Since this is your time and your life, you should know that this story is 10 pages (6100 words) long, and is about how going to India got me a job in Japan and then back here in America, and it's all about talking with people. Do not proceed unless you're ready to read.
Anyway, I was at this café eating lunch, and I was planning to leave the next day after ten days on the beach. I had made up my mind to go to Bangalore.
I was journeying through A dream, and walking on the bliss beam. As strange a sentence as that may seem, it was the best way I knew how to feel life.
Still, I didn’t feel very “blissful”, like the book said it would be, or at least eventually.
I’d gotten all excited about this “hero journey” romantic adventure poetry from stories told in books and songs. That’s why I moved from New York City back to Cambridge in upstate New York to remember where I came from and learn who my parents were and who my friends had become, and just to do it because they’re awesome and it’s an amazing place to be. But so (433) is the rest of the universal symphony. I was moving around the best I could as long as I could to find the place to best be me (461). I started in New Delhi, and five weeks later I had finally gotten tired of being at the beach.
I’d mostly kept to myself during my ten days, beyond the occasional ten to twenty minute conversation with someone at a crowded meal space. Those were usually good, and I was always happy to be talking to anyone, and they were all interesting, completely relaxed, and somewhat adventurous people from around the world, mostly Europe. The vibe was never right for me though. It seemed like people were doing a lot of cool interesting things I’d never seen, but at the same time most of them were doing nothing, which is why a lot of people go to the beach. We all deserve the experience of knowing how to do nothing well, and that’s what I was trying my best to do after what I’d just been through. 2009 had been a long year.
It had all begun with the hero journey explained by Joseph Campbell in Pathways to Bliss, given to me by my parents. He told me that if I was already feeling it, then I should leave and go somewhere new. But not just anywhere, and not for vacation. I should go on a journey where I am active physically and mentally, confronted with new situations that require reasoning and intuition pretty constantly, and have to face down fears and do my best not to sink under all the pressure or lose sight of the long term goal amidst all the sadness and chaos around me.
I’d arrived at this small Indian village by the southwestern shore of the Indian Ocean the day before New Year’s Eve, after traveling for nearly two days straight from northeastern India. I’d spent the previous week, my first Christmas away from home, alone in a hotel room in a dirty nowhere crowded loud city with some horrible stomach bug and unable to eat anything or go anywhere, besides watching terrible American movies. I’d basically been alone in a room for four days straight and unable to do anything. That was fine with me because the week before I’d spent hiking in the Himalaya Mountains with a guide my age and named Buddha. I saw the most beautiful mystically inspired view of my life, with the sun setting above the clouds and the third highest mountain in the world right in front of me, and the highest mountain in the world visible in the distance, merely a speck compared to my current reality. It was also the hardest physical test of my life. Right before that had been the hardest everything test of my life, a week on the Ganges River in the oldest holiest Hindu city, Varanasi. The week before that… anyway...
When I got to this village all of the hotels were full, but one guy said that his brother was building new huts to accommodate/profit from the overflow, and charging four bucks a night so long as I could sleep on a large flat rock.
Every morning I walked barefoot to get breakfast because the sandals some hippie recommended to me on my way in ended up cutting up my feet. When I asked him how long he’d been there, he couldn’t really say.
There were a lot of people like that there.
Each morning I had about a five minute strange walk on a narrow path through a small forest, then a field, over a canal, through an alleyway, past the real hotel and restaurant, to the beach, and the Arabian Sea. There were hotels lining this cove of the beach, but beyond that it was an isolated area.
I’d usually walk by this one hippie Japanese guy about my age doing all sorts of crazy yoga stretching up on one hand, clearly a master of some sort of balance. He appeared intensely focused and peaceful at the same time, but also doing all sorts of crazy things that I didn’t think I really wanted to learn. I had my own things that I was good at, and he kind of intimidated me. I thought he was showing off, but what did he care what I thought? He was just doing it and doing it well, whatever it was. There was probably something to learn from him, but I was too tired and spent. I used my body in many ways, and I knew how to access peace and new parts of my brain, and I was open to new things. Even so, there was a mutually understood unspoken schism between us. Maybe it was my fault, I can’t remember. There were a lot of good vibes going around that place, and I just couldn't tune in, which is really all you're supposed to do in life. Tune into the goodness however and whoever it's coming through. I was tired and confused and sad and happy to just be me and be by the sea. He could sense that I wasn’t exactly reaching out to people. I was clearly the loner, and he had his crew. I’d often see them holding their heads in ecstasy and smiling at each other and feeling great about life, but I didn’t have access to whichever brain beans (1111) they did, because I didn’t feel like that. I stared at the waves, walked along the beach, hopped in random taxi boats for hire and went wherever and walked back past temples and along rocky paths barefoot, and through forests, and past enormous monkeys, and had a pretty peaceful time most of the time. But I couldn’t get my previous experiences out of my head.
I’d started this whole journey in New Delhi, alone. I’d never been to India before, or anywhere in Asia before, or anywhere that English wasn’t the only major language and everyone was “white”, so to speak. I was 25 years old, and lived in New York City for three years. I am from Long Island suburbs, and farmland of Cambridge, New York, and educated in central New York, and lived just about my whole life in the state of New York beyond one five month study abroad experience in New Zealand five years earlier, shorter vacations around the US, a family trip to England/France in high school and a visit to my sister in Germany back in college. New Delhi is still the most insane experience of my life. And I had been gaining them at a steady pace for quite a few years at that point. You don’t just drop a decent existence in the capital of the world unless you really feel drawn to something mysteriously beautiful and worth whatever it takes. Somehow India seemed like the best starting line for this adventure. I’d been trying to embrace the school of jumping in the deep end of the pool and learning how to swim.
That’s what it had been like starting out in some ghetto apartment in Brooklyn when I left the pampered campus very high above Cayuga’s Waters, and then working as a banking paralegal in Rockefeller Center after a summer of bohemian scraping by and reasonable doubt over the whole journey, whether it (1433) was living in the city or pursuing the storytelling dream, and the corresponding lifestyle of viewing life as a journey with the occasional magical message from the mystery of human history. As strange as it seemed to be responsible for tens of millions of dollars more often than not (there was even one Japanese deal worth a billion) (1492) and then going home to read enlightening books, listen to music, or smoke lots of pot, that job really saved me and gave me great skills staying organized, working well under pressure, and closing with a lot of other people’s money and time on the line. Filing in the Cayman Islands and so forth was daily routine. I had my own office after the crazy paralegal who had been training me finally got fired. They left me alone in a long conference room with a table full of closing documents from an airline plane leasing deal. The deal was done, but I had to make sure all the parties involved had their own binder with all original signed documents perfectly organized. So I spent about two weeks alone in that room with my headphones, sitting in pretty comfortable chairs. This was the fifth largest/richest multinational law firm in the world, thus their perch high atop the spooky McGraw Hill Building, a company responsible for all of my standardized testing as a child. They gave me a decent amount of money to dot the I’s, cross the t’s, and make damn sure f****** well that I didn’t f*** up or they’d f*** me proper. Actually, they’d just fire me, but it would be bad. They hired me for my strange diverse resume and eagerness to work anywhere after four months of unemployment out of college, but they told me at the interview that I could have all the creativity in the world, but ultimately what mattered to them was that I make sure everything is organized perfectly so the deal can close. It drew on half of my strength. I guessed this was an okay (1777) way to start making a living. It was next door to the News Corporation and Chase Bank, and across the street from Rockefeller Center and publishing giant Simon & Schuster. It’s a series of the three ugliest buildings in the world. But they’re organized and get the job done efficiently, like a good computer slat should. I was able to live in the city, and even though I was always treated well, I wasn’t happy very quickly, because I knew that I was not walking the path to my creative destiny. I was living a split life. I couldn’t stand.
