Spirit of the Time

I’ve never been to the Amazon and I’m only beginning to understand what they mean by this more general idea of Amazon consciousness.  For our sake here, we could call it Earth consciousness.  Or Mother Earth consciousness.  Or Pacha Mama consciousness.

The trick is for us to recognize that the Amazon mind is always present wherever we are.

A personal anecdote: I’ve just arrived in the United States after living the last seven years in Patagonia.  I’ve been living as close to the land as I can since I realized it was important and have observed with a somewhat distant eye how new technologies like smaller flashier cell phones have been arriving into the valley where I was living.  The classic anecdote that my brother and I share is that he had to make it to town to call a campesino neighbor on his cell phone so that he would come to till the earth with his team of oxen.  So there I was thinking I more or less knew what the modern technological world had to offer and trying to choose differently and I get on the plane….  Woah! Hey there!  Woah… what’s THAT!?  And THAT!?  All these little gadgets started popping out of people’s pockets and bags once we had successfully taken off and soon I was wide-eyedly observing as folks “plugged” things into their ears and awkwardly scrunched over very small big screens with all the visions that they were generating.  In some ways, it was like a jungle for me… a jungle of creatures with strange appendages and unusual ways of being in this world.

And I guess this is the point…. we are always in the jungle.  The Amazon is always present.  I think back to the last time I arrived in this country and remember walking through a part of Brooklyn, New York that had still not been transformed by bougie-fying real estate tendencies to find refuge in Matt’s appartment.  It was high noon and hotter than hell. I was the only white person in sight amongst the many African-Americans (who actually use the sidewalks and streets like they belong to the public), had a big camping backpack on my back, was lugging a guitar case in one hand and generally feeling like Prometheus did with his rock.

This is their jungle, I thought.  Of course, if you grow up on asphalt streets and amongst concrete buildings than these are the plants of your jungle – of your mind.  And just like you might learn to be a bad-ass hunter or have your senses honed to split-second dances around venemous snakes in one jungle… so might you learn the elegant agility of false-stepping your opponent and taking the ball gracefully to the hoop in another.

What I’m getting at is that we all live in the jungle.  That shiny military-looking vehicle that some guy was driving yesterday on the streets of Berkeley was made out of metals mined from mountains that may well have had jungle or forest covering them before.  And no matter what we eat… even if it has more chemically synthesized components than not… continues to always be some glorious transformation of the earth’s offerings.  Amazon consciousness recognizes that EVERYTHING comes from the earth…. even those things that are bought at IKEA.  I suppose that one of my main observations with these still fresh eyes of life in America is that everything is so polished and the materials in which we live generally so processed that it might be easy to forget that they are made of compressed fibers that were once standing trees, latexes that might have flown in the sap of forests or petroleum products that were actually pumped from some underground reservoir.

It’s interesting to observe that green consciousness seems to be a big thing.  It was the cover story in the Continental in-flight magazine, for example.  I guess I am afraid that it might be taken as one more in a series of games: who can be most eco-friendly might be considered like who can make lots of money: a strange form of competition.

This ain’t no game.  This is the woven web of this wonderful reality and the truth is that in huge countries like Argentina and Brazil they are continuing to chop down jungles to plant soy so that people around the world can eat big steaks and now run their cars on this short term fertility.  A jungle eco-system continually recycles nutrients so its richness is in the dynamicness of this exchange.  Current economic practices with respect to the land are more akin to mining where you exploit it and then its gone.

So the main thing I’m trying to share is the reminder for us to all be grateful for each and everything that we “have” in our lives.  And especially for the sparks of life which are the people that surround us in our environment and accompany us in this dance.

It is Fall in the southern hemisphere and friends are celebrating the harvests by drinking from the gushing spout of newly pressed apple juice.  And spring has come to bless the northern hemisphere where seeds of hope are being planted so that life can continue to be a blessed journey for yet another year around.

So this is the latest project that I worked on.  It is an open fire place that turns into an efficient mass stove when the doors are closed and the flu direction changed.  The backside of the fireplace is actually an oven when viewed from the kitchen (as seen in bottom photo although the oven has not been installed yet).  Hot water pipes run through the firebox and feed a hot water tank on the second floor which works in parallel with a solar heating system.  And the whole structure is part of a staircase…. the wooden part of which has yet to be built and will serve as a big box for storing wood under too.  Claudio drew up the plans (which I will put up as soon as I get to a scanner) and I built it during the month of April.