From San Francisco to Asheville and Back: A Cross-Cultural Reflection

On the city and the forest.

In early 2021, I left my job as a machine learning engineer, and my housing in San Francisco, to vanlife around the US and explore what other lifestyles were out there. This vanlifing quickly lead me to Asheville, North Carolina, where I stayed up until two months ago, at which point I’ve returned to settle back in the Bay! Lots of people have been asking me how that transition has been, so I wrote this post.

In brief, Asheville feels like a different culture than the rest of (what I know of) the US. It’s an enchanted forest, a thriving scene of heart-centered living and earth-based-spirituality-by-default. I feel like I spent the last two and a half years in literal Narnia.

For more detail than that - my best entrypoint is this song I improv’d a few weeks ago. I wrote the chorus in Asheville, and the verses since I moved here. So here’s the song, and in the rest of this post I’ll go through and comment on the lyrics. I’ll post the lyrics all as one batch at the end.

Feel free to listen now, or simply read.

Also available on Soundcloud and YouTube.

Where is the forest?

The way I lived in Asheville, the forest was so integral to my cosmology (my embodied sensemaking and experience of my relationship to the broader world), my nervous system regulation, and my sense of replenishment and motivation, that coming back here to the city I’m initially bewildered by “how does anyone function??” Like, people here clearly do function, so they must either be drawing those aspects from somewhere else, OR have cut those parts of themselves off entirely and found ways to psychically-architect their energy flows in a configuration that doesn’t require them. Still, it’s an adjustment for me, for sure.

In big part, for me the forest versus the city is - a reminder that it’s ok to relax! I look around in the woods, and there’s so much happening that I don’t understand, and will never understand, and life goes on without my active effort. I don’t feel that in a city. The surroundings feel more “human-architected by sheer force of will.” In the forest, if some aspect of my will felt off or misaligned, I could dispense with all will entirely - and sure enough, cleaner, more aligned will would eventually re-sprout in my life later on. Living amidst the perpetual compost pile of the forest - where something’s always dying, something’s always sprouting, something’s always hundreds of years old and stable, something’s always eating something else, something’s always relating symbiotically to something else - made that decay and re-emergence cycle easier to trust within my own motivational rhythms.

That cycle of decay and re-emergence isn’t a metaphor. It’s very real physical process that happens in nature - and inside us, too.

We all live in concrete.

It provides us with housing, and blinking machines.

“We all live in concrete” references both apartment buildings, and the huuuuuge preponderance of factual certainty and the rational, left-brained mode out here, with comparatively little valuation of leaving a schedule spacious and playing guitar in the woods with our friends.

In Asheville, I met exactly one person, out of hundreds, who kept a google calendar of their social and work life. Here it’s more of a norm.

Sure, the concrete mode has many gifts! It sure is good at earning money to pay rent, and it’s baked into the world order of a city in a very real “most people need it to survive” way. And it’s fertile in its own way - it births all these curious machines and pieces of technology, blinking with their own agendas and animate energies. Cars, computers, phones, printers, wifi routers, alarm clocks, streetlamps, smartwatches, oura rings - ecosystems of their own.

But having lived in a place that thrives without the analytical-factual mode, I regard the prevalence of analytical-factual in the Bay as more of a curiosity than an innate virtue. My Asheville friends found it harder to pay rent, on average - but also they were happy. Closer to direct joy and meaning. Many Ashevillians are time-wealthy, which is something I personally value. Not to mention, many of them built their own houses with their families and communities. “Tiny house building” is a thriving scene and craft out there. The energy of those personally-built houses is unbelievable. Alive, and grounded.

A house built by a friend of mine in Asheville, with his dad.

A not-so-tiny house built by another Asheville friend. I asked how long it took to build it and he says “10 years, to build both the skills and the community that made it possible.”

In the city, it’s always light - unless we block out some shade.

But this leaves me questioning: where do I bring my decay?

