(image via jenconsalvo)
Gooooood morning SuperForest!
I sit at the desk in the living room of Zero One. Outside, the sun has come up, the birds and chickens are singing, and the weather is sweet. Kauai in January is such a paradise. Melissa just handed me a strong cup of tea.
Ahhhhhhh.
Good morning again!
For the last several weeks I have taken a break from the internet. Yes, the entire internet. For nearly a month now, I have not opened up my glowing rectangle of truth and connectivity. I didn’t plan on taking a month off, it simply happened. Life here at ZO got moving so fast with such amazing color and excitement that it simply didn’t make sense to post up in front of a glowing screen and try to use clumsy words to explain what was going on in my life.
I’ve realized that I had been living what felt like two lives. One in meatspace, and one online. My online persona took up a lot of my real life time. It was almost like there existed online a tiny, shinier version of myself, a chirping Tamagotchi-esque me, that demanded constant care and feeding. If I stopped posting on SF, and stopped checking emails, and ignored facebook, what would happen to both versions of myself?
If I spent enough time away from the net, would my online persona die?
I am reminded of the video game The Sims. Did anyone ever play The Sims? I loved it intensely for a while. In the Sims, you have a little person whose life you control. You can make this little person clean his house and brush his teeth and do exercises and socialize. When I realized that I was spending far more time making my little Sim avatar exercise and keep clean than I was actually doing myself, I stopped playing The Sims.
Online, I’m Jackson Nash, or Jackson SuperForest, and I have an incredible, vibrant, and exciting life. I spend time communicating and sharing with an international net of bright minds and I’m able to create and share my ideas instantly. In real life, a lot of people around me have very little idea of who I am, and what I’ve been working on for the past few years.
I wanted to merge my online self with my real life self. So I stopped going online. And what I’ve found is… Real life is really, really, amazing. By ignoring my online persona, who is all flash and basically just a mirage, I have at last come into my real life life. I have breathed in rich, non-digital air, and found it sweet and restorative.
By ignoring my online persona and all of the connections and energy it takes to keep that little beast up and running, I’ve found that my real life persona has flourished. I’ve never been happier. I’ve never felt stronger. I feel more healthy and connected now that ever before and I know that my learning is just beginning. It is a nice feeling.
So, in the past week, because I had lots of real life time on my hands, I’ve been hard at work integrating myself into Kauai’s many different communities, out of simple curiosity.
(image via Jason Rogers)
In the past week I helped kill and slaughter a pig on our friend’s farm. Melissa and I worked with our neighbors to throw a luau, where the piggy we dispatched was butchered and lovingly placed in a earthen oven, to cook over white-hot lava rocks covered with crushed banana stems and leaves. We harvested the banana stems together with our neighbors’ three and a half year old son, the three of us wheeling around the farm on a six wheeled ATV, rushing like wild chickens through the thick rows where the bananas grow, and using machetes to chop down banana trees.
(image via jenconsalvo)
Earlier in the week, a morning caravan left Zero One with five happy volunteers who ventured down to Waipa farms in Hanalei, and there we helped the Aunties and Uncles of the island prepare the weekly poi for Kauai’s elders and poi lovers. If you’ve never heard of it, poi is a delicious starchy dish made of boiled and mashed taro root. Taro is basically a large, blue-ey purpley potato. We scraped and peeled the taro, piling it into buckets and sending it over to the double-grinder set up, where it was ground twice into a fine purplish mass. The great bins of fresh poi were then bagged (by hand) in different weights for distribution later in the day. The significance of the weekly poi making had been lost on me until I participated in it myself. For an older generation of Hawaiians, the weekly taro is one of the few surviving links they have with Kauai and a life long vanished. Even though we were just volunteers scraping mushy bits off of boiled tubers and mashing them up, there was a hallowed and sacred aspect to our work. Our actions were creating peace and a sense of place in the minds of Kauai’s elders, and that makes them beautiful.
As I said, this beautiful and significant act was lost to me until I participated in it myself.
I have spent my entire life on this island, but never before ventured to Waipa to make the Thursday poi. I have eaten emu pig at countless luaus, but never before helped to put a pig in the ground.
And that in a nutshell is why I’m spending less and less time online. My life is a beautiful and significant act, and I am missing it. By spending so much of my time cultivating and stroking my online persona, I have inadvertently allowed my real life being to wither and become afraid and weak.
No mas. For many years now I have kept this online journal of my personal progress. I never really questioned why I was doing it. It simply felt right. Now, I am less and less interested in communicating my experience than I am in simply experiencing the gorgeous world around me. It’s like trying to dictate your dreams out loud while you’re dreaming them. Two very different mind sets. When I realized that I was addicted to trying to funnel my reality into words in order to communicate it in the form of posts on SuperForest, I quit cold turkey to see how it would feel.
It feels great. I want more! More real! More fun! Yes! More pigs! More poi! More ohana. More culture. More neighbors. More love. More stability. More abundance.
Last night, sixteen of us walked from Zero One to the luau in a long train. We had a stroller full of beer, a raw pie that Mea made, and ingredients for smores. We walked under a bright moon, with warm air surrounding us. Baby Naia was with us. It was a scene that felt straight out of The Green Beautiful. We arrived and found that there was enough food and love for all of us, thanks to the love and hard work of many people.
At last I am home.
All my love,
Jackson
Melissa and I salting the pig.
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