October 25, 2007

The shower in Jay, Cedar, Silas and Edie's house is the expression of the holographic relationship we are in the spiral dance of life in the planet.

In that bathroom, each spiral – made of pieces of ceramics - is connected to the rest by way of color, shapes, grout but also by the intentionality of the builder and artist who created it: shower, clean, cool off and enjoy... and now because of this piece I wrote, it is also a tourist place you can visit when you go the learn form the sustainability community that people are building in Hartland, Vermont.

The artistic shower allows see yourself as part of the whole. You know that for sure because the builders put lights in it. That is the data. “Switchology” is how you can see yourself as part of the whole because if you take your clothes off with the light shining on your naked body, you immediately become part of the spiral dance and can even see yourself – naked truth – as part of it. That happens because some of the spirals are pieces of mirror glass.

And when you try to look at yourself fully in the mirror that some the spirals are, you see parts of your own body, but other parts of you are the other spirals. That happens because you cannot see through them, thus they become a part of your own body.

What I barely understand as “systems thinking” or “complex theory” or “holistic paradigms” or whatever you like to call it, is nothing more than process – because it is only a process – one of relearning to dance the spiral dance to its rhythms and connections while recognizing yourself fully in it.

It requires a certain mindset, I must admit. There is a lost paradigm that ordinary people – mainly the least versed in the rational education systems, most women and some men who are still connected to caring, expressing it and making it their thrust in life, and even those in academia, sciences, the arts and even politics that have become vitally critical about the hegemonic paradigm of control, domination and dichotomization of everything and everybody in this planet, into unequal halves. Teachers in that perspective have also been those natural processes like love, sex, community, movements, family life and communion with nature that bring me back to life at its fullest, when I try hide in my head.

All of them taught me along the way to come back to life. That is my change of paradigma. It did not happen all at once, and it definitely is not a finished task. It is just that: a road to bringing life back to its fullest – mine and the rest of it as a hologramic whole.

It is hard, but a time came when I could not ignore it any more. But that is another story.