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Silk Hope

LOCAL LEGEND has it that a wealthy merchant named Lut-terloh once traveled to China and became enamored with silk worms. Apparently he loaded his ship with worms and plants and returned to Chatham County to found the community of Silk Hope, North Carolina.

Travelers through Silk Hope today find only an elementary school, an intersection with a gas station, and a small fairground run by the Ruritans, a civic service organization. Once a year they fire up their steam engine and host “Old Fashioned Farmer Days.”

Silk, it would seem, was a bust. Perhaps the worms didn’t care for the climate. Or perhaps our food soured their stomachs. Maybe the soils were wrong. Lutterloh remains a prosperous name, now known for a thriving trucking business that delivers crusher-run gravel to many of us when we repair our lanes, or make concrete from scratch.

And while silk may have been a bad idea in its day, there are vibrant signs of life in Silk Hope that are easy to miss on first pass. There is Celebrity Dairy, an astonishing bed-and-breakfast–of considerable renown, which runs a herd of goats and a full-fledged dairy. In an era when North Carolina agriculture is flirting with “agri-tourism” as its next great hope, Celebrity Dairy is a pioneer. Brit and Fleming provide a resting spot to visitors to our county, and a place to host a wedding, but they also bring visitors from near and far when kidding time arrives.

It seems that every ounce of goat cheese is sold the moment it is produced, and for many the year is marked by those days when Celebrity Dairy products are in season. It arrives in co-op grocery stores, and on the menus of fancy restaurants as an early harbinger of spring.

Silk Hope is also home to the Body Therapy Institute, a pioneering massage school which has been graduating professional body workers for about as long as the profession has existed. From the road it is an unassuming place, but deep into the grounds it houses classrooms, dormitories, and parking lots filled with students. Many of which graduate, and stick around, leaving Chatham County with a disproportionately high masseuse-per-capita ratio.

Fran is a graduate. She lives one concession down with her husband John. Their children left the nest long ago, and they settled into immaculate country lives where she offers massage therapy up at the house, and he offers talk therapy down by the pond.

In many ways their neatly rowed gardens, and manicured orchard offer a counterbalance to those with frenetic lives. I doubt they have ever spent a penny on marketing their services, and I suspect their appointment books are full thanks to word of mouth.

My wife Tami and I have been going to John and Fran for years, and all indications are that we would like to continue to be their clients for as long as they stay in the therapy business. The fact that they do nothing to promote their services is anathema to us, as we are immersed in the go-go world of sales and marketing, and so we have invented an imaginary tag line for them that we refer to as “Quack and Back.”

Every couple of weeks — or sometimes twice a week — or as schedules and budgets permit, we steal a morning and head to John and Fran’s idyllic place in Silk Hope.

Tami always starts with a whole body massage up at the big house with Fran, while I pull up a chair across from John down at the “therapy shack.” After an hour or so, we change places. I wrap up my session with the Quack, travel to the house, strip down and stretch out for an hour’s worth of work on the Back.

It could be called marital therapy, although my ex-wife cannot stand the idea that both Tami and I see the same therapist. Or it could be considered simply a recess from our hectic lives. Tami spends her time on the massage table chatting with Fran, and I find myself asleep almost instantly.

When I am in dialog with John, I think of it more as a “practice,” or as a time of study than as a time of therapy. He is a wiry, elfin looking fellow who exudes an inner calm. Put him in a robe and he would pass as a priest. Shave his head and he would pass as a Rinzai master. He appears utterly uninterested in station, however, and merely dons a t-shirt, ties back his ponytail, and walks through the woods to his off-grid therapy quarters to spend his days discussing reality with the likes of Tami and me.

John has a simple worldview that he espouses, and it is one that I have been trying to grasp. At its heart is the idea that we are often raised in a world that teaches scarcity. Because love is scarce, we must compete for affection. Because money is scarce, we must fight to accumulate as much as possible. Everything — from attention, to resources, to compliments — is in short supply, and so we are programmed from an early age to work to get our share.

His simple message is that such a world has it all wrong, and that in fact we live in a place of abundance, where the start point is that we get everything we want — or something better. He teaches that struggle is optional, and that we manifest our realities, and that we forge our lives exactly the way we want them.

I began exploring John’s messages as a skeptic. Money was tight, my marriage to Tami was in trouble, business was tough, the kids were annoying, and I was locked in many pitched battles simultaneously.