Two years later I found myself working back in that same building, with a marketing temp job for a large radio station. I had no marketing experience, but I pretty much spent my three years in New York City working various office jobs so long as I could live there, eat, and get a behind the scenes view of how the world really worked. That’s all I cared about back then, or before then, or now, besides having a good time with it, but that depends upon learning it, and that depends upon doing it.
While working in that enormous building that the ominous Koyaanisqatsi “Life Out of Balance” movie made its evil apex and The Devil Wears Prada took place (I walked through the same turnstile as that protagonist in the movie), I found myself reading the most magical, mysterious, spiritual, realistically creative and positive book I had ever read. Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss. Campbell's a mythologist of Irish descent who found himself loving the stories of the world and wanting to explain their joyous treasures to everyone: Find your own mystery. Meditate on your own symbols. Listen to what is inside of you, and feel the balance which brings you life’s beauty, and love it, and don’t worry about all the externals falling into place, because they will if you move forward on the “pollen path”.
That’s why I decided to leave New York when the temp job was over in March, that’s why I decided to teach English in Asia after mulling it over for a few years, and that’s why I found myself in India to start out. Campbell talked a lot about India, and it seemed like the most insane opposite place on earth, but still filled with enlightening rewards. After all, it birthed two major religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and had its own ocean named after it. It overthrew the largest empire on the earth, the English (my ancestors), through non-violence, and was the longest running majorly large civilized society on the planet. Although, to an outsider, it depends on your definition of civilization.
My first week in New Delhi was the hardest and saddest week of my life. It would eventually have its good moments, but just the first thirty minutes provided me with the greatest shock to my understanding of what life was like for most people. It was as if I had been catapulted into a completely different universe, like time and space would never be the same again, because the old world and new world had switched places and now I had to deal with all of these billion new faces. The traffic, the chaos, everyone trying to rip you off, strangers approaching you out of nowhere and telling you you’re being followed and then walking away just as quickly, strangers approaching you and trying to trick you out of your money, the smoky pollution, the poverty and destitution, the children without legs and arms and eyes begging in the middle of blind crowds and surrounding me at the train station after seeing the “palace of love” at the Taj Mahal, the thin teenagers collapsing amongst the possibly already dead men in the middle of the street as women throw McDonald’s wrappers from their purses beside them. It was the most miserable I had ever been.
Yet I had still found friends. It wasn’t all bad. In fact, it somehow became beautiful. I was trying anything to tune out the horrible sights of the victims and their plights, so I needed to tune into something. I tuned into the romance of the alleyways and the crowds and the smiling faces and stepped up paces in myriad rat races in this strangest of all places. I ate in the home of two friendly young Muslims, met a lot of other travelers, and eventually got into the whole adventure idea and started embracing the madness and trying to give a smile and money when I could open the gates and be with the world, whatever its strange appearance.
Five weeks later I was thinking of my next step, and a Japanese guy living in Australia named James sat down at my table and started talking to me. He told me to go to Kerala instead, and ride around on the backwaters. So I got a different ticket ten minutes later.
In Kerala I met an Irishman, Italian woman, and Israeli man at the train station, and we traveled together for a few days. While riding on the backwaters, we wandered into the same obscure hidden restaurant as two Norwegian women I’d met while sick in Varanasi five weeks earlier. Then we met another Israeli, and moved around together as a trio for two weeks. At the end of two months in India, I felt great and moved to the next place in the plan, Thailand. But I didn’t teach English. I kept going and going and going for five more months, and then two more months across America to San Francisco and the pyramids down in Mexico.
When I got back home from that journey, I put out a plea for help to get job leads in Japan. I got a response from my second Israeli friend, the one who happened to go to the same play as us in Kerala, and then sit on the same bus as us a few days later. He said he had met an Italian guy by playing music somewhere else in India, and this guy was teaching English in Japan. So I contacted the guy and he was incredibly helpful, telling me about a conversation school in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area where I could live where I figured things out. I bought a ticket March 4, and then the earthquake tsunami power plant happened a week later, so I canceled the ticket on March 28. I was supposed to fly on March 30.
On April 14 I got a call from a man who ran the conversation school and could provide living space. He was the man my Italian contact had referred me to. We had exchanged e-mails twice, and he had told me to come to Japan first and then we could talk. Now he was reaching out to me, saying he was desperate. So I got on a plane in early May, and three days after landing in Tokyo, (777) I began my Japanese journey as an English conversation sensei.
My first day was a Saturday, which begins with the English café. This is for three hours, and happens once a week. It is not for regular students. It is for people who just want to chat with native English speakers. There’s no pressure. There are three group levels, beginner, intermediate, and advanced, but you can talk about whatever they want or you want, and if it goes right, it’s what you both wanted, even if you weren’t sure about it at first. My first was one-on-one with an advanced middle-aged salary man who was amazed I went to a good school and had visited Syracuse once on business. My second was with two nice women, a college student and a waitress in her 30s. My third was with several advanced students.
Then I had my first real student. Everything was different now. I didn’t have to just talk to the student and get them to talk too for fifty minutes straight, but I had to do it with the boss sitting right next to me, and ultimately, eventually, with my living situation on the line. I knew he wouldn’t kick me out when he was desperate for teachers and it was my first student, but it was still nerve-wracking. What’s more awkward than a slow-moving bad first conversation? If it weren’t pressure enough, during the ten minute break, the other teachers told me that I had the shyest, quietest and hardest to teach student of all.
I walked out to the beginner’s table and sat across from a fourteen year old girl who was nice and obviously very shy. I’m sure if I was 14 and had to talk to a 25 year old Japanese woman, I would have been equally shy. Then again, she was shy with everyone. All she would say was, “I like… badminton?” And she was telling the truth. I taught her sporadically throughout the year, and although her vocabulary, skills and confidence would slowly progress, the badminton theme was always there somewhere, because it was the one school activity that she was good at and could make friends through. I remember that first hour being really difficult. I was still jet lagged, and had never taught before, never, in any official position, and rarely had to do a job like this with my boss watching me handle a customer immediately for an hour straight. I’d never had to talk to a 14 year old Japanese girl before. The only time I’d talked to Japanese girls was when I was 14, and they were older and more confident. So even though I had a positive attitude, she really wasn’t saying anything. I eventually gave her sentences to write down. Afterward the boss took me aside to give me pointers. He admitted that she was difficult, but said that I had to do more to get her to talk because the reason they came here was to practice speaking in a real situation. And especially with her, because she already had enough practice copying sentences in school, and her parents were paying for her to have supplemental education.
