Do you know about - The hamlet and The Mountaintop
California Counseling! Again, for I know. Ready to share new things that are useful. You and your friends.Once upon a time there was a village. That community was home. It was sanctuary, it supported most all of our needs, and from it we learned most of what we needed to learn to navigate our life path. In the community were our parents, aunts and uncles and cousins and children and wise elders. There was love and commonality and understanding. There was security, and safety, and there was comfort.
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From infants to elders, the community contained and sustained all. There was a lovely symmetry in this, an interaction and interdependence that was mutually beneficial. The young studying from the old, the old taking joy in the young, there was much sharing, organically, effortlessly, a giving and receiving not just of resources but of life itself.
A short length from the community one could find isolation, time and space to commune with nature, to reflect, to meditate, or to pray. And when that need was met, one could return to the village, renewed and refilled, equilibrium restored, and carry on.
Sure, some would leave the village. Young habitancy are called to explore, to go beyond what they have known. That, too, was and is the nature of things. But the community was the hub, the point of reference, and even those who left it took something of the community with them.
This has been the way of things, in one form or another, since we first stood upright. That is, until modern times.
The market age made us mobile, and we were on the move. Villages spread and diversified, and got larger and busier. Families spread out, the young going further afield, often leaving the old behind. The fragmentation of the community had begun in earnest.
Historically, this is a very recent occurrence. In the blink of an eye, a mere blip on the human timeline, our whole group buildings has dramatically changed. Yet our needs - the inherent, hard-wired nature of human as group animal - have not changed. There naturally hasn't been time for us to adapt well.
So we find ourselves living in what is essentially a model that is foreign to all of our historical frames of reference, one of suburbs and cities where we don't even know the names of the habitancy living next door, let alone being in any real way mutually supportive. Families are no longer nuclear, and the only real commonality of villages is geography.
Now, an additional one shift has begun within our culture. Because we still have within us all of the needs that the community provided to us, we are developing coping mechanisms to address them. And, like the improvement of any new tool, we are still going about it rather clumsily.
What we are begging to see now in our culture is a drawing of habitancy towards aspects of what the community used to provide. This is showing up as polarity, and while there are extremes, there is, mostly, all of the degrees of equilibrium in between. Since we are all unique and individual, our needs and desires are not gift in each someone to the exact same degree. Even within the equilibrium of the villages of old, some have always leaned more towards community, while others have always leaned towards a more solitary experience.
The extreme swing of the pendulum, the beginning place, or brackets of you will, for this emerging model, is that there are community people, and there are mountaintop people.
Village habitancy think mountaintop habitancy are odd. Reclusive, quiet, inclined towards rural introversion, mountaintop habitancy tend to sit back and watch, and consider things, sometimes overly so. They are happy listening to the wind in the trees, water flowing in a stream, or the silence of night.
This inclination is how we are trying to address security and safety, reparation restoration, and balance.
Mountaintop habitancy think community habitancy are nuts. Generally more extroverted, community habitancy are more urban oriented, do well in towns and cities. They thrive on the hustle and bustle, are more impulsive, best in crowds. They are happy going, doing, on the move.
This inclination is how we are trying to address the house aspects of the village, the busy-ness, the interaction and interdependence.
I haven't come over too many habitancy who are all one way or the other, because whether we are aware of it or not, we all still have the same needs and desires somewhere within us. No, most of the rest of us fall somewhere in between. All of us have aspects of both in us, and the sooner we become aware of our inclination, where the scales currently stand in our hearts and souls, the more conveniently we can navigate our daily life.
And the fact is that we live within a society where both gift themselves for us to choose, in what degree we share in them, and how we navigate that participation.
And therein lies the challenge.
Part of us craves the solitude, the peace, the symmetry and charm and organic nature of nature itself, of the mountaintop. But the fact is that the grocery store, the gas station, the taste of interpersonal relations - loving each other - in essence, the society that we also want, need and desire to be a part of are all to be found in the village.
And our wants and needs are not fixed in position. The scales of need and want within us may currently stand in one position, and next week, next year, 10 years from now that may change. It's not a garage thing, our inclination. Mine has changed over the years. The chance here is to keep a finger on our own pulse, so to speak, to feel the subtle - or perhaps not so subtle - leanings that our heart and soul are communicating to us, in order that their needs be heard, honored, and met.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and idea that city life was normal, just the way things were. I did fine there when I was young. I had no other points of reference, so while somewhere in my heart and soul I knew at some level, even then, that my natural leaning was not towards being a city boy, I had nothing to assess my current environment to. I didn't know what I was missing.
Then somewhere along the way Mom sent us kids to spend a summer with my grandparents on their farm in Indiana. In the policy of one day I went from Los Angeles to a teeny tiny exiguous town named Andrews, whose population, according to my research, was somewhere between 72 and 107 souls, most of whom were scattered far and wide on farms spread over the countryside. I quickly learned the meaning of the word culture-shock.
Indiana is the flattest place on Earth (I'm sure some atlas or an additional one has statistical proof of this), or so it appeared to me, and is truly dark at night. And quiet. Not silent, but quiet. There are sounds and smells there that are not man-made. There is space where there are no buildings, no asphalt, nothing but dirt and grass. There are woods, and lanes, farm-ponds, and the muddy but marvelous Wabash River. There are barnyards and chicken coops and fireflies.
Indiana is magical.
After I recovered my senses, and got past truly being physically sick from being so disoriented, I began to explore. Though not exactly a mountaintop, Indiana was the closest thing to it that I had experienced in any real way.
