Seems I’m feeling impatient this morning. I noticed it as Sally and I sat together for our daily check-in, drinking coffee, watching the sunrise, watching the small black cat prance about on the roof of the mobile home across the road, and speaking whatever is most on our minds and in our hearts. I kept noticing these feelings of irritation, boredom, impatience, as if there was really something “more important” that I needed to “get to.”

Now I’m up in my lab where, ostensibly, I can follow whatever fascinates me. And yet that feeling has not dissipated. There’s a wanting in me. A dissatisfaction with the now. An itch for something else. What a waste that seems. I’ve got hot coffee, beautiful music, warmth, freedom, sunshine, work to do… what more could I need?

Perhaps it’s this need to write a blog that is poking at me. As if it’s something to be “gotten to” so that it can be “gotten over.” As if I hate so much to be told what to do that I even hate being told what to do by myself. Even when what myself is telling me to do is something the both of us really want to do. Yar. The joys of owning a “civilized” human ego. Now where did I put that instruction manual?

But it need not all be something “egoic” (read “habitual” or “reactive” or “programmed”), something that needs to be patted on its head and sent to bed with a cookie. That’s the problem with sorting out “ego”: it wraps itself tightly around the true and free and real and essential, to the point where it can feel almost impossible to tease apart. And that, perhaps, is a deep motivation for coming to my lab in the first place: I can do my sorting here.

I’ve been thinking about Facebook this week. I thought I might write about the “coming end of the Mayan calendar” today, but right now that feels boring and obvious and defensive. I thought about following up on last week’s piece about “getting free from limiting stories and stepping into what I really want” with a preemptive strike against my many imagined “arguments” to what I said. That feels boring and obvious and defensive as well. When I look through my list of possible blog topics, I notice that many of them are defensive in nature, blogs that explain or reply or claim or defend some point of view. But I just don’t have the heart to get defensive right now. Even with the coffee, the beautiful music, and the sunshine, mostly what I feel are tears of exhaustion. I’m so tired of defending. I grew up in a bantering family system that was face-paced, clever, intelligent, funny, and ultimately, for me, at least, combative. I’ve already fought in that arena. I did that. Now I want something else.

What I notice about Facebook is that it allows me to live both in a tiny village and a huge metropolitan area at the same time. The tiny village exists all around me in the physical plane, and is peopled with gulls and crows and the world’s most badass bird, the chickadee. It’s peopled with artists and merchants and thinkers and feelers and workers and players of every sort, good people wanting good for themselves and their community. It’s peopled with the ever-changing bay, the solid sun, the insistent wind, the steadfast ground, and the talkative, flirty stars. I quite love this place and its many peoples. I’m glad to be here now.

And yet my fascinations seem to take me far afield of this place. Some of my interests fall more than a few standard deviations from the mean, I gather, and might leave me feeling quite alone in the world were it not for Sally, to begin with, and the many souls with whom I can commune online. Were I living in a huge metropolitan area, there might be enough of even such rare mutants as myself to form a meet-up. But since I do not, I can find that online, and that is a precious thing to me. This past week I’ve been involved in threads about destructive White Guy™ language patterns, UFOs, the “horrible” state of the world’s environment, reincarnation, the immense power of the Stockholm Syndrome phenomenon, and the origins of the swastika.

I’m not sure to what extent I might have these conversations in my village. What I know is that, if these conversations are here, waiting to happen, I’ve not yet found a way to fully access them. And I know that, online, in Facebook City, there are folks who have studied some of these things deeply, and who can speak to them with insight and knowledge. I am endlessly informed, challenged, inspired, and motivated by the people I meet on these cyber streets. I know there is a danger of addiction here. There are strangers with trench-coats lined with funny pictures of cats. But I also know that I am also drumming, getting more connected with local musicians, spending time outdoors, running, writing my second novel, stacking firewood and eating lots of salad. I feel like I’ve got this addiction “under control” right now. And if not, I live with a fierce and compassionate woman who will tell me otherwise.