Luckily, the next hour was much easier. I sat with five adults in the advanced section. They were all middle-aged, and three were adoring/adorable elderly women. We had a great time as they asked me a zillion questions about who I was and everywhere I had been, and I got to ask them the same questions. It was interesting leading a group of people who spoke well enough to have a flowing conversation, yet I was still inherently the master simply through inevitable experience. The fact that I was a decently educated writer who had studied many subjects and recently traveled extensively, especially in their own Asian backyard, only made me a better partner.
One owned her own café and had a tennis court too. She was very friendly and eager to learn about me. Another loved reading and traveling when she could, despite her poor health. A third was a chef on a cruise ship, and I’d been warned by the boss not to let him dominate the conversation, because he just liked to show off his very erroneous English and interrupt people, eliciting many complaints from other students. I really had to manage the crew now, as opposed to just hanging out one on one. I always had to keep in mind how much each person had been able to participate.
A fourth was named Kevin. He was the highest skilled of all, and always joked about going back to his beautiful castle and his beautiful wife. I always thought he was joking, but in (6111) another conversation, when I asked him what he believed his life was about, he said it was about meeting his wife, and for once he didn’t laugh off his own comments, got serious and said that she truly made his life so happy and made everything he (6161) did worthwhile and joyous, and that every day was better because of it, no matter how much he worked. But during this first class it was all laughs and smiles.
After all of the happiness of the second conversation, I had to go back to the beginner’s table and teach the girl again. Daily students come for two consecutive lessons, and others come for an hour here and there. Barely anyone stays for three, and she hadn’t before either. So my boss gave me some more basic pointers about introducing topics to give her a chance to practice what she already knew, and then finding places where I could share my expertise and help her improve with new words, better pronunciation, the best way to say what she’s trying to express, and all while having it be fun. With her the main focus was helping her pass the zillions of standardized tests she was preparing for practically her entire waking existence, what with school, cram school, badminton, English club, and homework. I found out that sometimes she watched movies with her friends, and that was fun. It didn’t take me long to realize that even if she spoke fluently, she was still fourteen and had fourteen year old experiences, so there was quite a bridge to gap in the first place. She also spent way more time doing schoolwork than I ever did, and I was a good student. I kind of felt bad for her, even though she was so nice. She was there because she had to be there, whether she liked it or not, and you could tell she was making the best of it, although she was so clearly incredibly shy.
I would learn a lot from my students, and a lot from my fellow teachers. One was named Matt Campbell, an elderly Irishman. Sometime in July Japanese immigration decided they either didn't like the looks of me, my strange traveling history or my sponsoring English company, or all three, and they were forcing me to leave the country and try again. Before going abroad and coming back for a second try, I remember sitting in the living room, quite confused about the entire direction of my life and wondering if I should even bother trying to come back to Japan. Matt had just moved to the club and was desperately trying to get a paying job himself. I don't remember everything we talked about, but I do remember he kept telling me to keep trusting in "the golden threads". So I took all of the pictures off of my walls, packed my suitcase, and then decided to write about one of the pictures my last night in the country. It's a practice that lasted the entire year. I went to Seoul for three days and came back refreshed for Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part 2.
Months later I had my commencement classes at the club, so to speak. It was my last day as a teacher at that school. It was March 28. Two of everyone’s favorite elderly students, Kiyomi and Izumi, gave me a beautiful clay sake glass, a soft handkerchief, and even gifts for my mother and sister. They’d met my sister when she came to visit the month before and the boss let her enhance her experience by having some conversations. She’d been doing it 6 years and just done a CELTA course for an intense two months, so she knew her game. The next week one of them innocently let slip that she was a much better English teacher than I was, which caught me off guard and later crushed me because they loved me and had previously told me that I was a great English teacher. Not to mention a lifelong competition with my sister to prove who could best use language. I knew she was a better teacher, but she could have at least left me Japan. Then again, she’d introduced me to Japan to begin with, so it was only fair at the time. In any case, I’d gotten over it, because I considered myself a writer who had happened upon teaching English and not the other way around. I’d been writing my whole life and on the adult path six years, and only been a conversational and kindergarten teacher for just shy of a year.
It was both wonderful and difficult to say all of those farewell’s. I had been talking to these students, many of them twice a week, in this same room, at these same tables and in these same chairs, for a year. We had talked about everything. Sometimes we were forcing it. It’s really strange to do something you do naturally with people that you know are paying for it. In a way, I suppose that’s one definition of living your dream, but the difference is that when you take your natural talent that you’ve worked hard to develop with help from others for many years and filter it through an employer, he is the one who does the choosing for you, and you have to talk with these people whether you like it or not. Overall it’s worth it, and it’s never really that bad, because it keeps you safe and fed, and sometimes it’s actually awesome and incredibly fun and sometimes thrilling because you find you actually are making tremendous connections with these people who you are sharing your precious time with as they are sharing their precious time with you and paying money for you. It’s those moments when you realize that none of those other outside barriers matter and you realize that you are living life’s mystery right in front of you with another journeyer, even if they’re coming from somewhere totally different. That’s the first reason it’s worthwhile anyway. You’ve already got plenty of room between you to learn, so that’s always a good start. When you realize all of the basic things you have in common as human beings, both trying to live and stay alive and love it, then it becomes easy. I really had an excellent time at that job, as much as I was ready to move to the next adventure back in America.
I got a great “thank you” card from my first student. It had a Mad Hatter walking beneath gigantic mushrooms and said “You are invited to a very important date”, and then had a magic lamp on the other side with a 10/6 Mad Hatter’s hat sticker and a clock sticker to seal the envelope. Inside was a note thanking me for being a great teacher and helping her improve her English, and apologizing for not being able to come that day. I could tell by the end of the year that she was much more confident, cheerful and talkative, although she still had a long way to go. A lot of that simply came with growing up and being excited to move to her new school the next year. Anyway, I was happy for her, because other teachers had said that they “hated her” and “couldn’t stand” teaching her because she never said anything. I think it was easy for me because I’d had her as my first student, so I knew it could only get better after that, and usually there was another more talkative beginner at the table during the rare times I did teach her after that. In between our first and final lessons, I had taught dozens and dozens of students through conversation, and about two dozen of them very regularly. They all knew me very well by then, yet they’d only scraped the surface as far as I was concerned. Then again, sometimes people can tell things about you that you don’t realize, even if they don’t quite speak your language or know your story.
One of my favorites was a businessman who always came in a suit. We always could connect by discussing hiking, since he was always climbing mountains on weekends, and had fond memories of camping up on Hokkaido for a month straight after college. He once said that he hoped he got to work as an investment banker until he died. He was always cheerful, energetic, interested, light hearted and had this great way of shifting eyes side to side, lowering his voice, and whispering jokes, then laughing and adjusting his tie like the host of the Tonight Show. During our last conversation, I asked him and two other intermediate students at the table what he had learned from our conversations. He thought deeply and then said, “To enjoy (718) life.”
