Berlin Diary

Two streams meeting: Mawenawasigh and ECLA, New York and Berlin
I've just arrived back in Berlin, where spring has sprung much more
thoroughly, and things are looking green and beautiful. Its good to
be back with yet a few more experiences to add to the stack.
It has been very interesting and rewarding spending four months in
Berlin, filling my mind full of ideas, meeting so many interesting and
diverse people and learning how to be an urbanite in this most
cosmopolitan of European cities. At the end of last term, I realized
that I was exhausted, and scheduled an emergency exit, flying home to
New York. Both in the days leading up to my departure (the day before
I left I traveled from Florence, to Rome, to Berlin, packed for home,
and then left early the next morning) and upon landing in Kennedy
Airport and driving up the Taconic to my home, I really had to think
about the nature of all of these places I had just been. I began to
be very aware of the sensation of a European versus American
consciousness, and I also became very sensitive to the way that the
land is so different in all the different places I was passing
through. I had also to think very carefully about what my purpose is
in each of these places, and how I can more effectively strive to
fulfill that purpose.
In Europe there is so little space; people have domesticated the place
for thousands of years, and over the course of this time with a fairly
steady human occupation, people have been required to discover methods
of being much more efficient with their time, energy, resources, and
space. We have not had this necessity in the United States. On the
contrary, a large proportion of those who immigrated to the New Land
were Europeans who were looking for more space -- who felt oppressed
either by religious concerns, by poverty, or anything else, and in
coming, it was imagined that if there was so much "empty" land, well,
it wouldn't matter if they spread out a bit.
But looking at Manhattan on my way out yesterday, I was struck by the
feeling that the whole city is suffering from a consciousness that it
has made not a few mistakes, that people haven't been very careful in
the creation of such a sprawling monstrosity, and that the time is
coming when they are facing the consequences of some of these
mistakes. I felt a certain sense of denial as to the state of
affairs, I felt fear and despondency, and I also felt a real sense of
wanting to do something, wanting to be able to change, but not knowing
how, not having any inkling of where to begin picking up this mess we
have gotten ourselves into.
When I arrived home to Mawenawasigh, Salt Point, Hanka Pond Road, the
first thing I kept saying, over and over was "its so nice here!!" It
felt incredible to be in a place where the land is relatively
undamaged, and where a real consciousness for stewardship is being
cultivated. The land felt loved, it felt like a place that is
beginning to learn to be itself again, beginning to learn that it will
be allowed to simply be itself and do what it was always meant to do
with the love and support of the humans who it provides for, and who
are re-learning how to provide for it.
The second thing that happened was that I went into my room, and I
found myself completely overwhelmed. I had come from a huge room with
four very large windows, lots of space in the middle, very little
storage space, and one suitcase worth of stuff for all my time in
Berlin. So to arrive and be thus confronted with all the sentimental,
might-come-in-handy-someday, and useless little things I had amassed
over the last years really brought home the issue at hand. I realised
that in order to fully be in life, fully experience all I had to
experience, to be both free and grounded in a place, I had to remove
some of the insulation of these possessions. If I had arrived with
only one suitcase to a place where I knew next to no one, and
certainly didn't have four generations of people collecting stuff in
case of need to back me up, and was fine, I realised I could take this
as a good lesson that what I need will come to me at any moment. I
spent a week solid sorting through the stuff, and ended up getting rid
of probably half of it, learning a lot about both what I am and what I
am not along the way.

I feel that being at home for this time, being with the gardens, the
land, the discussions not of Plato and Kierkegaard, but of what shall
we have for dinner and how to double dig the garden and lets clean out
the shed today will really help me in grounding the philosophy that I
am learning here. If I have that foundation on which to build this
life of ideas that sometimes feels like floating in space then I will
be much more able to be grounded in myself. I have the American land
in my blood and my bones (and a bit in a jar on my desk...), and it is
the land as it wants to be, as it truly is, not as something trying to
swallow the lump in its throat that is a strip mall.
And in order to really know how to nourish that land, how to be in a
place that is about doing fundamentally, rather than thinking and
speaking, I have the feeling that an education in thinking and
speaking will very much help to refine what that doing is. If I can
keep the consciousness and purpose of each place alive in me as I am
in the other, while fully experiencing what it is to be where I am, I
believe that I will be able to learn more readily and understand more
fully the lessons that each place has to offer as I learn more and
more clearly how to allow the mind to be the servant of the heart.

-- Elizabeth Hanka