by Caitrìona Reed
We were looking for a retreat center where the land would do some of the teaching for us, a piece of land that we could grow into, where the ancestors would be present, and where their presence would be part of our work.
I had read Gary Snyder’s words in my teens and they had sat with me as guiding message. All my life I had been searching for Manzanita Village, or somewhere like it.
About twenty-five years ago we started looking for land. We were living in Venice, California. I was teaching meditation classes, and Michele was teaching Aikido and Iaido. Michele was a painter; I was a poet. We were both performance-artist. We both had the sensibility of artists. Together we were holding retreats a few times a year in the high desert near Joshua Tree at Ruth Denison’s center, Dhamma Dena.
Initially we had been teaching a classical style of Vipassana meditation. In the late 1980’s we had started practicing intensively with Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and also working with scholar and activist Joanna Macy. So by the time we moved to Manzanita Village our work was a synthesis of Deep-ecology, Vipassana, and Zen, with a strong focus on socially engaged spiritual practice.
We now live at three thousand feet, in the mountains of north-east San Diego county, surrounded on three sides by tens of thousands of acres of wild land, situated a mile off the main road, forty miles from the nearest freeway, yet within a couple of hours of both San Diego and Los Angeles, drawing our water, filtered through a thousand feet of granite, from our own well. When we found Manzanita Village, even though the buildings were in a terrible state of disrepair, we knew that this was the place.
Many years later, a friend and student of Diné (Navajo)ancestry, who came here for a retreat asked us, “How did you know?”
“How did we know what?”
“How did you know that this is a perfect place to do the work you guys do?”
“We felt it.”
Find your place on the planet, learn the names of the animals. And plants, learn about where the water comes from and where the garbage goes, learn about the clouds and we at her. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.
Gary Snyder
Over the years many people have confirmed that we made a good choice. They felt it too.
In those years we gradually incorporated other elements of our work into the work we do here; family constellations; Neurolinguistic programming and hypnosis; and something we call Psychomagic, which is a blend of all that we have learned on this journey towards embracing the human in ourselves and all those who come here.
Sometimes we host and co-lead retreats with others; Lama Surya Das, Joanna Macy, Starhawk, and more recently a community of Colombian curanderos who have adopted Manzanita Village as their home in the north.
Sometimes when we teach meditation and other spiritual practices, we tell people to ‘try it out’ for ten years, to see how it goes before deciding if they want to pursue the work seriously. We ask them to take their time. Ina similar way, we have been living here for more than twenty-one years, taking our time, learning to become native to this place, letting our work evolve, informed by the land, by the animals and plants, and by our own sense of the presence of the ancestors.
We came here as we were, but with the intention to remain always open to what this land might teach us. Much of what drives contemporary society is the ac-cumulation of generations of monumental trauma, the residue of both individual and collective suffering, often buried deep within behaviors and patterns of thinking that we accept as normal. The violence and injustice of generations seeps through our collective psyche. Our work has now become more deliberately focused on healing those traumas, on becoming human, a native of planet earth.
Today, as I write these words, according to a United Nations report issued a few hours ago, up to a million plants and animals species face extinction. Not that that’s any surprise to those of us who have been following the growing destruction of life on this planet for the past several decades. However, the question remains, aside from the present likelihood of the collapse of all com-plex life systems, how do we hold our own grief for the destruction of life on such a scale? Without grieving, we add to the buried trauma, our own and others’. Through opening to the grief, we begin to become present to what is alive, in ourselves and others. How to face grief of such a scale is completely beyond our comprehension. But we begin by bearing witness, by seeing and feeling the destruction committed in our name, and by recognizing that ‘spiritual’ practice is not about immunizing ourselves against such grief. Numbing and distraction is a part of the epidemic societal problem that makes the perpetuation of such destruction possible.
So our work challenges all that has numbed us, as well as the assumptions of the dominant culture; the assumptions of fundamentalist materialism; and the violence inherent in the systems that have come to dominate the increasingly adversarial mores of the world we live in.
How could such a small place make any difference? We see Manzanita Village as a sanctuary that we have deliberately set apart from the world, while we remain informed and engaged in the most effective ways we know. We believe that it is a sanctuary among many such small places, and that we are part of a movement, one among tens of thousands of such sanctuaries whose every existence contributes in some small way to the greater momentum and power.
We know something is working. Last week I sat down with someone from the local utility company who had dropped by. “What do you do here? It feels really strange. I don’t remember when I last felt this calm and relaxed. ” So maybe we’re doing something right.
Caitrìona Reed
As a woman of transgendered experience this land has supported not only my own transition but the transition of others who come here facing, not gender transition, but all the challenges that come on the journey towards living and embodying a life of authenticity and truth-telling.
Take any path, and follow it
from The Colonies, Caitrìona Reed
till every path becomes your own,
till all things are yours,
all living belovèd
till all paths take you
along the path which is yourself
Visit Five Changes
fivechanges.com
Michele Benzamin-Miki
The form of Aikido and Iaido, martial arts that Michele has studied and taught for nearly forty years, are rooted not in notions of ‘self-defense’ but in active non-violence. It’s an art that focuses not on winning a fight, but on breaking the pattern of violence. It is deeply connected with her work as an artist. The sword and the brush have become one in her hands. She works from her studio at Manzanita Village. “This land has taught me to be fully present with my work in the process of its creation. The spaciousness, silence, and energy here have taught me to trust the depths of my creative imagination. ”
Michele is one the world’s highest ranking women in the martial arts of Aikido and Iaido Sword, and teaches both in the US and Japan. She has facilitated non-violence and diversity trainings, meditation, mindfulness, and creativity; for organizations, schools, within the prison system, and on reservations; for three decades. As someone of mixed Japanese and European heritage, she passionately believes that we can come into our beauty and power by thinking outside all the boxes that we have been squeezed into; and that authentic self-expression means crossing all the imaginary borders, to integrate every aspect of your life.
Tara
Michele’s work has been shown in galleries internationally. She has pursued a parallel career as an artist alongside her work as a martial artist, teacher, healer and facilitator.
Visit Michele’s website
michelebenzaminmiki.com