Two days later I got on a plane to go home to America. I was bummed because I’d left right before the Sakura Festival in Japan to celebrate the cherry blossoms blooming to signal the start of spring. But the first tree I saw when I stepped onto US soil in California was a fully bloomed cherry blossom tree. I went back to New York for a while, and that was where I picked up my car and canoe that had been waiting patiently as gifts from my parents who had their own better versions now and were happy to grant me yet another great gift as I continued on my journey to find my voice.
I drove that car and canoe 14,000 miles in 100 days, through 19 states, and camped in 17 national parks and wilderness areas. I had to be very organized and responsible with many expensive and potentially destructive forms of equipment, I had to find a way to connect with what was around me, and I had to make it fun. I did this by camping and hiking to as many beautiful places to be as possible, and by breaking ground for the human race...I mean, isn't that also your place? Creating new imagination in space? Find your own ace.
I perfected the art of balancing myself across the seats and rails of a canoe while stargazing on my back, floating and spinning beneath the universe. I began developing the technique in silence beneath the clearest sky I’d ever seen on a lake in Minnesota, with no iPod or anything, just silence. At one point during the day my hands had caught a web, and the threads reflected the golden light of the sun.
I mastered the technique under the Grand Tetons on Jackson Lake in Wyoming, feeling intense emotions under the enormous Milky Way, with a celebratory celestial symphony in my pocket. I was very happy because I'd just survived hiking to Heart Lake, twelve miles each way through a Grizzly Bear Management area, alone, and even at night because it was such a long hike. It was there that I did my favorite version of a Super Mario power-up on July 24th, the seven year anniversary of my grandfather Michael Sullivan's leaving the world at the age of 94, after a life of hard work and a heart of gold, always happily telling stories, singing old Irish songs and playing the harmonica. He ran a lumber mill, was stationed in the South Pacific during World War II while fighting the Japanese, and built a cabin to create my favorite place to be on the shores of Lake Champlain, New York. It meant a lot to me to experience such glorious natural beauty in Yellowstone Park, testing my bravery and wondering if I was worthy of his legacy.
After Heart Lake and Jackson Lake was the best of all: I mixed the music with some mysterious magic beans from India on a lake in Glacier Park, Montana. I kept an eye out for grizzly bears as I floated peacefully in the universe in a secluded cove beneath mighty glaciers, staring up at all of those brilliantly burning light factories in the sky, feeling them burning in my chest and behind my eyes, all three of them. I don’t recommend it to anyone, because I’ve been practicing on my parents’ pond since I was seventeen (the magic beans came much later). It takes ten years to master a skill, and that night I mastered the duty of being with beauty, the most important experience in the universe (101).
After all of that soulful solitude amongst the synchronized (111) sophistication of the celestial smile, I finally finished the move to California. I arrived just in time for the harvest, and then through a connection from my hometown got a strange job at a winery. I found myself still sleeping in a tent on the ground, but now reporting to work 12-16 hours a day to use the punch down machine to stir up the wine, sort grapes, shovel several tons of grapes out of the tanks, and just about anything else that was asked of me, even though it had absolutely nothing to do with my career. Then again, the last time I had to work such long hours was organizing documents in the McGraw Hill Building as a banking paralegal, sometimes until 3 in the morning with the deal changing a million times in the eleventh hour, and I’d be the one who had to keep up with all the changes. Well, it appeared those skills had come in handy in a zillion different ways applied toward my real dreams later on, so maybe this wine harvesting gig would pay off later too. If anything, my muscles were getting an ego boost.
Since then I got another job teaching English, although this time I’m in charge of a class of international students from all around the world. There are guidelines, but I lead the class and choose what we do every day, and my imagination and traveling experiences are once again my greatest skills.
While at the English club my favorite conversation student was Kazuko. She was my “mother” in Japan. Her son was my age and studying in the Bay Area, where I live now. She often commented on how much my mother must miss me. She always gave us food, and gifts, and lots of loud laughs and smiles. She traveled a lot in Europe and any time she heard I was going somewhere, she’d show up with maps she’d spent hours printing out, and give me all sorts of directions and suggestions. She wasn’t there for my last class, but she did catch me right before I moved out of the club and went to the airport, so she could pose for one more picture. She had already created three t-shirts for me. She had been practicing Japanese calligraphy for twenty years, and had just begun teaching it to children too. One day she asked me my favorite Japanese word, and I told her it was “genki” because that’s how all of my kindergartner’s enthusiastically replied when I asked them how they were every morning. Then a week later she surprised me with a t-shirt with the kanji for "genki" in red on the back. I wore it all the time. During our last session she gave me two more shirts. One of them was a second "genki" kanji shirt in case the first one got overused, and it also had my English name on the front. The other has my kanji name on the back in green, my favorite color. It means “exertion through study”.
Last night I got an e-mail from Kazuko. We hadn’t e-mailed in months, but she wanted to show me pictures of cherry blossoms in Japan, and wished I could be there to see them in person. She said she was happy that her son was back, but that he might move to America because he liked it so much. The first thing she asked me in the e-mail was, “Are you genki?” I wrote back, “Now I am!” Then I realized I was wearing the green kanji shirt.
It’s been almost one year since I’ve been back in America. I haven’t lived in America for a year straight since 2008-2009, right before I traveled from India to Ireland, to New York to San Francisco and Mexico and Japan, to New York and back to Japan and back to New York, and then back to San Francisco.
I knew about Yeats because I’d been given one of his books by an elderly Irishman in China, and read it in Ireland at the end of my first international journey. It said: “…the desire, which every artist feels, to create for himself a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and muddy universe.”
When I drove to work at the winery in Sonoma every morning, usually in a thick fog before the sun lit up the vast valleys of vineyards, I’d pass by Sullivan Road. The Irish clearly love exploring. Thanks to endeavoring at that job, I was able to put enough money in my wallet to get an apartment in San Francisco, write my first book, and get another job teaching to keep me afloat while I write the next story.
It begins in India.
It’s about the golden threads which unite us on the path to bliss.
I look in my wallet. It has the initials “MJS” for my grandfather, Michael J. Sullivan. It was his wallet. It says “Made in India”.
Michael Sullivan extended his hand to greet everyone who came his way. He placed himself on equal ground with every face that came into his space. He worked a lot, and he laughed a lot, and he loved a lot.
I carry on his dreams with my power to imagine.
In
January of 2010 I was seated outdoors at a restaurant, eating alone with the
Arabian Sea behind me. I had been traveling
alone on a journey in India for five weeks, and I’d barely spoken to anyone in
days. I wasn’t big on conversation at
the time. I’d just seen some really
wrong things, and really exhausted just about every part of myself. But now all
I had to do was hang out on a beautiful beach in southwest India to celebrate
the new decade with an international assortment of hippies and local Indians
around me. I just had to be willing to sleep on
a raised flat rock bed in a small recently built (the day I arrived) thatch hut
with hard mud floors and a small flimsy lock with a key. I didn’t have much worth stealing, but I
think some sort of small monkey came in at one point in the middle of the night.