Oh I had been to real mountaintops before. Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead are Los Angeles's version of the mountaintop. Since it's so close to L.A., and since L.A. habitancy must have all of the comforts of home strapped to their roof-racks, that area of the San Bernardino mountains is, well, a suburban mountaintop. Traffic and track-homes and smog do not, in my mind, a mountaintop make. It sure isn't Indiana.
Interesting, the synchronicity of things. I stopped writing to take a call, and an acquaintance was asking about this very community / mountaintop thing.
"Where are my people?" she asked. "Where are the habitancy that I can be myself with, where I can be comfortable and authentic without fear, where I can hang out and have real conversations?"
"Funny, I was just mental about that." I replied.
"Well," she said, "I'm not sure where I am going to end up this summer. I may keep working here in Marin County, but I may hole-up in a cabin somewhere."
Check. I get it.
This is exactly what is development the mountaintop more and more consuming for so many people. We can't find our people. And for those who are inclined, even slightly, towards the quiet side, city life can be a pressure cooker quite capable of driving one fully mad. I've seen it. Ok, I've felt it too.
Unfortunately, since mountaintops are at a premium, we're creating them elsewhere; in our own homes and apartments, in our own minds and hearts. We're isolating, because the community has become, for many, unsafe. So we withdraw, mentally, energetically, emotionally, even spiritually from what villages do exist.
But this then creates disagreement within us, for we are, at our essence, group creatures. Interaction is vital to our well-being. Sanctuary is likewise principal to our well-being. So how do we find our way, how do we navigate this ever changing, ever consuming line between a desire to be in sanctuary, to have a place where we can be safe and real and peaceful, and our need to interact, to be stimulated and to give and receive love?
First, as with most things, we must become aware that this dynamic exists in our culture, and in our hearts and souls, because without awareness, it's too easy to just assume that we're nuts, that there is something inherently wrong with us, which just feeds into the very sense of disunion that we are seeking to heal in the first place.
There is nothing wrong with you. Let's get that out on the table right now. There is nothing wrong with you. Every person is wired a exiguous differently, has separate needs, and navigates this equilibrium between community and mountaintop a exiguous differently. That is as it should be, as it always has been. We are each unique individuals, yet we have also latched on to this rather odd reliance that we are supposed to be like Every person else. We're not. Get used to it. Then go beyond just getting used to it. Get comfortable with it.
The big invitation here is for you to get to know yourself, to become aware of, well-known with, and then comfortable with your needs, and your inclinations, and then learn to navigate accordingly.
When I don't get sufficient nature time, when it's too busy in the house for too long, when there to too much noise or too much running around, I get cranky, and I know exactly why. I need some mountaintop time.
I have a good friend who lives out in the country, not too far, just far sufficient for her liking. It suits her. Before she retired she used to drive in to town - which is truly a fair sized city here in northern California - most days to work, go to church, do anyone she needed to do, and then drive the 20 or so miles back out to her place in the country, her sanctuary, her mountaintop. It took her some time, and some work, but she figured out and now knows her community / mountaintop equilibrium point pretty well. When she gets her fill of the village, she has no compunction about saying, "Had, enough, gotta go!"
We don't all have that luxury of a place in the country. Some habitancy wouldn't want it if they could.
I have an additional one friend who is all city oriented. She cracks me up actually. I asked her recently is she might be curious in joining a group of us to go white-water rafting.
"I don't do dirt." She told me. "I need clean sheets, cable, a taxi when I need it, and Starbucks. If they have that, I'll think about it." She's so City.
Where to you fall on the community / mountaintop scale? And, more importantly, are you meeting your own needs?
I see a lot of habitancy for one-on-one counseling, and the majority are out of equilibrium in this area. If anyone we, as a culture, are over stimulated, and have forgotten what sanctuary looks and feels like. We live in a wound up state, from the moment we wake until we collapse into bed at the end of the day. Run, run, run, faster, more, these are the unspoken agreements that we have made, culturally. And it is taking it's toll, on our bodies, our minds, our hearts and our souls. It's taking it's toll on our relationships, on our self-image, on our worldview. It is, as a whole, way, way out of balance.
I can't count the estimate of times that I have assigned, as homework to a client, a half day at the beach, or at the river, or a daytrip to an spectacular, grove of redwoods that we have nearby. They come back transformed. I had one someone truly ask me, about the redwoods, "How long has that place been there?"
Oh, about three thousand years, give or take.
It also helps to seek out and find - if not create - villages where you can find some degree of relieve and commonality.
I see more and more of that happening in our society. Since the dissolution of the old village, we are creating new ones, villages that are safe, where there is commonality, comfort, giving and receiving, and the chance to give and receive love in all of it shapes and sizes and ways that shows up.
I'm not speaking of actual villages where one lives full time. There are those, but what I am speaking of is the places that we can go, that will meet some of our needs. They may not be like the villages of old, where most or all of our needs could be met in one place. We may need to share in complicated villages in order to taste the equilibrium that we seek. It may not be perfect, but it's a start.
I see art and group farming 'villages' here in my area, there is a renewed interest and movement towards spiritual villages. Ecologically oriented villages, and now even virtual villages like Facebook and MySpace are meeting some of these needs.
I have a friend and colleague who facilitates vision quests. She takes habitancy out into the desert and they go off on their own and spend time with nature, with the silence, with themselves. Can you ever remember the last time you did anyone like that?
The lowest line is that we all have our needs, in varying degrees. Figure out what yours are, then decide, consciously and intentionally, to address them. When you do that, some degree of equilibrium will begin to restore itself within your being.
Find a mountaintop, anyone your mountaintop may be, and go and sit there for a while. Notice what you feel. If you can, sit there long sufficient for your mind and heart and soul to get quite. It just might convert everything.
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