The Road West

So in May of 2010, I made the choice. I quit my job after saving up several thousand dollars, again packed what I could fit in my Honda Accord (which wasn’t much), only this time including my partner, and two other friends Nova and Zandor whom I knew through the sustainable habitat program called the SHIRE, and drove to California to attend a sustainability festival. We never made it.

Instead we drove up the coast to Northern California, stopping along the way to visit friends and beautiful views.

Zandor, the original driving force behind the formation of the SHIRE, expressed his displeasure with the project and the direction it was heading, and voiced his need to separate himself from it. In my naïve enthusiasm, I offered to take on his duties and responsibilities as President of the Board of Directors. He agreed, and sent an email the following week to the rest of the Board.

My first project as President was building a composting toilet on a friend’s land in California. They were having trouble with their septic system. Our traveling crew offered to build them a composting toilet. The structure was about 2 meters tall, an elevated throne that dropped down into a pit, where the humanure would decompose for two years, when it could then be used as fertilizer. As long as sawdust (or rice hulls or corn husks or what have you) covered each deposit, there is no offending smell. I oversaw the ground leveled, the primary structure put up from scraps we found laying around the property, and finally the walls enclosed using waddle & cob, woven sticks with a mud and straw mixture. It was a beautiful building when we were finished. I felt so proud of myself, and grateful still to have people around me who were competent builders.

Instead of returning to Texas, I opted out of the broiling heat and thought my time would be better spent back East, gathering myself together and preparing for my responsibilities as President. I returned to Chestertown and spent the remainder of the summer there, repainting several rooms of the house and doing general maintenance around the property. With my new lenses and excitement about the possibilities of living sustainably, I appealed to the three owners at the time, my grandmother and her two sisters, about the value of the property and how it could be turned into a productive space, instead of a one month a year rental property. I was rejected and, heartbroken, returned to Texas.

On the way back to Texas I picked up my best friend Ross, who had just graduated Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Fresh to freedom, we stopped in the Everglades, Florida, to visit our marine biologist friend Sara, who gave us a tour of the glades and the beaches. Our last stop before reaching Austin was two days in New Orleans, walking around the city and enjoying the delights of the South. At the end of September 2010, I was back in Austin and officially moved into the Hundred Acre Wood.

 

Story of My Life – Part 6

 

The Road South

I graduated in August 2009. I spent the last week and a half living out of my car, since my apartment lease ended before the graduation ceremony. Fortunately I spent the summer practicing Tai Chi, and was able to apply the calming effects of moving meditation on the otherwise stressful conclusion to my formal education career.

I moved to Austin, Texas within a month.

I packed my Honda Accord with everything I could fit, including my partner, and we drove South. And we drove South. And a little West. Making it to Texas was itself an accomplishment. Very little planning went beyond just getting there.

We were able to find a swanky apartment within a week, on the third floor of a brand new apartment building. With less than 20% occupancy, we were some of the only people in the building. The complex was located at a Metro stop, but the Metro train was several years behind schedule, and did not stop once during our 9 month lease.

My first job was as a community organizer. I spent 8 hours a day knocking on doors, gathering signatures, donations, and letters. I was terrified at first to talk to strangers in their own home, but by the third week, I was a pro. It became a joyous game to meet and talk to so many different people.

The campaign itself was focused on creating more responsible channels for e-waste – those old computers and tvs and printers filled with toxic metals and precious bits of elements that all end up seeping into our ground water when they’re thrown in landfills. I held that position for three months, until “I could donate money to you or buy presents for my kids for Christmas” overtook my ability to meet the nightly $150 standard, and I was let go.

Fortunately, I had been offered a job the previous week by one of the folks who signed my clipboard to cleanup the customer database of a telecom company. I proceeded to work in an office for six months, making good money but not developing the kind of skills I wanted to develop.

The saving grace was my weekends, which I would spend at a sustainable habitat outside the city. It was so clear being out there what I wanted to do (fulfilling work surrounded by nature and good people) and what I didn’t want to do (menial, meaningless work for a mediocre company).

It’s occurred to me at this point I’ve mentioned very little of my family. The whole story thus far has been a random assortment of events, without much emotional weight, that have just happened to me as my life floats along.

My parents both work for a pharmaseutical company, and I am wholly blessed to have both my biological parents still married, something I gather is quite a rarity in America these days. I have a younger brother in college, and a still younger sister who work for DirectTv in Frenso, CA. My mother’s side of the family I grew up visiting and vacationing with frequently, the only one I knew on my father’s side was one of his brothers, Uncle Jerry, who works as a librarian at Albany State University.

These are the people I share blood with, blood I learned recently goes all the way back to an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower. I guess exploring is in my blood. So is creativity, obstinance, rebellion, and (if I may be vain) beauty.

Story of my Life (Part 6) – The Road West

The Birth of Bright Sky

Though the experience renovated much of my inner landscape, the thing that has stuck with me most is my name.