Anyway, I was at this café eating lunch, and I was planning to leave the next day after ten days on the beach. I had made up my mind to go to Bangalore.
I was journeying through A dream, and walking on the bliss beam. As strange a sentence as that may seem, it was the best way I knew how to feel life.
Still, I didn’t feel very “blissful”, like the book said it would be, or at least eventually.
I’d gotten all excited about this “hero journey” romantic adventure poetry from stories told in books and songs. That’s why I moved from New York City back to Cambridge in upstate New York to remember where I came from and learn who my parents were and who my friends had become, and just to do it because they’re awesome and it’s an amazing place to be. But so (433) is the rest of the universal symphony. I was moving around the best I could as long as I could to find the place to best be me (461). I started in New Delhi, and five weeks later I had finally gotten tired of being at the beach.
I’d mostly kept to myself during my ten days, beyond the occasional ten to twenty minute conversation with someone at a crowded meal space. Those were usually good, and I was always happy to be talking to anyone, and they were all interesting, completely relaxed, and somewhat adventurous people from around the world, mostly Europe. The vibe was never right for me though. It seemed like people were doing a lot of cool interesting things I’d never seen, but at the same time most of them were doing nothing, which is why a lot of people go to the beach. We all deserve the experience of knowing how to do nothing well, and that’s what I was trying my best to do after what I’d just been through. 2009 had been a long year.
It had all begun with the hero journey explained by Joseph Campbell in Pathways to Bliss, given to me by my parents. He told me that if I was already feeling it, then I should leave and go somewhere new. But not just anywhere, and not for vacation. I should go on a journey where I am active physically and mentally, confronted with new situations that require reasoning and intuition pretty constantly, and have to face down fears and do my best not to sink under all the pressure or lose sight of the long term goal amidst all the sadness and chaos around me.
I’d arrived at this small Indian village by the southwestern shore of the Indian Ocean the day before New Year’s Eve, after traveling for nearly two days straight from northeastern India. I’d spent the previous week, my first Christmas away from home, alone in a hotel room in a dirty nowhere crowded loud city with some horrible stomach bug and unable to eat anything or go anywhere, besides watching terrible American movies. I’d basically been alone in a room for four days straight and unable to do anything. That was fine with me because the week before I’d spent hiking in the Himalaya Mountains with a guide my age and named Buddha. I saw the most beautiful mystically inspired view of my life, with the sun setting above the clouds and the third highest mountain in the world right in front of me, and the highest mountain in the world visible in the distance, merely a speck compared to my current reality. It was also the hardest physical test of my life. Right before that had been the hardest everything test of my life, a week on the Ganges River in the oldest holiest Hindu city, Varanasi. The week before that… anyway...
When I got to this village all of the hotels were full, but one guy said that his brother was building new huts to accommodate/profit from the overflow, and charging four bucks a night so long as I could sleep on a large flat rock.
Every morning I walked barefoot to get breakfast because the sandals some hippie recommended to me on my way in ended up cutting up my feet. When I asked him how long he’d been there, he couldn’t really say.
There were a lot of people like that there.
Each morning I had about a five minute strange walk on a narrow path through a small forest, then a field, over a canal, through an alleyway, past the real hotel and restaurant, to the beach, and the Arabian Sea. There were hotels lining this cove of the beach, but beyond that it was an isolated area.
I’d usually walk by this one hippie Japanese guy about my age doing all sorts of crazy yoga stretching up on one hand, clearly a master of some sort of balance. He appeared intensely focused and peaceful at the same time, but also doing all sorts of crazy things that I didn’t think I really wanted to learn. I had my own things that I was good at, and he kind of intimidated me. I thought he was showing off, but what did he care what I thought? He was just doing it and doing it well, whatever it was. There was probably something to learn from him, but I was too tired and spent. I used my body in many ways, and I knew how to access peace and new parts of my brain, and I was open to new things. Even so, there was a mutually understood unspoken schism between us. Maybe it was my fault, I can’t remember. There were a lot of good vibes going around that place, and I just couldn't tune in, which is really all you're supposed to do in life. Tune into the goodness however and whoever it's coming through. I was tired and confused and sad and happy to just be me and be by the sea. He could sense that I wasn’t exactly reaching out to people. I was clearly the loner, and he had his crew. I’d often see them holding their heads in ecstasy and smiling at each other and feeling great about life, but I didn’t have access to whichever brain beans (1111) they did, because I didn’t feel like that. I stared at the waves, walked along the beach, hopped in random taxi boats for hire and went wherever and walked back past temples and along rocky paths barefoot, and through forests, and past enormous monkeys, and had a pretty peaceful time most of the time. But I couldn’t get my previous experiences out of my head.
I’d started this whole journey in New Delhi, alone. I’d never been to India before, or anywhere in Asia before, or anywhere that English wasn’t the only major language and everyone was “white”, so to speak. I was 25 years old, and lived in New York City for three years. I am from Long Island suburbs, and farmland of Cambridge, New York, and educated in central New York, and lived just about my whole life in the state of New York beyond one five month study abroad experience in New Zealand five years earlier, shorter vacations around the US, a family trip to England/France in high school and a visit to my sister in Germany back in college. New Delhi is still the most insane experience of my life. And I had been gaining them at a steady pace for quite a few years at that point. You don’t just drop a decent existence in the capital of the world unless you really feel drawn to something mysteriously beautiful and worth whatever it takes. Somehow India seemed like the best starting line for this adventure. I’d been trying to embrace the school of jumping in the deep end of the pool and learning how to swim.
That’s what it had been like starting out in some ghetto apartment in Brooklyn when I left the pampered campus very high above Cayuga’s Waters, and then working as a banking paralegal in Rockefeller Center after a summer of bohemian scraping by and reasonable doubt over the whole journey, whether it (1433) was living in the city or pursuing the storytelling dream, and the corresponding lifestyle of viewing life as a journey with the occasional magical message from the mystery of human history. As strange as it seemed to be responsible for tens of millions of dollars more often than not (there was even one Japanese deal worth a billion) (1492) and then going home to read enlightening books, listen to music, or smoke lots of pot, that job really saved me and gave me great skills staying organized, working well under pressure, and closing with a lot of other people’s money and time on the line. Filing in the Cayman Islands and so forth was daily routine. I had my own office after the crazy paralegal who had been training me finally got fired. They left me alone in a long conference room with a table full of closing documents from an airline plane leasing deal. The deal was done, but I had to make sure all the parties involved had their own binder with all original signed documents perfectly organized. So I spent about two weeks alone in that room with my headphones, sitting in pretty comfortable chairs. This was the fifth largest/richest multinational law firm in the world, thus their perch high atop the spooky McGraw Hill Building, a company responsible for all of my standardized testing as a child. They gave me a decent amount of money to dot the I’s, cross the t’s, and make damn sure f****** well that I didn’t f*** up or they’d f*** me proper. Actually, they’d just fire me, but it would be bad. They hired me for my strange diverse resume and eagerness to work anywhere after four months of unemployment out of college, but they told me at the interview that I could have all the creativity in the world, but ultimately what mattered to them was that I make sure everything is organized perfectly so the deal can close. It drew on half of my strength. I guessed this was an okay (1777) way to start making a living. It was next door to the News Corporation and Chase Bank, and across the street from Rockefeller Center and publishing giant Simon & Schuster. It’s a series of the three ugliest buildings in the world. But they’re organized and get the job done efficiently, like a good computer slat should. I was able to live in the city, and even though I was always treated well, I wasn’t happy very quickly, because I knew that I was not walking the path to my creative destiny. I was living a split life. I couldn’t stand.