One one level, this line came out because a window in my new room is right across from an enormously light-polluting streetlamp, and I had to get extreme blackout curtains to preserve my access to replenishing, restorative darkness. I love the dark. I sleep so well in it. Dark nights camping, candle-lit only, are the best sleep I’ve ever had.

Also, as per Malidoma Some, dark is critically important. “The night is the day of the spirit and of the ancestors, who come to tell us what lies on our life paths.” In his culture it was actually forbidden to light the night - an old truth that sleep researchers and poets are now rediscovering as nourishing, generative, and valuable.

But there’s another layer - in a city of people who strive to understand everything, who regard ‘solving everything’ and ‘having it all together’ as a virtue - where do I go when I inevitably fall apart? I miss my Asheville grief community for this. We understand, there, that sometimes life is up and sometimes it is down, and that’s fine, actually. There are cracks in everything and that’s how the light gets in - not to mention, it’s vehicle through which our present-self ego is updated by our subconscious true nature.

“Communion with the vastness brings about the death of the small self. It blows us apart and shatters us. And at the same time, it reconstructs us and initiates us into a place of greater alignment with what is.” - Josh Schrei

So, there’s a whole lot that dissolution, darkness and not-knowing have to contribute to human maturation and development. I wonder if it’s even possible to mature without ever falling apart. As per Josh Schrei’s quote above, perhaps not!

But on another level - and this is the one I see us culturally stuck at - losses and dissolutions don’t feel nearly so bad when we’re still loved and held through them! As there is in grief ceremony, where there’s always someone around to witness and understand as I animalisticaly wail and howl, and whose arms I can curl up in when my rage runs its course and turns to weeping.

Decay happens. I feel so much safer in a culture that embraces it, and has ways of holding and moving through it, rather than playing weird status games of “whoever’s least decayed is the most revered!” No. I save my reverence for those who decay and regrow, and decay and regrow. For honest decay and regrowth is a real process of soulmaking. And I suspect if “decay” is caught early enough it is merely a “natural shedding of snakeskin” and not the gangrenous hazard we often fear it as - but that’s a topic for another post.

There’s also a thread of: here in the Bay, desires for anti-aging and immortality are so common. Meanwhile in Asheville, lots of my friends are death doulas. The latter feels more grounded to me in ways I haven’t yet articulated. I suspect it’s a “death is fundamentally baked into the structure of nature, and coming to terms with it is much of the work of adulthood, but it will ultimately take good care of us - I mean, reincarnation and returning back to soul source and the land of the ancestors are real things” thing. But, I am also having some very earnest and human and grief-motivated conversations with some people here who yearn for immortality - conversations that give me real pause for nuance and thought. Stay tuned, I may write more about death later.

Epilogue:

There’s a huge, bigggg thread here of “valuing the fertile mystery that takes good care of us” versus “valuing the concrete” that I’m only just starting to pull. Asheville has a way better relationship with mysterious knowings, formless primordial body knowings, overall. As I looked for the reference to the book about streetlights, I also found this book I’d never heard of: Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by a research psychologist, Gary Klein. It’s pulling the same thread from the side of the analytical systematic mode, concluding

“He takes ten commonly accepted claims about decision making and shows that they are better suited for the laboratory than for life. The standard advice works well when everything is clear, but the tough decisions involve shadowy conditions of complexity and ambiguity. Gathering masses of information, for example, works if the information is accurate and complete—but that doesn't often happen in the real world….We can make better decisions, Klein tells us, if we are prepared for complexity and ambiguity and if we will stop expecting the data to tell us everything.”

Other sources that explore this same thread - the mystery - from a mystery-first lens include Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With The Wolves. Also, Josh Schrei’s podcast episode Snail Juice & Bear Fat & Werewolf Moons splits lenses about 50-50 between analysis and invocative mystery.

In my opinion, integrating concrete truths with embodied-mysterious subconscious truths is one of our culture’s biggest growth challenges today.

This is plainly what happened. I felt lost in life - though I did have many desires - and I walked into the forest and asked to be supported and shown the way.

I did this simply because it felt right to me, with no prior sense that it was a thing - only to find myself in good company among many lineages of initiation, wilderness vision quests, and ritual. It’s a whole scene.

