A Joyful TaskThis is my mind. It’s beautiful, vast, complicated, contradictory, layered. If my mind were a landscape, I'd tell you this story. Let’s take a walk together and I’ll show you what my life has been. Nestled in a cloud, I blinked and gazed out the cottage window to blue skies as far as the eye could see. A cool breeze swept over me, and my lungs filled like two rising balloons. Breath carried my feet to the worn wooden floors and my body to stand. The cottage was exquisitely quiet as I tiptoed downstairs in soft white linen. My eyes opened wide and my mind rested spacious and still. Wind through the open windows danced with the edges of my body. Sunlight kissed the corners of my eyes. Bliss twirled me around. Joy slid down my jaw and lifted my cheeks. I fell through the front door with elation. And then I heard the Voice through the loud speaker announce "You're late!" I slid quickly down, down, down to the City. The City is a tight and congested metropolis. The air is filled with the sounds of ticking clocks, alarms, laughter and the Voice yelling "you're late" at irregular intervals. Everyone in the City commutes via a network of bright blue and yellow plastic slides and chalk-drawn roadways. Ever since the Slip-n’-Slide Network expansion of 2011 (marking my freshman year of public high school) the access points in every nook and valley of my mind make it nearly impossible not to end up here. Some of the notable features of the City are as follows. There's the brick-border checkpoint enclosed with a Nerds Rope fence and a Starbucks moat. People’s image is cast upon walls and scanned to determine whether or not they are beautiful by standards dictated by the cloud of opinions gathered from middle and high school voices, trash magazines and wounded mothers trying to please their husbands. Workers here look afraid. They have shifty eyes and locked jaws. The whole place smells like chemicals and shame. There are airport walkways that fast track me to a suburban family, house and career. I arrive ten years older having learned nothing and met no one. No matter how I begin—and I have tried beginning in many different ways—I arrive there buzzing and lonely, feeling imprisoned in what looks like it was once meant to be a paradise, and everyone around me is smiling. There's a virtual reality arcade with bottomless chips and beer where I spend hours laughing with my always-twenty-something-year-old friends, playing game after game. Winning means staying longer with the twenty-year-old friends, bottomless chips, and beer. There’s the dump. A chorus of people and ghosts of ideas stand around a trash pit with me at the center. They throw opinion after opinion to me, and I catch each one and pronounce “this is shit” before throwing it into the smelly pit. Depending on the wind, the rotting trash pile wafts anger, despair or resentment. I go here to feel in control. Downtown there are glittery shops with objects that turn into babies who cry for your attention. Everyone in the Ctiy is young. People who are physically sick or injured or mentally ill are simply removed. I can work fifteen-hour days and keep on running and sliding from place to place, and it doesn’t matter because the biggest thing about the City is that I am the only person that matters in it. I learned to run away from the City by climbing myself out of it. I trained constantly, running with the five a.m. ultra athletes, practicing yoga with the nine a.m. hot yoga Lululemon moms, and climbing with the ten p.m. bros. I pounded protein shakes and transitioned my wardrobe to a rotation of spandex pants and sweat-stained cotton shirts. My face glowed with a sunscreen, sweat and the sheen of essential oils. In the winter of 2019 on my 147th attempt, I finally made it up the Northside Slip n’ Slide. After a grueling eight hours, I stuck the landing and saw the sun rise over the horizon. Once I made it out of the City, I made avoiding it my mission. I landed at the Sanctuary, made a home in Early Morning Meditation Cottage. I took walks, ran and danced on You’re Really Free Mountain. I picnicked on Taste the Food Hill. I sat with friends, family members, children and elders on I Can Be Here With You Bench. I felt my feet on the ground. I breathed deep into my belly. I saw—really saw—the people I love, and I felt the love from those that love me. I tasted the history of the earth in each bite I took. I grieved and I rested. And for a while this was enough. But I fell back into the City with nothing more than a sneeze, a hiccup—really a whisper from the Voice—to send me spiraling down hundreds of times. So I fell down, down, down again, and there I was sliding through the streets with a tight chest and work clothes. But it was different than before my mind had rested in the Sanctuary; while my body rushed through the City, I felt for the first time “I can change this.” You see, our brains are like the earth. It is, and it is built. We are born with a brain that has already started developing. In our first year of life, more than one million neural connections are formed. These are like foundations for towns, cities and trails. Over our lifetime trillions more connections are built and added on. There’s the Annie Dillard quote: “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” Well, how we spend our days builds the infrastructure in our brains for how we spend our lives. It takes something like fifty years for concrete to begin to decompose, so the remnants of the City will be with me for a while. One thing that’s changed is shame. I used to feel ashamed of the City, so I hid it. But today, my heart feels open. Dismantling this place is no small task, but after I felt “I can change this,” I invited some friends to help. I have seen houses demolished and built. I have seen thousands of acres of industrial farmland restored to the prairie. I have seen individuals and communities heal. Today, we gather around with work clothes, potluck dishes, paint cans, paint brushes, sledgehammers and pockets full of seeds. I see that as much as this task will be difficult, it will be joyful. So to everyone: We’ll sow seeds, and as winter passes to spring passes to summer and passes to fall again and again, a flourishing earth will grow into and blanket the City. Naomi Worob
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