreme — detach from our creaturehood, and exalt only our spirit-hood — we may feel blissful for a while, as I did during mystical moments at the 12 × 12 — but we’ll miss out on half of what makes life meaningful: the portion of us that is clay. To me, the tension between spirit and clay is exemplified in a Raphael painting I saw in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy. The Renaissance artist shows Jesus rising out of this world — but with his feet still hanging down into this one. Why doesn’t Christ rise completely, detaching from the suffering of the world to become pure blissful spirit?

  The first time I saw it, I lingered in the Uffizi and gazed at Jesus’ feet, about to leave this world. After a while his feet seemed to be wiggling in the painting’s fresh air, then tapping to music. I listened. No, it wasn’t celestial harps. Perhaps Jesus likes jazz. He doesn’t ascend — not quite yet, those gorgeous earthly riffs.

  I wonder if it was jazz Jackie heard as she walked across the vast Nevada desert to a nuclear test site to utter the word No. A person has to love messy, soulful, heartbreaking life to march across a desert to oppose the weapons that could eliminate it. Not too tight, but neither too loose; clay and spirit like to dance. Loving-kindness is the goal, not a disembodied detachment. But we can’t get to loving-kindness through ego-driven love. We can only authentically inhabit ourselves as clay after rising first into spirit.

  One of Jackie’s favorite writers and teachers, Thich Nhat Hahn, embraces loving-kindness in the way he names the source of the problem, which is different from blaming, which can be a way of displacing one’s own anger and frustration onto another. Nor does Thich Nhat Hahn refrain from suggesting concrete action for personal and societal transformation. At Jackie’s, I discovered his reinterpretation of the five precepts of Buddhism, in order to cultivate compassion in a way that keeps with the changes in society: “Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I vow to cultivate compassion and learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals.”

  I read this one morning at six A.M. in Jackie’s loft, the silence gathering. I let my feet dangle down from the loft, toward the 12 × 12 cement floor below. My toes tapped to the improvisation of morning birds, and I was seized with an urge to descend. Down the ladder, mindfully, feeling my big toe touch bare cement. Walk out into the gardens, and into the woods barefoot, the soil now loamy with spring life. How good it is to be clay! To be alive, and to be free to choose a wildly ethical path.

  God’s feet linger here because of the human heart. It’s never fully born. Amaya, I think, and then feel something catch in my chest. As hot as the blood is the missing of her. God, how I want her little hand in mine. Only another parent can fully get this. It’s completely different from separation from a parent or lover. The clay in me wants to touch that part of myself — my blood flowing through another heart — touch the memories of her birth. The first time I held her, she was the length of my forearm. Her mother’s ecstatic smile over this perfect form that’s come out of her, laced with the courage of giving birth to someone she knows will someday die. Kathleen Norris captured this:

  her water breaking,

  her crying out,

  the downward draw of blood and bone….

  Now the new mother, that leaky vessel,

  begins to nurse her child,

  beginning the long goodbye.

  Not long after leaving the 12 × 12, I finally got to see Amaya, if only for five days. Her mother, Ingrid, came to Little Rock, Arkansas, to visit her high school exchange host family from years before. On a walk through the suburban neighborhood where her host family lived, Ingrid pointed at a nursery school, the Growing Tree, which stood directly adjacent to a funeral home.

  “Next to the Dying Tree,” I said.

  On my last night with Amaya I look into her light eyes, kiss her cheek, and say her name out loud. She says mine: “Daddy.”

  “Amaya,” I repeat.

  “Daddy,” she says. The moon overhead waxes oblique, like a beach stone, and the trees blow in the wind, and I feel warm and shivery at the same time. A plane crosses the moon, its tail of smoke gray on the moon’s white.

  “Amaya.”

  “Daddy.”

  “Amaya,” I repeat. “Daddy,” she says. “Amaya.” “Daddy,” this time smiling big and leaning over to kiss me. “Amaya,” I say, kissing her. “Daddy,” more serious now. “Amaya.” “Daddy.” We’re memorizing each other.

  “Amaya.”

  “Daddy.”

  I rise above Little Rock, looking out over what really is a little rock, a tiny airport, those couple-of-skyscrapers enveloped by the big curve of the Arkansas River, and all the dead, soy-scarred land stretching north toward St. Louis, where I will connect to New York, and I think: I might never be in Little Rock again. Might never land in St. Louis, I think, later, as we hit turbulence and the plane sighs deeply, the woman next to me mumbling something. I’m aware of the irony — here I am, on a plane again — and consider for a moment how incredibly hard it is to live sustainably, particularly when I want to see my daughter.

  The plane banks toward the St. Louis Arch, an upside-down smile, a piece of twisted tin against the treeless plain, and lands. With a long layover, I decide to leave the airport, walking out beyond all the asphalt to a patch of green, an empty lot filled with overgrown grass and wildflowers. The sun sets, painting itself in fiery crimson. I miss Amaya.