Two years later I found myself working back in that same building, with a marketing temp job for a large radio station. I had no marketing experience, but I pretty much spent my three years in New York City working various office jobs so long as I could live there, eat, and get a behind the scenes view of how the world really worked. That’s all I cared about back then, or before then, or now, besides having a good time with it, but that depends upon learning it, and that depends upon doing it.
While working in that enormous building that the ominous Koyaanisqatsi “Life Out of Balance” movie made its evil apex and The Devil Wears Prada took place (I walked through the same turnstile as that protagonist in the movie), I found myself reading the most magical, mysterious, spiritual, realistically creative and positive book I had ever read. Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss. Campbell's a mythologist of Irish descent who found himself loving the stories of the world and wanting to explain their joyous treasures to everyone: Find your own mystery. Meditate on your own symbols. Listen to what is inside of you, and feel the balance which brings you life’s beauty, and love it, and don’t worry about all the externals falling into place, because they will if you move forward on the “pollen path”.
That’s why I decided to leave New York when the temp job was over in March, that’s why I decided to teach English in Asia after mulling it over for a few years, and that’s why I found myself in India to start out. Campbell talked a lot about India, and it seemed like the most insane opposite place on earth, but still filled with enlightening rewards. After all, it birthed two major religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and had its own ocean named after it. It overthrew the largest empire on the earth, the English (my ancestors), through non-violence, and was the longest running majorly large civilized society on the planet. Although, to an outsider, it depends on your definition of civilization.
My first week in New Delhi was the hardest and saddest week of my life. It would eventually have its good moments, but just the first thirty minutes provided me with the greatest shock to my understanding of what life was like for most people. It was as if I had been catapulted into a completely different universe, like time and space would never be the same again, because the old world and new world had switched places and now I had to deal with all of these billion new faces. The traffic, the chaos, everyone trying to rip you off, strangers approaching you out of nowhere and telling you you’re being followed and then walking away just as quickly, strangers approaching you and trying to trick you out of your money, the smoky pollution, the poverty and destitution, the children without legs and arms and eyes begging in the middle of blind crowds and surrounding me at the train station after seeing the “palace of love” at the Taj Mahal, the thin teenagers collapsing amongst the possibly already dead men in the middle of the street as women throw McDonald’s wrappers from their purses beside them. It was the most miserable I had ever been.
Yet I had still found friends. It wasn’t all bad. In fact, it somehow became beautiful. I was trying anything to tune out the horrible sights of the victims and their plights, so I needed to tune into something. I tuned into the romance of the alleyways and the crowds and the smiling faces and stepped up paces in myriad rat races in this strangest of all places. I ate in the home of two friendly young Muslims, met a lot of other travelers, and eventually got into the whole adventure idea and started embracing the madness and trying to give a smile and money when I could open the gates and be with the world, whatever its strange appearance.
Five weeks later I was thinking of my next step, and a Japanese guy living in Australia named James sat down at my table and started talking to me. He told me to go to Kerala instead, and ride around on the backwaters. So I got a different ticket ten minutes later.
In Kerala I met an Irishman, Italian woman, and Israeli man at the train station, and we traveled together for a few days. While riding on the backwaters, we wandered into the same obscure hidden restaurant as two Norwegian women I’d met while sick in Varanasi five weeks earlier. Then we met another Israeli, and moved around together as a trio for two weeks. At the end of two months in India, I felt great and moved to the next place in the plan, Thailand. But I didn’t teach English. I kept going and going and going for five more months, and then two more months across America to San Francisco and the pyramids down in Mexico.
When I got back home from that journey, I put out a plea for help to get job leads in Japan. I got a response from my second Israeli friend, the one who happened to go to the same play as us in Kerala, and then sit on the same bus as us a few days later. He said he had met an Italian guy by playing music somewhere else in India, and this guy was teaching English in Japan. So I contacted the guy and he was incredibly helpful, telling me about a conversation school in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area where I could live where I figured things out. I bought a ticket March 4, and then the earthquake tsunami power plant happened a week later, so I canceled the ticket on March 28. I was supposed to fly on March 30.
On April 14 I got a call from a man who ran the conversation school and could provide living space. He was the man my Italian contact had referred me to. We had exchanged e-mails twice, and he had told me to come to Japan first and then we could talk. Now he was reaching out to me, saying he was desperate. So I got on a plane in early May, and three days after landing in Tokyo, (777) I began my Japanese journey as an English conversation sensei.
My first day was a Saturday, which begins with the English café. This is for three hours, and happens once a week. It is not for regular students. It is for people who just want to chat with native English speakers. There’s no pressure. There are three group levels, beginner, intermediate, and advanced, but you can talk about whatever they want or you want, and if it goes right, it’s what you both wanted, even if you weren’t sure about it at first. My first was one-on-one with an advanced middle-aged salary man who was amazed I went to a good school and had visited Syracuse once on business. My second was with two nice women, a college student and a waitress in her 30s. My third was with several advanced students.
Then I had my first real student. Everything was different now. I didn’t have to just talk to the student and get them to talk too for fifty minutes straight, but I had to do it with the boss sitting right next to me, and ultimately, eventually, with my living situation on the line. I knew he wouldn’t kick me out when he was desperate for teachers and it was my first student, but it was still nerve-wracking. What’s more awkward than a slow-moving bad first conversation? If it weren’t pressure enough, during the ten minute break, the other teachers told me that I had the shyest, quietest and hardest to teach student of all.
I walked out to the beginner’s table and sat across from a fourteen year old girl who was nice and obviously very shy. I’m sure if I was 14 and had to talk to a 25 year old Japanese woman, I would have been equally shy. Then again, she was shy with everyone. All she would say was, “I like… badminton?” And she was telling the truth. I taught her sporadically throughout the year, and although her vocabulary, skills and confidence would slowly progress, the badminton theme was always there somewhere, because it was the one school activity that she was good at and could make friends through. I remember that first hour being really difficult. I was still jet lagged, and had never taught before, never, in any official position, and rarely had to do a job like this with my boss watching me handle a customer immediately for an hour straight. I’d never had to talk to a 14 year old Japanese girl before. The only time I’d talked to Japanese girls was when I was 14, and they were older and more confident. So even though I had a positive attitude, she really wasn’t saying anything. I eventually gave her sentences to write down. Afterward the boss took me aside to give me pointers. He admitted that she was difficult, but said that I had to do more to get her to talk because the reason they came here was to practice speaking in a real situation. And especially with her, because she already had enough practice copying sentences in school, and her parents were paying for her to have supplemental education.
