Untitled by Lara Lynn Lane - 4/26/06 Home
“The problem of modern man isn’t to escape from one ideology to another, nor to escape from one formulation to find another. Our problem is to live in the presence and in the attributes of reality.” --Frederick Sommer
When September 11th happened I changed my whole
life, riding the front of a wave that would change America forever.
Long story short, I moved to Madrid, New Mexico.
I have called Madrid my home since my first full day in the village.
I woke up with a slow cup of coffee in the morning and
everything was so still and a single person in a cape crossed the greenbelt, and
David and Craig’s SLOW sign spoke to me deeply and profoundly about what I
should do with my own life. Later
that morning on a walk out to the coal piles, I threw a blue marble out into the
arroyo and asked the Great Spirit for a home here, or wherever else it was I was
“supposed to be.”
That was in March of 2003.
That was before, when I’d lost my ability to write as the
writer I had become in my “old life.”
Everything is telling me
stories again.
Today, tomahawk heads and prehistoric archery stones in the
arroyo. The warriors are calling
out to me – Look here! Look at
this. Here is where I bled to
death. Here is where I laid for the
last time and saw the sky. By this
rock, we hid, here, when they came. Look.
Look here, near this tree. Look
what happened.
Pieces of the ocean floor
found, even older still.
Arroyos – ancient crossroad paths filled now with
narrative’s absence, crevice dwellings, and shadows of Time suspended in
stillness . . . I remember back to when we were nomadic.
The smell of the sand transporting me.
The spirit of the earth is luring me back and forth into the moment.
Sun brash. Windy like the
beach in Rhode Island. Is someone
calling me? The rest of humanity?
When September 11th happened, I changed my whole life.
I sold my piano. Gave
a roomful of books to the town library. Went out to dinner with my parents and said good-bye.
I moved West to a space in between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
How metaphoric of my own place as an individual American.
How could this happen?
People asked bewilderedly in those first few weeks after September 11th,
as people started to gradually come out of shock and regain their societal
senses. At school a man came and
lectured about foreign policy, America’s actions in the world-scene over the
past hundred years, and human rights and just how this could have happened to
America given what America has become in its tangled state of world-identity.
Really, since 9-11, I think a lot of people have been
pondering community. This is sort
of a “flipside action” to fear of terrorism, I think. Mother Nature has shown us repeatedly since the Trojan Horse
attacks, on grand scale, just how fragile we are. And just how important “grassroots” movements are is
becoming increasingly more apparent through the media by the day.
In the current day and age people all over the planet are
navigating global village issues and in this way Madrid is a model for how an
American place can function as a village. I
really see Madrid as a model in lot of ways of a modern American place.
I think that there are a lot of people in this community who are building
bridges of communication and empowerment. I
know I see a lot of people commited to Madrid.
We all prove this with our daily living rituals and gatherings, and our
comings and goings to and from the “nest.”
And in the stillness we uphold in the midst of an ever-increasing pace in
our Western world.
peace,
Lara Lynn Lane
26 April 2005
Madrillos, New Mexico