And there’s something vulnerable of it, too. In the forest, I have nothing to hide. I am made up of the same stuff as my environment and it sees me, as gravity everpresently draws every last cell of my body to the earth. The most thorough hug.

When all false lights and ornaments and ways of hiding from self are burned away - because the forest doesn’t care about our illusions - it’s confronting. One one hand it’s stark. But also, it looks like the forest itself: a lush, multipotential, plural explosion of the fertility of life.

Moreover, there’s help to be found in the forest. There’s perils too - the forest is full of both wonders and dangers, after all - and it’s important to tell the perilous from the helpful. But there’s long lineages of enlisting spirit help to help us seek our fortunes, and they’re ones I gladly join. You can take my use of ‘spirit help’ here as literally or metaphorically as you like.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I practice an animist spiritual lineage. That includes a lot of singing to the world and hearing it sing back. Animists have a good time!

No, this isn’t a metaphor, it’s something I learned from my teacher Josh Schrei, and it would take me a while to convey the knowledge. But, for now, have a gesture of it through song and a linked tweet or two or three.

I’m reluctant to punctuate “and what became of me” - it’s both a question, and a loving invitation to my future self to gather and sing with us, too.

I walked into the forest

I asked how to breathe

I’m a bodyworker. Something I learned very quickly while studying bodywork is - the human body has a lot more in common with a forest than it does with a medical textbook! So, rather than taking More Bodywork Classes™ inside lifeless windowless rooms, I started spending a lot of time on permaculture gardens, immersed in life itself, feeling its flows and patterns.

In asking the forest how to breathe - there’s also a piece here where three years ago I found myself at the end of my rope, where my pre-existing knowledge of basic, assumed, foundational life processes stopped working. And it’s in the forest and the Asheville community that I re-learned, from the ground up. Via a different frame, that allows me continued life.

Re: “Hugging the primordial mother:” no, this is not a metaphor, this is a real somatic-imaginal felt experience I had in trance. Not even plant-medicine trance - it simply came through, living in that land where earth-based spirituality is such a default.

And I carry it with me in my bones. It’s a sense of relief and fullness and settling and groundedness. These are two of my favorite lines to sing, in this song. They put my humanness in felt loving context, among both human and animate nonhuman.

You live with me

in all your mystery.

Where are we going? Oh,

it will be revealed.

We live in close relationship with the unknown all the time - and while I find curiosity a virtue for sure, there’s also something to growing direct relational fondness for the mystery itself. The mystery is an energetic being with its own life. We feel certain ways about it. The more somatic felt intimacy we have with the unknown in all its flavors - the ones that care for us, the ones that scare us and we totally better run away from, the ones that’re irrelevant to us - the more we can experience life as it really is, without asking it to be something else.

There’s a way in which leading with curiosity too quickly can feel like prematurely collapsing a waveform - like a scrambling of energy, rather than a fruit ripening on a tree.

And, huge credit for my teacher Josh Fox for this part - we’re actually, like, not supposed to know everything. We can’t. Information comes to us over time. And when life doesn’t go according to plan - that’s often a sign that life has better outcomes in store for us, better outcomes than we could have imagined ourselves. “Living” is actually a collaborative ongoing process between our best intentions, our best laid plans - and life itself.

(Fox walked me through this when I was amidst a grief-y episode of me being down on myself for my plans really, really not working out - and he correctly observed that “trusting, adaptive relationship with the unfolding mystery” is not something I ever learned as a mathematician or computer programmer, haha. So he had to bridge the gap.)

Carry me with you,

river of all souls.

In “carry me with you,” I’m de-individualizing myself. Setting down ‘feeling like I’m doing it all on my own’, and invoking a sense of support by a broader flow that takes care of me and has been flowing for as long as we imagine or remember. Karla McLaren, one of my biggest influences about how to relate to emotions, references grief in particular as ‘complete immersion in the river of all souls.’ If you deny that there’s such a thing as a river of all souls, I wager it’s grief that will ultimately involuntarily drag you (or your descendants) into it, kicking and screaming. But now that I’ve grieved plenty, and built a healthy, ongoing relationship with grief, I can feel the river of all souls humming along even in peacetime. It’s going a particular direction. One that we can feel the tug of, now, if we 1. shed layers that block us from it 2. listen.