Luckily, the next hour was much easier. I sat with five adults in the advanced section. They were all middle-aged, and three were adoring/adorable elderly women. We had a great time as they asked me a zillion questions about who I was and everywhere I had been, and I got to ask them the same questions. It was interesting leading a group of people who spoke well enough to have a flowing conversation, yet I was still inherently the master simply through inevitable experience. The fact that I was a decently educated writer who had studied many subjects and recently traveled extensively, especially in their own Asian backyard, only made me a better partner.
One owned her own café and had a tennis court too. She was very friendly and eager to learn about me. Another loved reading and traveling when she could, despite her poor health. A third was a chef on a cruise ship, and I’d been warned by the boss not to let him dominate the conversation, because he just liked to show off his very erroneous English and interrupt people, eliciting many complaints from other students. I really had to manage the crew now, as opposed to just hanging out one on one. I always had to keep in mind how much each person had been able to participate.
A fourth was named Kevin. He was the highest skilled of all, and always joked about going back to his beautiful castle and his beautiful wife. I always thought he was joking, but in (6111) another conversation, when I asked him what he believed his life was about, he said it was about meeting his wife, and for once he didn’t laugh off his own comments, got serious and said that she truly made his life so happy and made everything he (6161) did worthwhile and joyous, and that every day was better because of it, no matter how much he worked. But during this first class it was all laughs and smiles.
After all of the happiness of the second conversation, I had to go back to the beginner’s table and teach the girl again. Daily students come for two consecutive lessons, and others come for an hour here and there. Barely anyone stays for three, and she hadn’t before either. So my boss gave me some more basic pointers about introducing topics to give her a chance to practice what she already knew, and then finding places where I could share my expertise and help her improve with new words, better pronunciation, the best way to say what she’s trying to express, and all while having it be fun. With her the main focus was helping her pass the zillions of standardized tests she was preparing for practically her entire waking existence, what with school, cram school, badminton, English club, and homework. I found out that sometimes she watched movies with her friends, and that was fun. It didn’t take me long to realize that even if she spoke fluently, she was still fourteen and had fourteen year old experiences, so there was quite a bridge to gap in the first place. She also spent way more time doing schoolwork than I ever did, and I was a good student. I kind of felt bad for her, even though she was so nice. She was there because she had to be there, whether she liked it or not, and you could tell she was making the best of it, although she was so clearly incredibly shy.
I would learn a lot from my students, and a lot from my fellow teachers. One was named Matt Campbell, an elderly Irishman. Sometime in July Japanese immigration decided they either didn't like the looks of me, my strange traveling history or my sponsoring English company, or all three, and they were forcing me to leave the country and try again. Before going abroad and coming back for a second try, I remember sitting in the living room, quite confused about the entire direction of my life and wondering if I should even bother trying to come back to Japan. Matt had just moved to the club and was desperately trying to get a paying job himself. I don't remember everything we talked about, but I do remember he kept telling me to keep trusting in "the golden threads". So I took all of the pictures off of my walls, packed my suitcase, and then decided to write about one of the pictures my last night in the country. It's a practice that lasted the entire year. I went to Seoul for three days and came back refreshed for Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part 2.
Months later I had my commencement classes at the club, so to speak. It was my last day as a teacher at that school. It was March 28. Two of everyone’s favorite elderly students, Kiyomi and Izumi, gave me a beautiful clay sake glass, a soft handkerchief, and even gifts for my mother and sister. They’d met my sister when she came to visit the month before and the boss let her enhance her experience by having some conversations. She’d been doing it 6 years and just done a CELTA course for an intense two months, so she knew her game. The next week one of them innocently let slip that she was a much better English teacher than I was, which caught me off guard and later crushed me because they loved me and had previously told me that I was a great English teacher. Not to mention a lifelong competition with my sister to prove who could best use language. I knew she was a better teacher, but she could have at least left me Japan. Then again, she’d introduced me to Japan to begin with, so it was only fair at the time. In any case, I’d gotten over it, because I considered myself a writer who had happened upon teaching English and not the other way around. I’d been writing my whole life and on the adult path six years, and only been a conversational and kindergarten teacher for just shy of a year.
It was both wonderful and difficult to say all of those farewell’s. I had been talking to these students, many of them twice a week, in this same room, at these same tables and in these same chairs, for a year. We had talked about everything. Sometimes we were forcing it. It’s really strange to do something you do naturally with people that you know are paying for it. In a way, I suppose that’s one definition of living your dream, but the difference is that when you take your natural talent that you’ve worked hard to develop with help from others for many years and filter it through an employer, he is the one who does the choosing for you, and you have to talk with these people whether you like it or not. Overall it’s worth it, and it’s never really that bad, because it keeps you safe and fed, and sometimes it’s actually awesome and incredibly fun and sometimes thrilling because you find you actually are making tremendous connections with these people who you are sharing your precious time with as they are sharing their precious time with you and paying money for you. It’s those moments when you realize that none of those other outside barriers matter and you realize that you are living life’s mystery right in front of you with another journeyer, even if they’re coming from somewhere totally different. That’s the first reason it’s worthwhile anyway. You’ve already got plenty of room between you to learn, so that’s always a good start. When you realize all of the basic things you have in common as human beings, both trying to live and stay alive and love it, then it becomes easy. I really had an excellent time at that job, as much as I was ready to move to the next adventure back in America.
I got a great “thank you” card from my first student. It had a Mad Hatter walking beneath gigantic mushrooms and said “You are invited to a very important date”, and then had a magic lamp on the other side with a 10/6 Mad Hatter’s hat sticker and a clock sticker to seal the envelope. Inside was a note thanking me for being a great teacher and helping her improve her English, and apologizing for not being able to come that day. I could tell by the end of the year that she was much more confident, cheerful and talkative, although she still had a long way to go. A lot of that simply came with growing up and being excited to move to her new school the next year. Anyway, I was happy for her, because other teachers had said that they “hated her” and “couldn’t stand” teaching her because she never said anything. I think it was easy for me because I’d had her as my first student, so I knew it could only get better after that, and usually there was another more talkative beginner at the table during the rare times I did teach her after that. In between our first and final lessons, I had taught dozens and dozens of students through conversation, and about two dozen of them very regularly. They all knew me very well by then, yet they’d only scraped the surface as far as I was concerned. Then again, sometimes people can tell things about you that you don’t realize, even if they don’t quite speak your language or know your story.
