Twelve By Twelve Part 11

What did it mean, "artificial" light streaking in one direction, "natural" light plying the opposite route? Airplane versus firefly, industry versus nature, Man versus G.o.d? Heavens no. I stood up from the hammock, walked down to No Name Creek, which cupped starlight in its eddies, and I knew that there really isn't any opposition at all. It was a mystical feeling, even deeper than the one I'd experienced that night with Leah, when I felt the house slip inside me. Looking into that sky, I wondered if all all of those lights were part of the same One Life, and the apparent duality an illusion. of those lights were part of the same One Life, and the apparent duality an illusion.

THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, Leah and I danced at the Shakori Hills summer music festival. At one point we stopped, out of breath, to eat bowls of curry, and then jumped back up for a band from Mali playing kora harps, negoni lutes, and a balafon-style xylophone. The crowd swelled as the melodies did. Black, white, some Latinos, all kinds of colors, a spring gathering. It was Earth Day. The wordless music spoke of birth and death, light and dark in the same breath, and my body moved, the hips loosening, ankles and neck more rubbery, shoulders straightening and falling, torso, hands, fingers - each part of my body found a different piece of that layered rhythm.

"It's like the blues. Malian music," Leah said. "It's got this pulse of joy."

"And sadness."

Leah kept dancing, while I went to the side of the lawn and sat down for a moment. As the sun set in brilliant orange, present in that seamless moment, I felt what Jackie had years ago: I must go beyond shame and blame, not just with myself and my personal imperfections, but in relation to the impact my species is having on the planet. I have to let go of my n.a.z.i dreams, my guilt over ecocide, and all of the rest of the negativity that keeps me in a cramped, dim self. This means allowing myself, and the world, to be. When I see unworthiness, anywhere anywhere, I'm to trace it. To allow doesn't mean to condone. Jackie had found a more precious jewel still on the other side of allowing, which spoke clearly to me about the nature of resistance to injustice - transform the enemy, not by fighting head-on with blame and anger; this just makes the enemy more powerful. Instead, be so present in the reality that you manifest an entirely different reality. The question is how to transform our anger into the energy of compa.s.sion, so that we can see the true cause of suffering. Then we can see more clearly how to root out that suffering.

Allowing is the way to experience the other world inside of this one. It lets us accept all of life's complexities so that we can come from a place of love at all times, even in a chicken factory, at a nuclear test site, and even, as psychologist and former concentration camp prisoner Victor Frankl observes, in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It's essential to peaceful, creative resistance and transformation.

On the drive back to the 12 12, Leah at the wheel, we pa.s.sed new subdivisions with enormous, energy-consuming houses in a s.p.a.ce that used to be forest. I watched my inner reaction. Neither of my "normal" reactions was present anymore, no rage, no guilt. Still, I remarked aloud to Leah about the destruction.

"Are you sure?" Leah said.

"What do you mean?"

"Are you sure?"

"Of what what?" I'd forgotten that ARE YOU SURE ARE YOU SURE? was one of Jackie's cards - the one, in fact, I'd put out that very morning.

Leah stopped the car at the edge of a ridge, cut the engine, took my cheeks in her hands, and pointed my eyes forward, saying slowly, forcefully: "Are you sure?" "Are you sure?"

From our now slightly higher vantage point, I looked out over a green forest canopy, stretching to the horizon. Just beyond the development hugging the road were rolling hills, forested smack down to South Carolina. We looked at each other for a moment and then back over this natural scene, which still contained so much green. Couldn't this, at least possibly, emerge as the face of globalization? Our consciousness grows and wildcrafter farms and forests fill the old slave plantations?

I took Leah's hand loosely, feeling a little dizzy. Patterns of light streaked across my mind: airplanes and comets, satellites and fireflies, the message in the sky coming through more clearly. I had the questions wrong. My questions implied a good and bad, a right and wrong. I thought of Lao-tzu: "Do you want to change the world? I do not think it can be done. The world is perfect and cannot be changed."

