Giant Journey on Foot.

Outside my doorstep lies a box inside which Outside Lies Magic lies. Yes? Hm. (Bring box inside home, open package: Marcovaldo, Poetics of Space, Flatland, A Place of my Own, Dirt.) No. Outside Lies Magic still lies outside of my reach.


I have more than enough to write about without it though. I have so many thoughts and ideas hiccupping and bubbling out of me it’s a little frustrating. I’m cringing right now because I’ve been writing myself crazy. I keep starting whole new threads of ideas without wrapping up or tying them together. Maybe they don’t need to be connected immediately. Or ever? Maybe I’m making it into too big of a deal in my head wanting to impress myself with really deep and profound insights, in which case I need to just (1) calm down, (2) breath, (3) accept the not-so-smooth start my brain is taking things and bringing them together. Maybe it’s just rusty from not working too hard lately.


Basically reading Anastasia is blowing me away and getting my mind spinning. There is this utter simplicity that is in your face. There also are things that are unbelievable. I mean that literally, I can’t believe them. It’s something like doubt but not quite. As if I’m holding onto something that is preventing my acceptance of these revelations. They are the sort of things that I say ‘I want to believe them’ or ‘that would be incredible if it were true’ but I’m definitely not there and I know it. My mom is though. She, whole-heartedly, is a lot more open to Anastasia’s message than I am. I can see it and feel it and am slightly awed, slightly jealous, and slightly wondering how she got there.


[A quick summary so far about Anastasia is as follows: Anastasia is a beautiful, strong, elegant, intelligent, naïve and childlike emotionally sometimes (‘she is human, after all’), while overwhelmingly wise at the same time. She lives unclothed, without shelter in Siberian Taiga. She uses her mind for telepathy or uses ‘rays’ to see people and perhaps suggest something to their minds to better their lives. Anastasia can learn and do anything she desires and lives in harmony with the animals. She eats whatever is around her the moment her body tells her she is hungry (like grass, or squirrels will give her cedar nuts), if she gets cold, she sleeps with a grizzly bear if she needs to keep warm. And she has an anxiousness to enlighten society with our potential because she believes that human beings are the most incredible creatures and the whole world exists to support and realize this. We just don’t get it, and she wants to speed up this process by opening her universal knowledge to this merchant (the author) who will share the message with the world through a series of books (which she predicted; and movie, in the future).]


The heart of the book gets at how humans are incredible creatures. That our capabilities and potential are so so so incredible, but we just aren’t there. It’s like we have systematically set up a complicated way to cut off our legs in preparation for a giant journey on foot. And then we are trying to invent technology to adapt and replace the legs or strengthen our arms in effort to waddle, as if this is the most reasonable and logical plan of action. As if cutting our legs off and haphazardly coping with this makes sense and, obviously, is the way to start all long, walking journeys. We praise our technological advances because they bring us closer to achieving something along the lines of our god-given legs that we already butchered. And that this is our story over and over.


For example, Anastasia discusses how people should plant gardens for themselves because in that way we can communicate to the seeds, soil, and growing plants what state our bodies and minds are in so they can grow specifically to heal our personal ailments.


“Every seed you plant contains within itself an enormous amount of information about the Universe. Nothing made by human hands can compare with this information either in size or accuracy. Through the help of these data the seed knows the exact time, down to the millisecond, when it is to come alive, to grow, and what juices it is to take form the Earth, how to make use of the rays of the celestial bodies –the Sun, Moon, and stars – what it is to grow into, what fruit to bring forth. These fruits are designed to sustain Man’s life. More powerfully and effectively than any manufactured drugs of the present or future, these fruits are capable of counteracting and withstanding any disease of the human body. But to this end the seed must know about the human condition. So that during the maturation process it can satiate its fruit with the right correlation of substances to heal a specific individual of disease, if indeed he has it or is prone to it.”


