Go Slow

The Learning Curve
So far, we've moved exactly nineteen point seven miles from East Mesa to Tempe, Arizona. I took a brief trip (less than a week) from here to Witch Well, Arizona to attend the Arizona regional burn, Toast and to test the RV functions. All was well except for what we think was a little vapor-locking. We're hoping the adjustments and repairs my mechanic friend made will take care of that and that we won't have this problem on the next trip to set up the Abundance Tree at the Star School outside of Winslow. Although we're not quite "on the road" because of repairs still in the works, we're meeting all sorts of good people. The serendipity is already working. In the house we're parked live artists and others we're sharing stories and helpful input. There is something that happens when you leave your house and enter the larger world that feeds the serendipity - that alone, begins the process.

I knew intuitively that this experiment was going to teach me things. I just didn't know what, or how much. So far I've learned things ranging from ways to find free everything, low cost whatever is left, and exactly how many truly decent people there are in the world when you get out of your house and start meeting them. I've learned how to patch holding tanks with fiberglass and epoxy - which has me seriously considering more artistic uses of the material, and several minor mechanical processes. I have a really good understanding of what the construct of an RV septic system looks like. I can tell you where to buy some pretty cheap plumbing and vent cover supplies, and I'm not as afraid of things failing as I used to be.

Slowing Down
The one thing I didn't count on learning, however, is exactly how important it is to slow down. The first week in the RV left me battered and bruised. I flung myself around as I, apparently, have been doing all along and knocking into just about every surface of both the vehicle and my body. I bruise easily. People looked worried. But I've begun to notice myself slowing down - physically, I'm moving more slowly, stepping more lightly, and seem more aware of my surroundings - the minutia of those surroundings. This has caused my mind to also slow and reason a little more carefully.

In an RV or other small space, it's extremely important to be aware of where everything is, and so organizational systems become a lifeline. Without knowing where everything is, you can easily spend hours moving things around trying to find one thing that you know you have, but have no idea where. I anticipated this journey making me more organized and facilitating my already in motion simplification strategy, but I had no idea just how much. Stepping over things gets very tiresome, very quickly. Everything is suspect - everything must be justified. CD Jewel cases make no sense. Drawers turn two cubic feet of usable space into one.

Good Things Come to Those Who Stop Complaining
There is no way to make everything work all at once, or to create the usability of the space I want as quickly as I want, and the comfort level in the meantime is vastly different than it would be in a regular home environment, and so the patience it takes to keep at task, instead of attempting to escape, and to pick away at the space while maintaining sanity is its own new skill. And this bleeds into all areas of life. My patience for all people, all situations, even the most annoying has doubled. Spending my birthday at the airport - all day long? Not nearly as bad as bumping into four boxes of things to be organized on my way to, well, everywhere, in the hundred square foot area I now call my only home.

Someone on a mailing list I'm on shared the Buddhist concept of Dana, or the practice of the perfection of giving. I realized that what I'm doing has a lot to do with this type of practice. The trees are gifts, and represent this virtue - allow people to experiment with the concept. But a little more digging led me to the Six Paramitas - Buddhist perfections or virtues to practice - and I began to think that somehow, intuitively, I've been set on a path to practice what I can of these. True believers of Buddhism may take issue with my stumbling upon these ideas and taking from them what has meaning, but it's not so much that I am pulling piece-meal from a religious philosophy as it is that I am intuitively following a path that only after being set in motion is revealed to be closely aligned with an established path. This all leads me back to my reliance on the intuitive mind. It keeps bringing me closer to peace, happiness, and a magical existence. Even the drudgery is fruitful - learning to work with new materials and becoming more self-sufficient beats coding papers for meaningless entry into databases any day.

Home Free
I've begun joking about being homeless to people I know, or new people I meet. I'm trying on the label for size. It sets people's minds at ease somehow and makes for some fun conversations. A new friend that I tried this with shook his head and refused to buy my label and instead told me that I wasn't homeless, I was "home free". It's funny, isn't it, how words and the ways they are manipulated can make such a difference in how we perceive our reality.