Summer, 2023. 

 

// I.

Now it is important to put into words, inasmuch as I am able, the whole dream of what I call SOLIS.

Like a dream, many of the details are blurry, just out of reach of my conscious mind. I am recovering / discovering them every day.

I feel the full force of creativity surging through my body again for the first time in a while, a year or two. The statue is trapped in the block of stone, calling to me to carve it free. If quantum theories are right and time is flat or whatever, SOLIS is already real in the universe, and like a time-traveller in a movie we just need to work backwards until we hold the acorn in our hands.

 

// II.

Pieces are falling into place.

I’m in Wheaton reading Ellen’s first-year college essays, radical early Ellen, Ellen I didn’t know how to see because I had not had my own eyes opened yet. The next day reading a book her dad gave me — Deep Economy — all the same topics: the fracturing of society, food, how more is not better, how efficiency doesn’t make us more satisfied, and all the statistics about wrecking the earth, horrifying already in 2007 when the book was written and the sick feeling knowing that in 15 years its gotten exponentially worse.

I am only now starting to make sense of it as I see it as a whole system, to get the picture as an interlocking set of narratives rather than a scattershot of guilt-inducing facts.

It’s all I can think about, because it is everything.

 

// III.

I can see now why I didn’t get out already: because it’s damn near impossible to get halfway out.

Ethical consumption is still consumption.

We are immersed in advertisements (brand logos so ubiquitous they are invisible, as well as insidious advertising so subtle we don’t really see it). We don’t even see it anymore but it is in the air we breathe and the water we drink:

The great outdoors brought to you by Coleman and Subaru. Fast food flown halfway around the world to be consumed by us in two minutes with no gratitude and no satisfaction. We try to do it ethically by eating potatoes from Taco Bell instead of beef from McDonalds but we’re still stuck in the game, still commuting our way through life, sterilized and separate from the world.

I am being radicalized. Maybe a decade or two late, but I’m trying to catch up. I guess I wanted to try having a lot of money because I never did. I tried. It wasn’t worth it.

I didn’t know there was an option and I didn’t feel at all confident or even hopeful that it could be significantly different than it is, couldn’t actually imagine myself somewhere green and sustainable.

I was afraid of leaving normal and feeling deprived, of feeling exhausted, of feeling bored, of feeling empty. But those are all the ways I’m feeling anyhow so what do I have to lose?

Clearly what we are doing isn’t working, has never worked.

 

//IV.

We don’t feel life is meaningful because it is a live of total alienation from everything that is real and our organisms are not doing what we evolved to do.

We are stuck in a hyper-individualistic society where family and community are obliterated and the void left is filled by advertising, and on one level we know it doesn’t work, but on another level it works on us in ways deep beneath our conscious defenses and articulated values.

We are swimming in poising, literally and figuratively, and it’s time to get out.

 

// V.

Not so long ago I articulated my role as a theologian as that of a musician on the Titanic playing “nearer my God to thee” as the boat goes down. But now I want to gather what scraps we can and build a lifeboat to share. If we know the ship is going down, we may as well do something. We have options.

I don’t want to own things that were made by slave labor.

I don’t want to burn oil for my food.

I don’t want to be dependent on the supply chain.

I have a growing sense of feral desire to be in/a tree.

I have a growing suspicion that 0ur civilization has become a virus, and that the only holiness is unity with Nature. The blood of the world is on our hands. I has begun to fear that it would better to not bring anymore life into this world at this moment in history.

But I am bound by irrational human hope, the Divine spark… and I choose live for my children and grandchildren.

 

// VI.

Do I really want this, or was SOLIS a fun thing to talk about for a few weeks one summer?

What if I get tired of farming? What if I want to play a few more rounds of the game? What if I want more stuff again? What if I miss having a bidet? What if this is a phase, an escapist hallucination, a desperate attempt to imagine a life — any life — different from what this one has been? What if the gamble doesn’t pay, and it turns out that you can’t grow locally sourced meaning in shallow Minnesota soil? What if it’s too hard? What if we don’t have what it takes? What if cooking for other people gets old? What if I can’t find what I’m looking for there? What if this is all a moment of collective mania, an idea whose best and only lasting form is the dreams and conversations?

No.

Always the answer comes back no.

No to worry. No to fear.No to the game.

No to the voice of the tempter — “You can have all this if you worship me!” I’ve been fooled before. I’m not falling for it again.

Maybe I’ll get tired of garden chores and maybe I’ll miss the possibility represented by the big house full of belongings. But I know in my bones that the possibility is only that; the realization of peace is always one step away, and when I do by the luck of persistence or the fickle grace of the universe manage to grasp something amounting to peace, it flickers for a moment and then is one.

I accept my fate, Sisyphean. I surrender to the eternal boulder. But as an existentialist, I demand the right to negotiate the terms of my servitude. If I’m going to spend my life doing chores, I want different chores. All my life I have burdened with things: with the acquisition of things, with the storage of things, with the transportation of things, with maintenance and repair of things, with the sale and disposal of things.

I’m tired of owning things.
(I wrote that sentence almost ten years ago and I feel it more strongly than ever.)

We are trapped in a cursed world of artifice, hungry ghosts eating but never satisfied, held in chains by our own belief that this is as close to freedom that we can get. In the end, the siren call of salvation issuing as an eternal scream from the marketplaces of Babylon ends in the same endless curse of the Christianity I once knew: “Try harder. Do more. A life of meaning is just around the corner.”

No.

I recognize that voice, and it’s my signal to leave. There is no life to be found here.

Do I really want to do this, leave it all for the woods? If not this, what? How else do you propose I find a way to be alive before I am dead?

 

//VII.

The game is empty. I know it in my bones. The truth of this statement is as old as writing, the ancient wisdom unanimous in warning that the only way a seed can grow is to fall into the ground and die and the only way to find enlightenment and/ or eternal life is to let it all go.

Stay in the game and do what? An endless stream of chores with occasional moments of anxious rest and even rarer euphoria? Go camping and hate going home every time? Spend all my time trying to be everywhere but here, because here does not have what your soul needs in order to thrive? And then what? Just keep playing the game and hope it gets better, or at least easier?

To what end? For what purpose?

None.

The words of the prophet in the Book of Ecclesiastes ring in my ears: “There’s nothing new under the sun. You can try it all — money, sex, parties, books. All vanity. All empty. Striving, then you die.”

The game offers only folly, sin, existential emptiness. You must get out if you want to find wisdom, justice, meaning.

And what is the prophet’s prescription for the ailment of existence?

“Do your work. Eat your food. Love the people around you.  That’s all you get. Find a way to let it be enough.”

It’s wisdom as old as writing but we all have to come to it in our own way.

This is mine.

 

This is a journal entry from the summer of 2023, almost a year before we moved to the woods that have become the Village of SOLIS. These words are my own, and don’t represent the community or organization as a whole. Thank you for reading.