Let the flow of time take you

Walking composition

Welcome, everyone! There are many new people here, and I’m so pleased to see you. On the Commons explores the deep roots and ongoing consequences of private property, commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with love for this world and being human in the middle of systems that often make such “being” difficult. This is a slow-rolling newsletter. Take your time—savor your time. Share your thoughts if you feel like it. I encourage dialogue, and though it might take me some time (!) to get around to responding to everyone, conversation is what I’m here for.

I include an audio version of all posts but chitchat a bit, so it’s not an exact match.

5% of this quarter’s On the Commons revenue will be given to Piikani Lodge Health Institute. Next quarter’s will go to the Flathead Warming Center.

Alpenglow-lit clouds at sunset, above the western peaks of Glacier National Park.

Audio version:

Last August I wrote about my time on a volunteer trail crew in the Bob Marshall Wilderness here in northwest Montana, about the river we camped next to and the trail we worked along, what it means to serve land and try to build a relationship with both river and Earth, and how, when I’m in areas where I have no phone or internet access, time itself becomes fluid.

“To sit on a charred log eating trail mix and hearing nothing but air in the foliage-less trees and a persistent woodpecker somewhere out of sight. To watch the light shift along those mountainsides. To spot snowberries and poke at the masses of Oregon grape, and to watch a river that slips through the valley like time itself.

Or it might be that time is slipping through us like the river. That’s what being out there does for me: it turns time into water.”

I felt that again last week, during my three nights at a U.S. Forest Service cabin I like to stay at by myself a couple times a year. This cabin is near the North Fork of the Flathead River, and ever since I started staying there a few years ago, I’ve found myself spending less and less time working and much more time hanging out with the river.

This trip, I intentionally brought very little work with me: Chapter 1 of No Trespassing, which I’m sorry to say I’m unsatisfied with, a couple of books to read, a raw essay draft I’ve been sitting on for over a year, and some half-baked ideas.

I touched almost none of it until the day I had to leave, and was okay with that. Instead, I devoted chunks of the afternoons to sitting by a fire, and otherwise spent hours by the river. A couple of hours before and after sunrise, coffee in hand, another hour in the evening to catch the alpenglow, and at least a couple hours in the middle of each day, when the sun was just hot enough to keep me from going hypothermic after (probably stupidly but I can’t help it) dipping in the freezing water.

A boulder under my head, I lay there listening to the water and an occasional robin, blinking at a dusky daytime crescent Moon in the northeast and Sun at a complementary angle, both high in the sky. Sometimes Canada geese flew over. Sometimes a thought passed through my head that I could, or should, go back inside the cabin and do a little work. I told the thought to gently carry itself off downstream.

To be completely at peace with that spot, occasionally asking the river a question, makes me wonder if it’s something of what place-time and space-time feel like if we could ever fully shake off imposed structures of time, deadlines, progress, and profit enough to find these moments of simply being. I feel like I got a hint of it there during those hours by the river, what it might be like to be wholly alive in a world that itself also feels whole, and there was—and is—nothing I want more than to stay within that awareness.

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For a few hours last week I was able to fully release anxieties about being productive, getting work done, earning a living. Bundled up against the temperatures near freezing, lying on a bed of river rocks, listening to water flow—it was like a recuperation regimen for the mind. It didn’t feel lazy. It felt necessary.

In their book The Prehistory of Private Property, authors Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall repeatedly go back to the main difference that they see in a private property society versus one where private ownership of, say, land, much less water and food, is unknown: freedom to leave. That is, if you want to walk away from your people, or your place, can you do so and still support yourself? Can you walk away and find or make food, shelter, and clothing? In non-private property societies, the freedom to walk away and still live just fine is the norm. In private property societies, it’s almost nonexistent. You have to work to make rent. Land-rent, you might call it. Someone else owns the land, and you have to pay to live on it.

The extent to which this reality runs counter to most of our existence, even if we’re just counting the few hundred thousand years that Homo sapiens have been here and not the millions of years of hominin evolution before that, is mind-bending. There have been territories and civilizations and controlling empires for thousands of years all over the world, but for most of our species’ existence, most humans had some kind of freedom to live on, with, and from land without needing to pay someone else for the privilege of existing. Until relatively recently.

We can’t all spend our time as we would wish not just because capitalism allows a few humans to hoard an increasing amount of money and power, but because the planet’s dominant societies force land to be privately owned, and make access to food and clean water something we have to pay for.

Priscilla Stuckey

wrote a beautiful and very informative piece about the bizarre concept of land ownership recently:

“It’s a strange idea if you think about it, the idea that we can own land. Because land is not like, say, a shirt or a table or other objects we own. Land is something else altogether. Land provides the material that makes the shirt. Land grows the trees that make the table. Land brings forth everything—all our food, all plants and animals, all the forests and creeks. And us! Land has brought us forth too!

So it’s absurd to think that we could ‘own’ land.”

Around a year ago, I wrote about this same cabin, and explorations of time and attention, and how much I truly like working, how I could spend hours losing myself every single day in writing and research, and even copy editing work.

“I like other kinds of work, too, like chopping wood and digging in the garden and pulling knapweed and spending whole days hunting in the freezing rain, or hiking miles to spend a couple hours picking berries and then processing whatever I’ve brought home or gathered from the garden, thinking about what’s needed to get my family through the winter and early spring. 

I do those things because I enjoy them and can make the time for them, but the reality is that as long as a few people at the top of the capital pyramid keep sucking up the richness of the world, including human labor and time and ingenuity as well as land and what are called ‘resources,’ none of those activities will ever amount to much more than hobbies, even for me.”

Add to that the question of land access. We have to pay to live on land, and at the same time people with far more money and resources can buy and cut off access to the lands where berries, roots, animals, free-flowing water, and trees exist. Can you walk away and survive has become, for me, a key question of freedom. In a world where you have to pay rent for your footsteps, freedom isn’t possible.

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During these times when I run away from the online world and my domestic obligations, I’ve become accustomed to waking up in the middle of the night and spending some time with the stars. They were at their brightest this last week. Nights so clear it was like I was breathing a poem of air, and, with Moon setting earlier, the starscape hovered low, rich and full, our galaxy’s path clearly visible and the sky so transformed I wondered if, if every human could see the sky like this every night, smothered in starlight, we could all remember what it is like to walk among a living spirit world.

I met up with a friend a few months ago who has been through significant trauma, and now runs trauma workshops and mindfulness training. We were talking about grounding, and I told her I’d realized recently that when I feel out of whack and need grounding, the only thing that works is to put my bare feet in running water, no matter what the weather. “So you find grounding in flow,” she said.

I love that. Flow is where I ground myself, and it’s this river that has taught me that lesson most often. We should all have access to food, shelter, air, water, and medicines, but we need this, too: the freedom to find what brings us closest to home, to our selves.

I take gifts to the river when I go, and to the creek that lies hidden behind the cabin. No matter what I bring them, or how much of my coffee I share in the mornings, it never feels like enough for what I walk away with. All those hours by the river being reminded: you are alive, with all that could possibly entail if we had both the courage and freedom to embrace it, draw it into ourselves and walk out into the flow of existence we live in, remembering that time, and this water, are one and the same.