I looked out over a suddenly perfect landscape, saw the Soft within the Flat within the Soft. My greatest teachers are my sufferings. Global warming, hyper-individualism, rainforest destruction, and racism, these things had led me to Jackie's place, forced me to struggle. The Buddhists put it eloquently: "no illusion, no enlightenment." I momentarily grasped nonduality, that at the deepest level everything is exactly as it should be at any given moment - including one's own gradual awakening through the force of apparent evils.

I've since found this is a difficult concept to convey. Atheist or agnostic friends and colleagues furrow their brows, exactly as I used to do before I experienced it directly. Words are mere connotations, pointers at something that must ultimately be lived, felt, breathed. It's helpful to think of persons who embody it - Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. They come from a nondualistic perspective, from a sense of One Life, while still accepting the existence of oppression and racism on the level of form on the level of form. Instead of dualistically opposing these "evils," they trace them through compa.s.sion and act through love - in other words, the enlightened master's resistance.

Allowing is the foundation, not the house. As I would soon discover, it is the necessary basis to achieve an even more sublime insight.

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ABANDON ALL HOPE OF FRUITION.

23. G.o.d'S FEET AS HUMAN BEINGS, we are suspended between spirit and clay. Spirit is the stuff of allowing, of detachment, of transcending the world. This is Buddha "overcoming the world" or Jesus "transcending the world." Through spirit, we discover the level at which the supposed dichotomy between the world and ourselves is smashed, giving a sense of fearlessness and joy.

But we are clay as well as spirit. We exist, earth bound, for some seventy or eighty years. The problem I have always had with any overly "spiritual" path is that it sometimes denies life. We have an eternity to exist in the soup of universal energy, but just a few precious decades to savor rich coffee, whether it's bad for us or not. To plant zucchini; to people-watch in a subway car; to love jazz. To love others, even if it gets messy.

If we take "allowing" to the extreme - detach from our creaturehood, and exalt only our spirit-hood - we may feel blissful for a while, as I did during mystical moments at the 12 12 - but we'll miss out on half of what makes life meaningful: the portion of us that is clay. To me, the tension between spirit and clay is exemplified in a Raphael painting I saw in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy. The Renaissance artist shows Jesus rising out of this world - but with his feet still hanging down into this one. Why doesn't Christ rise completely, detaching from the suffering of the world to become pure blissful spirit?

The first time I saw it, I lingered in the Uffizi and gazed at Jesus' feet, about to leave this world. After a while his feet seemed to be wiggling in the painting's fresh air, then tapping to music. I listened. No, it wasn't celestial harps. Perhaps Jesus likes jazz. He doesn't ascend - not quite yet, those gorgeous earthly riffs not quite yet, those gorgeous earthly riffs.

I wonder if it was jazz Jackie heard as she walked across the vast Nevada desert to a nuclear test site to utter the word No No. A person has to love messy, soulful, heartbreaking life to march across a desert to oppose the weapons that could eliminate it. Not too tight, but neither too loose; clay and spirit like to dance. Loving-kindness is the goal, not a disembodied detachment. But we can't get to loving-kindness through ego-driven love. We can only authentically inhabit ourselves as clay after rising first into spirit.

One of Jackie's favorite writers and teachers, Thich Nhat Hahn, embraces loving-kindness in the way he names the source of the problem, which is different from blaming, which can be a way of displacing one's own anger and frustration onto another. Nor does Thich Nhat Hahn refrain from suggesting concrete action for personal and societal transformation. At Jackie's, I discovered his reinterpretation of the five precepts of Buddhism, in order to cultivate compa.s.sion in a way that keeps with the changes in society: "Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I vow to cultivate compa.s.sion and learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals."

I read this one morning at six A.M. A.M. in Jackie's loft, the silence gathering. I let my feet dangle down from the loft, toward the 12 12 cement floor below. My toes tapped to the improvisation of morning birds, and I was seized with an urge to descend. Down the ladder, mindfully, feeling my big toe touch bare cement. Walk out into the gardens, and into the woods barefoot, the soil now loamy with spring life. How good it is to be clay! To be alive, and to be free to choose a wildly ethical path. in Jackie's loft, the silence gathering. I let my feet dangle down from the loft, toward the 12 12 cement floor below. My toes tapped to the improvisation of morning birds, and I was seized with an urge to descend. Down the ladder, mindfully, feeling my big toe touch bare cement. Walk out into the gardens, and into the woods barefoot, the soil now loamy with spring life. How good it is to be clay! To be alive, and to be free to choose a wildly ethical path.