One way of engaging the Ojibwe community was to participate in a sweat lodge – a traditional healing and purification ceremony where 20+ people sit in a tiny pitch black structure where water is poured over hot stones while the participants sing and chant. This was no sauna – the heat was uncomfortable and it was hard to breathe and at the end something came out. I fell out of the structure weeping, clutching the dirt and letting the earth absorb my tears. There had recently been a traumatic death in the family and I could feel all the tension and sadness flowing out of me, releasing itself from my muscles and cells and mind.

We had been asked to fast for the day preceding the lodge. That meant no food or water for 24 hours. After the lodge, each participant offered a handful of tobacco to our lodge leader, a Midewewin (medicine man) named Richard. He put it in his pipe, lit it, and waited. Each of us received a name, guide, and colors.

My colors were red, blue, and yellow. My animal was the deer. My name was wasogiizhig., which means ‘light of day.’ Or, Bright Sky.

The first time I actively used the name was to change my Facebook account. My pictures had been previously stolen when I was involved in a legal proceeding. I had been arresting streaking for the traditional year-end finals week run and been stopped unexpectedly by the police. I was acquitted after a six hour trial. The next year, I heard no one was arrested during the run.

Still, the experience made me wary of how indelicately my online information is protected. Bright Sky premiered on Facebook.

Story of My Life (Part 5) – The Road South

 

“College”

I attended Pennsylvania State University at the insistence of my parents. My plan involving community college (due to not having a clue what I wanted to do with my life), was inadaquete, and anyway I could start as an Undeclared. I finished my Bachelor’s degree in English in three years and graduated in the summer of August 2009.

The first two years were relatively uneventful. Heavy class load, good grades, and I discovered the unlikely bonding that came out of smoking herb, rather than the chaotic and dangerous ritual of nightly binge drinking.

My third and final year was the most adventurous by far.

In the fall, I spent a semester in Rome with ten other students. It was my first quasi-community living experience. We lived in the same hallway and shared a bathroom. Rome itself was provocative, ancient. I was in constant wonder at the contrast between the old and the new, in architecture, in relationships, in my own self to constantly evolve. Also having to cook for myself was a large life change.

In the summer semester I took a cultural studies course, which involved a month living in Bemidji, Minnesota, in the midst of three of the largest Indian reservations in North America, occupied by the Ojibwe tribe. The trip was completely transformative. Meeting with tribal leaders, both political and spiritual, learning about current conditions on many reservations, alcoholism, the struggle to retain their language, poverty, trash, contradiction at every turn, the guilt about my own ancestor’s/culture’s behavior, genocide, the resilience and kindness of people despite these enormous challenges, the embarrassment of giving a gift, how quickly a loving community may form, the deliciousness of the sugarbush, the wisdom and generosity and healing powers of the midewewin, the outlawing of sweat lodges even up until the 1990s… all these things I cannot tell in a linear fashion because this was my introduction to a world that was connected at many levels – above and below, and to each other.

It turned my hierarchy upside down; instead of seeing man as the most complex or highly evolved, lording over the plants and animals, they showed me a hierarchy of dependency where man depended on all things around him to survive, just as the animals depended on the plants, just as the plants depended on the earth, and it was the planet herself that deserved the utmost respect for sustaining all life.

Story of My Life (Part 4) – The Birth of Bright Sky

 

Early Life

I was, as previously stated, born and educated in the great state of Pennsylvania. Homeschooled in my former years, Mom took me and my younger brother William and my younger sister Kathryn on outings to science museums and historical sights, skating rinks and community parks, friends’ houses and 4-H. She let us set our own book work hours during the week, and encouraged us in whatever we wanted to do, as long as it was safe. My early education was dotted with achievements, such as a championship in a regional Future City competition, where we were asked to design every aspect of a future city, from energy to transportation to a building a city block model. At 12, I was running a multi-thousand dollar business selling beanie baby leashes, which saw my already extensive vocabulary grow to include words like ‘wholesale’ and ‘commission.’

Then the time came for me to re-enter the mainstream. With some prompting from a friend’s mom, I began 8^th grade at the local middle school.

My first day at public school I declared myself King Bob and walked backwards through the hallways. Shocked at the incapacity of the other students to play and humiliated that they found me so strange, I focused my attention on my unconscious, or rather, the surprising capacity to sleep in a desk. Marching band kept me engaged through high school, but mostly my creative energy was focused on a percussion group called United, an intense mostly college-age group that traveled the country performing and competing through complex musical narratives. The instructors were unforgiving, the music was mercilessly difficult and I cannot recall a time in my life where I was ever pushed harder, physically or mentally. I loved every moment.

I graduated high school a quarter early in 2006 under the pretense that I was going to march all summer in a drum corp. I never did.

Story of My Life (Part 3) – “College”