  There are two types of problems we face in life: convergent and divergent. Convergent problems are like engineering problems or jigsaw puzzles, putting pieces together to arrive at a definite answer. Divergent problems are those of the heart and spirit, diverging into greater mystery the more we try to untangle them. Perhaps a lot of the modern dilemma is that we try to solve divergent problems with convergent logic — instead of disengaging the mind and getting to the subtler levels that guide people like Jackie. Here’s this moment’s dichotomy: I miss my daughter, and at the same I watch a softening world with joy. Instead of creating an inner drama out of paradox, I sit with it, allowing a butterfly to land on my arm. It’s black with flecks of ginger, and its wings beat slowly. In an instant, it’s gone, lost to me in the sunset.

  A moment later the butterfly flutters back. Lands on a flower beside me, as the day ends, finding nourishment in what’s right here.

  IT WAS MY LAST DAY
AT THE 12 X 12.

  Leah came out to help me clean and pack. Jackie was coming back in a few days, and it was time for me to depart for New York. Just as we finished — the bare cement floor swept, my bags in her car — a train horn sounded, low and solemn to the south. It was one of the only times I heard a train pass on that lonely stretch of track across No Name Creek. Leah took my hand and said in a childlike voice: “Let’s try to catch it.”

  We ran, side by side onto Old Highway 117 South, narrowing in on the train. It sounded again, and this time we were so close to the machine that it vibrated all the way through me. We ran harder. I looked over at Leah at one point and her face was pink and sweaty and serious, as if she were putting all of her soul into this one thing. We ran, the train right ahead, its bell still ringing, but alas, we arrived just as the caboose swept by.

  But we kept on running, along the track now, laughing and slowing down, those familiar railroad ties under my feet, the heat of the train on our faces and chests, the widening gap between that old train and us.

  Then, eventually, silence. We continued to walk, onto a path into the woods, along No Name Creek, and we began to talk about us. We felt love for each other but both knew at our cores that we weren’t meant to form a couple. There are some people who touch your life for a month, others for a season, and still others for a lifetime. We had touched each other for that spring, grown together in the light of Jackie’s lessons, and now we let go of each other.

  It was not easy, or completely clear. We stopped by the creek and held hands and kissed, and talked about seeing each other again — when I came down to visit my parents, when she came up North for a visit. And we would see each other again, in the future, but it would be as friends. An hour passed with Leah, in silence. We watched the creek’s flow, and I knew that there’s no greater gift to the world and to others than being true to your deepest self. So many times, out of fear of loneliness or other negative emotions, we form relationships that are good enough, but untrue to our uniqueness. Doing so risks flattening ourselves.

  That’s when one of Jackie’s most important secrets bubbled up to me from the creek. A revelation (re-velar: veil again) that came up in full clarity and then concealed itself. I understood what the 12 × 12 really is.

  Its floor, the bare slab of white cement that Jackie steps down onto from the loft every morning. What’s under it? According to physicists, our bodies and the earth itself are 99.99 percent empty space, more a wave of energy than anything solid. That floor is Jackie’s integrity: a 12 × 12 rock over nothing.

  We are God’s feet, and it is out of a place of total emptiness, a place beyond “the world” that we must create our lives. We sculpt our characters out of wildness. Leah and I held hands for one last moment beside No Name Creek, and then we let each other go.

  ON MY LAST DAY AT THE 12 X 12, the Thompsons’ two ATVs sputtered out and died. The second failed right in front of the 12 × 12. It took three of the brothers to push the lifeless machine up to their woodpile, where it now lay belly-up.

  “You want to ride bikes?” Kyle asked me.

  “Sure, Kyle, let’s ride bikes.”

  The other kids came running down to us. “Hey, you all been swimming?” I asked them, as they shook the water off their bodies, having just emerged from their makeshift kiddy pool — one of the hog’s water basins.

  The four-year-old mumbled: “Bradley’s got a bush hog.”

  “He does?” I said, picturing the mammals I’d seen in Africa. “Like from the Lion King?”

  Kyle, in a teacher-like tone, explained the obvious to me. “It’s for clearing bushes. It takes down the rough stuff.”

  “Those are our new pigs!” Greg said, pointing to a black one and two pink ones, new arrivals.

  “That’s right,” Mike said, walking all macho toward us down his drive. “I’m getting heavily into hogs.”

  “Wanna know their names?” Greg said. “Bacon-for-Breakfast, Sausage-for-Lunch, and Ham-for-Dinner!” The other kids squealed with delight.

  “Bacon!” said tiny Allison, grabbing my pant leg for attention.

  Kyle and I rode down to the post office and back, and when we got back to the Thompsons’ driveway a kind of spontaneous party seemed to be forming. All six kids, including the baby in Zach’s arms, were there, along with Leah, Michele, and Mike. And remarkably, for the first time ever, José’s son, Hector, was there, playing with the other kids, real evidence of a cultural and racial healing at work.

