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Weeds, Wagons, Clothes,
and Cans: Volunteering
in a Selfish Town
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By Paul Salamone
ONE OF THE MAIN CRITICISMS leveled against the "integral" movement—a movement intent on the "integration of body, mind, and spirit in self, culture and nature" (as voiced by Integral Naked, one of the more vocal expressions of this movement, but by no means the cause of it)—is that it doesn’t do anything. For all the seminars, workshops, discussion groups, talks, raves, conferences, and multimedia presentations, its impact on the tangible world has been all but nil. Compared to something like, say, Habitat for Humanity, or Americorps, integral is little more than a book club for privileged white weirdoes with fancy meditation cushions and too much free time, and anything but integral [full disclosure: this author is as much a part of the problem as anyone]. With the United States in the midst of a full-scaled regression on many fronts, and the world at large wracked by war, famine, pollution, arms proliferation, and climate change, to hang out at a coffee shop all day debating the intersubjective nature of the consciousness of golden retrievers or to waste time wondering how someone with a values line at turquoise would interpret a peak mystical experience of interior luminosity seems like a profoundly immoral act.
Last July I participated in a 3-day integral arts weekend here in Boulder as organized by Stuart Davis and members of the now-defunct Integral Salon of Art, and for me it represented all the potential for actual real-world change this movement is capable of. Having gotten over my Ken Wilber fetish years ago, a chance to meet the extra-prolific philosopher was besides the point: I was simply starving for a community of people intent on using their art to benefit the world, rather than the empty experimental nihilism I was used to back home in Buffalo.
And what a weekend! After an exhausting schedule of ice breakers, dinner parties, creative visualizations, yoga and dance workshops, meditation sessions, talent shows, and discussions of theory, it all culminated in an intense improvised group performance for an assembly of developmentally-disabled adults which demanded the use of every capacity we had to offer as human beings, and made yours truly break out in tears.
Now, a year later, the Boulder scene has yet to reproduce such a cathartic event. While there have been plenty of theoretical discussions, teaching events, meditation groups, and art workshops, the Front Range lays waiting for the "compassion" the movement always speaks of, yet never delivers. In order to prod this reconnection with the world along, we at The Manifest went out to volunteer at four different non-profit organizations in Boulder, the results of which are reported below. But please note: it is not our wish to glorify volunteering for the community at the expense of all else, but simply to emphasize that serving one’s community is an important component of the grand spiritual project of GETTING OVER YOURSELF.
WHO: Volunteers for Outdoors Colorado
WHAT: Boulder Prairie Restoration Project
WHEN: May 8, 2004
The Mediterranean sage is a weed invading the open spaces of Boulder County, sucking up water, chasing out native plants, and killing the preferred forage of dozens of wild animals. On May 8th the VOC teamed up with Boulder County Parks and Open Spaces to assemble over 400 volunteers on four individual worksites to pull up the nasty little weeds and preserve the Front Range’s natural habit for generations to come. What was most inspiring about the project was the VOC’s genius for organizing: each site was well-stocked with digging tools, water tents, and bathrooms, and volunteers were divided into teams of 10-15 led by a knowledgeable leader in eradicating every offending plant on a predetermined section of Boulder’s massive tracts of undeveloped land. Our group included a small coterie of Americorps kids, a well-traveled hippie couple from Lyons, two brothers from India, and a black electrician named Dave. Under the blazing spring sun we worked, jamming the ends of our spades into hard-packed dirt to kill the taproot of each Salvia aethopis we came across (and our section had plenty) while talking about politics, the weather, mountaineering, and everything else. After seven hours split by a well-earned lunch break, the massive congregation of weed-killers assembled back in town for a party featuring free food, thank-you speeches, and the awkward sounds of one of Boulder’s many all-white "African marimba bands". While physically demanding, the event was rather easy on the brain, and didn’t require too much in the interpersonal department, and what this volunteer took away from it was awe in the face of humanity’s capacity to Get Shit Done.