One of my favorites was a businessman who always came in a suit. We always could connect by discussing hiking, since he was always climbing mountains on weekends, and had fond memories of camping up on Hokkaido for a month straight after college. He once said that he hoped he got to work as an investment banker until he died. He was always cheerful, energetic, interested, light hearted and had this great way of shifting eyes side to side, lowering his voice, and whispering jokes, then laughing and adjusting his tie like the host of the Tonight Show. During our last conversation, I asked him and two other intermediate students at the table what he had learned from our conversations. He thought deeply and then said, “To enjoy (718) life.”
Two days later I got on a plane to go home to America. I was bummed because I’d left right before the Sakura Festival in Japan to celebrate the cherry blossoms blooming to signal the start of spring. But the first tree I saw when I stepped onto US soil in California was a fully bloomed cherry blossom tree. I went back to New York for a while, and that was where I picked up my car and canoe that had been waiting patiently as gifts from my parents who had their own better versions now and were happy to grant me yet another great gift as I continued on my journey to find my voice.
I drove that car and canoe 14,000 miles in 100 days, through 19 states, and camped in 17 national parks and wilderness areas. I had to be very organized and responsible with many expensive and potentially destructive forms of equipment, I had to find a way to connect with what was around me, and I had to make it fun. I did this by camping and hiking to as many beautiful places to be as possible, and by breaking ground for the human race...I mean, isn't that also your place? Creating new imagination in space? Find your own ace.
I perfected the art of balancing myself across the seats and rails of a canoe while stargazing on my back, floating and spinning beneath the universe. I began developing the technique in silence beneath the clearest sky I’d ever seen on a lake in Minnesota, with no iPod or anything, just silence. At one point during the day my hands had caught a web, and the threads reflected the golden light of the sun.
I mastered the technique under the Grand Tetons on Jackson Lake in Wyoming, feeling intense emotions under the enormous Milky Way, with a celebratory celestial symphony in my pocket. I was very happy because I'd just survived hiking to Heart Lake, twelve miles each way through a Grizzly Bear Management area, alone, and even at night because it was such a long hike. It was there that I did my favorite version of a Super Mario power-up on July 24th, the seven year anniversary of my grandfather Michael Sullivan's leaving the world at the age of 94, after a life of hard work and a heart of gold, always happily telling stories, singing old Irish songs and playing the harmonica. He ran a lumber mill, was stationed in the South Pacific during World War II while fighting the Japanese, and built a cabin to create my favorite place to be on the shores of Lake Champlain, New York. It meant a lot to me to experience such glorious natural beauty in Yellowstone Park, testing my bravery and wondering if I was worthy of his legacy.
After Heart Lake and Jackson Lake was the best of all: I mixed the music with some mysterious magic beans from India on a lake in Glacier Park, Montana. I kept an eye out for grizzly bears as I floated peacefully in the universe in a secluded cove beneath mighty glaciers, staring up at all of those brilliantly burning light factories in the sky, feeling them burning in my chest and behind my eyes, all three of them. I don’t recommend it to anyone, because I’ve been practicing on my parents’ pond since I was seventeen (the magic beans came much later). It takes ten years to master a skill, and that night I mastered the duty of being with beauty, the most important experience in the universe (101).
After all of that soulful solitude amongst the synchronized (111) sophistication of the celestial smile, I finally finished the move to California. I arrived just in time for the harvest, and then through a connection from my hometown got a strange job at a winery. I found myself still sleeping in a tent on the ground, but now reporting to work 12-16 hours a day to use the punch down machine to stir up the wine, sort grapes, shovel several tons of grapes out of the tanks, and just about anything else that was asked of me, even though it had absolutely nothing to do with my career. Then again, the last time I had to work such long hours was organizing documents in the McGraw Hill Building as a banking paralegal, sometimes until 3 in the morning with the deal changing a million times in the eleventh hour, and I’d be the one who had to keep up with all the changes. Well, it appeared those skills had come in handy in a zillion different ways applied toward my real dreams later on, so maybe this wine harvesting gig would pay off later too. If anything, my muscles were getting an ego boost.
Since then I got another job teaching English, although this time I’m in charge of a class of international students from all around the world. There are guidelines, but I lead the class and choose what we do every day, and my imagination and traveling experiences are once again my greatest skills.
While at the English club my favorite conversation student was Kazuko. She was my “mother” in Japan. Her son was my age and studying in the Bay Area, where I live now. She often commented on how much my mother must miss me. She always gave us food, and gifts, and lots of loud laughs and smiles. She traveled a lot in Europe and any time she heard I was going somewhere, she’d show up with maps she’d spent hours printing out, and give me all sorts of directions and suggestions. She wasn’t there for my last class, but she did catch me right before I moved out of the club and went to the airport, so she could pose for one more picture. She had already created three t-shirts for me. She had been practicing Japanese calligraphy for twenty years, and had just begun teaching it to children too. One day she asked me my favorite Japanese word, and I told her it was “genki” because that’s how all of my kindergartner’s enthusiastically replied when I asked them how they were every morning. Then a week later she surprised me with a t-shirt with the kanji for "genki" in red on the back. I wore it all the time. During our last session she gave me two more shirts. One of them was a second "genki" kanji shirt in case the first one got overused, and it also had my English name on the front. The other has my kanji name on the back in green, my favorite color. It means “exertion through study”.
Last night I got an e-mail from Kazuko. We hadn’t e-mailed in months, but she wanted to show me pictures of cherry blossoms in Japan, and wished I could be there to see them in person. She said she was happy that her son was back, but that he might move to America because he liked it so much. The first thing she asked me in the e-mail was, “Are you genki?” I wrote back, “Now I am!” Then I realized I was wearing the green kanji shirt.
It’s been almost one year since I’ve been back in America. I haven’t lived in America for a year straight since 2008-2009, right before I traveled from India to Ireland, to New York to San Francisco and Mexico and Japan, to New York and back to Japan and back to New York, and then back to San Francisco.
During my first day of classes as a
conversation teacher in Japan, one of the women in the advanced group gave
me a Haruki Murakami book, which I love. I had already read one of his
novels back in New York City. The new one, the gift from my student on my first day, was Kafka on the Shore. It told me, “What I imagine IS very important, for the
entire world… it’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to
Imagine. It’s just like Yeats said ‘In
dreams begin responsibilities’.”
I knew about Yeats because I’d been given one of his books by an elderly Irishman in China, and read it in Ireland at the end of my first international journey. It said: “…the desire, which every artist feels, to create for himself a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and muddy universe.”
When I drove to work at the winery in Sonoma every morning, usually in a thick fog before the sun lit up the vast valleys of vineyards, I’d pass by Sullivan Road. The Irish clearly love exploring. Thanks to endeavoring at that job, I was able to put enough money in my wallet to get an apartment in San Francisco, write my first book, and get another job teaching to keep me afloat while I write the next story.
It begins in India.
It’s about the golden threads which unite us on the path to bliss.
I look in my wallet. It has the initials “MJS” for my grandfather, Michael J. Sullivan. It was his wallet. It says “Made in India”.
Michael Sullivan extended his hand to greet everyone who came his way. He placed himself on equal ground with every face that came into his space. He worked a lot, and he laughed a lot, and he loved a lot.
I carry on his dreams with my power to imagine.