G.o.d's feet linger here because of the human heart. It's never fully born. Amaya Amaya, I think, and then feel something catch in my chest. As hot as the blood is the missing of her. G.o.d, how I want her little hand in mine. Only another parent can fully get this. It's completely different from separation from a parent or lover. The clay in me wants to touch that part of myself - my blood flowing through another heart - touch the memories of her birth. The first time I held her, she was the length of my forearm. Her mother's ecstatic smile over this perfect form that's come out of her, laced with the courage of giving birth to someone she knows will someday die. Kathleen Norris captured this: her water breaking, her crying out, the downward draw of blood and bone....Now the new mother, that leaky vessel, begins to nurse her child, beginning the long goodbye.

Not long after leaving the 12 12, I finally got to see Amaya, if only for five days. Her mother, Ingrid, came to Little Rock, Arkansas, to visit her high school exchange host family from years before. On a walk through the suburban neighborhood where her host family lived, Ingrid pointed at a nursery school, the Growing Tree, which stood directly adjacent to a funeral home.

"Next to the Dying Tree," I said.

On my last night with Amaya I look into her light eyes, kiss her cheek, and say her name out loud. She says mine: "Daddy."

"Amaya," I repeat.

"Daddy," she says. The moon overhead waxes oblique, like a beach stone, and the trees blow in the wind, and I feel warm and s.h.i.+very at the same time. A plane crosses the moon, its tail of smoke gray on the moon's white.

"Amaya."

"Daddy."

"Amaya," I repeat. "Daddy," she says. "Amaya." "Daddy," this time smiling big and leaning over to kiss me. "Amaya," I say, kissing her. "Daddy," more serious now. "Amaya." "Daddy." We're memorizing each other.

"Amaya."

"Daddy."

I rise above Little Rock, looking out over what really is a little rock, a tiny airport, those couple-of-skysc.r.a.pers enveloped by the big curve of the Arkansas River, and all the dead, soy-scarred land stretching north toward St. Louis, where I will connect to New York, and I think: I might never be in Little Rock again. Might never land in St. Louis, I think, later, as we hit turbulence and the plane sighs deeply, the woman next to me mumbling something. I'm aware of the irony - here I am, on a plane again - and consider for a moment how incredibly hard it is to live sustainably, particularly when I want to see my daughter.

The plane banks toward the St. Louis Arch, an upside-down smile, a piece of twisted tin against the treeless plain, and lands. With a long layover, I decide to leave the airport, walking out beyond all the asphalt to a patch of green, an empty lot filled with overgrown gra.s.s and wildflowers. The sun sets, painting itself in fiery crimson. I miss Amaya.

There are two types of problems we face in life: convergent and divergent. Convergent problems are like engineering problems or jigsaw puzzles, putting pieces together to arrive at a definite answer. Divergent problems are those of the heart and spirit, diverging into greater mystery the more we try to untangle them. Perhaps a lot of the modern dilemma is that we try to solve divergent problems with convergent logic - instead of disengaging the mind and getting to the subtler levels that guide people like Jackie. Here's this moment's dichotomy: I miss my daughter, and at the same I watch a softening world with joy. Instead of creating an inner drama out of paradox, I sit with it, allowing a b.u.t.terfly to land on my arm. It's black with flecks of ginger, and its wings beat slowly. In an instant, it's gone, lost to me in the sunset.

A moment later the b.u.t.terfly flutters back. Lands on a flower beside me, as the day ends, finding nourishment in what's right here.

IT WAS MY LAST DAY AT THE 12 X 12.

