So much of the community that we aspire to and yearn for comes out of certain kinds of practises. We're all here for a certain amount of time doing something. So the question is, what are you doing with your time? How do you spend it, how do you fill up a day? What is the quality of that experience? When you take those units of experience and concentrate them over time in many people, what does it foster? A community is not an abstract set of principles; a community arises out of what people have to do - day in and day out - to take care of themselves and each other. The way they are together.
Why would you, in a time of supermarkets, go out there collecting individual clams, harvesting with your bare hands, drying out berries, walking around harvesting little bits of food - so much work for so few calories - why? What is the point? Because that's what you did with the day. Because theres a quality of experience that comes from looking so closely at the earth. You learn something. The way it absorbs your attention, the way you can spend hours in the berry bushes; it's not for the berries... they're just the effect. They're the berry on top. The meat of the matter is, “that's what I did today, that’s how I saw the world today, thats how quiet my mind was today, how many times I felt a spark of joy at "Oh, look, here's one. Oh, another one, and here's another one!" That's how precise my observation got today.
A revised quote by Eli Marienthal from "Back to Earth", speaking with Chris Ryan on Tangentially Speaking, episode 411.
So, how are we spending our time?
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