She continues with specific ways to communicate your current state of health with the seeds and plants. The idea of what she says makes sense and her steps are very simple. It actually seems so easy they way she puts it! I can plant those plants, walk barefoot through the garden every morning thinking good thoughts and maybe even build that beehive to your specs, an empty, simple box with boards at least 6 cm thick, roughly 120 cm long and 40 cm deep and 40 cm wide and prop it up at least 20 to 25 cm off the ground facing south. (There is plenty more detail!) But she lays it out all very clearly and specifically.
Hell yeah I want to give to try it, why not? How hard would it be? What harm could creating a beautiful bountiful garden do? And what’s the worst that could happen, it not work? What is there to loose?


Oh, wait Anastasia! My legs are cut off. I’m already handicapped.


How can such a simple thing as planting healthful food for oneself seem so daunting and nearly impossible to achieve? Do I begin my garden by ripping up the grass in my artificially fertilized and irrigated back yard and plant reengineered seeds bought in a package at the hardware store? Do I have time to instill my essence and care for the plot amongst all the other things in my life like making money by hostessing at The Jolly Cricket, pursuing my modeling career, and then pursuing architecture. I need to do those things in order to function day to day as well as pay back the debt I am in from my education, not to mention paying for the two courses I am currently enrolled in now, and nourishing my body in the meantime before the garden starts producing? Are these reasonable explanations for my lack of a garden, am I just lazy, or is it that I just don’t think this is the most important thing to me immediately? And why isn’t it?


It just seems like I am so deep and buried in ‘society’ that it’s already too late for me to opt out. As if this garden is a form of opting out. And as if opting-out was never a choice, nor did I realize it as an idea until it was too late to realize that I could have the option, before I accumulated debt, tying me down. This sort of thing reminds me in a way of smoking or drinking or something. All of society. We knowingly make decisions and live in a way that is harming ourselves; and we keep doing it. It’s just on a bigger level so the guilt or blame is less personal or direct. The tragedy of the commons? We point the finger at mass production by corporations that mechanically only recognize profit in maximum output numbers for minimum input > the highest yields. Reengineering plants for pure volume instead of health and nutrition. But corporations are ultimately made of people that are eating these plants. We are all victims of the system we have set up and it is so vast that I can’t help but feel hopeless to try to turn it around or escape it. Not to mention I can’t just shake off the values and goals that I have within this sickening structure. I want to be an architect. I want to be a model. I want to eat at restaurants and savor ice-cream. I want to travel around the world and read books and watch reality t.v. Is that so bad?


I’m not unusual or unique. There are many people like me that just go with it, accepting hypocrisy or, maybe more accurately, spending our lives making the best of this self-conscious hypocrisy. To me, it just comes to the forefront of my thoughts sometimes and fades back at other times when something more immediate confronts me.
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I volunteer at an organic garden that was started at my autistic sister’s group home. We put fish guts mixed with air and worm poop to fertilize the baby arugula, bok choy, lettuce, spinach, and other plants. We kill the ant colonies with grits. This winter, it’s been the coldest it has ever been in 20 years. The entire garden died. I wasn’t there for it, I was inside keeping warm. I went back out when it was warm again and came back in because it got cold again. I live in south Florida. Anastasia lives in Siberian taiga. Whoa. Thinking about the garden brings up my thoughts about all.


Driving in my falling-apart Volkswagen bug to and from Miami (about a 2 hour drive) along Alligator Alley makes me think of it, staring at the road, the cleared median and manufactured canal parallel to the road. I drove this drive 8 times in the past six days, 4 times since yesterday. I’ve spotted one alligator along Alligator Alley. Ever.
Huge parking lots make me cringe and think, especially when they are empty. I zoom in and out. When I step back--the little things I lose sleep over--I find myself laughing at their futility. How pathetic whatever it was actually is in the whole ‘scheme’ of things. Like this post. But then I zoom out even more and my existence seems futile and pathetic, which is hopeless. The thing with that is that I don’t think my existence is futile or pathetic. I don’t believe that. I have a faith that there is a higher power, greater plan, that there is a reason I am here. It’s the thing that makes me keep going. What makes everyone keep going I think.