Leah came out to help me clean and pack. Jackie was coming back in a few days, and it was time for me to depart for New York. Just as we finished - the bare cement floor swept, my bags in her car - a train horn sounded, low and solemn to the south. It was one of the only times I heard a train pa.s.s on that lonely stretch of track across No Name Creek. Leah took my hand and said in a childlike voice: "Let's try to catch it."

We ran, side by side onto Old Highway 117 South, narrowing in on the train. It sounded again, and this time we were so close to the machine that it vibrated all the way through me. We ran harder. I looked over at Leah at one point and her face was pink and sweaty and serious, as if she were putting all of her soul into this one thing. We ran, the train right ahead, its bell still ringing, but alas, we arrived just as the caboose swept by.

But we kept on running, along the track now, laughing and slowing down, those familiar railroad ties under my feet, the heat of the train on our faces and chests, the widening gap between that old train and us.

Then, eventually, silence. We continued to walk, onto a path into the woods, along No Name Creek, and we began to talk about us. We felt love for each other but both knew at our cores that we weren't meant to form a couple. There are some people who touch your life for a month, others for a season, and still others for a lifetime. We had touched each other for that spring, grown together in the light of Jackie's lessons, and now we let go of each other.

It was not easy, or completely clear. We stopped by the creek and held hands and kissed, and talked about seeing each other again - when I came down to visit my parents, when she came up North for a visit. And we would see each other again, in the future, but it would be as friends. An hour pa.s.sed with Leah, in silence. We watched the creek's flow, and I knew that there's no greater gift to the world and to others than being true to your deepest self. So many times, out of fear of loneliness or other negative emotions, we form relations.h.i.+ps that are good enough, but untrue to our uniqueness. Doing so risks flattening ourselves.

That's when one of Jackie's most important secrets bubbled up to me from the creek. A revelation (re-velar: veil again) that came up in full clarity and then concealed itself. I understood what the 12 12 really is.

Its floor, the bare slab of white cement that Jackie steps down onto from the loft every morning. What's under it? According to physicists, our bodies and the earth itself are 99.99 percent empty s.p.a.ce, more a wave of energy than anything solid. That floor is Jackie's integrity: a 12 12 rock over nothing.

We are G.o.d's feet, and it is out of a place of total emptiness, a place beyond "the world" that we must create our lives. We sculpt our characters out of wildness. Leah and I held hands for one last moment beside No Name Creek, and then we let each other go.

ON MY LAST DAY AT THE 12 X 12, the Thompsons' two ATVs sputtered out and died. The second failed right in front of the 12 12. It took three of the brothers to push the lifeless machine up to their woodpile, where it now lay belly-up.

"You want to ride bikes?" Kyle asked me.

"Sure, Kyle, let's ride bikes."

The other kids came running down to us. "Hey, you all been swimming?" I asked them, as they shook the water off their bodies, having just emerged from their makes.h.i.+ft kiddy pool - one of the hog's water basins.

The four-year-old mumbled: "Bradley's got a bush hog."

"He does?" I said, picturing the mammals I'd seen in Africa. "Like from the Lion King Lion King?"

Kyle, in a teacher-like tone, explained the obvious to me. "It's for clearing bushes. It takes down the rough stuff."

"Those are our new pigs!" Greg said, pointing to a black one and two pink ones, new arrivals.

"That's right," Mike said, walking all macho toward us down his drive. "I'm getting heavily into hogs."

"Wanna know their names?" Greg said. "Bacon-for-Breakfast, Sausage-for-Lunch, and Ham-for-Dinner!" The other kids squealed with delight.

"Bacon!" said tiny Allison, grabbing my pant leg for attention.

Kyle and I rode down to the post office and back, and when we got back to the Thompsons' driveway a kind of spontaneous party seemed to be forming. All six kids, including the baby in Zach's arms, were there, along with Leah, Michele, and Mike. And remarkably, for the first time ever, Jose's son, Hector, was there, playing with the other kids, real evidence of a cultural and racial healing at work.

Animals honked, bayed, scurried, and flew around us - indeed, the Thompsons were "getting heavily into hogs" and other animals. The farmers market rumors seemed unfounded; perhaps this family had a chance of making it. New pens and the number of animals had grown since I'd arrived. Mike had enrolled in the community college sustainable agriculture program. As I'd seen in Durham, therewas demand for organic, local produce, and room for creativity for this new-old American Dream of being a Jeffersonian-style freeholder.