Since every wave in the ocean is ‘made of’ the ocean itself, since it has the same ‘substance’ as the ocean, pushing away a wave of yourself - a thought, a sensation, a feeling, a sound - numbing yourself to it, rejecting it, denying it, trying to escape it - is equivalent to pushing away the entire essence of the ocean. Pushing away a moment of sadness, or pain, or doubt, or fear, or joy, or delight, is the same as pushing away all of life. Even the smallest wave, in essence, is as vast as the ocean - there are no insignificant thoughts or feelings, no ‘ordinary’ experiences, no moments unworthy of kind attention.

Jeff Foster, posted on a wall in Facebook City

So if I do not simply push away my impatience as some Bad™, Egoic™ thing to be dispelled as uncomfortable or unhappy, and embrace it as a teacher, as the ocean in which I swim, I can begin to see it not as a irritant, but a longing. And my thoughts about Facebook City reveal to me that what I am longing for is connection. I don’t want to be right. I want to be known. I don’t want to defend. I want to open up to a larger knowing than I already have. I don’t want to be alone. I want to be in close, loving communion with other souls who walk the path beside me. I want dialogue, the deep, rich, challenging, assumption-busting sort of dialogue I’ve already tasted, that can take me far beyond the boundaries of my own limited ego and wash me up on the unknown shores of something far more powerful and mysterious than I. And my greatest fear is that I am so different from the others around me walking around in human suits that I will never get what I want in the flesh. We wandering mutants are too spread out, it seems, like seeds scattered by the winds that rush toward the end, toward the bottleneck, the crash, the awakening, the great reset, the transformation, the apocalypse, the singularity, the end of the Mayan calendar, and the end of the world as we know it. The distances between us make the physical level a difficult inn in which to gather.

I think it’s that desire for connection that makes me impatient checking in with Sally, as it’s just the two of us, and I can envision it being so much larger. It’s that desire for connection that makes writing these blogs more challenging, as they feel, at least so far, less like dialogue and more just self-expression. It’s that desire for connection that makes it so hard for me to answer emails and letters. It’s that desire for connection that has made non-fiction books feel so much less interesting than they used to be. All of these activities feel smaller, more contained, and more private than I want them to be. I’ve come to love and even crave the back-and-forthness of Facebook City, the swiftly flowing river of posts and comments, the “is this a private fight or can anybody join in?” public-ness of it all. It’s as if Facebook City has become, for me, an ongoing dialogue circle, of sorts, with different people showing up at any given moment to state their positions, argue with others, attempt to convert and reform, learn to listen, open up to other points of view, identify and suspend their own assumptions, step into empathy, compassion, and deep understanding, and find, together, in the spaces between us, something new, and even something greater, than that held by any one of us.

And perhaps this online connectedness can begin to function not only as a substitute or “toxic mimic” (to use Derrick Jensen’s term) for the sort of extrasensory connection and holographic access for which I long, but perhaps even as a training ground and a path toward that very thing. Right now I can pick answers out of the air using an iPad with Google search. Is that helping or hindering my ability to learn to pick answers out of the air with my mind, heart, and spirit? To learn to trust my own feelings, knowings, and intuitions? Is it helping or hindering my ability to listen to the land, or the soft whisperings of the Muse? I don’t know. I suspect that, as always, it’s a bit of both. But I do have a sense that the cyberworld is giving me, in some small, strange way, a feeling experience of the tech-free cosmic connectedness I seek. This tech-bound connection, built as it is on an unsustainable foundation, will probably not last forever, and maybe even for much longer. It may be that my long desire to free my consciousness from the purely physical and learn to connect in other realms is based in some deep wisdom, a knowing that we can only do unsustainable things for a limited time, and that we should make sure we get where we’re trying to go before the gas runs out.

But I don’t know. That could all be more “ego.” So I explore. I try things on. I ponder out loud. I check in with Sally. And sometimes I even ask the chickadees. Always, their answer is the same: be bold, they say, not caring in the least, it seems, that they are quoting Basil King, or perhaps he them. Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid, they tweet, bribed with sunflower seeds. So once again, I open my mouth and take a risk. Tweet.

I’m done for today. Time to go post this on the walls of Facebook City.

Pax, ya’ll. T