Transition Time, for me, and for (at least) one reader: “I need to consider my own life as a source of inspiration.”

I’m in the middle of a massive transition period. Have decided to scale way back my involvement with the wide-ranging exopermaculture site to focus instead on the new babypictureproject site. Why? Because the time for sharing information and commentary, bridging/blending Above and Below, opening the mind to whatever, scaling between and within dimensions — is OVER. That’s no longer appropriate. I must rechannel my energy to concentrate much more narrowly and intensely on a website, and activities associated with it, that provide one gateway for cultural transformation.

I had planned to begin this changeover today. However, my podmate Brie has the admin “keys” to the babypictureproject site, and she is unavailable. So today I will instead share a wonderfully synchronous snail mail letter that I received yesterday from a long-time exopermaculture reader here in the midwest. In part, her letter reads:

“After a little more than three years of reading your blog, I feel I’ve “graduated” in a sense. . . my two oldest friends jokingly said that I needed to consider a 12-step program for withdrawing from reading your blog and Laura’s (laurabruno.wordpress.com). One even asked me to apologize to her for having written many emails about the blogs, as one does in a 12-step program, and that I should substitute other activities, like having a milkshake or a facial. . .

“It got me thinking more clearly — I had done so somewhat foggily for over a year — about why I was so dependent on vicariously living through other people’s blog posts, instead of living and creating my own life. Of course I was living my own life, but mine seemed so much more boring and conventional, limited by finances and lack of access to transportation in a car-centric part of the country. I knew lots of people in my town, some for decades, but could share almost nothing of my inner life with any of them, because they were not interested in any of the things I was. They spray their gardens and design their gardens formally. Their version of religion is either none, with no meditation or other practices, or traditional religion, with its judgments and prescriptions (and proscriptions). They’re not against US foreign policy, they don’t question the media for the most part or just ignore it. They think that sharing tools or cars or houses sounds horrible — why would anyone want to do that?

“So — I realize that while I appreciate many of your posts and agree with a large number (esp. on foreign policy or need for community or openness to other faiths), I really was reading your blog because I was engaging in magical thinking. I was dreaming that, because you wrote about having a shared household, somehow by reading your blog, I would be led to my own version of a shared household, somewhere else than my own small town. I did not want live in “community” again — I already lived 3 years in an ashram and various times over the years in shared houses, mostly to save money. . .But I also did not want to live alone in a house in a town where I could not talk to anyone about permaculture, or shareable.net, or false flag events, or much about portals/astrology/tarot/nature-based spirituality, as I do now.

“I realize that I do need to find that shared place, but it won’t come through your blog. It might come through a reference at a Senior Center . . . or an Area 10-type organization, or a Unitarian community — someone will know of people who like me are living alone but don’t want to, would appreciate a companion. I want to be the “Rebecca” of your ecopod to someone else . . .

“So — thank you for bearing with my . . . comments over these years. I still check in, but am reading several other (blogs) now, and considering my own life as a source of inspiration.”

I say bravo to this courageous woman who is stepping out of her own interior comfort zone to seek what she will find through the agency of her own life. And I would add that it may be time for all of us to do the same. Certainly it is for me. While I will still be posting here, my focus will be gradually redirecting to the babypictureproject site.

Just today, for example, I realized that by recognizing our “essential innocence” when each of us enters this life, we are going directly against the “religion of our fathers,” in my case, Roman Catholicism, which considers each baby born as innately soiled by “original sin” and thus must be “saved” through “baptism.” (That recognition, of course, I will turn into a blogpost on the bpp site.)

Hard to believe that I once uncritically “be-lie-ved” in that that deeply corrosive notion of “original sin”!