Once again, this thing about de-individualizing myself isn’t a metaphor - it is an energetic patterning with real physical manifestations. Being too individualized, too unplugged from broader sources of current or support, is physically draining. In my bodywork practice, when I first started seeing clients I’d end the day so drained - until I started clearing the space with smoke before and after, and invoking elemental energies of water to leave me refreshed and renewed for a new experience. My teacher Josh Fox says prayers before he sees his clients. This literally gives us more energy, and now we can see full days of clients with no problem. And it’s not just the pracitioners, it’s a pattern I see in my own clients as well: absence of “feeling supported” can lead to depression or physical illness, including back pain.

Take us to places where

well ancestors roam.

Ohhh this is a big one, where I expect to be well-understood in default Asheville and not so well-understood in default Bay Area.

There’s lots of futurists out here in the Bay area. My own vision for the future is - I want to live well, and then I want to become an ancestor who’s also died well. In many traditions, it’s common framing that something weird happened in the last thousandish years where ancestors stopped “making it to the other side” as much. Meaning, their souls never made it to the the land of the ancestors and now many of them are kicking around in limbo, causing ruckus.

Moreoverrrr, there are lots of lineages that live in close relationship with ancestral spirits all the time, and call on them for deep guidance with our worldly human affairs.

Putting these two noticings together - in practices of calling on ancestors for help, it’s important to specifically invoke the ones that “lived well and died well”. We all have them. We might need to go back a few generations, though. So, that’s what I mean by “places ‘well ancestors’ roam.” To a life order that feels emotionally, physically, intellectually, spiritually satisfying, and where my descendants are still in healthy relationship with me.

Though, note, I’m not calling for a return to the past. I don’t think we can actually do that. We need a lot more information and guidance from the past - but wherever we go needs to meaningfully match our culture and the energies alive in us now, too. Exporting old ritual to people who didn’t grow up with the same cultural references tends to land flat.

Ancestral medicine isn’t something I feel super well-versed in right now, but I’m curious to learn more. Here are three links about it, to practitioners I trust.

I walked into the forest

I asked for my dreams

I sang with the animate forces

and what became of me

Ah, we’ve already heard this bit. But now we’re back, in the rhythm of cyclicity and repetition. And we’re a little bit changed, this time around.

I walked into the forest

I asked how to grieve

I have written about this above already - but, I love my Asheville grief community. It’s a big reason I chose to stay in the area.

A friend joined it because he saw people in his social circle lose people close to them - and as he put it, “if they didn’t grieve, something happened to them. they shut down, they didn’t feel alive anymore. I never wanted that to happen to me, so here I am.”

I joined it because in 2021 I was already amidst a “grief initiation” - a period of my life where my emotions were flowing, flowing, flowing, and I was sobbing for at least an hour a day. I needed a place that understood that. And I’m still amazed and grateful that I found one.

"Grief has a sound. A sound that embarrasses the repressed and offends the oppressive. Grief is the sound of being alive.
…

Grief is a shameless dreamer who thinks nothing of healing impossible despair head-on, of reionizing impossible situations, of healing impossible sickness, of depolarizing impossible hardheaded people. Grief thinks nothing of impossibility - only of what makes life more deliciously alive.” - quoth Martin Prechtel. I’ve certainly experientially found this to be true.

For more of my writing on the Asheville grief community, see my other post about emotional spaceholding, and also a smattering of my tweets.

<3 Thanks for reading.

For all that I’ve shared here of my love for Asheville and my wariness of some elements of the city, I did chose to come back here - partly on behalf of illegible reasons that so far feel correct. I expect more will be revealed.

This post speaks to the parts of Asheville I found vital, that I do find missing, here. In writing them I intend to carry them with me. May it be so.