Eric Francis is an astrologer and writer roaming the galaxy, currently sitting at the place where two rivers converge in the secret Zen country of New Jersey. Visit his homepage at planetwaves.net, or e-mail him at: eric@planetwaves.net.
One day I was in Athens
talking to a pharmacist about how much I loved Greece. He said to me, “No
place is paradise.”
Neither the 20th century nor the Hudson Valley qualify as such. But the more
I think about the era in which I’ve lived so far, the more I think about
the place that I’ve called home for so long, and often do out of habit.
Lately I have been meditating on this business of home, and I decided that
it has to do first with family and second with a relationship to the land.
One historical fact we’re living with is that the whole notion of family
is being rearranged. Industrialism, technology, transportation and now micro-technology
are redefining the shapes of human existence so fast that we never have time
to get accustomed to one change before another has emerged. This is hard on
relationships. In some places, the ideas of family and community are being
dismantled and not put back together. These days in America, we end up working
in cubicles, and being known and loved by more people as our e-mail address
than our name. During the past five years, many people have left their bodies
and moved out to the astral plane, otherwise known as the Internet. Other
places are more fortunate, and there is still family; but it is no longer
a group of people related by blood, but rather those who have chosen one another
as long-term companions on the journey through time. The official term from
psychology is “family of choice.”
Everybody may know this, but environments tend to be invisible, and they tend
to be lived in unconsciously. Today I have the advantage of writing about
the Hudson Valley from Miami; I can see it more clearly. This is an old trick
that writers have used for a long time. Leave, and you will finally know a
place. When I was visiting the Northeast last week, I didn’t have a chance
to get to High Falls, which after ten years wound up as my official favorite
place in the region. I was really disappointed. I wanted to visit trees I
recognized, and the waterfall where I’ve had so many watery experiences.
And I wanted to see the people who remember me all the way back to the days
when I showed up here and, on cue, started writing investigations about the
cops and getting arrested for covering PCBs at SUNY New Paltz. Not exactly
my childhood, but a version of it. And this is not just nostalgia; as the
currents of time whip past us, the past and its people are becoming a kind
of treasure that’s constantly plundered by progress.
Family is a matter of time, I think. It is the people who are stuck with one
another. I grew up in New York City, where, once you leave your family of
origin (a modern ritual), you’re never really stuck with anyone. Live
somewhere 25 years, then move three blocks away and you can be utterly anonymous.
In the Hudson Valley, one of the sociological facts that I observed is that,
despite not liking one another all the time, people still have to get along.
We have to do so because we want to keep living here, and most of us like
it to be more or less pleasant. There is a standard of tolerance that has
developed in this community in which a level of individualism is acceptable
because it’s easier than not being acceptable. Rosendale, my second favorite
place but only by a shade, is a great example of this. It has the people who
have been there as long as the mines, plus a variety of artists, freaks, punks,
corporate people, moms, gay politicians, Lesbian artists, jeds and rednecks,
whom you can all find cavorting in Stewart’s each morning.
One of my favorite things about the neighborhood here was getting along with
the very people I didn’t like so much; with the meter lady who had my
car towed six times; being truly happy to see the newspaper publisher whom
I know I annoy greatly, but who printed scores of my articles despite it.
It may sound strange, but that, more than anything, reminded me that I was
really in a community.
Living together for so long, and often so intensely, it was inevitable that
differences had to be patched up or overlooked. Sooner or later I would end
up working with, working for, working near or being involved with people who
had rubbed me the wrong way at one time or another, and there was no point
holding grudges. Forgiveness became a practical necessity rather than a nice
spiritual thing. I suggest you remember this quality of life here, assuming
you’ve discovered how great it is; it is something we have now, in the
last remnants of Old Earth, and here, in a tidal lagoon called the Hudson
Valley, where high tide happens about once every six or ten years.
Another historical fact is that our relationship to the Earth is changing.
I travel a lot, and what I’ve noticed is that everywhere I go in America
it pretty much seems the same. There are exceptions. There are places where
there is still character and texture that you don’t have to go diligently
searching for. But where there are people, there are corporations taking over,
non-people from far away who now own everything from local laundromats to
“community” newspapers that are part of national chains. But we
need real laundromats. These things matter. They are not just details of life;
or rather, they are the details that make up life. At the Rosendale laundromat,
the ladies returned my Fleet Bank card no fewer than seven times, and would
deduct the money for wash-and-fold service out of what they collected in my
pockets. One decided she liked my “Great Gazoo” tee-shirt and borrowed
it for a few weeks. These were not my close friends; these were, really and
truly, the people I knew from the laundromat.