Later that afternoon at the Thompson farm, I saw Julie and Yvonne, the ones living in a shed in the shadow of the chicken factory. Their van clunked along toward us, as Leah, myself, the Thompsons, and Hector and Jose chatted and joked among all those animals, the setting sun causing their duck pond to positively sparkle, the woods rising in deep green down by No Name Creek. The van pulled up and both women climbed out, huge smiles on their faces, their hair going every which way, and Yvonne - without saying a word - opened the sliding back door.

A long pause stretched out over the farm.

Even before it happened, before the rush of sound and color, it occurred to me that I could be looking at a piece of the New We. This ragtag bunch in Adams County, inspired by Jackie and their hearts, were living according to their loves. If the aborigines have it right that the twenty-first century is dreaming the wrong dream, perhaps these particular Americans were dreaming a more inspired one.

All of a sudden: WHOOs.h.!.+ WHOOs.h.!.+ Dozens of Muscovy ducks alit from the van and fluttered crazily out toward us. Mike had purchased a fresh batch of ducks from Julie and Yvonne, and they were making the delivery. "Muscovys!" Julie cried out. Dozens of Muscovy ducks alit from the van and fluttered crazily out toward us. Mike had purchased a fresh batch of ducks from Julie and Yvonne, and they were making the delivery. "Muscovys!" Julie cried out.

"Woo-hoo!" Mike yelped. "We're going heavily into ducks, too!"

What followed, in the sunset at the Thompsons', made little rational sense. I'd look back on it later as a kind of ecstatic play. Adults, kids, and animals alike began running in circles, whooping, doing a jig. The animals didn't try to flee, and at times they seemed to be chasing us as we laughed, skipped, and danced up onto the Thompsons' porch, the sky now fantastically aglow. I found myself twirling with Leah and with Mike, receiving a duck handoff from Kyle, and suddenly, completely out of breath, I stopped.

I stopped, but the dance continued: Leela Leela, divine play, the song of the Tao. By doing this, deeply, we were doing everything at once. It smelled like a farm, sounded like an out-of-control symphony, and moved with the swoosh of wings against my arms and cheeks. Cackle, whoop, yaw; the howl of a dog. I looked into that soft blur. I couldn't smell the chicken factories, but Gold Kist still worked up the road, and the stench would return tomorrow. The box stores would open their doors, inviting us to consume. The nuclear arms complex would puzzle over ways to destroy the planet five hundred times over. The planet would continue to heat up as many of us feel nothing but flatness both inside and out and shrug.

But thousands, perhaps millions would discover the kind of wildcrafting afoot in Adams County and send out feelers along the creative edge. The primal swirl of human and wild continued around me, but I remained still, sensing a truth. The 12 12 is a s.p.a.ce of integrity, and also a symbol of a larger, growing resistance to standardization. A No - and a Yes. There's life at the heart of empire. The world can be freer if we allow our inner lives to be vast national parks. We are wilderness. Jackie's integrity is more than that 12 12 slab of concrete over nothing. It's the ten thousand 12 12 squares of wild s.p.a.ce that she's liberated from the Flat World.

Suddenly, through the swirl of people and animals, I noticed something attached to the woodpile: a detail that stood out precisely because of its stillness and smallness. I walked over, leaning in to take a better look: the black casing of a coc.o.o.n, broken open, the b.u.t.terfly gone.

24. TOUPEE'S SONG THREE MONTHS AFTER I LEFT the 12 12, the nonprofit World Conservation Union sent me on a three-month a.s.signment to postwar Liberia. There, I was to help that fragile country negotiate a sustainable timber agreement with the European Union. I knew that, to be truly transformative, warrior presence must withstand even the most difficult situations - even a h.e.l.l on earth. Going to Liberia would be the first real test of my 12 12 rebirth, but the experience proved to be more than I bargained for. Jackie's whole philosophy was about to come under a.s.sault. the 12 12, the nonprofit World Conservation Union sent me on a three-month a.s.signment to postwar Liberia. There, I was to help that fragile country negotiate a sustainable timber agreement with the European Union. I knew that, to be truly transformative, warrior presence must withstand even the most difficult situations - even a h.e.l.l on earth. Going to Liberia would be the first real test of my 12 12 rebirth, but the experience proved to be more than I bargained for. Jackie's whole philosophy was about to come under a.s.sault.

