Staying Found on the way toward a Commons culture

This post contains two follow-ups to my September, 2024 essay,
Toward a Commons culture.

My essay, Toward a Commons culture, led to an invitation from journalist, Lucas Tauil, to be the first guest on his podcast, Entangled Futures. Lucas is a kindred soul. Like me, he and his wife started a school in Brazil which is still going. Unlike me, his family sailed for several years in the Pacific Ocean, and they now live in New Zealand. Our podcast is a series of responses to his questions to introduce listeners to the ideas in the essay. I was impressed by his preparations for our conversations and how nicely he edited two different conversations into one.
The link to his podcast is https://entangledfutures.fm
He also has this link https://linktr.ee/entangledfutures for connecting from various channels.
I hope you enjoy it and will share it with others.

Staying Found on the way toward a Commons culture

‘Staying Found’ is an activity Chrysalis does with our 7th and 8th grade students in the spring. We go out to a large public expanse of oak savanna and roam cross-country in small groups for several hours. Then each group needs to find its way back to the starting point.

I told my group the story of where “Staying Found” came from. Forty years ago, I invited Alysia (who would later become my wife, mother of our children, and co-creator of Chrysalis Charter School) to come out to the desert to hike cross-country.
“Do you mean off the trail?” she asked nervously.
“Yes.”
“How do we keep from getting lost?”
“By staying found.”

Upon a ridge near the beginning of our roaming, I had my students look over the land before us. What direction did they want to head? I introduced them to the Sun as a way of maintaining one’s sense of direction. The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west. At mid-day it is south. So in the morning, the sun is somewhere in the south-east. In the afternoon, it is somewhere in the south-west. That’s a general enough sense of direction to keep you oriented within your mental map. So, using the morning Sun, what is the approximate direction you’ve chosen to head today? “South-east”. Where will the Sun be when you want to be heading on your way back? “South-west” And what is the approximate direction you want to be heading on your way back? “North-west.”

Then we set out. Kids took turns being leader, following their noses as we roamed cross-country. I followed, occasionally pointing something out (like looking back so you know what the land will look like on your way back), but wanting most of their experience to be shaped by their lead in response to the land.
“My favorite part of the hike was how independent we were allowed to be.”
“Another fun thing was how much freedom we had. I really liked being able to muck around and not be forced to follow trails or not get dirty.”`

After three hours of roaming and a growing sense of “feeling at home”, it was time to start back. I called my group together. I mentioned several experiences we had had that wouldn’t have happened if we had been just following a trail. They were experiencing nature teaching them “about yourself and your capabilities that you won’t learn on-line or in towns.”

“Your test now is whether you can find your way back. If you can, then you are learning the ‘freedom of the hills’. And when you are sixteen and can drive, you can invite some of your high school friends to come walking cross-country out here with you. When they ask ‘how do we keep from getting lost,’ you will say _” and they all chanted, “By staying found.”

We started back. They stopped several times to discuss which way to go, especially at first. What direction was it that we wanted to go? The Sun is up there so what does that mean? They paid closer attention to things, looking for signs of the way back. Eventually, they recognized the Cave of Calendula – (their name for a place near the beginning of our hike). I told them they had done fine; they were ten minutes from the trailhead and we still had 45 minutes. Did they want to get back early or did they want to hang out here for half an hour? They wanted to hang out. And so they did. Some played in a stream. Some lay with the flowers. I sat at distance and pulled out my notepad to reflect on this wonderful time.

By the next morning, a connection was growing in me between (a) the kids using the Sun to stay found and navigate within an unknown landscape and (b) my using the Second Law of Thermodynamics to stay found and navigate within the landscape of my life.

Using the Sun to “stay found” works – once you understand how the Sun’s apparent motion (in the mid-latitudes), throughout each day, is always from east through south to west. My sense might not be precise, but it’s sufficient to orient and stay found. Similarly, the Second Law of Thermodynamics describes a direction that useable energy spontaneously flows – towards less possibilities. That flow shapes the world into a topography of possibilities by which I can navigate my life in order to create Upward Spirals and contribute towards a Commons culture.

Because of the reality described by the Second Law, nourishing these possibilities will require work on my part. Having to do work often has an odious connotation within our culture. But I like to think of it as like when we ask for help putting away the hundreds of metal folding chairs after our school graduation outside.

People pick up a chair and bring it towards the door of the storage room. A traffic jam forms at this bottle neck but it resolves as the jam separates into two lines: coming in and going out. The bigger jam forms where the folded chairs are hung onto racks. A folded metal chair can be hung four different ways. It doesn’t matter which way as long as they all are aligned the same way. But people don’t realize this at first and the chairs are being hung in different ways and an increasingly complex mess is starting to develop. Someone recognizes the problem and stops the flow of chairs, takes off the misaligned chairs and hangs them uniformly. Someone else understands what the person is doing and steps forward to help. Chair-hanging specialists have emerged who hang chairs far more quickly and quietly than we had been doing. Now people hand their chairs to the hangers and flow back out of the room for more chairs. Each chair is hung purposefully, with much less clanging clatter than before. The flow of chairs grows faster, quieter. A group energy vibrates. Cheerful. Purposeful. We’ve got this!

We’ve become a team competing with ourselves. How smoothly can we accomplish this flow of metal chairs back onto their storage racks with the least expenditure of work? The Second Law has set a challenge and then, like a cheerful coach, gives feedback as loud and clear as metal chairs banging into one another on where there’s room for improvement. Like the Sun, the Second Law marks a direction by which we can orient our efforts. Life can be like a barn-raising or a quilting bees: focused community actions that lift everyone. That is the kind of work the Second Law inspires; a work party in which we work towards a Greater Whole rather than striving against each other for a Bigger Piece.

There’s a Zen story recounted on several internet sites.
“A Zen master named Gisan asked a young student to bring him a pail of water to cool his bath. The student brought the water and, after cooling the bath, threw on to the ground the little that was left over.
“You dunce!” the master scolded him. “Why didn’t you give the rest of the water to the plants? What right have you to waste even one drop of water in this temple?”
The young student attained Zen in that instant. He changed his name to Tekisui, which means a drop of water.”

What difference is there between pouring the extra water on the ground or on a plant? Can we help one another be mindful of that difference and let it shape our actions? How many other tiny daily actions can we shape if we are mindful of the difference?

I don’t like the priest’s scolding but I like the story’s implication: we live within a world full of flows that define a direction we can orient by. We can grow mindful of more and more opportunities to participate in Life’s work. Awareness of these opportunities helps us stay found as we roam throughout our lives.