Tiny Homes

I want one.





Check out Greenpod and Jay Shafer's Tumbleweed for house tours, info, and more pictures. Oh, and Tumbleweed's flicker page, where I got the pictures above.

Letting Go

I just read Judith Warner's "Being and Mindfulness". In it she describes the distance that erupts between her and a friend when she responds to the friend's anxious e-mail by encouraging her to react mindfully. The friend writes back to JW, outraged at her ingenuine response, and demands JW's usual edge. JW yells back at the friend; JW reflects on her own experiences with other people's mindfulness; JW concludes that mindfulness is a form of checking out and that our edge (which she says mindfulness eliminates) is part of what keeps us in touch with our humanity and with other people.

I love edge. Other people's spirituality (especially their ill-disguised spiritual advice) is trying. When I think I'm having a bitching-together conversation and the person I'm talking with says, "I just can't talk about so-and-so. She's been so nice to me," I feel betrayed and misunderstood. I kind of want to throw coffee in her face. She is not that awesome, and I am not a monster. Sometimes I want to add that I'm from New Jersey and bitching/edge is the heart of my culture. So I see JW's point.

But what is really interesting to me about JW's article (blog post?) is the choice she encounters: new perspective or old friend? Buddhism challenges us to be present at least partly in order to help us confront our anxious preference for the past. When we are mindful, when we keep the past from inflecting all our present moments, our loyalty to our old identities fades, and we are free to be our best selves. But the loss of our worst selves is a real loss, and precipitates a host of other losses. If, for example, I live in an Arkansan present, if I let my Jersey edges soften into this slower, vastly less competitive life, I become a stranger to my family and to my lifelong friends. When my mother complains about the religious right, and I try to explain the desire for good that pervades the RR's rank and file, I betray her. When my friends agonize over how to keep immaculate homes and raise immaculate children while excelling at their high-powered, world-changing careers, the conversation curdles if I suggest that all of that juggling is a choice that they could decide to unmake. Should we just shut up around the people with whom we used to share everything? If we do, what happens to the authenticity of those relationships?

I guess I don't think we should just shut up. Shutting up gives up on relationships, and it isolates us. But JW's solution isn't right either. We shouldn't yell whenever old friends demand yelling. I think we have to try to explain. It's hard and a little depressing to explain things to the people who you count on to just get it . Maybe we can start by admitting that we know we sound weird. We know we're breaking a contract, and we're sorry.