Liberia shocked me. I'd worked there for two years during the civil war, from 1999 to 2001, as an aid worker, an experience that led to my book Blue Clay People Blue Clay People. In 2003, the war ended, and the blood diamondsmuggling, child soldiercommanding Charles Taylor was driven into exile. It was now 2008, and I expected to find a country on the rise. Instead, Liberia was in many ways worse.

There was still no electricity or piped water, even in the capital city, Monrovia. Malnutrition was so bad that, according to a UN report, "stunting" of people's bodies from malnourishment was costing the economy some $400 million, offsetting all foreign aid. Malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS were spiking. And there were the young girls. I'd seen some of them in Monrovia's poorer markets, as young as thirteen, often very beautiful, sometimes dressed in their school uniforms, selling their bodies for about a dollar.

One afternoon, I found myself walking along Monrovia's Poo Poo Beach. The city's residents dubbed their central beach with this sardonic, affectionate name because it acts as both bathing spot and public latrine. I stepped carefully to avoid the fecal land mines. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, the government had just completed a mini-Berlin Wall around the city cemetery to keep former child soldiers from sleeping in the graves. A place where they have to build walls to keep people from living in graves? A place where they have to build walls to keep people from living in graves? I thought to myself. I thought to myself.

This wasn't confined to the capital. Up-country, ArcelorMittal, the world's biggest steel conglomerate, had a team of Brazilian miners on alternating twelve-hour s.h.i.+fts to extract the best of Liberia's iron ore rapidly while the postwar government was still weak. Mittal had cut a dream deal with the corrupt interim president Gyude Bryant that created a virtual nation within a nation - a nation called Mittal, inside Liberia, that had sovereignty over the Nimba Mountains, the Buchanan port, and a prewar railroad line linking the two. A nation of greed. The global price of minerals was shooting up as the Flat World demanded ever more - and ArcelorMittal stepped up to do the dirty work.

I journeyed by rough road into the Nimba Mountains to see what was happening. Schmoozing my way into the mining area and befriending some of the Brazilian mine workers with my awkward Portuguese and love of Brazil, I saw firsthand how Mittal pollutes the water supply, exploits the Brazilians with low wages and few rights, and leaves behind scant technical capacity to prevent Liberians from eventually running their own mines.

Moreover, ArcelorMittal is owned by London-based Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal. At the time, he was considered the world's fourth-richest man, and the richest in Europe, with a net worth, according to Forbes Forbes, of $45 billion, after Americans Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Mexico's Carlos Slim. Perhaps to compensate for being just fourth on the list, he created new superlatives for himself. He paid $60 million to host his daughter Vanisha Mittal's wedding at the Palace of Versailles, making it the most expensive wedding ever. And he dished out $128 million for his residence at 1819 Kensington Palace Gardens in London, the world's most expensive house. He even decorated it with marble from the same quarry that supplied the Taj Mahal, dubbing his palace the Taj Mittal.

As I watched Lakshmi Mittal's air-conditioned trucks zoom right through the markets in Monrovia where Liberian schoolgirls were selling their bodies for a dollar a day, I pictured his pillaging of Nimba's beautiful mountains. As I walked along Poo Poo Beach, I felt uncertain. Warrior presence? Warrior presence? Was it just a useless concept? I couldn't hear the murmur of No Name Creek anymore. Liberia's problems nipped away at my inner reserves, and I spiraled downward. I stopped doing yoga, practically stopped meditating, and had almost no contact with the kind of pristine nature that buoyed my spirit at the 12 12. And I began to drink. Was it just a useless concept? I couldn't hear the murmur of No Name Creek anymore. Liberia's problems nipped away at my inner reserves, and I spiraled downward. I stopped doing yoga, practically stopped meditating, and had almost no contact with the kind of pristine nature that buoyed my spirit at the 12 12. And I began to drink.

