Last night I got together with my friend and permaculturist Keith (permacultureactivist.com) for our “second annual exopermaculture board meeting.” Kind of a joke, except not really. In December 2010, on a surprise visit from him, I had started to riff about the necessity I felt to somehow bridge the two worlds within me, the one that flies high and wide (into UFOs and multidimensions and astrology and any number of right-brain “weirdnesses”) and the other that roots into the ground (as a permaculturist running the Green Acres Neighborhood Garden and ecovillage activist).

A few days later, Keith came up with the name, exopermaculture. Bingo! That was a year ago. (And see About.)

Okay, fast forward to last night. He brought the salad. I decided to make baked chicken and vegetables. The two were so striking together that we decided to take a picture.

As usual, the fractal nature of the endlessly proliferating universe made a visual joke out of our combined efforts — the wild exuberance of Keith’s greens in a transparent bowl coupled with the dark pan full of earthy, meaty, dark grounded tubers, including rutabagas. The above and the below, on one table, side-by-side, inviting our mouths and stomachs to dissolve their edge.

Our actual meal-time conversation didn’t seem nearly as “radical” as last year’s; maybe that’s because we now assume “spherical” (rather than linear) intelligence as a matter of course.

Of course we spoke of the latest global cops-‘n-robbers caper as narrated by David Wilcock and Ben Fulford. How could we not? Anyone who follows and engages in the enormous, multidimensional, sci-fi(?) world that verges continuously on possible “disinfo” would be aware of this latest wild, death-threat-ridden story about the cascading and now climaxing(?) historical ramifications of hidden gold treasuries — in caves under the earth, under the World Trade Center Building 7, inside a deep ocean trench. . .

I noticed yesterday afternoon a post on the stevebeckow.com site saying that Fulford says that initial reports were wrong. He wasn’t kidnapped, or in hiding; he was just seeing someone and had to do it without anyone listening to what they were saying, so he went into a mountain valley by a stream where white noise would drown out any hidden mike. I told this to my son Colin, and he said, “See, this is what I don’t understand about Fulford. Why would he say where he had been, if his life is always in danger? That’s why I have trouble trusting what he says.”

Well, maybe.

Also yesterday, another permaculturist, friend, and commentator Rob A on this site who has been following the Wilcock/Fulford story line, wrote to me personally:

Rob here. Listened to that interview (go to this post for a link to the interview and my initial response to it)- definitely a wild and weaving story underway here. Not sure how much I think it’s ‘true,’ but then again, living a good story is what’s important to me.

Any thoughts?!? . . . Well, here goes:

When speaking of what’s “true” and what’s not: I’ve been playing around with the idea that “everything is true” for awhile now, and attempting to understand how that could be, and even what I mean by it. The reason I’ve been almost forced to entertain this idea is because I’ve heard so many conflicting stories from so many well-meaning, intelligent people during this time when I’ve opened my mind to entertain all sorts of things that I used to refuse to even consider.

The usual (“scientific”) way we use the word “truth” is to say that there’s only one truth, or maybe I should say, one “objective” truth, the “real truth,” and lots of “subjective” interpretations of it, not to mention lies, disinfo, and other kinds of dissembling. But how about thinking of “truth” as something that adheres to the individual, in that everybody’s experiences, and the meaning assigned to them, i.e., their stories, is true for that individual? In other words, that each person, you might say, to use another phrase in current parlance, is on his or her own “time-line.”

My dear late husband Jeff used to say, humorously, whenever I would get too serious or rigid in my thinking or belief system, or too monomaniacally determined to find out what’s really going on, “but Ann, we’re making it all up!” I.e., truth is being created moment by moment, by each of us, to set up in a certain way!

It used to really piss me off when he said that. Now I appreciate his wisdom — as well as the vast, inclusive reaches of his intelligence and curiosity and the lightness with which he could entertain and appreciate various ideas without needing to attach to any of them.

If then, we are making it all up, if truth is being created moment by moment, by each of us to set up in a certain way, then our specific set-ups (composed of our memories of the past from which we base expectations of the future) can each be considered a time-line.

I woke up in the middle of last night and got this visual: each of these time-lines as existing within the “space” of a plane (not an airplane; think geometry, three or more lines linked at their ends to form a “space” within them).

And when we feel a “conflict” or contradiction between story-lines, when we wonder just what is true, thinking we have to “come down on one side or the other,” what we’re really experiencing is the intersection between two story-lines, two planes, at 90° angles (in astrology, the 90° angle is one of conflict, fueling growth). Like this.

And when that happens, unless we stay in the center, and stand there in the intersection, we feel uncomfortable. Why? Because otherwise we find ourselves flippng from one reality to another, from one plane to another. It’s strange, off-putting, destabilizing. Okay, agreed! So don’t flip back and forth! Don’t try to crush one in favor of the other! Instead, stand in the center, feel the frisson as the two story-lines move through each other like currents in water or air.

Mostly, without realizing it, we go about our lives “making it up as we go along,” both the shapes we give to memory and therefore to expectations of the future (based on those memories, because we don’t want anything new to pop in and disrupt our routine). And mostly, without realizing it, we see all this, the line connecting past to future, as if it’s in a space, the 3-D space, the one we’re all in. But what if we’re not, not really? What if it only seems that way because we’ve been conditioned to shape memory and expectation according to certain forms or norms?

What if we wake up in the present moment, and learn how to stay right there, right here, with our memories and expectations obliterated? What if those (usually old ones) who “have dementia” are actually modeling what’s next for all of us? Our essential innocence. The bliss of this unique, onrushing moment, the gift of this pulsing, living presence, right here, right now, the multiverse endlessly and creatively breathing in and out through each of us, spinning out forms we identify as objects in space inhabiting past and future, these — really, quite arbitrary, or, I should say, all of equal value, in the long run, the big picture — threads of our various story-lines?

Like this.

What if, with every breath, on the inhale I sense my “self”, my physical form dissolve into the nanosphere, and with every exhale the entire sky and earth dissolves as well? What if, we are each separately and all together breathing in and out in the exact center intersection node of an infinity of planes, not just two at right angles to another, but an infinity of them, where any time line, any story line you want is, or can be, “true.” It’s up to you to choose. Or not. You don’t have to inhabit a story-line. You don’t have to confine yourself to one linear line linking memory to expectation. You can, instead, stand in the center of Now and breathe forms into the void.

We tend to want to hold on to a particular story line, as if it were flotsam floating in an ocean of being, so that if we let go it’s all over, we’ll dissolve into the oneness. Well, is that so bad?

How about letting go of any story line as something to “hold on to,” to “believe.” How about just recognizing the incredible fertility of the human mind and imagination, how it spins stories into manifestation, some of them stories held in place by many many people, others just by two lovers in “a world of their own,” or even by one, a lonely artist, expressing him or herself into paint or music or dance, with no one around to see. Does that make his or her story less real? Less true? Less valuable? Is the audience necessary for dreams to manifest? Isn’t that one individual, all by his or her lonesome, a fractal of the whole, a living, breathing, manifestation of all that is?

So anyway, these were the thoughts that beset me in the middle of last night, when I woke up, stomach grumbling to dissolve that edge between above and below, exuberant salad greens and earth meat and roots. Thoughts about how to hold any idea, any story, any “truth.”

Yes. To center in this current in this stream, forever falling towards the ocean of being.