  Animals honked, bayed, scurried, and flew around us — indeed, the Thompsons were “getting heavily into hogs” and other animals. The farmers market rumors seemed unfounded; perhaps this family had a chance of making it. New pens and the number of animals had grown since I’d arrived. Mike had enrolled in the community college sustainable agriculture program. As I’d seen in Durham, therewas demand for organic, local produce, and room for creativity for this new-old American Dream of being a Jeffersonian-style freeholder.

  Later that afternoon at the Thompson farm, I saw Julie and Yvonne, the ones living in a shed in the shadow of the chicken factory. Their van clunked along toward us, as Leah, myself, the Thompsons, and Hector and José chatted and joked among all those animals, the setting sun causing their duck pond to positively sparkle, the woods rising in deep green down by No Name Creek. The van pulled up and both women climbed out, huge smiles on their faces, their hair going every which way, and Yvonne — without saying a word — opened the sliding back door.

  A long pause stretched out over the farm.

  Even before it happened, before the rush of sound and color, it occurred to me that I could be looking at a piece of the New We. This ragtag bunch in Adams County, inspired by Jackie and their hearts, were living according to their loves. If the aborigines have it right that the twenty-first century is dreaming the wrong dream, perhaps these particular Americans were dreaming a more inspired one.

  All of a sudden: WHOOSH! Dozens of Muscovy ducks alit from the van and fluttered crazily out toward us. Mike had purchased a fresh batch of ducks from Julie and Yvonne, and they were making the delivery. “Muscovys!” Julie cried out.

  “Woo-hoo!” Mike yelped. “We’re going heavily into ducks, too!”

  What followed, in the sunset at the Thompsons’, made little rational sense. I’d look back on it later as a kind of ecstatic play. Adults, kids, and animals alike began running in circles, whooping, doing a jig. The animals didn’t try to flee, and at times they seemed to be chasing us as we laughed, skipped, and danced up onto the Thompsons’ porch, the sky now fantastically aglow. I found myself twirling with Leah and with Mike, receiving a duck handoff from Kyle, and suddenly, completely out of breath, I stopped.

  I stopped, but the dance continued: Leela, divine play, the song of the Tao. By doing this, deeply, we were doing everything at once. It smelled like a farm, sounded like an out-of-control symphony, and moved with the swoosh of wings against my arms and cheeks. Cackle, whoop, yaw; the howl of a dog. I looked into that soft blur. I couldn’t smell the chicken factories, but Gold Kist still worked up the road, and the stench would return tomorrow. The box stores would open their doors, inviting us to consume. The nuclear arms complex would puzzle over ways to destroy the planet five hundred times over. The planet would continue to heat up as many of us feel nothing but flatness both inside and out and shrug.

  But thousands, perhaps millions would discover the kind of wildcrafting afoot in Adams County and send out feelers along the creative edge. The primal swirl of human and wild continued around me, but I remained still, sensing a truth. The 12 × 12 is a space of integrity, and also a symbol of a larger, growing resistance to standardization. A No — and a Yes. There’s life at the heart of empire. The world can be freer if we allow our inner lives to be vast national parks. We are wilderness. Jackie’s integrity is more than that 12 × 12 slab of concrete over nothing. It’s the ten thousand 12 × 12 squares of wild space that she’s liberated from the Flat World.


  Suddenly, through the swirl of people and animals, I noticed something attached to the woodpile: a detail that stood out precisely because of its stillness and smallness. I walked over, leaning in to take a better look: the black casing of a cocoon, broken open, the butterfly gone.

  24. TOUPEE’S SONG

  THREE MONTHS AFTER I LEFT the 12 × 12, the nonprofit World Conservation Union sent me on a three-month assignment to postwar Liberia. There, I was to help that fragile country negotiate a sustainable timber agreement with the European Union. I knew that, to be truly transformative, warrior presence must withstand even the most difficult situations — even a hell on earth. Going to Liberia would be the first real test of my 12 × 12 rebirth, but the experience proved to be more than I bargained for. Jackie’s whole philosophy was about to come under assault.

  Liberia shocked me. I’d worked there for two years during the civil war, from 1999 to 2001, as an aid worker, an experience that led to my book Blue Clay People. In 2003, the war ended, and the blood diamond–smuggling, child soldier–commanding Charles Taylor was driven into exile. It was now 2008, and I expected to find a country on the rise. Instead, Liberia was in many ways worse.

  There was still no electricity or piped water, even in the capital city, Monrovia. Malnutrition was so bad that, according to a UN report, “stunting” of people’s bodies from malnourishment was costing the economy some $400 million, offsetting all foreign aid. Malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS were spiking. And there were the young girls. I’d seen some of them in Monrovia’s poorer markets, as young as thirteen, often very beautiful, sometimes dressed in their school uniforms, selling their bodies for about a dollar.

  One afternoon, I found myself walking along Monrovia’s Poo Poo Beach. The city’s residents dubbed their central beach with this sardonic, affectionate name because it acts as both bathing spot and public latrine. I stepped carefully to avoid the fecal land mines. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, the government had just completed a mini-Berlin Wall around the city cemetery to keep former child soldiers from sleeping in the graves. A place where they have to build walls to keep people from living in graves? I thought to myself.