There, at the bar at Monrovia's Royal Hotel, I had plenty of company. A disillusioned and cynical colony of expatriates was ready to receive me into their circle. Along with UN peacekeepers, Western emba.s.sy staffers, NGO workers, and businesspeople, I drank one whisky after another and blocked out the h.e.l.l around me.

Get up in the morning. Drink coffee. Look on the positive side. At least my work was having an effect. Amazingly, half the country is still covered in primary rainforest, and Liberia had canceled without compensation all of the concessions to arms-for-timber lumber companies engaging in uncontrolled logging - including the Oriental Timber Company, which as I doc.u.mented in Blue Clay People Blue Clay People, colluded with dictator Charles Taylor to ransack enormous swaths of the Krahn Ba.s.sa and Sinoe wildernesses. I spent long days helping to set up a multimillion-dollar monitoring system to ensure that only "legal timber" could be exported to the European Union; only one of every thirty trees would be cut, leaving the forest intact and bringing cash to local people instead of corrupt politicians. Warrior presence helped there; the reserves of strength I'd built up at Jackie's helped me focus on the job at hand without being overtaken by cynicism and dread.

Then I noticed a change in the national forest ministry, where my office was housed. Along with the usual crowd of colleagues - Liberian government and NGO officials - were new faces. Asians. Once a week at first, but then at least one group a day - Da Cheng Ltd., China-Liberia Holding, and a dozen other mostly Chinese companies - were arriving or quickly set up to erase Liberia's virgin forests and thereby supply China's coastal factories with the wood needed to send cheap furniture to Ikeas in the West. Unfortunately, China was not subject to the supposedly airtight legal timber policies we were putting in place.

I met with the Chinese chancellor - China was at the time busy building its biggest emba.s.sy in West Africa in Liberia - to try to persuade them to commit to legal-timber standards, but he used every diplomatic sleight of hand imaginable: deflection, flattery, even feigning ignorance of the presence of Chinese logging companies in Liberia. Flat World economic globalization, it seemed, would in the end be far stronger than any legal-timber s.h.i.+eld we might construct.

Physically exhausted one day after banging my head against Chinese diplomatic walls, and then getting sideswiped by a Mittal SUV racing into the interior as I left my office, I beelined to the Royal for a whisky. I sat at a table with some tipsy UN peacekeepers, emba.s.sy staffers, and an NGO worker or two and placed my order. One of the UN guys, already fairly loaded, joked about getting some "underage p.u.s.s.y for about a buck," but he was only half kidding; another couple of drinks and it would probably tempt him. Just as my drink arrived, my cell phone rang.

It was Toupee, the friend of a Liberian colleague from my civil war work in Liberia. I didn't know her that well, but that didn't stop her from asking a big favor. Could I drive a full hour from the Royal into a dangerous neighborhood, at night, to pick her up at a clinic and take her home?

The whisky in my gla.s.s was positively glistening in its ice. Despite the sleazy banter, the cozy cynicism at the Royal was better than what lay outside in the Monrovian night.

"Now?" I said, weakly.

"I have plus-two malaria," Toupee said. Then the phone connection cut.

Plus-two malaria, I thought, fingering my gla.s.s. So what? So what? Malaria is as common as a cold in Liberia. I hardly knew this person. I'd already worked a twelve-hour day. I wanted out of the terrible reality around me, not more of it. Did I really want to drive into a neighborhood full of exchild soldiers, into a rat-infested clinic in miserable Barnersville? I didn't need more contact with a world where one person h.o.a.rds $45 billion while kids die of preventable diseases like malaria, where the kids dying are the same ones being exploited to ama.s.s more money for those on top. Malaria is as common as a cold in Liberia. I hardly knew this person. I'd already worked a twelve-hour day. I wanted out of the terrible reality around me, not more of it. Did I really want to drive into a neighborhood full of exchild soldiers, into a rat-infested clinic in miserable Barnersville? I didn't need more contact with a world where one person h.o.a.rds $45 billion while kids die of preventable diseases like malaria, where the kids dying are the same ones being exploited to ama.s.s more money for those on top.