As I began working with John, I timidly took a stab at some of his techniques, and to my amazement, found myself manifesting different results than those that I had normally known. The bank account began to fill up. Tami and I fell deeply in love. I mended some broken relationships with my children, and incredibly, found myself to be a believer.

I have never managed to find much spiritual traction. I don’t care for ritual, and despite genuine efforts to immerse myself in Paganism, Methodism, Unitarian-Universalism, and Buddhism, I have never managed to find an abiding faith and have instead found myself feeding my soul from the bottom of the religious food chain.

Yet I have remained a student of John’s. And as a result of my many years with him, I occasionally see a glimmer of mastery that I can call my own, and I have managed to manifest some interesting results.

In many ways, our remarkable journey into biodiesel, from a pole building behind my house which we call Summer Shop, to a multimillion dollar, many-faceted renewable energy conglomerate is the direct result of John’s teachings.

On our advice, others in our circle have adopted the Quack and Back habit. And many others in our community were there before us — such that John’s phrases are often quoted around town. It could be that Pittsboro is merely John’s playground, in which he manifests a remarkable community that is capable of moving into abundance.

My daughter Kaitlin rejects John’s teachings, and fails to see why anyone would go back to see him month after month. She feels that “the something even better” is a trap that keeps me going back for more and is merely a ploy by John to take my money into his retirement.

At age 15, Kaitlin’s point of view is refreshing — and she offers wisdom on virtually every aspect of our lives. If Tami and I are merely a living 401K for John and Fran, we are happy to play the role.

And the reason to return over and over again is that it is hard to overcome old programming. Sometimes I manage to practice John’s teaching, and when I do I find myself manifesting remarkable results. And sometimes I slip back into the ways of old, in which I choose struggle and see the world through the lens of scarcity rather than abundance.

I figure going to church is the same way. The essential messages are easy to grasp: Christ died for my sins, or my mind is a jumping monkey, or the planet is our mother. Most people can get their heads around the tenets of religion quickly and easily, but the reason to return week after week is because without the reminder, or “top up” so to speak, the easy to grasp tenets are quickly forgotten.

John’s practice is one approach that I follow. Through the filter of his philosophy it is entirely possible to measure Silk Hope not by the absence of silk worms, but rather by the presence of so many thriving business endeavors.

When I take the Silk Hope road to John’s, the fecundity starts at Gum Springs Garage, where Roy continually chomps on a half smoked Tampa Sweet, and where mechanics gather around the woodstove. They can fix anything — all in good time — and it would be by stopping in, not by telephone that most updates on work are passed along.

I then pass Louis’ place, where they run a small sawmill, and make cedar chests, and coat hangers, and where they run a small cow-calf operation, along with vegetable production. You can see multiple generations about the place, from young children weeding vast beds of broccoli to Louis’ father loading up a trailer of rough-cut wood.

It’s a hopeful road, on the way to Quack and Back, despite the failure of silk.

My brother Jim shares some overlapping philosophy with John. He is an insatiable entrepreneur who insists he be measured not by the vast pile of bad ideas, heaped at the bottom of the wall — but rather by those ideas that stuck. As a risk-taker he has figured out a way to stay in the possible, and not dwell on those ventures that stung him.

At Piedmont Biofuels, many of us have internalized the teachings of John, and we have distilled it down to an expression that we call “staying in the Ray.”

Ray is a resident of Blue Heron farm, the co-housing community down Lutterloh Road just past Gums Springs Garage. One day when Rachel and I were working the booth at the Sha-kori Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance, Ray approached our table. We chatted idly about one thing and another, and when he realized he was in the presence of Rachel, he lit up brightly.

“You’re Rachel Burton?” he said. “Thank you. Thank you for teaching down at the college, and for being a female mechanic, for setting an example for my daughters, for being so generous with your knowledge. Thank you so much for all you do.”

Rachel was taken aback. And beaming.

That night she collided with some struggle in her personal life, and we talked on the phone. I asked her if she remembered her encounter with Ray earlier in the day. Of course she did. And I wondered if she could set down her troubles of that moment and think back to when Ray was showering her with gratitude.

“Stay in the Ray,” I said, and we have all attempted to get back to that moment many, many times along the way.

Whether it comes from a therapy session with John, or from the optimism of my brother Jim, or from a chance encounter with Ray, the message is the same. Anything’s possible, we can manifest any reality we desire. We might not make a lot of silk in these parts, but there is certainly no lack of hope.