WHO: The Boulder History Museum
WHAT: Boulder History Day
WHEN: May 22, 2004
I had a conversation the other night with one of Boulder’s aging Boomer Beats, and I asked him to recount some of the major changes he’s seen in town over the last 20 years. Among the usual complaints of urban expansion, the skyrocketing cost of living, and the homogenization of the local art scene, he also revealed the shocking news that Canyon Road, one of the main arteries in town running along Boulder Creek between the ultra-bourgeoisie Pearl Street shopping district and the posh quads of CU Boulder, was once an all-black shantytown! This was one of many secret factoids glossed over by the Boulder History Museum’s History Day, which seemed to revel in the quaint trappings of frontier life at the expense the more difficult realities of the People’s Republic. With nary a dark face in the place, I manned a "Toys Through the Decades" table, moved furniture, and showed little Boulderites the lost art of panning for gold, all while gritting my teeth at the alienation of the whole thing. Along with the fur trapper, the blacksmiths, the genealogy expert, the Native American spear thrower, and the gun-toting representatives from the 10th Mountain Division came a keen sense of the covered-wagon kitsch all such "history" events fall prey to. In his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Czech writer Milan Kundera described kitsch as "a folding screen to curtain off death," and that’s certainly what History Day was to me. While it was a pleasure to teach kids a bit about where they came from, there was little to challenge an adult resident of Boulder to see his or her organic, ecologically-correct existence as resting on the backs of thousands of less fortunate people. This moral dilemma became my preoccupation throughout most of the day, and clouded whatever good I felt I was doing for the community.
WHO: The Salvation Army
WHAT: retail outlet volunteering
WHEN: June 20, 2004
In full contrast with the middle-class superficialities of Boulder History Day, a five-hour shift at our local Salvation Army Store put me in touch with the shadier side of Colorado’s crown jewel of liberalism. Nothing screams DEATH like wading through the discarded ephemera of consumer culture, and after an afternoon spent putting worn women’s shoes on shelves, sorting long-sleeve shirts by color, and struggling to make sense of the random trash of the Bric-a-Brac section with two college kids doing community service, the collective weight of a careless world was all my dust-encrusted lungs could handle. But then I was asked to cull excess stuffed animals from the Toy section, and my soul just broke. How do you decide which dough-eyed terrycloth bear, no doubt the prized possession of some pre-teen whelp now working his way through medical school, is no longer worthy of bringing joy to the waiting arms of an underprivileged youth without medical benefits? But such decisions have to be made, and after pushing a second cartload of doomed Pookies into the dumpster, I had a newfound respect for those who sift through society’s detritus and decide what is worth keeping and what isn’t. Beyond that, working at this unofficial Museum of Consumer History had me laboring alongside Latinos, blacks, and downtrodden whites who know a thing or two about the sort of suffering the tofu-eaters of Pearl Street seem to have escaped.
WHO: Emergency Family Assistance Association
WHAT: food bank volunteering
WHEN: June 24, 2004
An experience with such suffering was a direct benefit of putting in time at Boulder’s EFAA, which provides food, medical care, and other services to the less-fortunate children, single parents, and families of the surrounding area. After spending the morning stocking the shelves with the latest donations of canned goods, boxed snacks, USDA surplus, and miscellaneous specialty items (the object being to make it all look like a normal grocery store as much as possible), one of the EFAA’s young summer volunteers showed me the ropes of taking needy people through the converted church’s food bank for their monthly dole. What struck me was the sheer diversity of people in need: along with the expected single mothers (mostly Latino), there was a long-haired gay man who looked a decade past his punk rock prime, a nice computer nerd named Christian with a mustache and strict lactose intolerance, a strung-out biker woman with tattoos and a cast on her leg, an educated Boulder liberal with a heart-wrenching spinal condition, and a frenetic bare-footed white lady who called me "dude" and bragged of the "bomb-ass" stir-fries she’d concocted with the previous month’s emergency rations. While there was a strict limit of food items per category they could take, I found myself allowing each person more than their fair share, finding it hard to stomach the "tough love" needed to fairly distribute the table scraps of George Bush’s constituency of "haves" and "have mores". While the food bank was stocked to the brim during my visit, volunteers informed me it was not always so, and I can only apologize to future clients who find nothing but waxed beans and canned tuna a month from now.
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TM editor Paul Salamone drinks too much coffee. This page was layed out while listening to Beck's One Foot in the Grave. |
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