On The Go Again

by Terry Sterrenberg

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Everything is a mess and out of order.  I both love it and hate it.  Messing up the order of my life means that a new order needs to be established.  When everything is a mess new order is unavoidable. We are packing and hauling, and getting ready to travel to NY for the the months of July and August where we will be  staying on Staten Island with the Ganas community. I told my sons  on father’s day  that I really have never lived “in the city”.  I feel we have started a good thing here in Salem and we will do the same in New York.  This will be a new experience and I approach it with both excitement and apprehension.

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I hate taking down our little aquaponic garden.  It is not quite balanced yet but it has come to be a plumb line for me, a point of grounding.  The thing about an aquaponic system is that every single piece of it is important.  Every plant and every fish needs to thrive for the system to work as intended. Water flow needs to be correct and the nutrients need to be balanced.   When plants are not thriving or a fish dies the whole system is affected and it means that something is out of balance.  Aquaponics has come to be a metaphor for our life.

Part of the difficulty with moving is that I start to wonder where I get my grounding.  The Villaging Project provides grounding for me now.  I realized that life is like that aquaponic garden.  When the flow of nutrients stops or is blocked suffering happens and there is death.

Being portable  has made my world and vision quite a bit larger.  A couple of weeks ago Laurie and I did a presentation for a small group in Salem where we presented a power point on our journey and on the Villaging Project.  We realized that we would like to do that everywhere and use our experiences as part of the Villaging America film. We talked abut the American dream, jobs and our future.  Following is an excerpt of that presentation.

“Leaving our jobs was a great risk. Some people leave jobs and make the leap but most of us don’t because we have no place to go. Some of us may think we  see something better around the bend. But for most of us it is like looking through a window at a “better” life but having no way to touch it, no way to feel it, or to move toward it without running into the transparent window pane. It is a tantalizing trap that beckons us toward an unreachable future. It is a future promised to every American. Work hard and you will make it. It is up to each of you individually to work hard and make your life your own and wonderful any way you can. We see the promise of that life all around us in what we are taught to want. That vision is so strong that the pane that separates us from it at some point is no longer necessary. We may  become resigned or angry about the living situation we have, and  feel betrayed. That vision has become nothing more than a fantasy, a fairy tale.”

Laurie and I are constantly looking for places to go and live and share our lives.  Anyone with a spare room to rent to us, who is willing to have us visit their area and talk to folks about Villaging is a new vista for us. Perhaps my larger world vision happened before becoming portable.  I’m not sure. What I do know is that “being on the go” is part of the vision of Villaging.  It means that the entire world is accessible to everyone.  Having access is what the Villaging Project is all about.