How can we live together on the same planet and bear the psychological strain of such vast inequality? Through denial, of course, but that's tough in a place like Liberia, where it's in your face every day. No, I was allowed a little denial. I'd earned it. I lifted my gla.s.s.

Then, under the din of the bar, beneath the tasteless comments and drone of CNN International, I heard it: the murmur of No Name Creek and Jackie's voice - see, be, do see, be, do. I visualized Toupee in the clinic, blazing hot with malaria. She was, what, twenty-two? Though Toupee was in college now, how many steps away from prost.i.tution was she? I closed my eyes, and in my mind I beat a narrowing path into the darkest part of the woods. "The narrow gate that leads to life," as Jesus beautifully put it. It is narrow indeed, just this: these tiny eyes, ears, and fingers touching the present moment.

I put the gla.s.s down, the whisky untouched, and drove into the humid Monrovian night. The slums got progressively dodgier, but I finally found Toupee's clinic. I helped her sister shoulder Toupee's feverish body into my car and drove Toupee and her sister back across the city to her room, on my side of town, stopping on the way to buy them groceries. I gave Toupee money for medicine and sat there with them for a long time in her mildew-covered room, a fifteen-dollar-a-month rental. Its dimensions were almost the same as Jackie's, about 12 12. Like 99 percent of Liberians - like Jackie - Toupee had no electricity. We talked for a while but then slipped into silence, the moonlight streaming in through the single window into her tiny square room.

There I rediscovered something I'd lost: warrior presence, a way of being in the world that slices through negative energy. Instead of letting myself drift into cynical disengagement, I allowed the gift of Jackie's wisdom to lift me to a different frequency where those negative energies pa.s.sed right through me, like moonlight through a window. Through this, I learned that warrior presence isn't a s.h.i.+eld that repels fear, greed, and other forms of negativity. These emotions entered me, but when I let go of my narrow ego-consciousness, these emotions had nowhere to lodge.

After that night helping Toupee, I resolved, as a kind of mindfulness practice, to perform at least one selfless action a day. One of my organization's drivers needed a thousand-dollar loan to meet a payment; I had the money and gave it to him. A Liberian friend's son needed a job and skills; I created a paid interns.h.i.+p for him, and in my spare time I taught him how to use the internet and make spreadsheets. Each of these actions flowed naturally from the warrior presence I'd developed in the 12 12, a state in which I felt love for myself, for others, for the world.

The day before I left Liberia, at my going-away party, I was surprised to find the love flowing back in my direction, as those same people I'd helped showered me with beautiful African clothing, long heartfelt speeches, and even an African name. It had been only three months, but what does that matter? I'd spent two full years in Liberia the previous time and did not receive a fraction of that warmth and love at my going-away party.

One more quite remarkable moment occurred before I left Liberia. Toupee sang to me. She'd recovered from her malaria, and we met for lunch at Sam's Barbeque on 16th Street in Monrovia. She looked so much better. Her hair was tied back in a bunch of thick braids, and her eyes were aglow over our now-finished plates of jollaf rice. I don't know exactly when she started, but I slowly became conscious that she was humming, something wordless, staring out into the busy street.

A Mittal truck raced by on the road the Chinese were paving into the interior; the rainforest and minerals needed to feed the global economy. Probably one of five people walking by Sam's Barbeque had AIDS. Toupee herself was a war child, having grown up in refugee camps in Guinea and the Ivory Coast as two hundred thousand people died in her country's civil war. Something was tipping in me. I balanced between negativity and peace on that humid early afternoon: a full stomach, the walk-and-jive of the pa.s.sersby, Toupee humming next to me. The details smashed together, and suddenly I was living one of those atmospheric moments in a Geoff Dyer or Murakami novel, where an expansive, breathing setting transports you beyond plot. A hum, now a song, as smooth as the 12 12 creek's flow.