something I am trying to manifest or hyperstition: the Asheville-NYC-SFBA triangle. a triad of American cities.
many people in my circles already know the value of looking at their subjective, first-person, phenomenological experience in terms of head, heart, and gut. disambiguating aspects of experience, learning the related skills, and integrating them together leads towards a more holistic, happy time being a human. tried and true!
well, moves that work at one scale work at others, also. U can transpose what works here and apply it there.
having been on pilgrimage for nearly five years, I found myself typing cities as head, heart, or gut cities. it’s just my own personal idiosyncratic typology. what i type as heart city U might type otherwise. or U might want different categories entirely.
everybody agrees that the Bay is a head city, though. no contest. the Bay is the head of America, the head of the world.
it’s great to have a head. we need conceptual reasoning, logical thinking. but just having a head, or putting the head in charge, is a recipe for imbalance, disconnection, harm. the head needs to be in service of the heart and gut, not the other way around.
to me, NYC and especially Brooklyn, are heart cities. it’s not a heart city in the sense of touchy-feely-Love stuff. it’s full of heart like thumos (θῡμός)—spiritedness, honor. there’s a strong connection to eros, aliveness, resonance—what I call fun. it’s an embodied sense of knowing what U want, where U are trying to go—who U are, who U are trying to become.
not from the head, not from conceptual knowing or logical reasoning. it just is. there’s a knowing: i just want this. my desires are simply as they are. and from there: U live it, day in, day out. U work hard towards what U want. U plot and scheme to make it happen.
to me, cities like Asheville are gut cities. there’s not so much care for ideas and intellectual activity. there’s not so much desire or ambition. people don’t necessarily have big dreams or plots and plans.
what there is instead is a grounded way of being. here, the Earth matters. nature matters. relationships and community matter. and in my Asheville circles, a connection to the larger cosmos matters—a way of seeing and practicing Dharma and the spiritual path. some people are Buddhists, some people are Christians, some people are off the woo deep end. they all get along fine.
gut cities are slow, calm. there are community dinners and potlucks. a sense of neighborliness. hikes and outings to national parks and the like.
from the perspective of this frame, it makes sense to connect these three cities. in the same way that we can have integrated head-heart-gut harmony within ourselves, we can have that for America as a nation. and then we can begin to look at how to have that kind of integration at the global scale…
from a more pragmatic perspective, I have some really lovely connections, friends, and relationships in each major city. i’ve spent significant amounts of time living in each, and am well-positioned to connect them. i want to weave more connections between these cities, their individual people and the communities within them. i want trade and commerce, exchange and flow, competition and collaboration.
what is in abundance in one place is scarce in another. what U are missing here can be found there. what has been learned in one context would be useful to transpose to another.
if this resonates with U, let me know. let me know which city U are in, what it’s like for U there—what U’d like to see more of. if U know anyone in another city that I might like to know about.
and tell others: tell your friends in the other cities and regions about this frame. see whether it resonates with them. and see if any concrete actions want to emerge spontaneously from it.
we flourish together.