In many ways, the landscape defines the Hudson Valley community. There are
natural limits on where people can live, economic limits on how many people
can live there, and both the climate and the terrain shape consciousness.
Economic realities keep the onslaught of time and the smash of progress down
to a reasonable pace. Corporate downsizing by IBM in the early ‘90s reversed
a process that is killing most other places with prosperity, and the interesting
thing is that the quality of life was not seriously impacted for the worse.
The community did not become an impoverished wasteland like Flint, Michigan
after General Motors pulled out. People just learned how to survive, and many
took the change as an excuse to do what they wanted to do all along. Everybody
became a Reiki master.
Much of who I am today was defined by the land that surrounds New Paltz, High
Falls and Rosendale. For the record, I lived in New Paltz three years before
I knew what Split Rock was. That one discovery pretty much changed everything,
and my primary relationship to the area (besides those six contaminated buildings
at SUNY New Paltz that I am still not through with) became the mountains.
The woods are not a natural place for a city boy. But I started venturing
in, and making discoveries; soon after, I was studying astrology, which is
the art of understanding the relationships between the cycles of nature.
Being in forests and caves, and studying astrology, became one thing to me.
As I made fire, drummed in mines and roamed around the woods behind Williams
Lake at three in the morning collecting wood, I began watching and feeling
the moon and the planets, and in the process, something I can only describe
as my modern-ness started to break down; I got in touch with much older things.
Whereas most astrologers study the phases of the moon in books, I remember
being in the bottom of a mine with my friend Nikki during a new moon, and
we sat there in amazement as the dimensions of space-time opened up all around
us at the exact moment of the moon-sun conjunction, then vanished as fast
as they had appeared. One day, I climbed up to the top of a mountain right
before the first quarter moon. The air was still and languid. But as the aspect
became exact, the wind picked up into a little fury, and then as the aspect
passed, it settled down and was still again.
But, you see, this is nothing
that the modern world supports very well, though it is something that you
have available, and this works whether you know it or not. The environment
shapes your mind and feelings, and in many ways defines the terms of your
relationship to life. Perhaps you came here for that reason. This is a reminder.
There is something distinctly un-modern about the Hudson Valley. It’s
not exactly provincial, but it’s not exactly Los Angeles. Yet you may
not live here the rest of your life, and though the currents of time seem
to be less swift here, this place, too, will change as we leave Old Earth
behind. And even living around forests, many of us suffer from many forms
of modern alienation, lack of time to be together with people and breakdowns
in very useful forms of community that, if we want to keep them alive, we
will need to use daily.
Perhaps you know that January 1, 2000 is not the beginning of the 21st Century;
it’s the last year of the 20th Century. This is a mathematical fact.
But the social facts are different, and we all seem eager to take the leap
forward at the end of this year. We will soon find out that there is only
so far that it’s possible to jump, but we will also find out what a difference
certain small intervals of time can make, largely owing to natural cycles
that for most people function invisibly. And even if you are fortunate enough
to use the land and natural cycles as your primary makers of time, our whole
perception of time, as an experience of consciousness, is changing, and the
past seems to recede ever-faster and our view of it becomes less clear. We
emphasize what is new rather than what is old, and in the process, we miss
what is now.
So before this century ends, I suggest you take a look at where you are and
who you are with. Put some pictures in a scrapbook, save a few leaves from
this autumn and invite some people you’ve known for a while over for
a meal. Follow your cat out into the woods. Take a walk at night and look
up at the sky. Jupiter and Saturn are easy to see now; they are close together,
but not as close as they’ll be in May, when they form their once-per-generation
conjunction, and we’re reminded, once again, that we are going forward
and we’re not coming back.
I want to thank Jason and Brian everyone else at Chronogram for another year
of Planet Waves and creative freedom. And I wish health, prosperity, love
and lust to my friends and mentors in the Hudson Valley who met me in the
waking world, where we pieced together the nature of reality, bit by bit.